Sedevacantism is a cope. If the pope can defect then Catholicism is untrue.
Here is the thing:
The Catholic Chruch claims to be the divinely appointed custodian of divine revelation. Infallible and indefectible. Yet its own behavior and policies, its own rhetoric and reversals; its banality in its post Vatican II form utterly betray such a notion. How can I believe the Catholic faith when Rome itself no longer cares about being consistent with its own claims? When it cares more about coddling and implementing progressive ideology than it does the doctrines it claims to be revealed truth?
My faith has near crumbled because under Francis the whole thing looks like a decrepit sham.
I don't know how long you've been a Catholic, whether you're a convert, or remember VII, or know the histories of the bad popes, so I'm lacking your context when you say (in effect) that Pope Francis is the catalyst or the maybe the final straw on your faith's back. If you'd like to provide context that would be helpful, but if not I still think the following will help, and maybe knowing that you aren't the only one who struggles, you're a member of a very large crowd.
I want to add that for a lot of Catholics it wasn't one criticizable pope that crumbled their faith, but the sheer numbers of all the priests who molested the servers who assisted them at the altar of God. In the same way someone who says "but that doesn't change the truth of the faith" because there are bad priests, they should in consistency apply that same logic to the pope.
Anyway: I went to look up some of the bad popes, the Borgias and Medicis and murderers and sexual deviants in the Church's past. And one of the links that came up was so helpful for me that I hope you'll either listen or read (there's a transcript, which I read) to the whole thing, and see if there's any of it that's helpful to you.
There's a point near the beginning which you could tease out as the thesis:
"Augustine’s point is actually a little more subtle, that if you're banking your faith on how personally holy the pope or another church leader is, even if they’re extremely holy, your faith is in the wrong place."
And that's my main point to you. But these guys are good, they bring up some "but what ifs" that reasonable people might ask:
"Well I was just saying one of the things that this can cause is if there’s a pope you don’t like or if there’s a bishop you don’t like or whatever that may be, let that be an instance of purification to say, 'Had I banked all of my hopes on just the goodness of another human person, had I put my trust in princes the way the Psalms warned us not to, or is my trust really in Christ?'”
And then they go on to explore some of these instances. I hope you read it or listen to it all the way through, and that it's helpful to you in some small way.
Many people have grown quite concerned that Pope Francis might, in fact, be a bad pope. We asked Joe Heschmeyer to examine complaints against Francis.
www.catholic.com
crisismagazine.com
