Argentine Catholic Apostolic Church - Pedro Ruiz Badanelli

Pedro Ruiz Badanelli

Pedro Ruiz Badanelli was a priest from the Santa Fe diocese of Argentina, to the rural north of Buenos Aires, and had made his name both as an academic canon lawyer, founder of university departments, and dissident catholic supporter and friend of Lieutenant General and President Juan Domingo Perón. The Lawyer–Academic–Priest Pedro Ruiz Badanelli is remembered as being a headstrong Andalusian, though his second surname is clearly of Italian origin. The author of several important books, Badanelli declared in his 1959/1960 work Perón, The Church, and a Priest (Perón, La Iglesia y un Cura) that he rejected the idea of a National Argentine Church along the lines of "Henry the Eighth’s Church of England", and also ridiculed the rumour that he had already been consecrated Bishop clandestinely by Bishop Duarte Costa on a visit to Buenos Aires in 1960. Nonetheless Ruiz Badanelli later adhered to the National Church (though his dissidence and militant support of Perón had never actually earned him excommunication) and was consecrated by Leonardo Morizio Dominguez in 1973. Ruiz Badanelli objected strongly and in person to the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s demands that the National Church’s clergy should wear the pearl grey cassocks of their Brazilian National Church cousins in order to differentiate themselves from their Roman counterparts, reportedly marching into the Roman Archdiocesan Vicar General’s office uninvited, and pinning him to the wall by ramming his desk into him.