On Saturday, October 26^th – 2024 – Michael Ellis, NFCR, was ordained a Bishop in the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America (CACINA). The service was held at the CACINA Parish of St. John of God in Schenectady, New York. Bishop Anthony Green, FCR, Auxiliary Bishop in the Diocese of Little Portion, was the principal consecrator with CACINA’s Presiding Bishop Michael Theogene, OSB, and Bishop Monica Kennedy as Co-consecrators. Many of Bishop Ellis’ family friends and colleagues were in attendance.  Also, clergy from Protestant faith traditions attended, including Pastor Katelyn Bradwell of Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church where St. John of God Parish nests.

The following day, on Sunday, October 27^th, Bishop Francisco Betancourt, FCR, who has been the Ordinary of the Diocese of Little Portion for more than 20 years, moved to the position of Bishop Emeritus and passed the crozier of the Ordinary to Bishop Green, with Bishop Ellis taking the position of Auxiliary Bishop.

The Catholic Apostolic Church in North America has a rich history and is proud to have sustained a lineage of direct apostolic lines to Bishop Carlos Duarte Costa, who is also known as St. Charles of Brazil. The Igreja Católica Apostólica Brasileira (ICAB), in English The Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church, canonized Costa on July 4, 1970, and gave him the title "São Carlos do Brasil" - Saint Charles of Brazil.

CACINA has carried on Dom Carlos’ theological vision of liberation theology. 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.

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.

Bishop Michael Ellis joins the College of Bishops of CACINA as it celebrates its 75^th year of ministry as a national Catholic Church this year. Bishop Ellis joins with the CACINA College of Bishops to oversee thirteen parishes and missions through the United States, most of which are in the northeast. Bishop Ellis comes to the bishop role with more than thirty years of work as a psychotherapist in private practice, and he will continue his vocational ministry in hospice chaplaincy.