Breakaway Church Seeks to Recruit Ex-Archbishop : Religion: Catholic official who resigned because of his relationship with a woman is urged to join African-American congregation.

The breakaway church of George Stallings on Friday said it is recruiting former Archbishop Eugene Marino, who was the highest-ranking black U.S. Roman Catholic until he resigned because of a relationship with a woman.

Roman Catholic Church officials said this week that Marino resigned last month after the disclosure of his two-year relationship with a lay minister, Vicki R. Long. The church previously said that Marino left because of a health problem.

Long, 27, who has filed a monetary claim against the archdiocese for an undisclosed amount, has refused to comment about the relationship.

In Washington, Stallings, the priest who founded the African-American Catholic Congregation, said that Marino’s resignation proves the “folly” of mandatory celibacy. He asked Marino to join his congregation.

“Roman Catholics intuitively know that Archbishop Marino’s dark night of the soul is not a personal failure but a failure . . . on the part of the Roman Catholic church to deal realistically with the issue that a call to ordained ministry is not synonymous with celibacy,” Stallings said in a statement.

He said that his congregation “would welcome a dialogue with him about a collaborative ministry within a viable Catholic alternative to Rome.”

Stallings would like to install Marino as an archbishop of his new congregation’s western diocese in Los Angeles or southern diocese in New Orleans, Stallings’ spokesman, William Marshall Jr., said Friday.

Richard McBrien, theology chairman at Notre Dame University, said that the Marino affair could have a harsh impact on black Catholics, who make up 2 million of the 53 million American Catholics.

“What I fear is that people are going to say, ‘Well, he is black and . . . they have different sorts of urges and needs,’ ” McBrien said. “That’s racism of the worst kind, but it will be an effort on the part of certain figures in the church to gloss it (Marino’s resignation) over.”

Terrence Dosh, a married priest who runs a national support group for priests, echoed that fear.

The incident will “hurt black Catholics in the sense that any leader of a group who falls, they’re (the church hierarchy) ashamed about it,” he said.