Married Priests Now! (MPN!) is an advocacy group founded and formerly led 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."
Automatic excommunication
Milingo gained international attention in September 2006 when he illicitly ordained four married men (
George Augustus Stallings
George Augustus Stallings Jr. (born March 17, 1948) is the founder of the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation and was long active in the Black Catholic Movement. He served as a Catholic priest from 1974 to 1989, and was based in W ...
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Peter Paul Brennan Peter Paul Brennan (November 1, 1941–August 1, 2016) was an American bishop in the Independent Catholicism, Independent Catholic movement. He was Bishop of New York for the Old Catholic Confederation, a bishop of the Ecumenical Catholic Diocese of ...
of New York City; Patrick Trujillo of Newark, New Jersey; and Joseph Gouthro of Las Vegas, Nevada)
as bishops. Milingo organized two meetings in the fall of 2006 of many married Catholic priests from the USA, Europe, South America, and Africa in New Jersey. Partly in response to Milingo's initiative a meeting was held in Rome to discuss whether to change the rule of celibacy. It was decided not to change the rule. Due to Milingo’s excommunication and his connection with the non-Catholic religious leader
Sun Myung Moon
Sun Myung Moon (; born Yong Myung Moon; 6 January 1920 – 3 September 2012) was a Korean religious leader, also known for his business ventures and support for conservative political causes. A messiah claimant, he was the founder of the Unif ...
, two groups of former Catholic priests who are pushing for a married priesthood, issued warnings against MPN.
Policy of laicizations
Archbishop Alain 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
(Latin meaning "of a/the sentence lreadypassed") and (Latin meaning "sentence to be passed") are ways sentences are imposed in the Catholic Church in its canon law. A penalty is a penalty that is inflicted , automatically, by force of the l ...
International Federation of Married Catholic Priests The International Federation of Married Catholic Priests was an association of priests who sought to reform existing celibacy rules within the Catholic priesthood in order to allow clergy to engage in their own marriages. It was dissolved in 2008 ...