Archbishop Hints He Was Brainwashed

Emmanuel Milingo, the Zambian archbishop who shocked Roman Catholics by marrying in the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, says in a new book that he may have been brainwashed.

Milingo, 72, left the Vatican in spring 2001 to marry Maria Sung, a 43-year-old Korean woman chosen for him by Moon, the controversial South Korean-born evangelist. The mass wedding took place in New York, where the archbishop kissed his bride for the cameras.

“Maybe I was the object of a type of brainwashing,” he says in the 160-page “Fished Out of the Mud,” which is to be published this week by Edizioni Paoline.

“I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. I only understood later that it was a way of them getting total control over me,” he says there.

Milingo wrote the book with Italian journalist Michele Zanzucchi. He refuses to reveal whether he consummated the marriage.

The Vatican, which never recognized the marriage, threatened Milingo with excommunication. He left Sung, rejoined the Church and went into seclusion a year ago.

“I was naive to think that I could still keep my membership in the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand the reality was different. With that act [the wedding] I became one of them,” he says in the book. “It was all so strange. It was like a strange dream.”