Married Priests Now! (MPN) is an advocacy group headed by Emmanuel Milingo, a former Roman Catholic bishop from Zambia. MPN is a liberal Catholic organization calling for relaxing the rules concerning marriage in the Latin Rite Catholic priesthood. Milingo has said that "There is no more important healing than the reconciliation of 150,000 married priests with the 'Mother Church', and the healing of a Church in crisis through renewing marriage and family."[1]
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Milingo gained international attention in September 2006 when he illicitly ordained four married men (George Augustus Stallings Jr. of Washington; Peter Paul Brennan of New York; Patrick Trujillo of Newark, New Jersey; and Joseph Gouthro of Las Vegas, Nevada) as bishops.[2] Milingo reportedly planned to hold a meeting in December 2006 of more than 1,000 married Catholic priests in New York.[3] Due to Milingo’s excommunication and his connection with non-Catholic religious leader Sun Myung Moon, two groups of former Catholic priests who are pushing for a married priesthood, issued warnings against MPN.[4]
According to Catholic canon law, the act of ordaining a bishop without the permission of the Pope incurs an automatic excommunication.[5]
Archbishop Paul Lebeaupin warned in 2009 that Catholic priests who had joined Married Priests Now! could be declared laymen by the Church, which would add a new penalty to Milingo's latae sententiae excommunication.[6] On December 17, 2009, the Holy See announced that Milingo had been laicized, calling him "Mister Milingo".[7]