If the Popes are capable of authoritatively teaching heresy and the world's bishops in near unanimity can define and declare heresy in an ecumenical Council, and the papacy can be impotently held for generations, if not centuries or even forever, lacking their sacramental, teaching, and even liturgical authority, then the Catholic Church is dead and probably always was - that's the problem of sedeprivationism. The papacy lost it's true authority now? At least Protestants offer a more realistic end date around the time of Constantine. Sede theology - when you really dig deep - boils down to "I miss ad orientem so let's blow the whole thing up, pack it up, and End Times LARP." One has to be simultaneously profoundly blind to the far more murky, terrifying, abusive moments in the Church's history where the papacy was outright bought and sold or passed on to nephews, where the papal court was treated as little more than a bordello, when there was actual confusion about who even held the Seat with three or more competing claimants (sometimes with the real Pope reigning over the smaller faction) and also naive enough to then believe the Church collapsed during usual business in the 1960s. It requires one to have absolutely no faith in the Church at all. Martin Luther beheld a Church in it's darkest moments and even then his premise was flawed. I have seen some of the most aboherent rad-trad Twitter accounts gleefully share images of Satan pitchforking Luther in Hell. ... And then they post their own neo-Lutheranism (replacing his earned outrage for abuses with their inane whining.) It's Catholicism without certainty or hope and it's Protestantism with dynamism or coherence. Sedevacantism/privationism is the very worst of both worlds, a theology that would prefer to see the Church disintegrate if only to validate their liturgical preferences. What do sedes, even those "open" to the possibility that the Church is only sleeping and not entirely dead, really want to hear? They want a repudiation and retraction of a Church Council? And then what? Will other bishops insist we "revisit" Chalcedon or Nicaea or Trent or Florence? We are to be a Church of the Councils built on the Rock of Peter and yet we are then to regroup insisting we never really believed in the integrity of those Councils or the Petrine Office to begin with? More on reddit.com

It is a peculiar theory, which seems to be trying to get all the "benefits" of a sedevacantist position without accepting the rather-obvious drawbacks. But it also seems an entirely novel theory, and I suspect one would struggle in vain to find support for it amongst the Fathers or later theologians (though I've not done my homework to actually substantiate this). And ultimately I'm not sure what it really adds to the conversation. If one isn't looking for a way to disclaim the current Pope, and isn't of the erroneous opinion that anything and everything a Pope says is infallible, then it doesn't seem like a theory with much practical application. Is holding to the theory gravely sinful? It seems the sort of thing that at very least "smacks of heresy." And it would make one at least effectively schismatic. Also, it's also a fringe, crackpot-ey sort of thing. I'd steer clear of it. More on reddit.com