Sedevacantism Explained and Answered

1. What Sedevacantism Is

Sedevacantism is the position that the Roman see has been vacant since some point in the 1950s or 1960s, because the men elected since then taught heresy and therefore never held the papal office at all. The name comes from the Latin sede vacante, meaning the seat being vacant, which is the ordinary Church phrase for the weeks between one pope's death and the election of his successor. Sedevacantists apply that phrase to a vacancy they believe has now run for more than sixty years.

Everything else in the position follows from that single claim. If there has been no pope since 1958 or 1962 or 1965, depending on which sedevacantist you ask, then the Second Vatican Council was not an ecumenical council, the Missal promulgated by Paul VI in 1969 was not promulgated by any papal authority, the bishops appointed since then hold no office, the canonisations of that period bind nobody, and the visible structure most of the world calls the Catholic Church is a different body occupying Catholic buildings. Sedevacantists usually call that body the conciliar church or the Novus Ordo church, and they describe themselves as the remnant that kept the faith unchanged.

The position is small, it is loud online, and it is the thing a Catholic most often meets in the form of a relative or a friend who has stopped going to the parish and started driving two hours to a chapel. That is the situation this guide is written for.

No reliable count of sedevacantists exists. The groups involved do not publish audited membership figures, national censuses do not offer the category, and the position includes a large number of individuals attached to no organisation at all. Any specific number circulating online should be treated as an estimate by whoever made it.

The Vocabulary a Searcher Will Meet

Four terms cover most of what gets written on this subject, and they are frequently confused with one another.

• Sedevacantist: holds that the see is simply vacant and that the claimants are not popes in any sense.
• Sedeprivationist: holds that a claimant is pope materially but not formally, which is a distinction section 4 explains.
• Conclavist: a sedevacantist who has gone on to elect a rival pope of his own.
• Recognise and resist: the opposite of all three. It accepts that the pope is pope and refuses obedience on particular points. The Society of Saint Pius X is the largest body holding it.

2. Where the Position Came From

Sedevacantism arose in the years immediately after the Second Vatican Council, which ran from 11 October 1962 to 8 December 1965, and it took hold among Catholics who judged that the council and the liturgical reform that followed had broken with earlier Catholic teaching. The reforms themselves were the trigger. The Missal of Paul VI, promulgated by the apostolic constitution Missale Romanum on 3 April 1969 and in use from Advent that year, replaced a rite most Catholics had known all their lives. The council's declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, and its decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, read to these Catholics as reversals of nineteenth-century papal teaching.

Most of the Catholics who objected stayed inside the Church and argued. A minority drew the further conclusion that a true pope could not have done these things, and therefore that the men who did them were not true popes.

The First Sedevacantist Writers

Father Joaquin Saenz y Arriaga, a Mexican Jesuit, is usually credited with the first sustained public argument for the position, in books published in the early 1970s, of which La Iglesia Nueva Montiniana (1971) is the best known. He argued that Paul VI, born Giovanni Battista Montini, had by his own acts placed himself outside the Church. Church authorities censured him. In the same decade a scattering of priests in Europe and North America reached similar conclusions independently, and in the United States the position spread through small chapels and newsletters rather than through any organised body.

The Consecrations That Made It Durable

Sedevacantism became a lasting movement rather than a set of opinions when bishops began ordaining priests for it. Archbishop Pierre Martin Ngo Dinh Thuc, formerly Archbishop of Hue in Vietnam and a brother of the assassinated president Ngo Dinh Diem, was the decisive figure. In 1976 he consecrated bishops for the group at Palmar de Troya in Spain and was declared excommunicated. He was reconciled with Rome, and then in 1981 he consecrated the French Dominican theologian Michel-Louis Guerard des Lauriers and, later the same year, the Mexican priests Moises Carmona and Adolfo Zamora. Excommunication followed again. Thuc died in 1984. Most sedevacantist bishops today trace their orders through those 1981 consecrations, which is why the phrase "the Thuc line" appears constantly in discussions of the movement. The SSPV is the notable exception, and section 6 explains why.

Palmar de Troya deserves a note of its own, because it began with claimed apparitions of the Virgin Mary from 1968 and ended as a separate sect with its own antipope. The Archbishop of Seville rejected the alleged apparitions, and Rome excommunicated the group. Our guide to Marian apparition sites and their actual Church status sets out the 2024 framework the Church now uses for judging such claims, under which the ordinary positive outcome is a nihil obstat permitting devotion without any declaration that the events were supernatural, and negative determinations exist precisely for cases that damage the faithful.

3. The Sedevacantist Argument in Its Own Terms

The sedevacantist argument is a syllogism, and stating it fairly is the only way to answer it. A sedevacantist would put it roughly like this: a public heretic cannot hold office in the Church, because heresy severs a man from the body of the Church by its own force. The men elected pope since 1958 have publicly taught heresy. Therefore they have not held the papal office, and the see is vacant.

Each premise carries its own supporting material, and sedevacantist writers are usually well read in the manuals of pre-conciliar theology and canon law that supply it.

The Doctrinal Charges

The specific charges brought against the conciliar teaching are consistent across sedevacantist authors. Religious liberty, taught in Dignitatis Humanae, is set against Gregory XVI's Mirari Vos (1832) and Pius IX's Quanta Cura and Syllabus of Errors (1864), which condemned the proposition that every man is free to embrace whatever religion he judges true. Ecumenism, taught in Unitatis Redintegratio, is set against Pius XI's Mortalium Animos (1928), which rejected participation in the assemblies of those who hold that the Church of Christ is divided among many bodies. Collegiality, taught in Lumen Gentium, is read as a dilution of the papal monarchy defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870. The council's teaching on the Jewish people and on non-Christian religions in Nostra Aetate is charged with indifferentism.

The Liturgical Charge

The second charge concerns the Mass. Sedevacantists argue that the reformed rite is at best gravely harmful and at worst invalid. The document most often cited is the Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass, sent to Paul VI in 1969 under a covering letter signed by Cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani and Antonio Bacci, which argued that the new rite departed in striking ways from the doctrine of the Mass defined at the Council of Trent. Sedevacantist writers press the point further than Ottaviani did, and some argue that the vernacular translations of the words of consecration, particularly the rendering of pro multis as "for all", touched the form of the sacrament itself. Our guide to the Traditional Latin Mass and its place in the Church today covers the liturgical history in detail.

The Charge Against the Bishops

A subset of sedevacantists carries the argument a step further and holds that the rite of episcopal consecration revised by Paul VI in 1968 is invalid, so that men consecrated with it are not bishops and the priests they ordain are not priests. This is the most consequential version of the position, because it empties the world of valid orders except among those who reject the reform. It is also contested inside sedevacantism itself, since the SSPV holds a form of it while the CMRI does not.

The Canonical Backing They Cite

Sedevacantists appeal to two texts more than any others. The first is the bull Cum ex apostolatus officio, issued by Paul IV in 1559, which declared that a man who had deviated from the faith before his elevation would hold no office even if elected pope by unanimous consent. The second is canon 188 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which listed public defection from the faith among the causes by which an ecclesiastical office is vacated by the fact itself, without any declaration. Section 9 takes both of these up.

4. Sedeprivationism, Conclavism and the Other Varieties

Sedevacantism is a family of positions rather than one position, and its internal divisions are sharp. The disagreements concern when the vacancy began, what exactly the claimant holds, and what should be done about it.

When the Vacancy Began

Most sedevacantists date the vacancy to the death of Pius XII on 9 October 1958, holding that John XXIII was already unsound when elected. Others date it to the opening of the council in 1962, or to the promulgation of Dignitatis Humanae on 7 December 1965, or to the new Missal in 1969, on the view that the man in question fell into heresy after a valid election and lost the office at that point. The choice matters internally, because it decides whether the cardinals who elected later popes were themselves validly created.

Sedeprivationism, the Cassiciacum Thesis

Sedeprivationism is a technically developed version of the position, worked out by Guerard des Lauriers, a Dominican who had taught in Rome before the council. Published from 1979 in the journal Cahiers de Cassiciacum, the thesis holds that a validly elected claimant is pope materialiter but not formaliter: he holds the material designation to the office, so the line of succession is not broken and the see is not simply empty, and he lacks the form, meaning the actual authority, because his adherence to error blocks it. On this account the man could receive the authority at any moment by repudiating the error, and no new election would be needed. Sedeprivationists present the thesis as a way of avoiding the difficulty that pure sedevacantism runs into, namely a Church with no legal path back to a pope at all.

Conclavism

Conclavists accept that the see is vacant and conclude that someone must fill it, so they hold an election of their own. The results have been consistently strange. Clemente Dominguez y Gomez of Palmar de Troya proclaimed himself Pope Gregory XVII in 1978 and founded a sect that continues in Spain. In Kansas in 1990 six electors, including his own parents, chose David Bawden as "Pope Michael"; he held the claim until his death in 2022. In 1998 a group calling itself the True Catholic Church elected Lucian Pulvermacher as "Pius XIII" in a conclave conducted partly by telephone. Mainstream sedevacantists reject conclavism outright, on the ground that the right to elect a pope belongs to the Roman clergy and cardinals rather than to any group of laymen who wish to hold a vote.

This table summarises publicly stated positions and does not describe every individual or chapel. Groups within each row differ among themselves, particularly on the validity of the revised rite of episcopal consecration and on whether the 1958 or the 1965 dating is correct.

5. The CMRI

The Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen, abbreviated CMRI, is one of the more visible sedevacantist religious congregations in the United States, and it is a group a searcher runs into quickly. It runs a seminary, schools, a religious community of sisters, and a network of chapels, and its centre is in northern Idaho, near Spokane in Washington State. Its liturgy is the Roman rite in the form in use before the reform, and its catechesis is the pre-conciliar manual tradition.

Its History

The congregation grew out of a lay apostolate founded by Francis Schuckardt in the 1960s, which became a religious community and then, after Schuckardt received episcopal consecration in 1971 from Daniel Q. Brown, a bishop of an Old Catholic line, a body with its own clergy. Schuckardt left the congregation in 1984 amid serious allegations concerning his conduct and his governance, and the community reorganised without him. The orders derived from Brown were widely regarded as doubtful, and the congregation's present episcopal line runs instead through Bishop Mark Pivarunas, consecrated in 1991 by Moises Carmona, one of the bishops Thuc had consecrated in 1981.

What It Teaches

The CMRI holds the simple sedevacantist position: the see is vacant, the claimants are not popes, and the reformed rites are to be rejected. It accepts the validity of the revised rite of episcopal consecration in principle while declining to use it, which puts it at odds with the SSPV. It maintains that its own sacraments are supplied with the necessary jurisdiction by the Church in a state of emergency, an argument section 11 examines.

6. The SSPV and the Nine

The Society of Saint Pius V was founded in 1983 by a group of priests dismissed from the Society of Saint Pius X, remembered in traditionalist circles as "the Nine". The dispute that produced the split ran on two tracks. The priests held sedevacantist views that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre would not accept, and they objected to the Society's use of the liturgical books of 1962, preferring the earlier forms of Holy Week that Pius XII had revised in the 1950s. Lefebvre dismissed them, and the new society took its name from the pope who codified the Roman Missal after Trent.

Its Distinctive Position on Orders

The SSPV takes an exacting line on the question of valid orders. It holds that the rite of episcopal consecration revised in 1968 is doubtful, and it therefore treats priests ordained by bishops consecrated with that rite as doubtfully ordained, which in practice means it conditionally ordains clergy who come to it from elsewhere. It has also declined to accept clergy of the Thuc line, on the ground that those consecrations were performed in circumstances that leave the intention in doubt. Its own episcopal orders descend from the consecration of Father Clarence Kelly in 1993 by Alfred Mendez, the retired Bishop of Arecibo in Puerto Rico, a consecration performed without any papal mandate.

The result is that the CMRI and the SSPV, two of the better known sedevacantist bodies in the United States, do not recognise one another's clergy without qualification. That internal fragmentation is worth noticing, because the sedevacantist case rests on the claim that the visible Church has lost the unity Christ gave her, and the alternative offered in her place has never managed to hold together for a decade at a time.

7. Why the SSPX Is Not Sedevacantist

The Society of Saint Pius X is not sedevacantist, and confusing the two is a common error in writing on this subject. The SSPX names the reigning pope in the Canon of the Mass, states publicly that he is validly elected and holds the office, and refuses obedience only on particular teachings and disciplines it judges to conflict with earlier Catholic doctrine. Its writers call this position "recognise and resist".

The history is clear on this point. Lefebvre dismissed the Nine in 1983 precisely over sedevacantism. In 1988 he consecrated four bishops without a papal mandate, an act that incurred the automatic excommunication attached by canon 1382 of the 1983 Code, and Rome declared those excommunications. Benedict XVI remitted them in January 2009. Pope Francis granted SSPX priests the faculty to absolve validly in confession, initially for the Jubilee of Mercy and then without limit of time in the 2016 apostolic letter Misericordia et Misera, and in 2017 provided for the licit celebration of marriages of the Society's faithful through delegation by the local ordinary. None of that is imaginable for a body that denied there was a pope to grant anything. Our guide to the SSPX and its canonical status works through the detail.

8. Why the See Cannot Simply Stay Empty

Catholic teaching holds that the office of Peter is permanent in the Church by divine institution, and a vacancy of sixty years with no means of ending it would empty that teaching of content. The First Vatican Council defined in Pastor Aeternus (1870) that Peter has perpetual successors in the primacy by the institution of Christ himself, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the pope, as Bishop of Rome and successor of Peter, is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful (CCC 882). A permanent office with no occupant and no lawful electors left alive is a contradiction of the definition.

Indefectibility and Visibility

The Church is indefectible, meaning that she will endure to the end of the age with her constitution intact, on the strength of Christ's promise to be with her always (Matthew 28:20). She is also visible, a society with an identifiable hierarchy that a person can find and join. The sedevacantist account requires that the visible body which every Catholic on earth took to be the Church became something else, that no bishop anywhere retains ordinary jurisdiction, that the entire body of the faithful was deceived, and that the Church survived in a handful of chapels whose clergy do not recognise one another. That is a defection in everything but name.

The Argument From Peaceful Universal Acceptance

The strongest single answer to sedevacantism is one drawn from the very theologians sedevacantists cite. Classical theology holds that the acceptance of a man as pope by the whole Church, peacefully and universally, is an infallible sign that he is truly pope. Robert Bellarmine taught it in his treatise on councils and John of Saint Thomas developed it at length, and the reasoning is that the Church cannot adhere as her head to a man who is not her head, since that would be to hold the whole body in error about the most visible fact of her own life. Every claimant from John XXIII onward has been accepted by the world's bishops, by the Roman clergy, and by the overwhelming body of the faithful. The doctrine of peaceful universal acceptance settles the case before the disputed texts are even opened.

Nobody Has Standing to Declare the See Vacant

Canon 1404 of the Code of Canon Law states that the First See is judged by no one, and canon 333 paragraph 3 provides that there is no appeal or recourse against a sentence or decree of the Roman Pontiff. The 1917 Code stated the same rule about the First See in canon 1556. Even a theologian who thinks a heretical pope would lose his office has to reckon with the fact that nobody outside the Church's own competent authority is in a position to establish the fact of the heresy, and that competent authority is precisely what sedevacantists deny exists. The position ends by making every individual the judge of who is pope, which is a Protestant principle applied to ecclesiology.

9. The Heretical Pope Question and What Bellarmine Said

The Church has never defined what would happen if a pope fell into heresy, and theologians have argued the hypothesis for centuries without agreement. Honesty requires saying that plainly, because Catholic apologists sometimes claim the question is closed and it is not. What can be shown is that the classical treatments of the hypothesis do not support what sedevacantists build on them.

The Five Opinions

Saint Robert Bellarmine, in De Romano Pontifice, laid out five opinions held in his day: that a pope cannot be a heretic at all; that he can be, and is deposed by a council; that he can be, and is deposed by the council's declaration of a deposition already effected; that he retains office until deposed; and that a manifestly and pertinaciously heretical pope ceases by that very fact to be pope. Bellarmine favoured the fifth, which is why sedevacantists quote him constantly. What they quote less often are his conditions. The heresy has to be manifest, meaning public and evident rather than inferred from ambiguous documents, and it has to be pertinacious, meaning the man persists after correction and knows he is contradicting a defined dogma. Bellarmine also treats the whole matter as a speculative case, since he did not think God would permit it. Our page on Saint Robert Bellarmine covers his life and his work on the papacy.

What Manifest Heresy Actually Requires

Heresy in Catholic law is a precise offence. Canon 751 defines it as the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt, after baptism, of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith. Two elements have to be established: the matter denied has to be a defined dogma, and the denial has to be obstinate. A disputed reading of Dignitatis Humanae, a pastoral gesture, a badly worded interview or a decision on liturgy does not meet either element. Sedevacantist arguments almost always establish, at most, that a papal act was imprudent or that a conciliar text was ambiguous, and then treat that as equivalent to formal heresy. The gap between those two things is where the whole position fails.

Cum ex apostolatus officio and Canon 188

The two legal texts sedevacantists rely on will not carry the weight placed on them. Cum ex apostolatus officio, issued by Paul IV in 1559 during the anxieties of the Reformation, was a disciplinary law rather than a dogmatic definition, and disciplinary law is abrogated by later legislation. The 1917 Code abrogated the prior penal law it did not incorporate, and the 1983 Code did the same in its turn. Canon 188 of the 1917 Code, which vacated an office by tacit resignation on public defection from the faith, presupposed the ordinary judgement of the Church about what counted as public defection; it was not a licence for private persons to determine that an office had been vacated. The corresponding provision in current law, canon 194, likewise requires that the fact be established by a declaration of competent authority before it can be enforced against anyone.

10. Answering the Vatican II and New Mass Objections

The doctrinal charges in section 3 deserve direct answers rather than a general appeal to obedience, because a reader who has been given the sedevacantist case will want to see the specific documents handled.

Religious Liberty

Dignitatis Humanae teaches a right to immunity from coercion in civil society in religious matters, meaning that the state may not force a person to act against his conscience or prevent him from acting according to it within due limits. The declaration states in its first article that it leaves untouched the traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ. The nineteenth-century condemnations concerned a different proposition, the indifferentist claim that a man may choose any religion and be saved in it, and that claim the council did not teach. One text is about the salvific standing of religions and the other is about the coercive competence of the state, and the two questions are distinct.

Ecumenism

Unitatis Redintegratio teaches that the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, that elements of sanctification exist outside her visible boundaries, and that Catholics are to work and pray for the restoration of unity. It does not teach that the Church of Christ is divided among the denominations, which is the proposition Mortalium Animos rejected. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith restated the point in Dominus Iesus in 2000, which affirmed the unicity and salvific universality of Christ and of the Church in terms nobody could call indifferentist. Our guides to Catholic ecumenism and to the meaning of no salvation outside the Church handle these questions at length.

Collegiality

Lumen Gentium 22 teaches that the bishops with the pope form one college, and it states explicitly that the college has no authority apart from its head and that the Roman Pontiff retains in full his own power of primacy over all. The council attached an explanatory note, the Nota Praevia, to make exactly that point against a collegialist reading. Vatican I was not diluted by Vatican II, and our guide to the papacy and the Petrine office sets out the positive doctrine.

The Validity of the Reformed Mass

The Mass promulgated by Paul VI is valid. It has the required matter, it has a form containing the words of institution, and it is celebrated by a validly ordained priest with the intention of doing what the Church does. The Ottaviani letter raised concerns about doctrinal emphasis and about the definition of the Mass given in the 1969 General Instruction, and that definition was revised in 1970. The SSPX, which has no motive to be generous here, has always maintained that the reformed rite is valid. The pro multis question was a translation matter and was corrected: in 2006 the Congregation for Divine Worship directed that vernacular texts render the phrase as "for many", and the current English Missal does so. Our guide to the Mass and what happens in it covers the theology.

The Rite of Episcopal Consecration

The rite revised by Paul VI in 1968 takes its essential consecratory prayer from the ancient text known as the Apostolic Tradition, which the apostolic constitution Pontificalis Romani names as its source, and the prayer asks God to pour out the governing Spirit on the man being consecrated. A closely related prayer stands in the West Syrian and Coptic ordination rites, and the Catholic Church acknowledges the episcopal orders of the Syriac Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox Churches that use them, Churches of the Oriental Orthodox family, which is distinct from the Eastern Orthodox communion and not in communion with it. A form the Church accepts as sufficient in those rites cannot be declared insufficient in the Latin one, and our guide to holy orders and the priesthood sets out what the sacrament requires.

11. Where Sedevacantist Orders and Jurisdiction Fail

The practical question most people bring to this subject is whether the sacraments received in a sedevacantist chapel are real. The answer separates into two parts, because valid ordination and lawful faculties are different things, and the sacraments divide along that line.

Orders: Probably Valid in Some Lines, Doubtful in Others

The Holy See has never issued a blanket ruling on sedevacantist orders, and validity has to be judged chain by chain. The 1981 Thuc consecrations were punished as gravely illicit without any declaration that they failed to confer the sacrament, and most canonists treat orders descending from them as probably valid, since Thuc was himself a validly consecrated Catholic bishop using the traditional rite. Other lines are weaker. The Old Catholic derived line through which the CMRI's founder received consecration was widely regarded as doubtful, which is why the congregation later took its orders from the Thuc line instead. Some chains pass through men whose consecrations were performed privately, without witnesses, and without documentation any tribunal could examine.

A layman standing in a chapel cannot verify any of this, and that is the point. The ordinary Catholic knows his parish priest was ordained by a bishop in communion with Rome because the whole apparatus of the Church stands behind the fact. In a chapel outside that apparatus, the assurance rests on the word of the men involved.

Jurisdiction: This Is Where It Fails

Two sacraments require more than valid orders. They require that the priest hold authority granted by the Church, and this is where sedevacantist ministry breaks down even where the ordination held.

Confession. Canon 966 of the Code of Canon Law provides that valid absolution requires the priest to have the faculty to hear confessions, granted by his own ordinary or by the local ordinary of the place. A priest who is in communion with no diocesan bishop anywhere holds no such grant, and absolution given without it does not take effect. Two exceptions exist and both are narrow. Canon 976 gives every priest the faculty to absolve any penitent in danger of death, validly and licitly, whatever his canonical situation. Canon 144 supplies executive power of governance, including the faculty for confession, in cases of common error of fact or of law and in positive and probable doubt of law or of fact. Sedevacantist clergy appeal to canon 144 through the idea of a state of emergency in the Church, and the appeal is difficult to sustain, since common error means the community mistakenly believes the priest has the faculty, and a congregation that has deliberately chosen a chapel outside the Church's structure is not in error about the situation.

Marriage. Canon 1108 requires for validity that a Catholic marry before the local ordinary or the pastor, or a priest or deacon delegated by one of them, together with two witnesses. A wedding celebrated by a sedevacantist priest lacks canonical form, and the marriage is invalid unless a dispensation from form was obtained, which a sedevacantist chapel by definition will not have sought. This produces real consequences for real families, and it is the reason a diocesan tribunal treats such cases as straightforward. Our guide to Catholic marriage and what makes it valid explains canonical form in full.

What Does Not Depend on Jurisdiction

Baptism is valid when anyone at all pours water and speaks the Trinitarian form with the intention of doing what the Church does, so a baptism in a sedevacantist chapel is real. The Eucharist is confected validly by any validly ordained priest, so if the orders held, the Mass is a true Mass and the consecration is a true consecration, irrespective of the priest's canonical position. Confirmation given by a bishop with valid orders is valid. The anointing of the sick requires valid priestly orders and is valid on the same basis. That is why the honest Catholic account of a sedevacantist chapel is mixed rather than uniformly negative, and the mixture is itself part of the danger, since people conclude from the valid Mass that everything else is in order too.

Canon references are to the 1983 Code of Canon Law. "Valid if the priest's orders are valid" carries real weight, since the orders in several sedevacantist lines are genuinely doubtful and cannot be verified by anyone in the pews. A Catholic with a concrete case, a marriage to convalidate or confessions to repeat, should bring it to a diocesan priest or the tribunal rather than resolve it from a web page.

12. Benedict XVI's Resignation and the Newer Variants

The resignation of Benedict XVI on 28 February 2013 produced a new family of claims, related to sedevacantism and distinct from it. Their common thesis is that the resignation was invalid, so that Benedict remained the true pope until his death and Francis was never pope. Writers holding it are commonly called benevacantists, and the position drew in Catholics who would never have accepted the older sedevacantist arguments.

The Munus and Ministerium Argument

The technical version of the claim rests on the Latin of the resignation, which spoke of renouncing the ministerium, the ministry, and it is argued that a valid resignation must renounce the munus, the office. Canon 332 paragraph 2 sets the actual requirements: a papal resignation is valid if it is made freely and manifested properly, and it requires acceptance by no one. Benedict's declaration stated that he renounced the office in such a way that the see would be vacant and a conclave would have to be convoked, he stopped exercising the office at the stated hour, he took the title Pope Emeritus, and he repeatedly and publicly stated in the years afterwards that the resignation was valid and that there was only one pope. Nothing in the canon requires a particular word, and the man himself denied the theory.

Where the Theory Now Stands

Benedict XVI died on 31 December 2022 and Pope Francis died in April 2025, so anyone still holding the theory arrives at ordinary sedevacantism with extra steps: the claimant they recognised is dead, no conclave they accept has met, and the see would be empty on their own terms. Some who held it have returned to the Church's communion. Some have moved to the older sedevacantist position. Our pages on Benedict XVI and Pope Francis cover both pontificates, and the current pontificate is treated on our page for Pope Leo XIV.

Prophecy Used as a Substitute for Argument

Sedevacantist and adjacent material frequently reaches for prophecy where the canonical argument runs out: the so-called Prophecy of the Popes attributed to Saint Malachy, private revelations about a great apostasy, or the claim that the third part of the Fatima secret was suppressed because it foretold the loss of the papacy. These are used to supply certainty the documents cannot supply. Our guides to the Prophecy of the Popes, the Third Secret of Fatima and the great apostasy examine each claim on its own evidence. Christ said plainly that no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), and no private revelation overturns the Church's public constitution.

13. If Someone You Love Has Gone Sedevacantist

Most people reading this page are dealing with a person rather than researching a theory. A father who now refuses to attend a grandchild's baptism, a friend who has started saying the parish Mass is invalid, a spouse driving three hours each Sunday to a chapel. Argument alone rarely moves someone who has already made this decision, and the following is what tends to help.

Understand What Drew Them

People arrive at sedevacantism because they wanted more of the faith and found their parish thin: catechesis that taught them little, liturgy celebrated carelessly, a scandal handled badly, a priest who could not answer a serious question. The sedevacantist chapel offered reverence, clear teaching, and an explanation for why everything felt wrong. The diagnosis of the symptoms was often accurate, and the conclusion drawn from it was wrong. Say the first half out loud before you contest the second. Our guides on why people leave the Church and on the scandals and how the Church has answered them deal with the same causes from the other direction.

Argue From Their Own Authorities

Do not begin with Vatican II, because that is the ground they have prepared. Begin with peaceful universal acceptance, which comes from Bellarmine and John of Saint Thomas, authors they respect. Ask which year the vacancy began and why, and ask how the see could ever be filled again on their account. Ask what happens to their own confessions under canon 966. These questions come from inside the tradition they claim, and they land differently from an appeal to conciliar documents.

Be Honest About What Is at Stake

Do not overstate and do not soften. Their Mass may well be a valid Mass. Their confessions are ordinarily not valid absolutions, and a marriage celebrated there is ordinarily not a valid marriage. A person can go for twenty years believing his sins have been absolved when the words had no effect, and that is worth saying gently and clearly. Christ gave the power to bind and loose to Peter (Matthew 16:19) and to the apostles together (Matthew 18:18), and it travels through the Church rather than around her.

What to Do Yourself

Go to a parish in communion with your diocesan bishop, and go this Sunday. If you have been receiving absolution from a priest with no faculties, make a good confession to a priest who has them and mention the situation to him; he will know what to do and he will not be shocked. If you were married in a sedevacantist chapel, contact the diocesan tribunal, since convalidation is usually straightforward and quick. If the reverence and the clarity were what drew you, look for a parish that offers them inside the Church's communion, which more dioceses now do than did twenty years ago. Our guide to confession and how to make a good one is a place to start, and our guide to Sacred Tradition and how the Church hands the faith on covers the principle at issue.

14. Related Topics