'We Weren't Planning on Falling in Love'
Three-Day Convention to Culminate with Bishop Ordinations Tonight

By Kristina Fiore
Daily Record
December 10, 2006

http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061210/COMMUNITIES/612100373/1203

[See CORRECTION below.]

Parsippany -- Marie Brennan watched the proceedings of the second Vatican Council in 1962 with great interest.

She had hoped that the council of Roman Catholic leaders who were meeting to update the tenets of the faith would allow priests the option to marry. Her interest stemmed in large part from her desire to marry a man who was enrolled in the seminary and studying to become a priest.

The church didn't make any changes in its rule about priests and marriage and the man who would later become her husband, Peter Paul Brennan, left the seminary thinking he would not become a priest.

However, Peter Paul Brennan discovered a group -- the Old Roman Catholic Church -- that had split from the church in 1870 and did allow marriage, so he enrolled and was ordained. The couple now lives in West Hempstead on Long Island.

There are a number of "rites"within Roman Catholicism, Marie Brennan said, and the Latin Rite -- the traditional church -- is one of the few that does not give priests the option of marriage.

"So many people don't know about these other (rites) that allow priests to marry," she said. "There should be more education."

The Brennans were in Parsippany this weekend for the Married Priests Now meeting held at the Sheraton and presided over by Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, who was excommunicated in September for ordaining four married men as bishops.

Milingo and Bishop George Augustus Stallings -- one of the bishops ordained by Milingo --gave keynote addresses Saturday morning to about 150 conference attendees. The three-day convocation culminates in the ordination of three more bishops tonight at the Trinity Reformed Church in West New York.

Among the other wives of married priests was Maria Milingo, a Korean acupuncturist who married the archbishop in 2001 in a union that was encouraged by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church who also provided funding for this weekend's conference.

Maria Milingo sat in the back of the room through a part of the program. She declined an interview, saying her English was not good.

Sayomi Stallings, wife of Bishop Stallings, also preferred not to be interviewed. Sayomi Stallings, who is Japanese, has been married to her husband for six years, and attended the conference with their two young children, Shin-Young and Young-Pal. The couple resides in Washington, D.C.

Ilia Trujillo, wife of Bishop Patrick Trujillo who was ordained by Milingo and excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church, met her husband 18 years after he took the vow of celibacy as a Roman Catholic priest.

She met him while she was working as a missionary in Wyoming, where he was serving as priest.

"We weren't planning on falling in love," she said.

Patrick Trujillo left the priesthood and studied to be ordained in the Old Roman Catholic Church like Brennan. Still, Ilia said, feeling unwelcome in the church he devoted so much of his life to was difficult.

"Celibacy is not our history. We should be mirroring an entire lifestyle that leads to holiness," said Virginia Graf, of Charles Town, W.Va., whose husband Robert had to give up the active priesthood so they could get married.

She said the couple tried to approach the problem legally --"we didn't have sex before marriage or anything"-- but several letters to superior clergy were ignored.

Instead, Robert Graf took a job as an assessor for property diagnostics, and all Virginia could do was help him adjust to his new life.

Kristina Fiore can be reached at (973) 428-6621 or at kfiore@gannett.com.

CORRECTION by BishopAccountability.org (July 1, 2010): Peter Paul Brennan and Marie Brennan met in 1967, when they were both teaching at the same school in New York City, after he had left the seminary and she had left the convent. They did not know one another when they were members of religious orders. They were both members of the laity when they married in 1968. Peter Paul Brennan was later ordained in 1972 as a married priest in the Old Roman Catholic Church. Archbishop Brennan now leads the Ecumenical Catholic Diocese of America. We thank him for contacting us and providing this correction.