A Marriage Made in Heaven?

As is often the case with people who say they receive direct messages from the divine, the whole story is in fact a bit more complicated than that.

IT'S NO SMALL THING TO MARRY for the first time in your eighth decade.

"Yes," Milingo said eagerly when I asked if he felt surprised to have a wife so late in life. "For me, it certainly had always been considered dangerous to be familiar with a woman. So there were quite a lot of apprehensions."

Sung moved in and out of the room as we spoke. Like Milingo, she had been a transplant to Italy, where she'd had a flourishing acupuncture practice. They spoke Italian together, except when there was an American in the room. Sung's English is a work in progress.

Her other work has ceased, however. When I visited, an acupuncture table stood largely unused in the corner of the living room. Does she still see patients?

"No time," she said. "No license. Now, I treat only archbishop. I treat him here," she said, directing a hand toward his head. She couldn't help smiling as she added, "He now have more hair."

"Masculine pride becomes very strong after 70 years," Milingo said. The archbishop seemed bemused by his newfound domesticity. He let out a hooting laugh, as if all at once he had come to understand the punch line of every marriage joke he'd ever heard. "My horns," he said, "have been cut a bit."

He'd been cut short in other ways, as well. When he was a member of the vast Vatican bureaucracy, Milingo received a salary of 5,000 euros a month, about $80,000 a year. Excommunication has meant a loss of livelihood, pension, health care -- everything -- leaving him now to depend on Moon. When Milingo left his church-provided residence in Zagarolo, just southeast of Rome, a priest he had taught the art of exorcism purified the house with holy water and salt, then burned the clothes Milingo had left behind.

Of course, all Milingo had owned had come from the church to begin with, even his name. Sixty-four years ago, he was not called Emmanuel. That name came later, at the school of the Missionaries of Our Lady of Africa in the provincial capital, Chipata. It was there that he learned to read and discovered that his given name, Lotte, came heavy with scandal. He spelled it differently than it appeared in the Bible, but the sound was the same: Lot, the man who had escaped Sodom only with the help of the angels; a man once called righteous who later did unspeakable things.

An adolescent Milingo declared that he no longer wanted to be called Lotte. Instead, he would be called Emmanuel, the name that means "God is with us," the name by which Jesus is known in heaven.

From then on, a new life began. Lotte Milingo had been an illiterate cattle boy from the Eastern Province; Emmanuel learned mathematics, geography, even etiquette. Lotte had enrolled after tagging along with two other local boys and was unaware that he had entered a preparatory school for seminary. Emmanuel committed the liturgy to memory and was eager to be ordained.

"My becoming a priest was not at all willed," Milingo told me. "It was as accidental as all this."