Sedevacantism - Early History

Early History

One of the earliest proponents of sedevacantism was the American Francis Schuckardt. Although still working within the "official" Church in 1967, he publicly took the position in 1968 that the Holy See was vacant and that the Church that had emerged from the Second Vatican Council was no longer Catholic. An associate of his, Daniel Q. Brown, arrived at the same conclusion. In 1969, Brown received episcopal orders from an Old Catholic bishop, and in 1971 he in turn consecrated Schuckardt. Schuckardt founded a congregation called the Tridentine Latin Rite Catholic Church.

In 1970, a Japanese layman, Yukio Nemoto (1925–1988), created a sedevacantist group called Seibo No Mikuni. Another founding sedevacantist was Father Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga, a Jesuit theologian from Mexico. He put forward sedevacantist ideas in his books The New Montinian Church (August 1971) and Sede Vacante (1973). His writings gave rise to the sedevacantist movement in Mexico, led by Sáenz, Father Moisés Carmona and Father Adolfo Zamora, and also inspired Father Francis E. Fenton in the U.S.

In the years following the Second Vatican Council other priests took up similar positions, including:

• The Dominican theologian Fr. Michel Louis Guérard des Lauriers, who developed a thesis similar to sedevacantism called sedeprivationism in the 1970s.
• Several students at the Society of St. Pius X seminary at Econe in the early or mid-1970s — Daniel Dolan, Anthony Cekada and Donald Sanborn — who were reportedly sedevacantists in that period and were expelled together with three others from the SSPX by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre for holding the error.
• The English priest Fr. Oswald Baker, who was a sedevacantist at least by 1982, and reportedly some time prior to that.
• The American missionary Fr. Lucian Pulvermacher, who left the Roman Catholic Church in 1976 and in October 1998 was elected Pope of the conclavist "True Catholic Church" with the name of "Pius XIII".