Brazil diocese received

into Southern Cone

Bishop Robinson Cavalcanti (left), along with the congregations and clergy of 44 parishes of the Diocese of Recife in northeastern Brazil, were received Dec. 8 by Presiding Bishop Gregory Venables as an extra-territorial diocese of the Church of the Province of the Southern Cone.

The reception marks a shift in the status of the evangelical Brazilian congregations from a personal prelature of Bishop Venables over individuals in Recife to a formal ecclesial entity within the province.

In Oct. 2005, Bishop Venables extended his personal primatial oversight to Bishop Cavalcanti and 40 priests of the Diocese of Recife after they were deposed by the Brazilian church for refusing to comply with the more liberal diocese. Approximately 90 percent of the diocese backed Bishop Cavalcanti and withdrew from the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil (IEAB) to form the Anglican Diocese of Recife (DAR). The IEAB appointed a new bishop to oversee the remaining clergy.

(The Diocese of Recife had earlier appealed for help to the Panel of Reference when it was formed in Feb. 2005--but to no avail.)

Following the vote by the Southern Cone synod to welcome ecclesial entities into the province, delegates to the annual synod in the DAR voted to ask to be received as an “extra-territorial” diocese, and adopted legislation conforming the diocese’s constitution and canons to those of the Southern Cone.

The Southern Cone also includes one diocese in the United States: the Anglican Diocese of San Joaquin located in California.

  The Anglican Network in Canada and its two bishops Don Harvey and Malcolm Harding, formerly bishops in the Anglican Church of Canada, are also members of the Southern Cone but the Canadian body is not yet a distinct diocese.

The Southern Cone has two dioceses in Argentina and one each in Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.  

– Main source: The Living Church