Argentine Catholic Apostolic Church - The Argentine National Church Since 1983

The Argentine National Church Since 1983

The end of the dictatorship in 1983 saw the removal from the National Register of Religions (Dirección Nacional de Cultos) of the ICAA. By this time the former Roman Catholic priest José Eugenio Tenca Rusconi (c.1930–2003), of Yugoslav/Italian parentage, had been consecrated Bishop by Monsignor Morizio Dominguez. Tenca Rusconi would then consecrate – directly or indirectly – all of the current Bishops of the church. In 1992 he ordained a former Roman Catholic seminarian who had studied in Barcelona, Dante Luis Bergonzi Moreno (1965–) to the priesthood, and then to the Episcopate only three years later, on the eighth of December 1995. The multilingual Bergonzi Moreno (of Italian/Piemontese parentage) is the current Bishop–Primate of the Church, who operates from a Sanctuary dedicated to Saint Expeditus in the locality of Alejandro Korn in Buenos Aires Province, in the ruins of a sofa factory. Tenca Rusconi also consecrated Bishops Ramón Frías (apparently now inactive as a Bishop), Eduardo Lencina (a church organist), Gustavo Gabucci (ordained priest for the Brazilian Congregation of Saint Andrew, now a high school teacher in Buenos Aires), and a Monsignor Arnedo. Bergonzi Moreno, in turn, has consecrated Bishops Carlos Walter Vich Pizarro as Bishop of Córdoba, and Carlos Adrian Guedes Dominguez as Bishop of The Exaltation of The Cross (a diocese centred around the northern Buenos Aires locality of Ingeniero Maschwitz).