In 1933, Eduardo Dávila Garza (1908?–1985) was elected Eduardo I, ‘Pope and Supreme Pontiff of Mexico and the Americas.’ Still, his plans were grander than that; he would soon replace the Roman pontiff, too, not only rule over the American double continent. Dávila is not an easy person to study. Not only is the source material fragmented, but he also had a well-developed ability to reconstruct his autobiography and fill it with contradictions.

From the late 1920s, Eduardo Dávila was part of the Iglesia Católica Apostolica Mexicana (ICAM; the Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church), founded in 1925 and also called Iglesia Católica Ortodoxa Apostólica Mexicana, which was led by Patriarch José Joquín Pérez Budar. Due to the Mexican government’s enforcement of strict anti-religious laws, the Roman Catholic episcopacy decided to suspend the cult entirely. For three years, between 1926 and 1929, no public Roman Catholic services were held in the republic.

Being pro-governmental and fiercely anti-Roman, ICAM assumed a relatively strong position in indigenous villages in states like Veracruz and Puebla for a few years. However, they were present in Mexico City, too. In the first years of the 1930s, after the Patriarch’s death in 1931, the Church fell apart. At that time, young Eduardo Dávila suddenly appeared on the scene and managed to achieve as the leader of one faction, though his ecclesiastical credentials were questionable. He assumed the Patriarchal office, and in the end, he was elected the Pope.

For a prelimary research report on Eduardo Dávila/Pope Eduardo I

La Chiesa Cristiana Universale della Nuova Gerusalemme–The Universal Christian Church of the New Jerusalem–was founded on October 4, 2015. Three days later, the Assembly of the Faithful elected Samuele Morcia (b. 1972) Supreme Pontiff Samuele. The headquarters of the Church is located in the small town of Gallinaro in the Frosinone province, about 110 kilometres east of Rome.

Of the nearly 2,500 church members most live in the neighbouring regions, but also other parts of Italy, particularly in Sicily, and to some extent abroad. The Universal Christian Church of the New Jerusalem considers itself to be the continuation of the One Holy Catholic Church. They claim that Pope Francis is no true pontiff, but a usurper who has created a new syncretic world religion that has nothing to do with Christianity.

Like many similar cases, the New Jerusalem Church has a background in private revelations. Giuseppina Norcia (1940–2008), Samuele Morcia’s mother-in-law, claimed to receive visions and heavenly messages, both as a child and as an adult. After a series of revelations in 1974, she constructed a small chapel in Gallinaro, La Piccola Culla del Bambino Gesù–the Little Cradle of Baby Jesus–which soon became a popular pilgrimage site, where many people claimed to be healed.

Here you find my research report on the Church:

As far as we know, Archbishop Ján Maria Michał Kowalski (1871–1942), the longtime leader of the Polish (Old) Catholic Mariavite Church claimed much spiritual power, even a kind of Messiah-status, but that he never explicitly claim the papacy. Still, bishops in the Mariavite core group, at least from the mid-1920s, asserted that the Roman pontiff was not the true pope anymore, that the Holy See had moved from Rome to the Mariavite centre in Plock, and that Kowalski was the long-awaited ‘Slavic Pope’, that Polish nationalist authors wrote about: a liberator and a benevolent religious leader.

The founder of the Mariavites was Sister Feliksa Maria Franciszka Kozlowska (1862–1921), often called Little Mother (Mateczka). She claimed to receive divine revelations–‘understandings’–from 1893 onwards, and the interpretation of them played a significant role in the development of the Mariavite doctrine, both before and after her death. Posthumously many followers believed Little Mother to be divine, and Archbishop Kowalski had an almost sacred status, even during his life. Claiming ‘understandings’, too, he introduced drastic doctrinal changes throughout the 1920s. Still, Kowalski’s autocratic rule and the unorthodox doctrinal development led to a schism in 1935, when only a small minority of the faithful remained with him.

A preliminary version of my text on Kowalski and the Mariavite papacy is found here

Some of the available lists of twentieth-century papal claimants include a Julius Tischler, who asserted that he was Pope Peter II. Most lists do not include any details on him, while some note that he was born in 1908. To my knowledge, the only researcher who provides some information about the case is Joachim Bouflet, who briefly mentioned Tischler in his well-researched Faussaires de Dieu. Though he does not refer to any primary sources, Bouflet underlined that Julius Tischler was not a real name, but a pseudonym, and that he was not strictly a papal claimant, but a claimant to a future papacy; he would become the last pope.

The main source of Julius Tischler’s claims is his 336-page-book published in 1972: Der Handwerksgeselle: Der Vierte Seher von Fatima [The Journeyman: The Fourth Seer of Fatima.] It is a peculiar book. On the one hand, it is a very detailed­ autobiography about the author’s first fifteen years in life, following a strictly chronological outline. On the other, the author included many accounts of amazing spiritual experiences, which he seamlessly intertwined with the much more down-to-earth autobiographical narrative. Among other things, the author claimed that he was mystically present at Fatima when the Virgin appeared in 1917. In short, he was the fourth seer of Fatima. Moreover, he was the only of the children who received the second, most important part of the Virgin’s message in 1923. The author’s real name was Franz Engelhardt (or Ferenc Egerszegi) who was a Roman Catholic priest of Hungarian origin who was a parish priest in the diocese of Trier.

A preliminary version of my text on Tischler/Engelhardt is found here