With the way American tradcaths are currently speedrunning schismatism, I’m about 80% convinced we’ll see a non-trivially supported American antipope within my lifetime, and not gonna lie, I’d be fascinated to see how that would go down.
@dubbedcorn replied:
I understand maybe 50% of the words in this post
In brief:
tradcaths: Traditional Catholics; folks who profess to be Roman Catholic, but oppose the reforms introduced by the Catholic Church in tie Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican in 1962 (colloquially known as Vatican II). Mostly they tend to have a problem with local priests being allowed to administer rites in whatever language is spoken locally rather than only in Latin, though there are other reforms they often object to as well.
The Traditional Catholic movement is closely associated with sedevacantism, the belief that the apostolic succession of the papacy has been interrupted and the Holy See is thus vacant – or, in plain English, the belief that somewhere along the line, one of the popes lost God’s support, and thus, that pope and all of his official successors, including the current pope, have been imposters. Sedevacantists usually identify Pope Pius XII (who died in 1958) as the last real pope, though there’s some disagreement on this point.
(Note that not all tradcaths are sedevacantists, and not all sedevacantists are tradcaths – there’s merely substantial overlap.)
Antipope: Anyone other than the official pope who claims to be the pope. All antipopes are sedevacantists, though their justifications for why they’re the real pope vary; some are self-elected, while others claim to be the legitimate successors of a secret lineage of “true” popes that branched off when the official popes lost their legitimacy. Naturally, no antipope would describe themselves as such – as far as they’re concerned, they’re the real pope, and it’s the guy currently warming the big chair in Rome who’s an antipope!
Historically, antipopes have sometimes been a very big deal; consider, for example, the latter part of the Western Schism, a period of eight years from 1409 to 1417 where there were three competing papal lineages who all denounced each other as antipopes and made a whole thing of it. More recent claimants tend not to get much traction; the latest American antipope, Pope Michael, for example, never had more than a couple dozen verifiable supporters.
Hm. Would sedevacantism qualify as heresy? Just asking for clarification.
Not necessarily. Heresy is about doctrine, and you can disagree about who the current pope is without rejecting any particular point of Catholic doctrine – indeed, sedevacantism is often motivated by the belief that the pope himself is a heretic.
(Note, however, that all forms of schismatism, including sedevacantism, carry a penalty of automatic excommunication from the Catholic Church regardless of whether they’re founded in heresy, specifically to avoid anyone squeaking by on that particular technicality, so in practice the distinction is somewhat academic.)