Pope Benedict XVI to hold Vatican summit on married priests | November 21, 2006

The Associated Press Published: November 13, 2006

VATICAN CITY: Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican officials will hold a meeting to discuss requests for lifting the celibacy requirement made by priests seeking to marry or who have already married, the Vatican said Monday.
The summit will take place on Thursday and was called because of the recent excommunication of Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, the Vatican said in a statement.

Benedict called the meeting to examine the implications of the "disobedience" of the Zambian prelate, who was excommunicated in September for installing four married men as bishops.

Milingo had previously angered the Holy See in 2001, when he was married to a South Korean acupuncturist chosen for him by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, in a group wedding ceremony in New York. Upon appeal from Pope John Paul II a few months later, he renounced that union.

Milingo disappeared from his residence outside Rome in June, resurfacing a month later in Washington, D.C., to announce he was back with his wife and was championing the cause of married priests through his new advocacy group "Married Priests Now."
The Vatican said in September that Milingo and the four men he ordained as bishops were "automatically excommunicated" under church law. The Vatican added that it did not recognize the ordination of the four and would not recognize any ordinations done by those men in the future.

Milingo said the Catholic Church should embrace more than 150,000 married priests worldwide in part to ease the ongoing clergy shortage and to elevate the sanctity of marriage.

The Synod of Bishops in October 2005 rejected suggestions that the mandatory celibacy requirement for priests be dropped. But Milingo's excommunication has brought the issue back into the spotlight.

The Vatican stressed that Thursday's meeting would not open a general discussion of the celibacy requirement but would only examine the requests for dispensation made by priests wishing to marry and the requests for readmission made by clergy who had married in recent years.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/13/europe/EU_GEN_Vatican_Married_Priests.php