Sedevacantism is the term commonly used to denote the belief, held by a minority of Traditionalist Catholics, that some or all of the men generally recognized as Popes since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958 (Pope John XXIII, Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI) have not truly held the papal office, and have hence been antipopes. The word is derived from the Latin phrase "Sede vacante", which means "while the See [or Chair] is vacant" and is used in Vatican documents in the interval between the death or abdication of the Pope and the election of his successor.
Strictly speaking, the term "sedevacantist" should be applied only to those who believe that there is at present no valid Pope at all, but it is frequently used more broadly to include those, also known as "conclavists", who have sought to elect "legitimate" pontiffs in opposition to the occupants of the Vatican. Most sedevacantists are strongly opposed to conclavism.
Some sedevacantists believe that the papacy was occupied until his death in 1989 by Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, who was allegedly elected Pope in 1958 (following the death of Pius XII) or 1963 (following the death of John XXIII) and is said to have taken the name Gregory XVII. While there are claims that the 1958 papal election was indeed initially won by Siri (unsubstantiated, as the details of all conclaves are held in secret under pain of Excommunication unless the reigning pope chooses to release them), it is a matter of historical record that the Cardinal subsequently accepted the authority of and served loyally under all the post-1958 pontiffs, and died in full communion with the Church.
Many Traditionalist Catholics are opposed to the post-Conciliar reforms. Some traditionalists, however, would argue that, while the last few Popes may personally have held many unorthodox beliefs, they have nevertheless been true Popes and have never tried to use their infallible authority (which is used only rarely) to teach heresy - something that all orthodox Catholics believe would be impossible. Sedevacantists, by contrast, believe that these men's promulgation and endorsement of the post-Conciliar changes has made them guilty of Heresy, and each in turn has hence either forfeited the papal office or rendered himself ineligible for election to it.
Arguments used by sedevacantists to defend their position include the following:
Sedevacantists are a tiny group compared to the mainstream of Catholicism. There are estimated to be between several hundred and several thousand worldwide, mostly concentrated in the United States and Australia, but their numbers are not certain; there may be either more or fewer sedevacantists globally. Sedevacantists note that Catholic doctrine teaches that the Church is identified by its unity, sanctity, catholicity and apostolicity, and they base their claim to be the legitimate Catholic Church on the presence of these four "notes" rather than on the size of their numbers.
Some sedevacantists in England prefer to be called "recusants". The original recusants were those English Catholics who refused to embrace Anglicanism and attend Anglican services after the Church of England was established as the official state church.
The United States-based True Catholic Church elected Fr. Lucian Pulvermacher, a traditionalist priest, as Pope Pius XIII in October 1998. This group accepts the theory that Pope John XXIII became a Freemason in 1935 while serving as papal nuncio to Turkey. "Pius XIII," however, in an interesting wrinkle, admits to having divined with a Pendulum since his Seminary days, a practice which arguably caused him to suffer automatic excommunication even before his ordination to the priesthood.
Another conclavist group elected Victor von Pentz as Pope Linus II in 1994, and a third group elected David Bawden as Pope Michael I on July 16 1990. Bawden and Pulvermacher have, predictably, declared Pope Benedict XVI an antipope.
For a full list of rival popes elected by conclavist groups, see the article Antipopes.
A related argument advanced by mainstream Catholics is that the notion that the Pope - together with the vast majority of the other bishops around the world - would succumb to heresy and fall from office is inconsistent with the doctrine of the indefectibility of the Church. A key text here is Christ's declaration to St. Peter in the Gospel of St Matthew: 'You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it' (16.18).
Mainstream Catholics reply that the analogy with the Great Schism is misleading, since there was never any doubt that one of the claimants was truly the Pope. In addition, they note that the sede vacante periods between successive papacies are transitory in nature and are not part of the ordinary constitution of the Church, whereas sedevacantists believe that the absence of a Pope has become a permanent feature of the Church's structure. They further argue that the Vatican I Dogmatic Constitution previously mentioned teaches that the perpetual presence of the Bishop of Rome, not merely his office, is an essential condition of the Church:
Mainstream Catholics affirm that, while sedevacantist rhetoric would have it that the Catholic Church has suddenly become Protestant, it is in fact the sedevacantists themselves - with each group practising its own interpretation of pre-Vatican II Catholicism and persistently denying traditional Catholic teaching on the primacy and indefectibility of the See of Rome - who have followed in the Protestants' footsteps.
The bishops that have existed within the sedevacantist movement since its inception can be divided into three categories. The first category consists of bishops consecrated within the "official" Catholic Church who were subsequently persuaded to the sedevacantist position. Within this category fell the Vietnamese archbishop Ngô Ðình Thuc Pierre Martin (who may have been reconciled to Pope John Paul II before his death in 1984) and the Puerto Rican bishop Alfredo F. Mendez, both of whom are now dead. In addition, the late Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer of Campos, Brazil is reported to have embraced sedevacantism, despite his association with the non-sedevacantist Society of St. Pius X, and a Ukrainian bishop named Yuri Yurchyk converted from Eastern Orthodoxy to sedevacantist Roman Catholicism in 2002.
The second category, into which most present-day sedevacantist bishops fall, consists of men who were consecrated within the sedevacantist movement by Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc or Bishop Mendez, or by bishops consecrated by them. The "Thuc line" of consecrations is particularly complicated, since Thuc consecrated a considerable number of men to the episcopate, and these in turn consecrated many more men. The Thuc and Mendez consecrations are generally regarded as valid both by sedevacantists and by mainstream Catholics, though the latter view them as illicit and maintain that it is therefore forbidden under canon law to take the sacraments from them except in a moment of dire need.
The third category of sedevacantist bishops consists of those clerics whose consecrations are generally regarded as outright invalid, even by other sedevacantists. The consecrations of Lucian Pulvermacher and Gordon Bateman for the True Catholic Church fall into this category.
To begin with, Pope Pius XII's apostolic constitution Vacantis Apostolicae Sedis, issued in December 1945, provided that, if any cardinal entered a conclave in a state of excommunication, his excommunication would not prevent him either from casting his vote or from being elected as pontiff himself. Therefore, even if Angelo Roncalli had been excommunicated at the time of the 1958 conclave, he would not thereby have been disqualified from election to the papacy. The same provision has in substance been included in all papal legislation governing papal elections since the fourteenth century.
It is quite common for sedevacantists to appeal to Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law in support of their position. (In 1983, John Paul II issued a new Code of Canon Law, but its authority is naturally not accepted by sedevacantists.) Canon 188.4 provided that a cleric who "publicly defect[ed] from the Catholic faith" (a fide catholica publice defecerit) would automatically lose any office which he had held in the Church. It has been contended, however, that this provision applied only to clerics who carried out acts, such as joining a Protestant church, which absolutely indisputably amounted to a renunciation of the Catholic faith: it cannot (it is claimed) be used to call into question the authority of a Pope who clearly intends to continue in the papacy but has taught propositions which appear to some Catholics to be heretical. Support for this interpretation is sought from the other paragraphs of Canon 188, which all related to "tacit resignations" from ecclesiastical office: paragraph 3 referred to priests who accepted promotion to offices incompatible with their present positions, paragraph 5 to priests who got married and paragraph 6 to priests who, in contravention of canon law, enlisted in the military.
Further support for the mainstream Catholic position is sought in Canon 2264, which provided that acts of jurisdiction carried out by excommunicated persons would be invalid only if the person concerned had been formally sentenced to or been declared to have incurred excommunication. Since Catholic teaching holds that no-one on earth can issue such a sentence or declaration against the Pope, the argument runs, the acts of an excommunicated pontiff would have to be regarded as valid exercises of papal authority - though such acts would certainly be illicit and displeasing to God. (This canonical argument can be paralleled by a scriptural one: in Chapter 23 of St. Matthew's Gospel, Jesus bound his disciples to obey the Pharisees in all things except for sin, and the same principle arguably applies with regard to the commands of an excommunicated pontiff.)
Another argument based on the distinction between invalidity and illiciety which has been advanced against the sedevacantist thesis is that, by the sedevacantists' reckoning, numerous medieval and Renaissance Popes whose actions and elections were arguably quite illicit would fall to be retroactively declared antipopes. If this were the case, the papal line of succession would have been broken long before the latter part of the twentieth century.
Sedevacantists sometimes state in their defence that a decisive majority of pre-Vatican II theologians who considered the question (most notably St. Robert Bellarmine) accepted that a Pope who fell into heresy would forfeit his office. Mainstream Catholics would reply that the private teachings of individual writers cannot be used to overturn the provisions of Church law.
Five popes in the conventional (Roman) line have been declared antipopes by Sedevacantist and Conclavist groups. They are: