Marriage made in heaven? (Zambia).

The shock waves over the recent marriage of the controversial faith-healing Catholic archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, to a Korean doctor, Maria Sung, are still reverberating. But the 71-year-old archbishop says he has no regrets.

He exchanged vows with his bride, 43, at a ceremony in New York on 27 May, under the aegis of the Rev Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church famed for its mass marriages.

As expected, Zambia's Catholic bishops wasted no time in expressing their "sadness" at the marriage. Dennis De Jong, bishop of Ndola, said: "We are deeply saddened and pained by the defection of Archbishop Milingo. This is an injury we will have to live with for a long time."

He revealed that many bishops, and even Pope John Paul II himself, had tried for several years to dissuade Milingo from marrying.

"Regrettably", Bishop de Jong said, "[Milingo) took this advice as a form of persecution. He rather portrayed others as not understanding his actions. He decided to go on with his plan to marry, thereby turning his back on the Church. This implies that he is no longer a bishop nor part of the Catholic Church."

But Milingo is unbowed. "It doesn't affect me," he has said. "The Lord has called me to take a step which will enable me to be a vehicle of his grace and blessing. It is only as a couple that we can fully reflect [God's] nature."

He said the Zambian bishops had not been sincere. "To say they have advised me on this matter is a white lie."

In any case, Milingo made it known in a statement, many Catholic clerics have not faithfully adhered to their vows of celibacy. "The rise of homosexuality and pregnancy among priests and nuns have become common knowledge," he retorted.

Worst affected, by his decision to marry, are nuns of the order he founded in the 1970s called Daughters of the Redeemer. When the news broke of the marriage, Mount Zion, the Daughters headquarters, became a virtual funeral house.

Pressure on Milingo to keep to the straight and narrow goes back to 1969 when he was appointed archbishop of Lusaka and the head of the Catholic Church in Zambia.

In the 1980s when his public, faith-healing sessions grew in popularity, his fellow clerics could not stand it. There were rumours that he was using "black magic" during the healing sessions, which attracted thousands into stadiums and halls throughout the country.

He was summoned to the Vatican in 1983 to face an ecclesiastical court, where he was pronounced mentally unstable and kept in seclusion for months.

To lessen the pain, the Vatican made him the head of an obscure tourism section of the Church. But Milingo insists in his autobiography, The Healer of Souls, that his seclusion was a virtual imprisonment.

Born in eastern Zambia in 1930, Milingo studied theology and philosophy before his ordination at the age of 28. He became archbishop of Lusaka at 39, a post he held for 14 years before falling out of favour with the Vatican.

Milingo has an abiding love for music and poetry. He has recorded two music albums, the first titled "Gubudu Gubudu" (meaning the drunkard), and the second named after himself.

But not everybody is against his marriage. Some clerics of the Protestant faith, who have the right to marry anyway, have welcomed it. Bishop John Mambo, head of the Church of God in central Africa, said Milingo's decision to marry is a God-given right. "It's good that he has come out in the open," Mambo says. "If a man cannot withstand temptation, it's good for him to marry than to live in sin."