This thread cuts right to the heart of the problem I've always seen in Sedevacantism, despite the many protestations I've heard to the contrary - and that is that the only realistic, honest end it points to is Conclavism. David Bawden ("Pope Michael") seems to have been the first to take the premise to its logical conclusion, and I for one, see his story as the greatest, most tragic of cautionary tales.
"Yet the general and deep-down problem of liberals and sedevacantists is the same, even if neither would care to admit it: both forget just how far Our Lord can choose to allow the men of His Church to misbehave without it ceasing to be His Church.
This is because the Catholic Church, like its Founder, is truly human and truly divine. For when God became incarnate, or took flesh, then the Son of God, true God, became also true man, so that in Jesus Christ the divine and human natures are always both present and distinct but neither separate nor confused. Similarly in his one true Church, divine and human elements are always both present but especially must not be confused, because whereas the divine element is infallible both in Our Lord and in his Church, on the contrary the human element is sinless in Our Lord but fallible in his Church.
If then I blur the divine and human elements in the Church, the same confusion can go either of two ways. Either I will blur the human into the divine, and then, crediting mere humans with divine infallibility, I will hold the churchmen to be right whatever they say, and, if I blindly follow liberal popes, I will fall into liberalism. Or I will blur the divine into the human, in which case discrediting the stainless Church, bride of Christ, with the stains of fallible churchmen, I risk repudiating the bride and falling out of the Church, as did many Catholics when they became Protestants in Luther’s time, and as have done a number of sedevacantists in our own time. On the contrary Catholics keep their balance by neither, like liberals, crediting the merely human with qualities divine, nor, like sedevacantists, discrediting the divine as merely human....
What has falsified and exaggerated infallibility in many Catholics’ minds over the last 120 years has been the Church’s strong discipline from the definition of papal infallibility in 1870 down to the 1960’s and a series of relatively good popes (in doctrine and morals) from Pius IX to Pius XII inclusive. In a way, Catholics had it too good. That is why when John XXIII and Vatican II began seriously to err, easily most Catholics were caught off their guard. Whether they accepted error with their erring leaders and became liberal, or repudiated the erring leaders and left the Church or became sedevacantists, either way they lost their Catholic balance."
--Bishop Richard Williamson