Conclavism is the belief and practice of some who, claiming that Pope Benedict XVI, Pope John Paul II and other recent occupants of the papal see are not true popes, elect someone else and propose him as the true pope to whom the allegiance of Catholics is due.
The term comes from the word "conclave", the term for a meeting of the College of Cardinals convened to elect a Bishop of Rome, when the see of Rome is vacant.
A similar phenomenon is that of those (referred to as "mysticalists") who base their claim to the papacy on supposed personal supernatural revelations.
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Conclavism as a phenomenon is inextricably linked with sedevacantism, which itself developed in the late 1960s and 1970s, in the years following the Second Vatican Council. Though the sedevacantist pioneer Fr. Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga of Mexico advocated holding a papal election in the mid-1970s and a number of other traditionalists discussed the idea in the following years, conclavism was primarily a movement of the 1990s, associated in particular with the English-speaking world.
The first of the antipopes listed below, Pope Michael, began to promote the idea of a papal election in the late 1980s. Ultimately, he circulated notices to the editors of all sedevacantist publications that he could find, and notified all priests listed in a directory of traditionalists as being sedevacantists, sending in all over 200 copies of a book that he had written to recipients in 20 countries.[1]
A U.S. traditionalist Catholic, Ken Mock, is sometimes credited with being the father of the conclavist movement. Mock's actual record of involvement in the various elections seems somewhat ambivalent. In the Bawden case, Pope Michael claims that Mock arrived the day before the election and attempted to stop it; he also claims that Mock later told Von Pentz that he (Michael) had abdicated in favour of him, and that he tried to stop the Von Pentz election.[2]. He was involved in the preparations for the election of Pulvermacher, but he reportedly lost faith in him, coming to believe that he was rigging the election in his favour.
Technically distinct from the above conclavist antipopes is the category of "popes" (sometimes called "mysticalists") whose claims to the papacy derive from alleged divine revelations or apparitions. In these cases, there is no "conclave" process, and hence the term "conclavism" is arguably inappropriate.
As can be seen, several of these individuals have styled themselves Peter II, a name that is normally considered taboo for a Pope and which has apocalyptic connotations in Catholic circles.
The first post-Vatican II antipope to come to wide public notice, Pope Gregory XVII of the Palmarian Catholic Church, whose papal claim was asserted in 1978, fell into this category. Other antipopes of the same sort include the following:
Alleged divine appointment was also the basis for the pre-Vatican II (1950) claim of Michel Colin to the papacy as Clement XV.[3][4] Colin's sect survives, divided into different factions, to this day.
The Legio Maria movement of Kenya can be considered as a special case within conclavism. It has its own popes and ecclesiastical structure, having broken with the official Church in the early 1960s, but it is geographically and ethnically concentrated in western Kenya and has no connection with sedevacantism or the doctrinal underpinnings of other conclavist groups. The current Legio Maria pope is Raphael Titus Otieno.