The Despair of Sedevacantism

In times of crisis, it’s easy to sympathize with those who are willing to consider extreme solutions to account for the extreme situation that they find themselves in. And if you’re a Catholic today and you’re paying attention, you can probably admit that the situation is extreme.

Which is why I don’t sympathize with Catholics and especially prelates who are carrying on as if it’s just business as usual. The sheep of the flock are suffering and confused, they are disenchanted, and they need a voice of reassurance. And in the absence of such authoritative voices, there are those with easy answers that are more than happy to lead people astray.

If I had started my channel 10 years ago, I think it would have been rare to see comments that say things like, “The Vatican 2 Church is false and you are a false prophet for supporting it.” Or simply, “Sedevacantism is true.”

I mean, those voices would have existed, but you’d have to search for them, whereas now, those voices have conspicuously multiplied so that on almost every video I publish, I will see a comment like that pop up.

And so, to reiterate, I sympathize with people who are struggling to make sense of things. Things are not as neat and tidy as they once were for Catholics and especially those who try to defend the Catholic position through apologetics.

Now we have any number of scandals to contend with from which there has been a lot of lip service from the highest authorities, but their actions are at best complacent and at worst, and there’s a lot of at worst, perpetuating, nurturing, and even encouraging the same corruption that created the scandals.

And among those same sectors of the Church, we find scandalous and incoherent teachings if not explicitly heretical. Which makes those of us who are trying to reconcile our beliefs with the historic tradition and the infallibility of the Church – anxiety inducing.

More recently, there was a debate published online that discussed sedevacantism that has amplified that anxiety for many people. And because there have been responses from competent apologists and thinkers like Trent Horn and Michael Lofton, I’m not going to repeat what they said, but I would encourage you to check out their efforts with the same open-mindedness that you brought to that initial debate.

And if you can’t do that, then ask yourself if you’re just looking for satisfaction and justification for your anger and indignation. It might be that you just want to give yourself excuses not to be meek and humble of heart as the reading from Ephesians at last Sunday’s Latin Mass implores us to do for the sake of unity in the Church.

But the thing about indignation is that it is dependant upon anger and for anger to be sustained, it will compete with reason. Righteous anger and indignation are good when needed as a response to something like war or a grave injustice, but if they are sustained for too long, you will forfeit reason. Beware of that. So come, let us reason together.