Controversial Catholic Healer Draws Throngs to Rome Rites

African Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, former head of the Roman Catholic Church in Zambia, is drawing congregations of 3,000 to 4,000 people--predominantly southern Italians--at his monthly faith-healing services in a Rome suburb.

During the three years Milingo has lived in Rome, first in virtual enforced exile and then as an official member of the Vatican Curia, he has attracted an increasing number of followers.

There are often traffic jams around the big, modern church on Via Laurentina where Milingo holds his monthly Mass for the sick and handicapped. Cars and coaches arrive from all over Italy.

Hundreds of Letters

He receives hundreds of letters each week from around the world asking for his prayers for the sick and the disabled. “We send back a standard letter in English, Italian or French, and we bless the letters before posting them,” the archbishop said. Many Africans from Zaire, Nigeria and Kenya travel to Rome to see him, and, Milingo said, he regularly receives telephone calls from sick people in Kenya asking for his intervention.

The Vatican, which always looks askance at cult figures inside the church, is beginning to be embarrassed by the publicity Milingo is attracting, notwithstanding his low-key approach.

In 1982, Milingo was the subject of an official church investigation, in Africa and then in Rome, about his faith-healing activities in Lusaka, Zambia. Some of his fellow bishops objected to the crowds he attracted to his healing sessions and accused him of neglecting his official duties as nominal head of Zambia’s 1 million Roman Catholics.

Milingo was summoned to Rome and given psychiatric tests during a period of intensive inquiry by his ecclesiastical superiors.

Given Minor Post

After reading their report, Pope John Paul II decided to remove the archbishop from his African diocese and gave him a minor official post inside the Vatican on the Pontifical Commission for Tourism. The clear intention was to keep him under scrutiny. But Milingo insists that the Pope placed no restraints upon his faith-healing activities in Rome.

Milingo said that since he was formally removed from his diocese in Lusaka in 1983, he has had no problems with his superiors inside the Vatican.