Founder: Carlos Duarte Costa (b. 1888; d. 1961)
The Brazilian Apostolic Catholic Church was founded in 1945, by the former Roman Catholic bishop Don Carlos Duarte Costa, constituting the first schism in the Catholic Church in Brazil. D.Costa was born in Rio de Janeiro (1888), studied at seminaries in both Brazil and in Rome, and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1911. He worked in the diocese of Rio de Janeiro until his episcopal consecration, in 1924, when he was named bishop of the Botucatu diocese, near the city of Sao Paulo. He was removed from his episcopal post in 1937, when he received the honorary title of Bishop of Maura, the name by which he came to be known throughout the country. In 1944 he was suspended from his sacerdotal duties and in 1946 he was publicly excommunicated by the Holy Office in Rome.
Still acting as Roman Catholic bishop, he assumed clear and belligerent political postures during moments of national crisis. He defended the Constitutionalist Revolution in Sao Paulo (1932), a movement aimed at ousting the dictator Getulio Vargas who had taken power using the armed forces, interrupting the democratic process of presidential succession (1930). During the Second World War, he openly opposed fascism and Nazism, at a moment when the Brazilian government and the Roman Catholic Church maintained an ambiguous stance on these issues.
The disagreement between the Bishop of Maura and the Roman church was fundamentally on disciplinary and moral issues, and these same issues inspired his church’s principal innovations. Among them, we may cite: the acceptance of divorce, the abolition of ecclesiastic celibacy, permission granted priests to exercise a civil or military profession, and the celebration of mass in the vernacular. According to his Manifest to the Nation (1945), ‘the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church is a religious society, structured on the biblical teachings of the Old and New Testament. It is Catholic because it professes the Christian faith throughout the world, embraced by all Christians, considering brothers in Christ all those who love Christ and respect him as God, Man, and Philosopher. It is apostolic because I am the successor of the apostles and all acts practiced by me are valid and licit. It is Brazilian because it is separated from the Roman church, respecting the direction of the national episcopate, conserving the traditional uses and customs of our land.’
Upon founding the ICAB, Don Costa conferred episcopal consecration on a number of Roman Catholic priests and some protestant pastors who were accompanying him in his rupture with Rome, and ordained several of his lay followers as priests, thus forming his own clergy destined to implant the ICAB in various regions of the country. As the Primate of his church, D.Costa established his residence in Rio de Janeiro where his religious movement met with certain success in the city’s suburbs. Other important nuclei sprang up in the states of Santa Catarina, Sao Paulo, Goias, Minas Gerais, and Mar-anhao. The movement penetrated into other Latin American countries, giving rise to national churches in Venezuela and Guatemala.
The ICAB is structured along the lines of the Roman Catholic Church, with dioceses and parishes. Its pastoral activ-ities are oriented fundamentally toward administering the Christian sacraments, often responding to a demand by people who have not been able to marry or baptize their children in the Roman Catholic parishes because they are divorced or not married in the church. Another significant activity of the ICAB is in the realm of popular devotion, as it honors saints and rituals that are con-sidered superstitious or syncretic by the Roman Catholic Church.
If, on the one hand, the path chosen by the ICAB makes it a rival of the Roman Catholic Church, on the other, this same path is responsible for ICAB’s scant visibility, given that it is easily con-founded with the original church. This absence of a doctrinal or ritual identity has created obstacles to the development of sense of community and strong belong-ing among the church’s members. Despite this fact, in the 2000 demographic census, 500,000 Brazilians (0.29 per cent of the population) declared themselves members of the Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church in a population esti-mated at 170 million inhabitants of which 125 million are Roman Catholics (73.5 per cent).
