The Fatal Flaw of Sedevacantism

I will grant the sedevacantists one thing- they at least have the intellectual honesty to admit that the Recognize and Resist position denies the indefectibility of the Church and is therefore untenable. One simply cannot hold the position that the Church has contradicted previous teachings and taught positive error, promulgated a “spiritually poisonous” rite of Mass and new forms of sacraments that are of dubious validity, and is actively leading souls astray, without admitting a “defect” in the Church. It’s contradictory, illogical, and impossible.

Sedevacantists usually try to skirt around this inconvenience by stating that the “conciliar church” simply isn’t the Church at all, and therefore no defect has manifested. To them, the Church still exists in its pure, indefectible state within the small pockets of faithful who have had the clarity to see through these errors, and are untouched by the “heresies” of Vatican II and by every pontificate since Pope John XXIII.

But in holding this position, one must admit to an even greater defect than what the Recognize and Resist position does. R&R says that a defect has come about based on particular historical circumstances, but sedevacantism admits to something much more catastrophic— a defect within the structure of the Church herself since its very beginning. This defect is that the very existence of the Church is put in the hands of human beings and not God.

The present circumstances actually illustrate this quite well. Sedevacantists believe that every pope since Pius XII has been a heretic and an antipope, and therefore have not actually held the office of the papacy. This means that any and all declarations that have come from Rome since 1958 have been null and void, including (most importantly, for our purposes here) the rite of ordination. It means that every ordination under this rite has been false, and every appointment to every position of authority has been false, thereby introducing a fatal domino effect that places the Church in a long, slow death. It means that over the decades, priests ordained under the old rite simply die out and are replaced by ones ordained in the new rite, until one day the Church will be made up exclusively of priests ordained under the new rite. If this rite were invalid, as the sedevacantists believe, the Church is essentially bleeding out and dying, and can only be saved by ordaining priests and consecrating bishops under the old rite of ordination. Sedevacantists believe the Church could (and will) lose a battle against time if they do not take it upon themselves to actively maintain its existence.

There are two options to examine here. The first is that Pope John XXIII and his successors were not malicious, but simply careless. They promulgated a new rite of ordination but overlooked critical details (the wording of the rite, the type of chrism used, etc) that, once absent, would render the rite invalid. The other option is that they were indeed malicious and intended to promulgate a rite that would cause the Church to slowly waste away, unless certain Catholics saw through this plot and took the necessary steps to avert it.

Both options reveal the aforementioned inherent defect in the Church. Ultimately, sedevacantism has to admit that, either through our own ineptitude or our own malice, we as mere mortals could destroy what God has divinely instituted. It means that the thousands of years of preparation for Christ to come to earth and the establishment of His Church would hang by the thread of human effort. It makes the merits of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of the Lord contingent on our own actions, and that something as small as a Vatican decree could hold the potential to completely erase the Church from existence, making null and void the Eternal Covenant. It implies that the greatest event in all of history, the Incarnation, could be undone by sin. What is this if not a defect, and a catastrophic one at that?

The fatal flaw of sedevacantism is not its convoluted and contradictory defenses. It is not its dead-end subjectivity that subordinates the power of the papacy to the decisions of lay people. It is in the fact that it subjects the Church to the existence of time and space, and dares to make finite the infinite. It admits the possibility that at one moment, the Church on earth could be sustained by a single bishop, the last one ordained under a certain matter and form, and once he passed on, the Church would simply cease to exist. There would be no avenue to revive it. No priest with valid Holy Orders would exist any more. The Body of Christ would be dead. 

Sedevacantism is an easy “answer” to the mess in the Church today. But taken to its logical conclusion, it is an insidious and blasphemous error, one that the Church must acknowledge and publicly condemn before its cancer eats away at the heart of the Church any longer.