Early life and priestly ministry Stallings was born in 1948 in
New Bern, North Carolina, to George Augustus Stallings Sr., and Dorothy Smith. His grandmother—Bessie Taylor—introduced him as a boy to worship in a black Baptist church. He enjoyed the service so much that he said he wanted to be a minister. During his high school years, he began expressing "
Afrocentric" sentiments, insisting on his right to wear a mustache, despite school rules, as a reflection of black identity. To prepare for the priesthood, he attended St. Pius X Seminary in Kentucky and received a
BA degree in philosophy in 1970. Sent by his bishop to the
Pontifical North American College in Rome, he earned three degrees from the
Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas between 1970 and 1975: the
Bachelor of Sacred Theology (S.T.B.), a master's degree in pastoral theology, and a
Licentiate of Sacred Theology (S.T.L.). Stallings was ordained a priest in 1974. His first assignment was as an associate pastor at Our Lady of Peace Church, Washington, D.C. In 1976, at age 28 and two years after ordination, he was named a pastor of St. Teresa of Avila parish in Washington. In 1985, Stallings secretly bought a private home in Anacostia in violation of the archdiocese rule requiring priests to live in the parish rectory.
The Washington Post reported that Stallings had allegedly misused parish funds to renovate his Anacostia house. He stated that he left because Roman Catholicism did not serve the African American community or recognize talent. In 1989,
The Washington Post reported that a former
altar boy at St. Teresa of Avila Church accused Stallings of sexual misconduct over a period of several months in 1977. Stallings said "I am innocent," declining to answer questions. In a follow-up series of three articles in 1990,
Post reporters
Bill Dedman and Laura Sessions Stepp reported that concerns about Stallings' association with teenage boys had contributed to his split from the Roman Catholic Church. Stallings' former pastoral assistant, who was 22 at the time, spoke publicly about having an alleged two-year sexual relationship with him. Thirteen days prior, Stallings attested that Archbishop
James Hickey of
Washington had ordered him to seek psychiatric treatment for an "excessive ego." Following the founding of Imani Temple, Hickey formally excommunicated Stallings and any Roman Catholics remaining in the Imani Temple movement. Stallings was consecrated a bishop on May 12, 1990, by Richard Michael Bridges, a bishop of the American Independent Orthodox Church. He was assisted by
Emil Fairfield Rodriguez of the
Mexican National Catholic Church and Donald Lawrence Jolly. In 1991, Bridges's group conferred upon Stallings the title of archbishop. In 2009, the archdiocese reached a $125,000 settlement with Gamal Awad, who said he was sexually abused at the age of 14 by Stallings and a seminarian in 1984.
Marriage and conditional consecration In 2001, Stallings married Sayomi Kamimoto, a 24-year-old native of
Okinawa, Japan, in a ceremony in New York City presided over by
Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the
Unification Church.
Emmanuel Milingo—a former Roman Catholic archbishop who was excommunicated—married a woman from South Korea at the same mass ceremony. Members of the Imani Temple were so upset by Stallings' sudden announcement of his upcoming wedding that some left after services in protest of his "close affiliation with and adoption of doctrine of the Unification Church." In 2004, Stallings was a key organizer for an event in which Moon was crowned with a "crown of peace." The event was attended by a number of
members of the U.S. Congress, a number of whom said that they were misled. It was held at the
Dirksen Senate Office Building, the use of which requires a senator's approval. Stallings said the matter of who approved access was "shrouded in mystery." (2006) Stallings was national co-president of the American Clergy Leadership Conference, an affiliate of Moon's Unification Church, and active in efforts to widen Moon's influence among black clergy. Though all were denounced and excommunicated by the Roman Church, however, according to the Catholic understanding of
sacramental character, Milingo and the four men were nevertheless considered "
valid but illicit." Following this
conditional sacrament, Stallings praised his second excommunication from the Roman Church.
Denial of Hell Following the January 2024 death of
Pentecostal bishop and
Christian universalist Carlton Pearson, Stallings denied the existence of an
eternal and physical Hell. ==Politics==