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It's a funny day in Christianity when a former follower of Sun Myung Moon-turned fallen Catholic Archbishop takes a stand to knock out yet another brick in the wall of the  Church's ideology. Yet that's exactly what happened when Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo ordained two married men, Raymond Grosswirth and Dominic Ricco, as priests in West New York yesterday. According to Milingo, the Church's current shortage of priests could be remedied by allowing Catholic priests to enjoy the comfort of marriage, just as leaders in other Christian sects, as well as Islamic and Jewish orders, do. But his actions symbolize far more for the Church in America than simply a bending of the rules to solve a heirarchical problem. By openly defying the Vatican, who excommunicated him after a previous round of ordinations of married men, Milingo is doing a small part to pluralise Catholicism: to make it, along with other institutions that shape mankind, in some part representative of the plurality of its constituents, or, if you prefer, flock. In short, Milingo is moving towards democratizing Catholicism.

This kind of adaptation is a somewhat refreshing contrast to the major religious trends of contemporary America, especially when you consider the very powerful efforts by the Religious Right to congeal conservative Christian values into government and society. It is not a surprise that the Vatican, long an strict enforcer of top-down heirarchy, has denounced Milingo for sewing dissidence in the Church. But in truth, such actions can only strengthen the conventional Church just as it brings others on the fringe inside. Those who find Milingo's actions unnacceptable will adhere to tradition as strongly as ever, and those who agree with him will find one less prohibitive restriction to damper their interest in the faith. And as ever, in America, everyone can just continue doing their thing. We certainly saw evidence of this in the much-bemoaned but ultimately uneventful ordinations of Gene Robinson, a gay man, and  Katharine Jefferts Schori, a woman, to positions of power in the Episcopalian Church. Despite all the hair-pulling and dire warnings about the future of Episcopalianism, ultimately the people who still strongly disagreed after the dust settled simply found other churches to attend. And the people who agreed that the pluralization of the church's leadership was a good thing, stayed. And everyone managed to remain pretty civil to one another, if slightly more diversified than before. And isn't that really the point anyway?

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