Miami Cult Member Selling Ruhama Canellis Dot Com

Someone has registered the domain name ruhamacanellis.com and is offering it for sale. The contact email address listed on the site belongs to a high ranking member of a Miami based religious cult that has been openly going after Alberto Cutie and the Roman Catholic Church for years.

by Gilbert Wesley Purdy.


On May 8th ― the day that Ruhama Buni Canellis was identified by the UPI as the love interest in the life of Roman Catholic priest Father Alberto Cutie ― the domain name ruhamacanellis.com was registered through the internet provider GoDaddy.com. The domain was purchased under a program GoDaddy offers to maintain a domain owner’s anonymity. The listing for ruhamacanellis.com at GoDaddy’s WhoIs search page reads the following in lieu of the registrant’s name:

Registrant:
This domain is for sale
Miami City
Miami, Florida 33015
United States

A gmail contact address (twittersdomain@gmail.com) is provided. The address does not have a searchable internet history.


At the site itself, however, (just below a picture of the cover of a tabloid newspaper featuring photos of then Father Alberto Cutie involved in love play on the beach with Ruhama) the contact email address provided for those who might be interested in advertising on the site is alvaro@aposmail.com. The site is laid out on a Google Blogspot template, features Google Adsense and advertising from unspecified sources and is called simply “Ruhama Canellis”. The articles and links portray Alberto Cutie and Roman Catholicism in the most unflattering possible fashion.

Alvaro@aposmail.com, as it turns out, is a very interesting email address. It is one of the many email addresses of Alvaro Albarracin, a close associate of Miami Cult leader Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda. De Jesus Miranda is the head and founder of the Creciendo En Gracias (Growing in Grace) church. The web site features links to a number of De Jesus Miranda’s and the church’s web sites including a site called “VaticanCrimes.US”. One unsigned post, dated May 28, 2009, reads “Father Cutie Will Marry Me Today, Thursday!”


De Jesus Miranda has declared himself both the second coming of Christ and the first coming of the Antichrist. In his theology both are the same person. In the words of Dan Matthewson, associate professor of religion at Wofford College:

In addition to its Latin American churches, the movement has also spread into the U.S., Spain, Italy, Canada, and Australia, with headquarters in Miami, Florida. Total, the group claims 300 congregations with more than 100,000 members, in addition to a 24-hour cable channel based in Columbia that purportedly reaches two million homes. Telegracia, as the channel is called, airs talk shows, music videos, and sermons in English, Spanish and Portuguese. It also broadcasts a news program, which is taped in the Miami headquarters.

De Jesus Miranda preaches that the Roman Catholic Church is evil and that there is no such thing as sin. (Actually, if pressed he adds that he finds all Christian denominations pretty much equally evil.) He has taken the number 666 and the letters SSS (which he claims stands for “Salve Siempre Salve,” but, of course, just might stand for “Six Six Six”) as corporate symbols of a sort. They appear on his backdrops, his pulpits and elsewhere. His followers often sport 666 tattoos.

According to a February 2007 Fox News article, Alvaro Albarracin, whose email address appears on ruhamacanellis.com, “oversees corporate donations to the church and holds the title 'Entrepreneur of Entrepreneurs.'” Albarracin has many business interests himself and among them is buying internet domains for resale. This might seem to explain his interest in the ruhamacanellis.com domain but there is much more to the story.

It seems that Alberto Cutie and De Jesus Miranda had a heated exchange of words in early 2005. Cutie had begun preaching that De Jesus Miranda was “ignorant,” “crazy,” “schizophrenic”. The founder of Creciendo En Gracia did not take the comments well and began counter attacking Cutie on his television station Telegracia. In December of 2006, well after the war of words had ended, De Jesus Miranda suddenly brought Cutie up again. The priest, he said, was going to fall due to a scandal.

Those who have been following the Alberto Cutie stories, since he was discovered on a Miami beach in love play with a then unidentified woman, will remember that Cutie admits that he has had an intimate relationship with Ruhama Canellis for “about two years”. That would mean that the relationship began at about the same time that Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda predicted that he was going to be the subject of a scandal. The cult leader is presently circulating a video claiming that he “prophesied” Alberto Cutie’s fall. A copy has been uploaded to YouTube by Creciendo En Gracias.

While Alvaro Albarracin is a notoriously fast operator, he does not seem the type to try to sell an internet domain that seems certain to be the subject of a lawsuit against whoever might buy it ― a lawsuit that would seem just as certain to succeed. And then there is the question of just who he might be selling it for. If he himself owns the site why pay a fee to mask the fact and then list his own personal email address on the site? If he is selling it for someone else then who is he selling it for? The answer to that question might be the answer to many of the mysteries surrounding the Alberto Cutie scandal.

Alberto Cutie Enters the Episcopal Church with Ruhama Canellis by his Side.

I received the call at 10:00 last night. The Roman Catholic Priest, Father Alberto Cutie, would be arriving at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral today to formally join the Episcopalian church. I was given a short list of additional work items for the morning. Nobody had much of any idea what is done on such occasions, least of all myself. 

The media began to show up in force at about 11:30 this morning. All instructions I’d been given as to how to handle them were countermanded almost immediately. New instructions were given and abandoned about once every half hour. 

Alberto Cutie and Ruhama Canellis were accepted into the church in a ceremony that began at 1:30 p.m. It was a small private service attended by approximately 50 Episcopalian clergy, staff and guests. The service was presided over by the Right Reverend Leo Frade, Bishop of the Diocese of Southeast Florida. Cutie is awaiting ordination as a Deacon, as well, but will be allowed, in the meantime, to preach in Episcopal churches but not to officiate over any of the rites of the church.

A luncheon followed in the cathedral hall. As I was lunching apart, myself, I do not know for sure if Cutie attended but it is unlikely. The media was waiting impatiently outside in the breezeway between the north parking lot and the garden, the Diocesan public relations staff not quite sure, at that point, what to do with them. The former Catholic priest was kept in seclusion until the press conference that had been scheduled for 2:30. 

All instructions for preparing for the press conference were, of course, repeatedly countermanded, and, as the result, the news crews had to break down and set up several times. I was to keep them strictly back behind the second row of pews, then the first, then in front of the first. No one was supposed to stand on the pews but then that too was abandoned as the cameras and reporters slowly inched their way forward in spite of all attempts to prevent them. 

The conference finally began at about 3:00 in the cathedral transept. Bishop Frade first read a statement in English then Spanish. He introduced Alberto Cutie, “his fiancée,” Ruhama Buni Canellis, and family members. About 20 clergy were also squeezed into the little space we’d managed to keep clear for them. 

Cutie wore a simple but well cut dark suit with an open-collar white shirt and was impeccably groomed. He also read a statement in English then Spanish. At the end of his statement the reporters began calling out questions in Spanish. He was immediately ushered out via the south transept, per plan, and into the church office questions being yelled out behind him. 

Bishop Frade answered questions for nearly an hour until the crews slowly started drifting away, during which time we spirited Cutie and Canellis out a side door in a pouring rain (I’m just now drying out) and into a vehicle with tinted windows. As the vehicle with couple slowly exited the property, and I closed the gate in order to prevent it being followed, one reporter who had managed to discover our plans, and had parked just outside the gate, pursued them up the street and past the television equipment trucks and four police cruisers.

As I write this, the various television crews are still shooting their “fake live shots” inside the cathedral, with the Cathdral's Italian mosaics for backdrop. The CBS truck is outside my window, camera mounted on its tripod and 30 foot transmitter deployed waiting for its reporter. I will hope to find an embeddable video of the press conference to back fit into this later. I’d better go check how matters are coming along.

Also from the Library of Babel and Virtual Grub Street:

• The Gourmet Pirate: his recipes for Syllabub. May 4, 2022. 'Mixing with a "birchen rod" and drinking the beverage from custom porcelain “syllabub cups” were absolutely essential aspects in better circles in which the participants took their syllabub seriously.'
• Shakespeare and the End of Western Civilization. February 21, 2021. “The SLJ article posted at pretty much the same time that a featured interview of Germán was posted in the much more radical White Supremacy in Education issue of the Learning for Justice group’s Teaching Tolerance Magazine. Learning for Justice was founded by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
• The Best Translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia.  July, 14, 2019.  “For the next month, then, I put aside a few hours each night.  Not only with Singleton and Merwin.  In the glorious Age of the Internet, the first step could only be a search for what books relating to the subject were available on Google Book Search and the Internet Archive.”
• A Memoriam for W. S. Merwin.  April 17, 2019.  “It took about three days, as I recall, for me to surrender to the fact that W. S. Merwin was the finest English language poet of his time.  I wished I’d been prepared to read him years ago.”
• Check out the Shakespeare Authorship Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.