The Catholic archdiocese announced Saturday that a priest had resigned because of a relationship with the same woman whose "intimate" ties with Archbishop Eugene Marino forced him to step down last month.
The woman, 27-year-old Vicki R. Long, sued the church for paternity payments stemming from her alleged relationship with a third priest. The church is paying child support but denies the priest is the father.The Rev. Michael Woods, pastor at St. Jude's Catholic Church in Sandy Springs, an Atlanta suburb, offered to resign Saturday after confessing to an intimate relationship with Long, a Riverdale lay minister, said Bishop James Lyke, acting administrator of the Atlanta Archdiocese.
It wasn't known if the church had accepted Wood's resignation.
The bishop said Woods used an undisclosed amount of parish funds to help Long. In a statement read to his congregation by an archdiocese spokesman, Woods said his relationship with Long has ended, but did not say how long when it had begun.
Long has charged that another priest, Rev. Donal Keohane of Columbus, Ga., fathered her daughter born in 1986. Blood tests concluded he was not the father.
Experts say the resignation of Marino, the nation's highest-ranking black Catholic, will heighten debate over mandatory celibacy, a church law adopted in the Middle Ages partly to curb corruption and nepotism in the church.
"Celibacy is unrealistic and it's counterproductive now," said Richard McBrien, theology chairman at the University of Notre Dame. "The priesthood as we've known it is falling apart ... because of a stubborn refusal to change."
Pope John Paul II strongly supports the celibacy requirement.
McBrien noted that there are increasingly fewer qualified priests in this country. About 15 percent of priests have left the order since 1970 and officials expect applications for seminary to decline 40 percent by the year 2000.
The Rev. Terrence Dosh, national coordinator for Corpus, a support group for married ex-priests, said Marino's stature draws attention to a worldwide disregard for celibacy.
"In the past 25 years, 19,000 American Roman Catholic priests resigned and married and 110,000 in the world resigned and married. It takes the situation of a bishop to draw attention to it," he said.
"Celibacy is quintessentially anti-woman," he said.