Question 91 – Is It Licit To Attend a Sedevacantist Church To Fulfill My Sunday Obligation?

Transcript:

In this case, it is never permitted to attend because this is a true schismatic community. They are denying the truths that the church has concretely. So the Sedevacantist is a true schismatic community, in some way comparable with the Orthodox churches, and also denies that there is a head. The difference between the Orthodox and Sedevacantists is that the Orthodox deny the principle of the primacy of the Pope while the Sedevacantists do not deny the principle of the primacy of the Pope, the dogma, but they deny this dogma in their practice because for them for 70 years, there is no head of the church.

Some go back to 80 years, other communities go back to 200 years, and others go back to 50 years. Now, others are saying that now with Francis, there is no Pope for eight years, and so on. It is completely subjectivist, a subjectivism criterion. It's against reason, against common sense, and the trust in God, that even in the worst situations in the history of the church, there is always a pope.

Well, there had been some short time of vacancy in the seat of Peter but it was not a considerable period. And therefore, in this case, the sedevacantists deny in praxis the reality of the primacy of the Pope yet this is an essential part of our Catholic faith. At this point, they are in some way, similar to the Orthodox communities who are denying both the practical concrete aspect of the papacy and the theoretical, dogma.

Therefore, we cannot go, in this case, to a Sedevacantist mass because we believe truly in the fullness of the revealed truth of the primacy of the Pope, that God cannot leave his church for a long time without a head. According to the Sedevacantists, the church has no head and so it's against the visibility of the church. I repeat it is coming closer to the Orthodox because the Orthodox say that the head of the church is invisible – they say, it's only Christ. So, the church can exist, say the Orthodox, without a visible head.

Now the Sedevacantists say that the church has existed for 70 to 80 years or more without a visible head. I repeat: this is against the fundamental structure which God gave to the church, the visibility also of a head. The Pope, bishops, and priests are the visibility and therefore we cannot do this when we believe in the fullness of the primacy.

It is different from the Society of Pius X because they accept the Pope, they mention him in the mass, and they pray for him. There are some Catholics who are in this way. The problem here is that they do not obey the Pope and his concrete orders. But this is only a canonical aspect, an exterior aspect of obedience, which is in this concrete extraordinary crisis of the church in some way can justify the situation of the Pius X community because the crisis is so enormous. The Pope in some way helped promote some bad things in the church, in the liturgy and so on which justifies, in this case, the situation of the society of Pius X, but it's temporary.

I think the importance here is to believe in the primacy and it is not always necessary for the fullness of the Catholic truth to obey every singular order of a pope but to obey when he commands the doctrine, which is the true doctrine of Christ. The Society of Pius X in this case, obeys the true doctrine that the church always had. Concrete canonical submission is difficult in our time. This is the difference between the situation of the Society of Pius X and the Sedevacantist communities.