Sedeprivationism is the Odd Man Out

I used Claude to provide some perspectives

Aside the fact that their Thesis makes no sense, is circular in reasoning, devoid of any historical excuse for ever having existed, and is just completely inverse to reality due to their simply being intellectually incapable of understanding the vast difference between Roman Law (on which Catholic Canon Law is based) and the absurdity and travesty of Justice that is all forms of Anglo-Saxon “common” Law or worse still, American Jurisprudence; we can also see that Sedeprivationism is a fringe, minority position. One driven mostly by a cult of personality and the blackmailing of parishioners and seminarians alike that unless they adopt the sedeprivationist position, they may not receive orders, and I know from personal experience some parishioners have been threatened with not being allowed to receive sacraments if they also attended CMRI masses.

Let’s start by looking at some numbers, somewhat imprecise though they may be.

Q1. How many sedevacantist (1958) Bishops are there in the world (i.e. presumably actually Catholic)?

There’s no registry, and any count depends on which filter you apply to “valid.” Three filters are in play and they give different numbers:

Filter 1 — sacramentally valid consecration (pre-1968 rite, valid matter/form/intent, traceable apostolic succession). This admits quite a few, including much of the wider Thuc-line fringe.

Filter 2 — publicly professing sedevacantism (excluding sedeprivationists like the IMBC, conclavists like the Palmarians or Bawden, and “resistance” non-sedes like SSPX/Williamson successors).

Filter 3 — mutually recognized within mainstream sedevacantist circles (the real bottleneck — SSPV has historically questioned Thuc-line validity over Thục’s faculties in his final years; Thuc-line camps in turn sometimes question things on the other side).

Taking the intersection of all three — publicly sedevacantist, sacramentally credible, and actively functioning as of late 2025 / early 2026 — the core is remarkably small. The best-accepted bishops are in two succession streams:

Méndez line (universally accepted because Méndez was a pre-Vatican II Roman bishop consecrated under papal mandate, 1960):

• Bp. Joseph Santay (CSPV/SSPV, cons. 2007)

• Bp. James Carroll (CSPV, cons. 2018)

Kelly died December 2023, so SSPV/CSPV is now down to these two.

Thuc line (Carmona → Pivarunas branch):

• Bp. Mark Pivarunas (CMRI, cons. 1991)

• Bp. Giles Butler (CMRI)

• Bp. Martín Dávila Gándara (Unión Católica Trento, Mexico, cons. 1999)

• Bp. Andrés Morello (Argentina)

• Bp. Germán Fliess (CMRI)

• Bp. Rodrigo da Silva (Brazil, cons. 2021 by Dolan shortly before Dolan’s death in 2022)

• Bp. Roy (Our Lady of Joy Mission) Cons. 2024 by da Silva. Eastern Canada (Maritimes), French-speaking apostolate, ex-SSPX

Thuc line (des Lauriers → McKenna → Sanborn branch — strictly sedeprivationist, but adjacent and often counted):

• Bp. Donald Sanborn (RCI, cons. 2002)

• Bp. Joseph Selway (cons. 2018)

• Bp. Geert Stuyver (IMBC, Belgium) — IMBC proper

So the realistic mainstream count sits around 9–13 actively functioning bishops worldwide, depending on whether you admit the sedeprivationists and where you draw the line on smaller Latin-American operations. If you widen to include anyone with a plausible Thuc-line claim who identifies as sedevacantist (independent chapel bishops, small breakaway groups), you can push it into the 20s or low 30s, but most of those are disputed even internally.

Two caveats that matter for the 1958 framing:

1. The recent deaths of Dolan (April 2022) and Kelly (December 2023) — plus Cekada (2020) — thinned the Anglophone bench substantially. Carroll and Selway are the youngest, and consecration activity is rare.

2. If you apply strict 1958 criteria and reject the 1968 Pontificalis Romani episcopal rite as doubtful, you still get the same answer for this cohort, because nearly all of these bishops (or their consecrators going back to Thục 1938 and Méndez 1960) pre-date 1968 or use the traditional rite.

The functional episcopate keeping the sacraments available for a global sedevacantist population of ~30,000 is, in other words, tiny — roughly a dozen men, heavily concentrated in the US with outposts in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Europe.

Q2. Approximately how many sedevacantist priests are there?

Best estimate: ~120–180 priests worldwide, with a likely error band of roughly ±40.

Breaking it down by group, using current public directories and the most reliable available counts:

• CMRI (Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen) — the largest single body. Its directory currently lists Mass centres in 12+ U.S. states plus Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, the UK, Russia (including Crimea), and Italy. Older sources cited 12 priests; the present footprint and the active Mater Dei seminary suggest something closer to 25–35 active priests today.

• Sanborn / Roman Catholic Institute + Most Holy Trinity Seminary — successor network to Dolan’s Cincinnati operation. Probably 15–25 priests across the U.S., with associated chapels in Europe and Latin America.

• SSPV / CSPV (Kelly’s group, now under Bps. Santay and Carroll) — a tighter U.S./Canada-only operation. Roughly 15–20 priests.

• IMBC (Istituto Mater Boni Consilii) — sedeprivationist rather than strictly sedevacantist, but commonly counted in this universe. Based in Italy, with priests in France, Belgium, Spain, and a few other locations. Around 15–20 priests.

• Sociedad Sacerdotal Trento (Mexico, under Bp. Dávila) plus the Carmona-line Mexican network — 10–15 priests.

• Argentina / Brazil clusters — Morello’s group (CJM, Argentina), Bp. da Silva’s seminary in São Paulo, plus the smaller Mexican-derived missions — 10–20 priests combined.

• Independents — sedevacantist priests not affiliated with any of the above, including former SSPX/CMRI/SSPV men running solo chapels and missions in the U.S., France, Italy, Spain, the UK, the Philippines, Vietnam, etc. — 20–40 priests, and this is the largest source of uncertainty because no one tracks them centrally.

• Conclavist and fringe groups (Palmarian remnants, Bawden’s group, the late Pulvermacher’s “True Catholic Church,” etc.) — usually excluded from a strict count, but if included add 5–15 more.

Sum of midpoints: ~135. Sum of low bounds: ~95. Sum of high bounds: ~175. Adding a margin for overlooked Latin American, Eastern European, and Asian missions gets you to roughly the 120–180 band, with ~150 ± 40 as a reasonable point estimate.

Q3. How Many Religious are approximately Sedevacantist?

There’s even less data here than for priests, because religious communities don’t publish member counts the way dioceses publish ordination figures. Working from what’s documented:

Best estimate: ~150–250 religious (sisters + non-priest brothers/monks) worldwide, central figure around 200 ± 60.

Women religious — the bulk of the total:

• CMRI Sisters (Mount St. Michael, Spokane; City of Mary, Rathdrum; and the various school foundations). Older sources cited about 50 sisters; the 2007 split removed 15 who reconciled with Rome, but vocations have continued and a new novitiate is being built. Realistic current count: 40–60 sisters, plus novices.

• Daughters of Mary, Mother of Our Savior (Round Top NY motherhouse, ~20 sisters in Long Island, ~11 in White Bear Lake MN) — founded by Bp. Kelly in 1984, associated with SSPV/CSPV. Total roughly 45–65 sisters.

• Sisters of St. Thomas Aquinas — small U.S. sedevacantist congregation, perhaps 10–20 sisters.

• Congregation of the Mother of God — also small, U.S.-based, 5–15 sisters.

• Carmelites of the Holy Face (Thuc-line foundations, mostly in Mexico) and various small Dominican and Carmelite tertiary groups affiliated with the CMRI and Sanborn networks — collectively perhaps 15–30 sisters.

• European and Latin American convents associated with IMBC (Italy), Bp. Stuyver (Belgium), the SST (Mexico), CJM (Argentina), and Bp. da Silva’s seminary network (Brazil) — small, scattered, perhaps 15–35 sisters combined.

That gives roughly 130–225 sisters worldwide.

Men religious who are not priests — a much smaller category:

• CMRI Brothers (lay brothers and seminarians not yet ordained at Mount St. Michael and Mater Dei) — perhaps 10–20.

• CSPV Brothers (Round Top) — a handful, 2–5.

• Most Holy Family Monastery (the Dimond brothers in Fillmore NY) — formally claims to be a Benedictine monastery but is essentially a two-brother operation with perhaps a few associates; mainstream sedevacantists generally do not recognise its religious standing. 2–10 depending on what you count.

• Monastery of the Holy Cross, Nova Friburgo (Brazil) — small Benedictine community linked first to Williamson, now with sedevacantist sympathies through Bp. da Silva. 5–15.

• Various OFM and Capuchin friars who appear in CMRI directories (Fr. Francis Miller OFM, Fray Leon Speróni OFM Cap., etc.) — these are mostly already ordained, so they’d already be in the priest count, but a few non-ordained brothers exist in these clusters. 5–15.

That gives roughly 25–60 brothers/monks worldwide.

Sum: approximately 155–285 religious, with my central estimate at ~200.

Why the error band is so wide:

1. Convent populations turn over silently. Unlike priest ordinations (which get announcements), sister entrances, professions, and departures rarely make the public record. The Daughters of Mary’s loss of one sister to a 1988 family-instigated removal made the news; routine departures don’t.

2. Definitional scope. If you count only solemnly-professed sisters, the number drops by perhaps 20–30%. If you count novices and postulants, it rises again.

3. The “third-order” and oblate question. Several of these communities have associated lay tertiaries, oblates, or “consecrated virgins” who live a quasi-religious life without formal vows. Including them adds perhaps 30–80 more, mostly women.

4. Latin American visibility is very low. The CMRI directory lists sisters in Mexico and Argentina but doesn’t give numbers; similarly, the Mexican Trento and Carmona-derived networks have small religious houses that appear in passing references only.

5. Dimond-type “monasteries” are a category problem. MHFM and a few similar one- or two-person operations call themselves monasteries but have no canonical standing even among other sedevacantists. Counting them is largely arbitrary.

Ratios worth noting:

Against ~150 priests, ~200 religious gives a religious-to-priest ratio of roughly 1.3 : 1, which is dramatically lower than the historical Catholic ratio (globally somewhere between 4:1 and 7:1 throughout the 20th century before the post-conciliar collapse). The sedevacantist movement is, in other words, structurally clergy-heavy and short on contemplative and active sisters — partly because forming a religious community requires more lay infrastructure than forming a chapel does, and partly because the demographic pool feeding sedevacantism is small enough that the men who feel called to consecrated life are funnelled almost entirely into the priesthood, where they’re more urgently needed.

Against ~30,000 laity, roughly 1 religious per 150 faithful — again, much higher than the modern global Catholic ratio, but driven entirely by the small denominator.

Q. 4 Extrapolating from all of the above, can we divide the populations of 1958 sedevacantists from the ones of sedeprivationists, by n. of bishops, priests, and laity that follows one route over the other?

First some distinctions: “1958 sedevacantist” isn’t strictly synonymous with “all sedevacantists who aren’t sedeprivationists.” Historically there have been intermediate positions (the See vacant from 1963, or from 1965, or from Paul VI’s promulgation of the Novus Ordo in 1969). In practice, however, those intermediate positions have largely collapsed —partly through CMRI’s intellectual influence, partly through generational attrition— so today “strict sedevacantist” ≈ “1958 position” for roughly 90%+ of the strict camp. The remainder (a few independent priests, some older laity holding Paul VI as valid but his successors not) is small enough to round into the 1958 column without much distortion.

Why laity skews even more 1958 than clergy does:

The clergy split is roughly 70/30 (1958/sedeprivationist), but the laity split is closer to 78/22 (~25,000/~7,000 of an estimated ~32,000 total). Three reasons:

1. CMRI’s chapel density. CMRI alone runs ~120 Mass centres globally — more than the entire sedeprivationist world combined. Each centre may only see a priest monthly, but the laity attached to it count as part of the 1958 universe.

2. Sedeprivationism is an intellectual/clerical position. The Cassiciacum thesis requires lay understanding of the materialiter / formaliter distinction to be consciously adopted. Most laity attending IMBC or RCI chapels are functionally just “trad Catholics who don’t trust the post-conciliar popes” and would not, if asked, articulate the Cassiciacum framework. They’re counted here as sedeprivationist by chapel affiliation, but their actual position is closer to undifferentiated traditionalism.

3. Strict sedevacantism has the more emotionally compelling story. “The See has been vacant since 1958” is intelligible to a lay Catholic in a way that “the popes are material but not formal” is not. This matters for retention and for the conversion of SSPX/independent laity who arrive at the position through reading Bellarmine or Pius XII rather than through systematic theology.

Important caveats and known gaps:

• The ~32,000 total laity figure is itself uncertain (Wikipedia uses ~30,000, citing pre-2010 estimates; a realistic 2026 figure is probably 30,000–40,000 given two decades of slow growth from SSPX defections and trad-Catholic conversions). The percentage split is more reliable than the absolute numbers.

• The SSPV/CSPV is officially silent on the 1958 question —Bp. Kelly was famously cautious about formal declarations— but the clergy and laity functionally occupy the 1958 position, so they are placed there.

• The “una cum” sedevacantists embedded in SSPX (perhaps 9–12 priests + a hard-to-estimate number of laity) are excluded entirely; if counted as 1958-leaning, they would push that column up by maybe 1,000–3,000 laity.

• Conclavists (Bawden’s “Pope Michael II” successors, Palmarian remnants) are excluded; they are technically 1958 sedevacantists who have resolved the vacancy by electing their own pope, and add perhaps 500–2,000 more if you want to count them.

The takeaway ratio: for every sedeprivationist bishop there are roughly 2 strict 1958 bishops; for every sedeprivationist priest, roughly 2.5 strict; for every sedeprivationist layperson, roughly 3.5 strict. The 1958 position is the dominant operational form of the rejection of the post-conciliar Roman claimants — by a wide and probably widening margin, are in aggregate larger and more vocations-rich than IMBC’s formation house in Verrua Savoia.