African Catholic archbishop and faith healer Emmanuel Milingo has been excommunicated after defying the Vatican by ordaining four married men as bishops, the Vatican said today.
The bishops also incurred excommunication under church law.
Mr Milingo, a former archbishop of Lusaka, Zambia, had shocked the Vatican by announcing over the summer that his new mission was to persuade it to allow priests to marry. The ordinations took place on Sunday in Washington, DC.
"The Holy See has patiently witnessed the evolution of the events which, unfortunately, have led Archbishop Milingo to a state of irregularity and progressive open break from communion with the church," the Vatican said in a statement.
Mr Milingo had already scandalised the Vatican by marrying into Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in 2001, a union the Holy See refuses to recognise.
The Vatican statement cited his "attempted marriage" and then the ordinations, which it said the church would not recognise.