Given the continuing efforts of sedevacantists to lead the faithful astray, I have chosen to republish this important essay as a free post. Due to some unfortunate technical difficulties, the bulk of this essay had been lost on the internet (clicking “continue reading” led to a blank page), so it is now restored in its integrity. While it is true that lengthy efforts have been made to refute Fr. Crean’s arguments, I am convinced his case prevails, with the benefit of a simplicity that is recognizably Catholic and common-sensical.—PAK

Shortly before the Ascension, Our Lord said to the disciples, Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world. Since this is a divine promise, it has been not only kept, but superabundantly kept, and so Christ remains with us in more than one way. He is substantially present wherever the Blessed Eucharist is consecrated and preserved. As regards His divine nature, He is present with the Father and their Holy Spirit in the soul of every person on earth who is in a state of grace. By His power, He is as intimately present to the whole earthly Church as the head is to the body, and so He keeps her in being until the end of time. This last manner of presence gives rise to what is called the indefectibility of the Church.

Theologians debate the details of this indefectibility. But all of them agree that it embraces at least three things: the faith, the sacraments, and the hierarchy.

(1) The faith delivered once for all to the saints (Jude 3) is preserved in every age. While every believer has his part to play in this work of preservation, the principal place belongs by divine decree to the bishops, the successors of the apostles. As St Irenaeus of Lyon declared in the second century, the bishops who succeed to the apostles and to the sees that they founded have been granted “the sure charism of the truth”. These bishops maintain this faith not only by their public preaching and writing but also by the documents to which they are publicly pledged: above all, Holy Scripture, but also the creeds and definitions of the councils and the popes.1

(2) The seven sacraments, likewise, are preserved by Christ until the end of time. He causes them to be in every age the unfailingly efficacious means by which God is glorified and human beings are both set free from sin and sanctified for eternal life within the kingdom of heaven. God doth not give the Spirit by measure, says St John the Baptist, speaking of baptism and the Son of God (Jn. 3:34). We can understand this to mean, among other things, that however many people have already received grace through baptism and the other sacraments, Christ can always give more grace; and this He does, whenever those who receive them put forward no hindrance.

(3) Thirdly, the hierarchy of bishops in union with each other, and united to St Peter and his successors as their earthly head, has been preserved by Christ since His Ascension and will remain intact until His return at the end of time. As the word ‘hierarchy’, literally ‘sacred rule’, implies, these bishops have the right to govern the Christian people, and the baptised have the corresponding duty to obey their bishop in sacred matters. The New Testament asserts this duty in clear words: Obey your prelates and be subject to them (Heb. 13:17).

We should note that these three elements of indefectibility are not only preserved, but preserved within the Catholic Church. The doctrine of indefectibility does not simply state that some people on earth will always be professing the true faith, administering valid sacraments, and possessed of episcopal orders. It states that the Catholic Church will always be professing the true faith, administering the sacraments, and structured by the episcopacy and the papacy. And the Catholic Church is an empirically identifiable organisation, by which I mean that it can be distinguished from other societies by the application of criteria accessible to the senses, even by a person without faith. From this point of view, the Catholic Church is no different from the Southern Baptist Convention, FIFA, or the Locomotive Club of Great Britain.

The criterion by which we may identify the Catholic Church is the papacy; she is the society governed by the man who succeeds to St Peter, according to the norms in force at the time of the succession. In this way, the Church in 2026 is one and the same society as the body of disciples that witnessed the Ascension on Mount Olivet almost two thousand years before.

Where the Catholic Church differs from the Southern Baptist Convention or FIFA is that it has a divine promise of perpetuity; which means, since it is a visible society, perpetual visibility.

Our Lord promised that it would be a city on hill that cannot be hidden (Mt. 5:14). This historically continuous and recognisable society will always have bishops who teach and administer the sacraments: and they will do so legitimately, since they will be governing some definite portion of Christ’s flock over which the Holy Spirit has set them (Acts 20:28).

The Fathers of the First Vatican Council, in 1870, spoke eloquently of this visible perpetuity of the Church:

The eternal shepherd and guardian of our souls, in order to render permanent the saving work of redemption, determined to build a church in which, as in the house of the living God, all the faithful should be linked by the bond of one faith and charity. Therefore, before He was glorified, He besought his Father, not for the apostles only, but also for those who were to believe in Him through their word, that they all might be one as the Son himself and the Father are one. So then, just as he sent apostles, whom He chose out of the world, even as He had been sent by the Father, it was in like manner His will that in His church there should be shepherds and teachers until the end of time (Pastor Aeternus, preamble).

Furthermore, as Pope Leo XIII would remark in his encyclical Satis Cognitum, since Our Lord made St Peter alone the foundation of the Church, these shepherds and teachers must remain united to the successor of St Peter, under pain of becoming “a lawless and disorderly crowd” (SC 15). Hence, Vatican I defined that it is by the institution of Christ, that is, by divine law, that blessed Peter has “perpetual successors in the primacy over the whole church”, and it defined, too, that the Roman pontiffs are these successors.

Pope Leo XIII summarises this double necessity, of both a papacy and an episcopacy within the visible Church of Christ, in these terms:

He who made Peter the foundation of the Church also “chose twelve, whom He called apostles” (Lk. 6:13); and just as it is necessary that the authority of Peter should be perpetuated in the Roman Pontiff, so, by the fact that the bishops succeed the Apostles, they inherit their ordinary power, and thus the episcopal order necessarily belongs to the essential constitution of the Church.

Applying these truths to sedevacantism

Why do I recall these elementary truths of Christian doctrine? Since the Second Vatican Council, some Catholics have been scandalised by the spread and tolerance of heresy within the Church. By ‘scandalised’, I do not mean simply shocked or saddened; I use the word in its technical sense, of ‘caused to stumble’. Among these are the so-called sedevacantists. Rightly desiring to defend the indefectibility by which the Church adheres to the truth, they fall into denying her indefectible visibility.

Sedevacantism is sometimes characterised as a form of Protestantism. This is inaccurate, since the sedevacantist does not believe that he has the right to determine the meaning of God’s revelation by his own private judgement, which is the essence of Protestantism. Nor, though it is a schism, is it the same kind of schism as that of the various national Orthodox churches. Unlike these bodies, the sedevacantist admits in principle the definition of the First Vatican Council that by divine law, the Roman pontiff is the successor of St Peter and therefore has primacy of jurisdiction over the whole Church. He therefore also admits that all other bishops are bound to subject themselves to a reigning Roman pontiff in order not to be a mere “lawless and disorderly crowd”. What he denies is that there have been any Roman pontiffs, in God’s sight, for some sixty or seventy years; most commonly, since the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958.

The sedevacantist thesis emerges as the conclusion to a syllogism:

The Roman pontiffs acting in their official capacity cannot teach errors against the faith; but the men generally accepted in recent decades as the Roman pontiffs have taught such errors when acting in an official capacity; therefore they were not truly Roman pontiffs.

The errors in question will be variously listed by different sedevacantist authors, but those that have been most frequently mentioned down the years are the following:

religious liberty as taught by the Second Vatican Council;
religious indifferentism as (allegedly) taught or encouraged by this council and subsequent popes;
the new sacramental rites, especially that of the Mass, promulgated by Pope Paul VI; and
the provision in the 1983 Code of Canon Law for administering Holy Communion to non-Catholics in certain circumstances.

Now, there are several ways in which one might respond to the sedevacantist thesis. One might point out the importance of distinguishing between papal teaching issued ex cathedra and lesser kinds of teaching. Thus, Bishop Gasser, who at the 1^st Vatican Council had the task of explaining the meaning of ‘papal infallibility’ to the assembled bishops before their vote, made this important statement:

Not just any way of proposing doctrine is sufficient, even when the Pontiff is exercising his supreme office of shepherd and teacher. It is necessary that the intention of defining doctrine be manifest, and of putting an end to uncertainty about some doctrine or matter to be defined, by giving a definitive judgement, and proposing that doctrine as something that the universal Church must hold.2

Again, one might point out the importance of distinguishing between different senses of the same words. Thus, a sedevacantist author may aver that Pius IX solemnly condemned religious liberty while Paul VI and subsequent popes have taught it.

But to say that ‘religious liberty’ is a heresy is rather like saying that ‘predestination’ is a heresy. There is indeed a heretical sense of predestination: that God created some people in order that He might damn them. There is also a Catholic sense of predestination, which is that taught by St Paul, St Augustine, and St Thomas Aquinas: that those who are saved by God’s mercy might have been justly allowed to die in their sins, actual or original.

Likewise, there is a heretical, or certainly an erroneous sense of religious liberty: that the civil power is not competent to recognise religious truth, and so ought never to prefer one religion over another. And there is a Catholic sense of religious liberty, which is that no threats to life, property, or freedom should be used to induce non-Christians to accept baptism.

Or again, one might urge upon a sedevacantist brother the need to distinguish more clearly between dogmatic and disciplinary decrees, or between teachings and actions. A provision in a code of canon law is not a definition of faith: Catholics are free to hold that the modern provision for giving Holy Communion to non-Catholics, mentioned in canon 844 of the present code, is misguided, without having to conclude that the man who issued it could not have been a pope.3

Again, the promulgation of a new sacramental rite, even if expresses some doctrine less clearly than before, is evidently not a denial of that doctrine.

Still less is every action of a pope a norm of faith. When St Peter briefly shunned table fellowship with Gentile Christians, one might say that his action implied that the Gentiles had not been fully cleansed by baptism; but he did not teach this, let alone demand on pain of excommunication that all Christians accept it. When Pope John Paul II invited representatives of ‘all world religions’ to come and pray for peace at Assisi, he probably gave many causal onlookers the (disastrous) impression that one religion is pretty much as good as another; but I do not believe that he himself believed this; still less did he teach it; least of all did he demand that other Catholics believe it. No churchman, after all, is impeccable. If a churchman sins and thus fails to obey God in his actions, does he lose office for implicitly teaching the heresy that “God is not to be obeyed”?

Yet while the different topics raised by sedevacantist authors are important, it is not in fact necessary, in order to respond adequately to their thesis, to go through the litany of charges one by one. It is sufficient to note that their position is self-contradictory.

These authors hold, rightly, that the Catholic Church cannot fail. They then use this true principle as a reason to condemn as impostors the popes of the past sixty years, and all the bishops who have held communion with these popes. But if this were correct, the correct conclusion would be that the Catholic Church had indeed failed. If there were no longer any popes or diocesan bishops, then Christ would no longer be with His Church, as He had been from the Ascension until the death of Pope Pius XII – and the New Testament would have strangely failed to warn us in advance of this momentous change.

Let us recall that the Church is a visible society, defined by reference to the papacy, through which Our Lord instructs, sanctifies, and governs His members. If there is no pope and no office-holders with the right to choose a new one, then this society no longer exists. Any men who are still teaching true doctrines and conferring valid sacraments are therefore not Catholics, since one cannot be a member of a society that does not exist. Contrary to Our Lord’s promise, there would no longer be any divine city set on a hill. There would be only the ruins of a city, from which men had taken bricks and stones to fashion for themselves a hovel in the valley.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a tip

It is, of course, possible for some bishops, for a certain time, to deviate from the faith. What is not possible is that all of them, together with their head, the pope, should so deviate. See Erick Ybarra, “Eastern Orthodoxy Under Fire: Responding to Michael W. Davis.”

Acta et decreta sacrosancti oecumenici concilii Vaticani (Coll. Lacensis, VII), 414: “Non sufficit quivis modus proponendi doctrinam, etiam dum Pontifex fungitur munere supremi pastoris et doctoris, sed requiritur intentio manifestata definiendi doctrinam, seu fluctuationi finem imponendi.”

It would no doubt be better, though, to lean on the phrase ‘properly disposed’ at the end of this canon, and to point out that only a non-Catholic who rejects the heresy and schism proper to his ecclesial community can be said to be properly disposed to receive the Holy Eucharist. Thus, this canon would come into effect only when the non-Catholic wished to be received into the Church but for some reason the minister of Holy Communion was not able to receive him.

A City Set on a Hill Cannot Be Hidden