Bishop, Wife and Pope Star in Vatican Soap Opera

At noon Friday, the 11th day of her hunger strike, the spurned wife of a Roman Catholic archbishop closed her eyes in St. Peter’s Square and mouthed a silent prayer for reunion with her husband, who she claims has been kidnapped by the Vatican.

By evening, Maria Sung’s prayers were heard--and all but crushed.

In a taped interview on Italian state television, Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, 71, said he loved his bride, a 43-year-old South Korean acupuncturist, “as a sister” but could not resist Pope John Paul II’s appeal that he abandon her.

The Milingo-Sung affair has embarrassed the Roman Catholic Church with a high-profile challenge to its position on celibacy and has dragged the Vatican into unwanted negotiations with the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who matched and married the couple in a May 27 ceremony in New York. The Vatican does not formally recognize Moon’s organization.

Friday’s broadcast ended the African cleric’s two-week disappearance from public view but not the awkward standoff between the two churches.

“No, I don’t believe it! It’s not possible!” Sung said after watching the TV interview in the lobby of her Rome hotel and voicing concern over his “tired-looking face.”

“He’s been drugged,” she declared.

Sung, who had looked wobbly as she clutched the archbishop’s gold pectoral cross during her midday prayer, said she will continue starving herself “until he is free to meet me or until I die.”

Milingo’s TV appearance may bring the unlikely soap opera, which has seized Italy’s late-summer headlines, a step closer to a denouement. With South Korea’s ambassador acting as a mediator, the two churches are trying to agree on terms for a meeting of the estranged couple.

The archbishop, wearing simple clerical garb, said on TV that he was looking forward to a meeting so he could explain his decision to Sung. “She’ll understand,” he said. “She’s not a girl. She’s an adult.”

According to the Vatican, Milingo has been on spiritual retreat at an undisclosed location since Aug. 8, a day after the pope received him privately and reportedly admonished him, “In the name of Jesus, come back to the church.”

“How can one resist this faith, this trust that the Holy Father showed me?” the archbishop said on TV.

Three days after the papal audience, Milingo said, he wrote letters to John Paul and his wife saying his marriage had been a mistake. On television, he charged that officials of Moon’s church had withheld the letter from her.

Sung started her fast after reading a copy of Milingo’s letter to the pope. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published photographs of her ripping it up, saying her husband must have been coerced. On Friday evening, she told reporters she was offered the letter addressed to her but decided not to read it.

“I will understand what’s really happening only when I can be with him, talk to him,” she said.

Fellow Catholic clergymen, who describe Milingo as a “loose cannon,” have been trying to figure him out for more than two decades.

A rising clerical star in his native Zambia, he became, at age 39, one of the youngest Catholic archbishops. He returned the Vatican’s favor by performing scandalous faith healing and exorcism rituals for crowds.

In 1983, he was transferred from Zambia to a Vatican desk job. But he continued his exotic practices in Italy against his superiors’ wishes, performing in hotels and factories, until he was removed again and stripped of his ultimate perk: a Vatican apartment.

The archbishop’s lawyer, Emanuela Comiero, told the Italian newspaper La Stampa that the eviction from the apartment last year pushed Milingo over the edge. He embraced Moon’s church because it “showed him the respect and consideration that were denied him at the Vatican,” the lawyer said.

Milingo and Moon found common cause in defying the Vatican’s centuries-old celibacy rule for priests. The Zambian began attending group weddings conducted by Moon and eventually allowed the reverend to choose a bride for him. Milingo and Sung met two days before they and 59 other couples were wed in unison.

The couple have declined to say whether their marriage was registered with civil authorities in South Korea--where they lived after their wedding--or any other country.

Defending his marriage, Milingo asserted last month in a statement that the celibacy rule had failed its purpose of strengthening the Catholic clergy’s spiritual purity. Instead, he said, the priesthood is “riddled” with “secret affairs and marriages, raping of nuns, illegitimate children, rampant homosexuality, pedophilia and illicit sex.”

Saying he had not renounced Catholicism, he pleaded with the Vatican to accept him as a married cleric.

The reaction was curiously cautious. Instead of excommunicating Milingo outright, as it threatened to do, the Vatican gave him an Aug. 20 deadline to renounce his marriage.

The reason for the caution, Vatican watchers explain, is Milingo’s rank. Any bishop has authority to ordain priests. If Milingo goes his own way, the Vatican is said to fear, he might continue to act as an archbishop, creating his own clergy--married and otherwise--and dividing the church.

A potential schismatic following exists. Priestly celibacy is a hotly debated topic among African Catholics. Worldwide, the Vatican admits, about 60,000 men have left the priesthood in the last 30 years to marry.

Before he vanished from view this month, Milingo moved about Rome wearing his bishop’s ring on his right hand and what appeared to be a wedding band on his left.

After his disappearance came his wife’s mineral-water-only fast and prayer sessions in St. Peter’s Square.

Yang Il Bae, South Korea’s ambassador to the Holy See, brought her a message that the pope was worried about her health. The ambassador urged her to eat. She declined, but it was the start of quiet negotiations between the Vatican and Moon’s church over a possible meeting of the couple.

The Vatican has refused to comment on its talks with a church whose doctrines its considers well beyond the bounds of traditional Christianity. For example, Unification Church followers regard Moon as the messiah who is completing the salvation they say Jesus Christ failed to accomplish.

The Rev. Phillip Schanker, a Unification Church clergyman and spokesman for Sung, said the key stumbling block in the talks has been the Vatican’s insistence on a witness at the meeting, ostensibly to translate.

“Maria doesn’t need a translator,” Schanker said. “She can speak to him in Italian and with the heart. All she is asking is an uncontrolled meeting in a place where just the two of them can get away from it all for a few minutes.”

Pressing her campaign, Sung has stepped up her prayer visits to St. Peter’s. The noon appearance Friday was her third in 16 hours. About 100 followers joined her Thursday night, rallying around a banner that read, “Where is Milingo?”