Hell Hath No Fury . . .

Washington Post/May 15, 2001
By Lloyd Grove

Years ago, the flamboyant George A. Stallings Jr. was a Catholic priest sworn to celibacy. Then the Church excommunicated him in 1990 for doctrinal heresy amid reports that he'd been having sex with men since the 1970s, including a long-term live-in lover who had worked as his pastoral assistant. But now Archbishop Stallings of the African American Catholic Congregation -- the breakaway religious movement he founded in 1989 -- is apparently a ladies' man in a clerical collar.

"I have been plagued by women scorned," Stallings told us yesterday in a brief interview before he abruptly ended the conversation. Last Thursday, we hear, the 53-year-old Stallings informed Washington PR executive Linda Greene, who calls herself his "longtime companion," that he is dumping her to wed a 24-year-old Japanese woman at the behest of Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon. The 49-year-old Greene has issued a press release declaring that she will not attend the wedding -- apparently to be held in Washington with the Rev. Moon and Mrs. Moon officiating -- but that she "wishes the Archbishop and his new family well."

Greene declined to explain her press release to us, but a close friend, Washington writer Michelle Moye Martin, said: "The news of the wedding was such a shock to everyone. Of course she's hurt. She has been very close to Reverend Stallings." Did Greene and Stallings ever discuss marriage? "I think at some point there was that consideration."

Stallings -- who, newspaper accounts report, married and divorced a Northwest Airlines flight attendant in the 1990s, prompting an airline investigation into his use of spousal privileges to fly around the world for free -- announced his latest wedding plans during Sunday Mass at his Imani Temple. Inside the Capitol Hill brownstone where his flock meets to pray, Stallings introduced his young bride, Okinawa native Sayomi Kamimoto, who was picked last week by Moon, the messianic Korean spiritual leader who in the 1980s served 13 months in federal prison for tax evasion and conspiracy.

The Post's Hamil R. Harris reports that Moon has been energetically courting African American clergymen; at a recent meeting at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, where the Korean presented the clergymen with $15,000 Christian Bernard wristwatches, Stallings leapt from chair to chair as he declared: "The word 'Messiah' means anointed one, and I am confident that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is an anointed man of God! . . . I believe that I am a Messiah! Go tell that!"

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a Unification Church official told us yesterday: "Archbishop Stallings got to know Father Moon during the recent 52-city tour that all the clergy took together. And he made a specific request of Father Moon to choose a bride. He specifically indicated that he wanted to marry a Japanese woman, and he was looking for someone to help him with his ministry and expanding his religious role into the international realm."

After the archbishop hung up on us, apparently to continue introducing Kamimoto to members of his family in North Carolina, a Stallings spokesman told us: "He's always wanted to be married, he's always wanted a family, he's always wanted kids. . . . You can dredge up whatever you want to dredge up, but that's where he is right now."