Jump to content

Sedevacantism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 195.40.196.124 (talk) at 23:54, 20 October 2007. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Sede vacante coat of arms, used by the Holy See from a Pope's death to the election of his successor

Sedevacantism is a theological position embraced by a minority of Traditionalist Catholics which holds that the Papal See has been vacant since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958 (or, in some cases, the death of Pope John XXIII in 1963). Sedevacantists believe that Paul VI (1963–1978), John Paul I (1978), John Paul II (1978–2005) and Benedict XVI (2005-) have been neither true Catholics nor true popes, but rather notorious heretics.

The term "sedevacantism" is derived from the Latin phrase sede vacante, which literally means "while the seat is vacant", the seat in question being that of a bishop. A specific use of the phrase is in the context of the vacancy of the Holy See between the death or resignation of a Pope and the election of his successor.

Some small groups of Traditionalist Catholics give allegiance to alternative Popes of their own, resulting in an open, consummated schism. Since they hold that the Holy See is headed by their nominee and therefore is not in fact vacant, they are not sedevacantists in the strict sense. However, the term "sedevacantist" is often applied to them because they reject the "official" papal succession. Another term for them is "conclavists".

Early history

One of the earliest proponents of sedevacantism was the American Francis Schuckardt. Though he was still working within the "official" Church in 1969, in around 1970,[1] Schuckardt publicly took the position that the Holy See was vacant and that the Church that had emerged from the Second Vatican Council was no longer Catholic. An associate of his, Daniel Q. Brown, had arrived at the same conclusion. In 1969, Brown illicitly received episcopal orders from an Old Catholic bishop, and in 1971 he in turn consecrated Schuckardt. Schuckardt founded a congregation called the Tridentine Latin Rite Catholic Church.

Another founding figure of sedevacantism was Fr. Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga, a Jesuit theologian from Mexico. Independently of Schuckardt, he put forward sedevacantist ideas in his books The New Montinian Church (August 1971) and Sede Vacante (1973). Sáenz's writings gave rise to the sedevacantist movement in Mexico, led by Sáenz, Fr. Moises Carmona and Fr. Adolfo Zamora, and also inspired Fr. Francis E. Fenton in the United States.

Other priests may have arrived at the sedevacantist position independently in the years following the Second Vatican Council. These may have included:

The sedevacantist position

File:Bishop sanborn ordination.JPG
A 2007 priestly ordination by bishop Donald Sanborn at the sedevacantist Most Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Seminary

As with traditionalist Catholicism in general, sedevacantism owes its origins to the rejection of the theological and disciplinary changes implemented following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Sedevacantists thus reject the Council, on the basis of its documents on ecumenism and religious liberty, which they see as contradicting the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church and as denying the unique mission of Catholicism as the one true religion, outside of which there is no salvation. They also say that new disciplinary norms, such as the Mass of Paul VI, promulgated on 3 April 1969, undermine or conflict with the historical Catholic faith.

Unlike other traditionalist Catholics, who continue to recognise the authority of Pope Paul VI and his successors and who, while in some cases acknowledging that these Popes have held and taught unorthodox beliefs, stop short of affirming that they have been formal heretics or have been widely and publicly judged to be heretics, sedevacantists claim that the infallible Magisterium of the Catholic Church could not have decreed the changes made in the name of the Second Vatican Council, and conclude that those who issued these changes cannot have been acting with the authority of the Catholic Church. Accordingly, they hold that Pope Paul VI and his successors left the true Catholic Church and thus lost legitimate authority in the Church. A formal heretic, they say, cannot be the Catholic Pope.

Claims used by sedevacantists to defend their position include the following:

  • Most pre-Conciliar Catholic theologians and canon lawyers taught that it is inherently impossible for a heretic to hold the papal office.
  • Particular provisions of Church law prevent a heretic from being elected or remaining as pope. Paul IV's 1559 Bull Cum ex apostolatus officio stipulated that a heretic cannot be elected Pope, while Canon 188.4 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law provides that a cleric who publicly defects from the Catholic faith automatically loses any office that he holds in the Church.

Mainstream Catholics have engaged sedevacantists in debate on some of these points. Brian Harrison of Puerto Rico, for example, has argued that Pope Pius XII's conclave legislation permitted excommunicated cardinals to attend, from which he argues that they could also be legitimately elected[3].

Opponents of Harrison have argued that a phrase in Pope Pius XII's legislation "Cardinals who have been deposed or who have resigned, however, are barred and may not be reinstated even for the purpose of voting", though it speaks of someone deposed or resigned from the cardinalate, not of someone who may have incurred automatic excommunication but has not been officially declared excommunicated, means that, even if someone is permitted to attend, that does not automatically translate into electability.

There are estimated to be between several tens of thousands and more than two hundred thousands of sedevacantists worldwide, mostly concentrated in the United States, Canada, France, the UK, Italy, and Australia, but the actual size of the sedevacantist movement has never been accurately assessed. (See further the section on statistics in the article Traditionalist Catholic.)

Catholic doctrine has taught that the four marks of the true Church are that it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, and sedevacantists base their claim to be the true remnant Roman Catholic Church on what they see as the presence in them of these four "marks", absent, they say, in the Church since the Second Vatican Council. Their critics counter by saying that sedevacantists are in fact not one, forming numerous splinter groups, each of them in disagreement with the others.

Most sedevacantists hold the holy orders conferred with the present revised rites of the Catholic Church to be invalid due to defect both of intention and form. They conclude that the great majority of the bishops listed in the Holy See's Annuario Pontificio are in reality laymen.

Bishops

Mainstream Catholics usually regard ordinations performed by sedevacantist bishops on baptized men as valid, provided that the bishop in question has himself been validly ordained, uses a valid rite and has the requisite intention of ordaining. Some hold that this intention implies that the ordination must be for the service of an existing Christian community. Since ordinations within the sedevacantist movement are performed contrary to the wishes and procedures of the "official" Church, they are regarded as certainly illicit or illegal. Indeed, a Roman Catholic bishop who consecrates another man as a bishop without papal mandate incurs automatic excommunication. Canon law permits Catholics to receive the sacraments from validly but illicitly ordained priests and bishops only in circumstances of dire need.

The bishops that have existed within the sedevacantist movement since its inception can be divided into four categories. The first category consists of bishops consecrated within the "official" Catholic Church who subsequently defected to the sedevacantist position. Within this category fell the Vietnamese archbishop Ngô Ðình Thuc (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 Antônio de Castro Mayer of Campos, Brazil is reported to have allegedly embraced sedevacantism, despite his association with the non-sedevacantist Society of St. Pius X. Reports in 2002 that the Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox bishop Yuri Yurchyk had converted to sedevacantist Roman Catholism were subsequently denied.

The second category, into which most present-day sedevacantist bishops fall, consists of men who were consecrated within the sedevacantist movement by Archbishop Ngô Ðình Thuc or Bishop Mendez, or by bishops consecrated by them. The so-called "Thuc line" of consecrations is particularly complicated, since the eight men consecrated by Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc in turn consecrated a considerable number of men.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has declared devoid of canonical effect the consecration ceremony conducted by Archbishop Ngô for the Carmelite Order of the Holy Face group at midnight of 31 December 1975, though it refrained from pronouncing on the validity of those consecrations. It made the same statement with regard also to later ordinations by those bishops.[3]

The third category of sedevacantist bishops consists of Francis Schuckardt and other men associated with him who received their orders from an Old Catholic line of succession. Old Catholic orders are regarded by the mainstream Church as being valid but illicit.

The fourth category of sedevacantist bishops consists of those clerics whose consecrations are generally regarded as outright invalid, even by other sedevacantists, because their consecration cannot be traced to validly ordained bishops who were part of the Apostolic Succession. The consecrations of Lucian Pulvermacher and Gordon Bateman for the small conclavist true Catholic Church fall into this category.

Conclavism

File:Pius XIII.jpg
Pope Pius XIII of the "true Catholic Church"

As noted above, some groups have put forward their own popes in opposition to those in Rome, making them "conclavists" rather than "sedevacantists".

In 1990 Teresa Stanfill-Benns and David Bawden called for a conclave to elect a pope. They sent their request around the world but only received six respondents. On July 16 1990, the six gathered in Belvue, Kansas in the United States and elected Bawden who took the name Pope Michael I.

Another conclavist group in Italy elected Victor von Pentz as Pope Linus II in 1994.

In October 1998, the United States-based "true Catholic Church" elected the Father Lucian Pulvermacher, a traditionalist priest, as Pope Pius XIII. This group accepts the claim that Pope John XXIII became a Freemason in 1935 while serving as papal nuncio to Turkey. It has been established, however, that Pius XIII has engaged in the practice of divining with a pendulum since his seminary days — a practice which was prohibited by Pope Pius XII and allegedly caused him to incur automatic excommunication even before his ordination to the priesthood. This revelation led some of his supporters to withdraw their allegiance from him.

As stated above, sedevacantists are opposed to conclavism.

For a full list of popes elected by conclavist groups, see the article sedevacantist antipope.

Criticism

Mainstream Catholics advance against sedevacantism arguments such as:

  • According to standard Catholic doctrine, the Catholic Church is a visible identifiable body that is literally catholic, in the sense of universal ('for all people'). This is seen as incompatible with the sedevacantist claim that the true nature of the Catholic Church has been hidden from the world for half a century.
  • The 1870 Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus of the First Vatican Council reaffirmed that "it has always been necessary 'for every Church - that is to say the faithful throughout the world - to be in agreement with (the Roman Church) because of its pre-eminent authority" and that consequently the bishop whom the Church in Rome acknowledges as its head "is the successor of blessed Peter, the prince of the apostles, true vicar of Christ, head of the whole Church and father and teacher of all Christian people. To him, in blessed Peter, full power has been given by our lord Jesus Christ to tend, rule and govern the universal Church." This is seen as incompatible with the sedevacantist claim that the papal line of succession has been broken since 1958 (or 1963).
  • The Catholic doctrine of the indefectibility of the Church, which appeals to Christ's promise to the Apostle Peter in Matthew 16:18 ("You are Peter (the Rock), and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it") excludes the possibility that the Catholic bishops around the world and the Pope with whom they are in communion would succumb to heresy and fall from office.
  • They say that sedevacantists wrongly treat certain papal statements of the past as if they were ex cathedra declarations.
  • They claim that sedevacantists fail to distinguish between matters of discipline — such as the use of Latin and of the Tridentine Mass — which can be reformed at any time, and infallible dogmatic teachings.
  • They say that sedevacantists indulge in the logical fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc when they attribute problems that the Church has experienced in the Western world since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council to the reforms themselves rather than to the general decrease in religiosity in the West.

Sedevacantists advance counter-arguments, such as:

  • They deny that they implicitly repudiate the dogma of papal infallibility as defined at the First Vatican Council, and maintain that, on the contrary, they are the fiercest defenders of this doctrine, since they teach that the Apostolic See of Peter, under the rule of a true Pope, cannot promulgate contradictory teachings.
  • To rebut the accusation of denying the catholicity and indefectibility of the Church, they say that, between the death of every Pope and the election of his successor, there is a sede vacante period during which there is no visible Head of the Church, and — while mainstream Catholics hold that, according to the dogmatic constitution Pastor aeternus of the First Vatican Council, which speaks of "perpetual successors" in the pontificate, there must be, apart from such transitory periods, a perpetual presence of the Bishop of Rome, not merely of his office — that the absence of a Pope has become a long-term feature of the Church's structure.
  • They recall that, during the 40-year Great Western Schism, while nobody claimed that the see of Rome was vacant, there was uncertainty about which of the two (eventually three) claimants was the true pontiff, with even canonized saints taking opposing sides in the controversy. In his 1882 book, The Relations of the Church to Society - Theological Essays, the Jesuit theologian, Father Edmund James O'Reilly, wrote: "... not that an interregnum covering the whole period would have been impossible or inconsistent with the promises of Christ, for this is by no means manifest."[4]
  • They interpret the Book of Revelation as speaking of an end-times Great Apostasy on the City of Seven Hills (Rome) and say that Our Lady of La Salette warned on 19 September 1846 that Rome would lose the faith and become the seat of the Anti-Christ.

Sedevacantist groups

  • Most Holy Family Monastery, a Benedictine community under the headship of Bro. Michael Dimond, O.S.B. It has the #1 ranked sedevacantist website (alexa.com) and produces the most comprehensive exposition and defense of the sedevacantist position, especially in the book The Truth about What Really Happened to the Catholic Church after Vatican II. Most Holy Family Monastery
  • Society of St. Pius V, formed when nine priests of the Society of St. Pius X split from that organisation over issues of using the liturgical reforms implemented under Pius XII and publicly reciting the name of the post-conciliar pope John Paul II. The SSPV holds sedevacantism as a probable opinion and as a topic of legitimate debate, not imposing sedevacantism as a morally obliged teaching however.
  • The Pierre Martin Ngô Đình Thục lines of episcopal succession
  • Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen (holds Pope John XXIII to have been the last legitimate Roman Pontiff until today)
  • The Society of the Immaculata, a religious community with the charism of St. Louis Marie de Montfort, founded by Rev. Dennis McCormack. The Society of the Immaculata

Conclavist groups

See also

Sedevacantist sites

Criticism

Footnotes

  1. ^ TraditionalMass.org on Schuckhardt [1]
  2. ^ This being the date of the compilation of church bulletins quoted on this page
  3. ^ "As for those who have already thus unlawfully received ordination or any who may yet accept ordination from these, whatever may be the validity of the orders (quidquid sit de ordinum validitate), the Church does not and will not recognize their ordination (ipsorum ordinationem), and will consider them, for all legal effects, as still in the state in which they were before, except that the… penalties remain until they repent" (Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Decree Episcopi qui alios of 17 September 1976 — Acta Apostolicae Sedis 1976, page 623).
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sedevacantism&oldid=165945783"