Sedevacantism
The Roman Catholic Church is a false religion and a false church. There is a teaching called sedevacantism — which translates from Latin as the seat is vacant — where basically there are traditionalist Catholics who believe the Catholic Church is the true church, but that the seat of the pope, the leader of the church, is actually corrupt and occupied by a bad person.
The reality is that if you do believe in traditional Catholic views going back hundreds of years, you would essentially have to take this position, because the church has changed on so many things. This idea largely took hold around the death of Pope Pius XII in 1958, because there were radical changes in the Catholic Church that followed with the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965. The way they worshipped just drastically changed. There was a time when all services were conducted entirely in Latin, and yet they made sweeping changes and modernised to the point where the Catholic Church today is very different from what it was 60 or 70 years ago.
And what are some modern applications of this? We have seen the last several popes make major changes to the Catholic Church. Pope Francis in particular is just completely different from the popes that existed a hundred years ago — the way he has modernised things, changed doctrines, gone soft on various positions, and moved away from the stricter traditional Catholic stances. He has made a lot of changes to the church.
But you can actually go all the way back to the days of Martin Luther. When the Protestant Reformation started, Martin Luther said that he did not leave the Catholic Church — the Catholic Church left him. As a Catholic priest he saw major changes happening in the church itself and said, I believe in the traditional Catholic views, and yet what they are teaching today is actually very different from those views. And so in a sense Martin Luther was also a sedevacantist of his day — though it must be said that Martin Luther was himself a false prophet, because the Catholic Church has never been the correct church. It has never been the true church. So there was never a golden age to go back to in the first place.
But the point stands — if you actually do believe in traditional Catholic views, you are forced to either leave the church or say the seat is vacant, because they are a very different church today from what they were when they started. The very existence of sedevacantism is an admission from within Catholicism that something has gone badly wrong.
And therefore, the Roman Catholic Church is a false religion and a false church.
Pastor Matthew Stucky
