BRAZIL: A TALE OF TWO CHURCHES

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD | www.virtueonline.org  | August 25, 2026

They never met, and there was never any intention that they should. The country was Brazil. Spiritually and theologically, the two gatherings might as well have convened ten thousand miles apart.

Two bodies of Anglican leaders — with different gods, different gospels, and different destinations — passed each other like ships in the night. Sunni and Shia without the bullets and the guns, a communion in unambiguous schism.

All talk of unity — that perennial incantation of archbishops, and never more so than from the present occupant of Lambeth Palace — has long since evaporated. It survives now only as liturgy, recited over a body that has already died. Dame Sarah Mullally spent her first African pilgrimage this summer at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, defending the Church of England's £100 million reparations fund from the very dungeons of the transatlantic trade, praying in lament and calling for healing. Even sympathizers noticed what was missing. The historian Bijan Omrani asked aloud why she prayed only in penance and never in thanks — never for the British clergy, sailors, and abolitionists who spent their lives, and in many cases their blood, to bring the trade to an end. The Church of England now knows how to apologize for its past. It has forgotten how to preach.

Why Brazil?

Why Brazil, one might ask? It has indigenous peoples, a rainforest of international note, and a burgeoning Pentecostalism that is slowly but surely overtaking several centuries of moribund Roman Catholicism. The people will no longer be intimidated into believing that the Roman Church is the one true church that alone dispenses salvation. God, it turns out, is bigger than the Vatican.

Anglicanism has had a footing in Brazil far longer than most realize. It arrived in 1810, when the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation between Portugal and the United Kingdom permitted the Church of England to build chaplaincies for British expatriates in what was still a Portuguese colony — making Anglicanism the oldest non-Roman church in the country. A genuinely Brazilian, Portuguese-speaking church came later, in 1889-90, carried by young missionaries from the Theological Seminary of Virginia — Lucien Lee Kinsolving and James Watson Morris among them — who came not to serve homesick Englishmen but to plant a national church. From a missionary district of the American Episcopal Church, it grew into an autonomous province of the Anglican Communion in 1965: the Igreja Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil, the IEAB.

And, like the Episcopal Church it sprang from, it eventually tore in two.

The Recife Story

The fracture came in 2005, over the issue that has broken Anglicanism on every continent: human sexuality. After the Episcopal Church consecrated the openly partnered Gene Robinson in 2003 in open defiance of Lambeth Resolution 1.10, the Diocese of Recife, under its bishop Robinson Cavalcanti, refused to bend. For that refusal he was deposed and expelled from the IEAB. He did not go quietly, and he did not go alone. He took with him roughly two-thirds of the diocese’s clergy and the overwhelming majority of its laity, and placed himself under the primatial oversight of Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone. The province kept the buildings; Cavalcanti kept the people.

Then came the tragedy that still shadows the diocese — and shadows me. On the night of February 26, 2012, Robinson Cavalcanti and his wife, Miriam, were stabbed to death in their home in Olinda by their adopted son, a young man with a long history of drug abuse. The bishop was sixty-eight; Miriam was sixty-four. Robinson was my friend, and I miss him still. A confessor who had faced down an entire province lost his life not to persecution but to private anguish under his own roof. GAFCON mourned him as one of its steadfast heroes; I mourned a man I had known and admired.

Into that breach stepped Miguel Uchôa Cavalcanti. He had planted the Church of the Holy Spirit in Greater Recife in 1996 with just thirty souls — a congregation that would become the largest Anglican parish in Latin America. This writer recalls the early days of that work quite vividly. Elected to succeed the martyred bishop later in 2012 and consecrated that December, Uchôa did not merely hold the line; he multiplied it. By 2018 the single embattled diocese had become a province — the Anglican Church in Brazil, the IAB — with Uchôa as its first Archbishop and Primate, recognized by GAFCON and the Global South. Today he sits as Vice-Chairman of the Global Anglican Council, the new governing body of the reordered Global Anglican Communion. The man who buried his predecessor now helps lead a communion.

That is the ground on which the two gatherings met. One tribe would remember none of it. The other had lived every word.

Gathering One: São Paulo

The first group convened in São Paulo from August 10 to 12 — the Anglican primates of the Americas, seven of them, gathered under the aegis of the IEAB and the Canterbury-aligned Communion. They were Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe of the Episcopal Church; Marinez Rosa dos Santos Bassotto of Brazil, the first woman to lead an Anglican province in Latin America; Shane Parker of Canada; Alba Sally Sue Hernández García of Mexico; Juan David Alvarado Melgar of Central America; Brian Williams of South America; and Philip Wright of the West Indies.

They pledged to labor together on the great global questions of the age. They issued a statement. They affirmed the dignity and rights of indigenous peoples. They deplored colonialism, secularism, polarization, migration, corruption, and climate change. They revitalized a committee on migration. What they did not do — what they dared not do — was look out the window at their own emptying pews.

It is tempting to file all seven under the banner of the progressive left, and the truth is more revealing than that. But the statement they signed named every crisis in the world except the one consuming their own provinces. Not a word about the collapse of attendance across the Anglican West. Not a word about the doctrinal earthquakes that have shattered the Communion they represent. It is more congenial to pronounce upon the state of the planet in righteous indignation than to stare the state of one’s own church in the face.

Picture, if you can bear it, the logical terminus of this trajectory: a gay dean preaching to an empty cathedral, announcing that God has now blessed every arrangement the age approves, and inviting the faithful — all four of them — to a rave in the nave afterward, gin and tonics provided. It is satire only until you notice how little distance remains between the joke and the trend line.

Gathering Two: Recife

Under the banner of God’s faithfulness, a very different assembly met in Recife under GAFCON, now the Global Anglican Communion. Its purpose was to install the Very Rev. Gabriel Moreira Uchôa Cavalcanti as Dean of the Catedral Anglicana do Espírito Santo.

By the movement’s own account, the service overflowed with joy and hope as Archbishop Miguel Uchôa passed the mantle of the cathedral’s leadership to his son, Gabriel. Ecclesiastical nepotism is not new, and where genuine generational faith is concerned it can be a mercy rather than a machination — the handing of a torch, not the hoarding of a throne. The celebration marked thirty years since Archbishop Miguel planted that church in 1996 with thirty people.

Yet even amid the celebration there was no forgetting the cost. Those thirty years told a story of hope purchased through severe trial. Faithfulness to the authority of Scripture had come at a punishing price for the brothers and sisters in Brazil — the loss of their former institutional home, their buildings, their standing in the province that raised them. That is the price of faithfulness, and the Lord did not abandon his people. Note well: the São Paulo primates, meeting in the same country the same month, made no mention of this schism, these losses, this exile. One cannot lament what one has caused.

When faithful Anglicans in Brazil found themselves cast out of their provincial home, GAFCON stood with them, offering recognition, encouragement, and a place within the global Anglican family. The Diocese of Recife became an extra-provincial diocese; then, through what the movement calls gospel growth, it multiplied into the Anglican Church in Brazil in 2018. Suffering and sacrifice, it turned out, had not been in vain.

The gathering was careful to locate its hope where hope belongs — not in institutions, buildings, or human strength, but in the risen Christ. During their days in Recife, members of the Global Anglican Council also met to continue the work of building out the new Communion, and announced that the G27 Prayer Conference will be held in Recife from April 20 to 23, 2027. The Most Rev. Dr. Laurent Mbanda, Chairman of the Global Anglican Council, reminded the faithful that thirty years after a small band stepped out in faith, they were being shown again that God is able to do immeasurably more than they could ask or imagine.

Two Gatherings, Two Gospels

Two gatherings. Two worldviews. Two gospels.

One stood in the sunlight of its own self-congratulation, imagining itself a chamber of globalists, deploring the condition of the world and hoping the governments of men might deign to listen. The other gave thanks to God for His faithfulness in bringing dead souls to living faith in Christ — even as the world staggers toward apocalypse.

One counted its causes. The other counted its converts. And only one of them was growing.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.