I too heard fellow sedevacantists say: “This kind of thing with no Pope has happened before whenever a Pope died or during historical times of multiple claimants to the chair of Peter.” The point I didn’t get when I was a sedevacantist was that right now everyone does know who the Pope is and there is no debate about it. (I think what finally taught me humility was realizing this.)
There surely
is a debate, though. The sedevacantists are taking the position that there isn’t a valid pope. So the objection has certainly been raised. The fact that very few people actually
care about this debate is probably nothing other than a signifier of the cancerous apathy in both the Church and in the world at large. Things were probably a lote more exciting during the days of the Arian heresy, when even sailors composed sea shanties about the controversy.
If you feel comfortable taking the position that 1.4 billion Catholics can’t be wrong, that’s fine. But the sedevacantist argument is not adequately refuted just because it’s lost a popularity contest. A tiny minority
can be righteous, as the stories of the Flood, Sodom & Gomorrah, and Joshua & Caleb illustrate rather well. The virtue of humility does not necessarily consist in joining the in-crowd.
Sedevacantist are a type of Protestant but instead of privately interpreting scripture they hold that they can privately interpret Roman Catholic teaching.
I’m surprised to hear this from a former sedevacantist, since it’s an absolute falsehood.
First of all, while Scripture contains Catholic teaching, there can be no question that the bible is a difficult book—full of poetry, parables, and metaphor. It can yield any number of private interpretations. But the teachings of the Church: the canons of her Councils, the encyclicals of her popes, and the magisterial teachings of her Doctors and Saints—these are hardly as ambiguous as a story about a man living in the belly of a great fish. In fact, the Church is famous for the crisp (and unflinching) clarity of her official texts (the florid prose in the documents of Vatican II being a striking departure). The Apostolic Constitution
Quo Primum is readily comprehensible and plain, for example, in a way that the Song of Songs is not.
Secondly, sedevacantists don’t “privately” interpret Catholic teaching. It’s not like they sit down with a copy of Denziger’s
Sources of Catholic Dogma in the same way that a Methodist sits down with a bible. Most of the intellectual work has already been done by considerably learned members of the hierarchy—beginning with Cardinal Ottaviani’s objections to the
Novus Ordo and Abp. Lefebvre’s courageous writings against the post-conciliar Church. There is no
re-interpretation or
private interpretation being undertaken by the sedevacantist—just a principled stand on tradition. There are Catholic teachings on the papacy (and on the ways in which the pope may defect from his spiritual authority) that are written neither in verse nor in allegorical myth, and they require almost zilch in the way of interpretation at all:
If a = b, then c.
The argument either proves too little or too much.