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Antipope



         


In the case of certain periods of turbulence in the Roman Catholic Church, elections later determined to have been invalid have set up claimants to the Papacy, and usually in opposition to a specific pope. A person so chosen is known as an antipope. The earliest of these, Hippolytus, was elected in protest against Pope Callixtus I by a schismatic group in the city of Rome in the 3rd century. Hippolytus ended his life, however, in exile during Roman imperial persecution in the mines on the island of Sardinia in the company of Callixtus' successor Pope Pontian, and was reconciled to the Catholic Church.

The late 14th and early 15th century saw a series of rival popes elected, one line of which is counted by the Roman Catholic Church as popes and the other as antipopes. The scandal of multiple claimants added to the demands for reform that produced the Protestant Reformation at the turn of the 16th century. See Western Schism, Antipope Benedict XIII.

It would not necessarily have been evident, during periods when two (or three) rival claimants existed, which was the antipope, and which was the pope, and the clear-cut distinctions made between them in retrospect can give a false sense that certainty existed among their contemporaries. Supporters might offer assistance to a given candidate, but could not know which would be determined to have been an antipope, and which the pope, until events had run their course.

There has not been an antipope since 1449, unless sedevacantist antipopes are counted (see below). Other schisms like the Church of England are controlled by lay sovereigns who do not want to have an ecclesiastical rival or begin like the Old Catholic Church and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association in a rejection of a primary dogma of the papacy.

Today the act of becoming an Antipope is considered a schismatic act by the Roman Catholic Church. This would result in automatic excommunication for the person who became Antipope.

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List of antipopes

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Sedevacantist antipopes

Some breakaway Catholics today, called sedevacantists, (see Sedevacantism) claim the current Popes are heretics for replacing the Tridentine Latin Mass with what they call the Novus Ordo Missae and allowing the celebration of the Mass in the vernacular. Some of them have their own popes to replace the popes they reject. They are sometimes called antipopes, although it should be noted that in contrast to historical antipopes, the number of their followers is minuscule.

Among modern Twentieth/Twenty-first century "antipopes" are:






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