The story of the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America begins in Brazil with a promising young Roman Catholic cleric whose faith journey would, in time, place him at cross purposes with the pope himself. Carlos Duarte Costa was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1888. His mother’s family, the da Silva’s, were minor aristocracy, and had a long history of involvem
ent in Brazilian politics and public life. Duarte Costa’s uncle on his mother’s side, Eduardo Duarte da Silva, was, himself, a bishop and later cardinal, who gave Carlos his first communion. Carlos was early marked for the church, and was taken to Rome at age nine by his uncle, where he attended the Pontifical Latin American College, before returning to Brazil and completing his studies at an Augustinian seminary. He was ordained a priest by his uncle in 1911, and served in a variety of essentially bureaucratic diocesan offices before being elevated to the episcopacy and made bishop of Botucatu by Pope Pius XI in 1924 at the relatively early age of thirty-six.
It was almost certainly during his time as bishop of Botucatu, a very poor diocese in a depressed part of the country, that Dom Carlos experienced a shift in his theological outlook and began to identify and champion what would later be termed a “theology of liberation”.
Through his care for the people of his diocese, Dom Carlos came to realize that the gospel must always be experienced in context, and its message made manifest in both the individual and collective circumstances of peoples’ lives. At its core, his theology was incarnational - not just God with us, but God as one of us. Dom Carlos understood that a Christian theology of liberation is tasked with engaging the world from the faith perspective of a Christ who situates himself in solidarity with those whom society has marginalized. In God’s preferential option for the poor, the messianic community is identified and formed, and the church is made visible.
In his championing of the lives of the poor, Dom Carlos soon ran afoul of both the Brazilian government and the Vatican. In his second ad limina visit to Rome in 1936, Costa presented Pious XI with a list of reforms for the church in Brazil, including the abolition of celibacy, the celebration of Mass in the language of the people, the church’s alignment with representative government (vs. militaristic juntas), and a reallocation of church funds towards the needs of the poor.
In response, Pious removed Costa from his diocese the following year (1937), and named him titular bishop of Maura, a non-existent diocese. Essentially, Costa, the aspiring young bishop whose uncle was a cardinal, was himself reduced to the margins of Church governance and service, and subsequently shunned by his episcopal peers.
Dom Carlos, however, refused to remain silent about the state of the Brazilian people and their Church.
During WWII, Dom Carlos called out and criticized his country’s accommodation of German and Italian clerics (who, it was later established, were functionaries of their respective governments’ intelligence services), resulting in his being placed under house arrest by Brazil’s military junta, an act coordinated with the support and approval of the Papal nuncio. He was released only after US President Roosevelt and Britain’s Prime Minister Churchill interceded personally for him.
Dom Carlos’s later accusation of the Vatican’s complicity with the Axis governments both during and immediately after the war earned him excommunication on July 2, 1945. Upon receiving the expected news, he remarked, “I consider today one of the happiest days of my life.”
The next day, July 3, 1945, Dom Carlos announced the formation of the Igreja Catolica Apostolica Brasileira (the Catholic Apostolic Church of Brazil – ICAB). In response, the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Brazil sought injunctions against Dom Carlos, seeking to prevent him from using the word “Catholic” in his newly formed faith communion. In the protracted legal struggle that followed, Dom Carlos prevailed, agreeing to distinguish his Apostolic Catholic priests from Roman Catholic clerics by adopting grey as their clerical color (a practice canonically observed by CACINA).
In its subsequent emphasis on issues of liberation and social justice at a time when Brazil was ruled by a succession of military regimes, the Catholic Apostolic Church of Brazil (ICAB) rose swiftly to national prominence, advocating tirelessly for land reform, redistribution of wealth, judicial independence, and a return to constitutional government. Soon, it would be known popularly by a simpler title: “the Church of the poor”.
Carlos Duarte Costa centered his devotional life in the Catholic intellectual tradition’s dialogue between fides and praxis. In his writing (which is not voluminous), and especially in his embrace of faithful Christian discipleship as a countercultural call to radical identification with the poor, we observe the foundation of much that would inform later theologians, giving shape to a mature theology of liberation. Almost alone at the time, he was also an environmentalist bishop, steadfastly maintaining that the world’s resources must be held not in private ownership but in sacred trust for the well-being of all creation.
The story of the Catholic Apostolic Church in Brazil is rich and colorful, as indeed Costa himself was. In his remaining lifetime, Dom Carlos, as primatial Catholic Apostolic Bishop of Rio de Janeiro, would consecrate eleven bishops, commissioning them to episcopal ministry in both Brazil as well as throughout Central and South America, where they, in turn, founded national Catholic Apostolic Churches.
Upon his death in 1961, Dom Carlos was canonized a saint by the Catholic Apostolic Church of Brazil (ICAB), and is included in the litany of Saints by the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America CACINA). In 2006, the Roman Catholic Church, in an internal document, estimated that the ICAB had three million members. The Brazilian census of 2020 wasn’t tabulated because of the covid pandemic. Expectations are that the census of 2030 may well accord ICAB a membership approaching 10 million.
CACINA
One bishop in particular whom Dom Carlos ordained, Dom Estefan Corradi-Scarella, was consecrated expressly for the purpose of transplanting Apostolic Catholicism to North America, arriving in the United States in 1949 and establishing a mission in New Mexico.
By the late 1960’s, identification with the Brazilian Church had been severed, and the Catholic Apostolic Church established communions with the Old Catholic movement and Independent Orthodoxy. Communication was restored with Brazil in the 1970's. In the 1980's, a dispute developed within the Catholic Apostolic Church over the liturgy. As a result, two bodies were formed: the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America (CACINA), which followed the Latin Rite under the primacy of Bishop Corradi-Scarella, and the Western Orthodox Church in America (WOCA), which favored a westernized Orthodox liturgy. The separation was amicable and cordial relations are retained today.
Bishop Francis Jerome Joachim Ladd became the second primate of CACINA, succeeding Bishop Corradi-Scarella to that title. The apostolic succession of all CACINA bishops, without exception, traces its line of episcopal ordination to Dom Carlos Duarte Costa. And in keeping with Dom Carlos’s mandate, CACINA is intentional in its use of the Roman Pontifical at all episcopal ordinations.
There are currently fourteen (14) CACINA parishes and missions in seven (7) states, along with two religious orders of canonical right, as well as stand-alone ministries in education, social services, health care chaplaincies, hospice, hunger relief, and restorative justice.
Finally, like its predecessor, the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America has deep roots in theologies of liberation. Recognizing God’s preferential option for the poor, CACINA, in conscious solidarity with “the crucified peoples of the world”, has, from its inception, been a voice for the disenfranchised, the marginalized, and the disinherited. CACINA seeks to discover and serve Christ in all persons, is committed to peace, reconciliation, and sacramental justice, and, as a truly Catholic Church, strives to witness to the universality of God’s love through the practice of radical hospitality.