Church Background
In 1937 the Roman Catholic bishop Carlos Duarte Costa - and his diocese of Botucatu, Brazil - severed ties with the Vatican. The bishop was excommunicated in 1945 after he accused the Vatican of having collaborated with the national socialists (Nazis) and fascists. He then founded the Igreja Católica Apostólica Brasileira (Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church). In 1949 the church was brought to Germany by the future Archbishop Johannes Peter Meyer-Mendez where it was registered as the Free Catholic Church ("Freikatholische Kirche").
After the death of Archbishop Meyer-Mendez, his successor Georg Fröbrich, later Archbishop Hilarios Karl-Heinz Ungerer, transferred the seat of the archbishop, i.e. the principal seat, from Cologne to Munich, the capital of Bavaria. Archbishop Ungerer also was temporarily conductor of the now vacant Kustodie der Mariaviten in Bayern - founded by Archbishop Maria Paulus Norbert Maas - until his successful bid for demission of bishop's duties in 1978.
In September 1972, Bishop Ungerer rented a shop for a "shop church", which became the Free Catholic Shop Church at 25 Thalkirchner Strasse in Munich, as was the fashion in some big towns at that time. Over the next 25 years he endeavoured to integrate marginal groups into the church.
Read more about this topic: Free Catholic Church
Famous quotes containing the words church and/or background:
“The Church has always been willing to swap off treasures in heaven for cash down.”
—Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)