{"id":2605,"date":"2007-03-10T20:05:33","date_gmt":"2007-03-10T20:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/marriage-made-in-heaven.html"},"modified":"2007-03-10T20:05:33","modified_gmt":"2007-03-10T20:05:33","slug":"marriage-made-in-heaven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/marriage-made-in-heaven.html","title":{"rendered":"Marriage Made in Heaven?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Manseau has an excellent piece in the Washington Post Magazine about Archbishop Milingo<\/a><\/p>\n

Photos here<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Milingo began to clash openly with those he considered his enemies. In November 1996, speaking at a conference in Rome, he declared that Satanism was being practiced at the highest levels of the Vatican. He did not name names, but who were more likely to worship the devil than those who wished to keep an exorcist from his work?<\/p>\n

As in Lusaka, it was not only Catholics who came to him, but anyone in need of healing. So Milingo was not surprised when people he called "Moonists" began to attend his prayer services. Soon they began visiting him at home, and when they invited him to a more formal gathering, he accepted.<\/p>\n

It would not have taken long to learn that he and their leader had much in common. Moon, too, had changed his name. Moon, too, believed that his mission had begun with direct instructions from Jesus Christ. Moon also had suffered abuse and rejection.<\/p>\n

While the fathers of his own faith tried to restrict Milingo’s travel, Father Moon, as the archbishop came to call him, encouraged and funded it. In February 1999, the Family Federation flew Milingo to Korea to take part in the blessing ceremony of 40,000 couples in Seoul’s Olympic Stadium. Then the Family Federation invited him to Washington, to spend time with the director of Moon’s interreligious outreach program, Frank Kaufman, whom Milingo refers to as part of "the orientation committee."<\/p>\n

"It was a beautiful time," Kaufman told me. "We spent 40 days together in a house in Northern Virginia. The archbishop started each day by saying Mass for several hours before breakfast, and then we studied Reverend Moon’s teachings seven or eight hours a day, six days a week. On Sundays, we rested. We’d go to dinner, see a movie. Once we watched a wonderful submarine film. I believe it was ‘U-571.’<\/p>\n

"At the end of our time together, the archbishop met with Reverend Moon, who urged him to think about getting married. There’s a tradition in Unification thought that a marriage can be performed in the spirit world: A living person can be joined spiritually to one that has passed on. At first, that’s what the archbishop thought we had in mind, and he seemed agreeable to the idea. But Reverend Moon said, ‘No, you should have a wife.’" According to Kaufman, the interest the Family Federation has taken in Milingo is not unique. The late grand mufti of Syria, Ahmed Kuftaro, once traveled to the United States for Unification lessons. The former president of Uganda, Godfrey Binaisa, married a woman of Moon’s choosing. In recent years, Moon has focused particular attention on African American clergy. A Family Federation offshoot known as the American Clergy Leadership Conference (ACLC) — founded, according to its Web site, "on a mountaintop in South Korea" — exists to sponsor conferences in the United States. One of the ACLC’s recent initiatives: encouraging pastors to "tear down the cross" in their churches and replace it with Moon’s religious symbol of choice, a crown.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Manseau will be participating in an online chat Monday at noon.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Manseau has an excellent piece in the Washington Post Magazine about Archbishop Milingo Photos here Milingo began to clash openly with those he considered his enemies. In November 1996, speaking at a conference in Rome, he declared that Satanism was being practiced at the highest levels of the Vatican. He did not name names,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2605","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMarriage Made in Heaven? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/marriage-made-in-heaven.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Marriage Made in Heaven? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Peter Manseau has an excellent piece in the Washington Post Magazine about Archbishop Milingo Photos here Milingo began to clash openly with those he considered his enemies. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}