Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church
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The Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church (ICAB - Igreja Católica Apostólica Brasileira) is a national catholic church established in 1945 by Brazilian Bishop Dom Carlos Duarte Costa, a former Roman Catholic bishop of Botucatu, who had been redesignated as the titular Bishop of Maura (an extinct diocese of North Africa), for administrative reasons.
Dom Carlos was an outspoken critic of the regime of Getúlio Vargas and the Vatican's alliances with totalitarian regimes, as well as doctrine of papal infallibility and Roman Catholic views on divorce and priestly celibacy. He was also considered to be a supporter of the Soviet Union and Communism (see Miscellaneous, below). In 1944 the Brazilian government imprisoned Dom Carlos and later freed him under political pressure by the United States and Great Britain.
When, in the following year (1945), Dom Carlos denounced the Odessa Operation, which was supposedly organized by the Vatican in order to facilitate the escape of Nazi officers, he was excommunicated by Pope Pius XII. One month later on August 18, Dom Carlos formed the Catholic Apostolic Church of Brazil (ICAB).
In 1961, the Roman Catholic Church received former ICAB bishop Dom Salomão Ferraz[1], who was married and had children, into the Roman Catholic Church, recognizing his orders as valid, although the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Brazil currently questions even the vailidity of ICAB baptisms.
The ICAB is currently headed by His Holiness the Patriarch Dom Luis Fernando Castillo Mendez, lists 48 dioceses, and claims around four million members worldwide[2], though analysts in Brazil, where the church is apparently not well known, estimate a wildly fluctuating membership of a few thousand, though many Roman Catholics may find themselves - inadvertently or not - participating in ICAB events and services. There is a likewise fluctuating number of partner Catholic Apostolic National Church groups around the world, identified as being in the ICAN communion Igreja Catolica Apostolica Nacionais by use of the title Catholic Apostolic National Church and presentation of the Worldwide Patriarchal seal. This would appear to be a tenuous communion. About a dozen such sister churches are mentioned from time to time, largely unverifiable beyond some semi-functioning websites, and others seem to shift in and out of communion. A World Council of the communion was held in Brazil in 2005, and a further Council in Mexico in 2010 has been mentioned.
[edit] Miscellaneous
The Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church is considered to have become more theologically, and generally, conservative under the Patriarchate of Dom Luis Castillo Mendez. The inclination of the founder, Carlos Duarte Costa, was unmistakably towards left wing politics and liberal catholicism. One of the most outrageous acts (at the time) perpetrated by Duarte Costa was his submission of a preface to the book 'The Soviet Power' by the then notorious Anglican Dean of Canterbury - the so-called "Red Dean of Canterbury" - Hewlett Johnson, famed for his unstinting support of the Soviet Union. Duarte Costa advocated the liquidation of church assets in favour of the poor, the political militancy of the poor laity, the challenge to military authority, and he also promoted fluid and flexible ecumenical cooperation, all of which have been set aside in the decades since his death.
Among its sister churches, in 2005 the Old Catholic Church of the United States entered full communion and became the Catholic Apostolic National Church.
