Italy is a Catholic country which reveres the Pope, but that does not stop it savouring the soap opera of a Zambian archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, the wife he married in a Moonie ceremony, and their possible unborn child.
The Vatican today announced that Mgr Milingo had returned to the fold, renouncing his marriage and the Moonie religion. According to the Vatican, he has written to the Pope, declaring: "I am your humble and obedient servant."
However final this may sound, the news is unlikely to daunt the determination of Maria Sung, aka Lady Milingo, to get her husband back.
Yesterday Ms Sung, 43, started a hunger strike in Rome to protest against the Vatican's alleged kidnapping of her husband, who disappeared after meeting the Pope last week.
An entourage of television crews followed her visit to St Peter's Square where she prayed inside the basilica, wept beneath the Pope's balcony and wiped tears with a red hanky.
"My period is late. If I am expecting a baby, it would be in the interests of the child to know its father. He would want to know his father."
She intends to sit in St Peter's Square, with a large picture of her husband, from dawn to dusk during the hunger strike.
"If I can't meet him on Earth, I will die and with my spirit I will be close to him. Marriage is still valid even beyond death."
According to the Vatican, Mgr Milingo, 71, who married Sung in a Moonie ceremony three months ago, is in spiritual seclusion at a secret location in Italy.
He needs to reflect in peace, said a spokesman. Which means he should not set foot outside his bolthole because the country is agog at a scandal which has everything: sex, tug-of-love, secret diaries, and a scorned woman battling John Paul II.
In the summer news drought, newspapers and television have seized on the story, feeding daily revelations to a scandalised and fascinated public.
Mgr Milingo was hauled to a desk job in Rome in 1983 because the Vatican distrusted his faith healings and exorcisms in his diocese of Lusaka, Zambia.
"Too African," muttered critics, and he was retired last year, despite enduring popularity in Zambia and Italy.
He was snubbed by colleagues and had a reputation for eccentricity - but nobody expected him to arrive at a New York hotel last May for a mass wedding conducted by the Rev Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification church.
Threatened with excommunication if he did not leave his wife and renounce the Moonies, the archbishop turned up in Italy unexpectedly last week. He met the Pope and told journalists he was torn by indecision. Then he disappeared, and Lady Milingo came to Rome to find him.
Have they consummated the marriage? A prurient question, but a "yes" could turn what is currently a Vatican public relations disaster into a catastrophe.
The Milan daily Corriere della Sera quoted the South Korean acupuncturist as saying that they had not had sex. But she told other journalists they had, and promised to have a pregnancy test - suggesting the Pope could be blamed for breaking up a marriage and effectively rendering a child fatherless.
Smartly dressed and chaperoned by aides from the Unification church, between bouts of weeping Ms Sung has shown a dignity and resolve which makes her a formidable operator.
She is merely a woman in love who wants her husband back, she says. "He is not the private property of the Catholic Church."
It is a battle of public relations and will. Ms Sung's credibility is strained by the fact that she met her spouse just three days before the wedding, which apparently was not registered, and had no shared language.
Her cause, several Italian journalists have privately said, would be helped if she was "bella". But she is not doing badly. She has kept the initiative through the hunger strike, press conferences and interviews. Her visit to St Peter's was orchestrated, right down to the eight-minute prayer in front of the altar and photo-ops outside. Mgr Milingo's diaries, which criticise some prelates, have been made public.
She dismissed a Vatican delegation which brought a letter in which her husband allegedly dumped her and begged forgiveness for his "mistake" in marrying her, and said that she would speak only with the archbishop.
The Vatican says it is enduring these tribulations because it is in the business of forgiving, and wants to welcome a prodigal son back into the fold.
Cynics suggest the real reason is the fear that Mgr Milingo could deploy his popularity and Moonie dollars to start a rival church in Africa.
Many cardinals are said to have been appalled that John Paul agreed to meet the Zambian, and lifted the threat of excommunication. Those blunders would have been avoided had not the Pope's formidable spin doctor, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, been on holiday.