In February 2023, I wrote a substantial piece on Pope Michael for the World Religions and Spirituality Project. Pope Michael (David Bawden, 1959-2022) was an alternative pope, elected in a small conclave in Kansas in 1990 and for the last decade based in Topeka. He claimed the papacy until his death on 2 August 2022. From the time of his passing away, his group of adherents declared the Holy See vacant and began planning for a new conclave. Until recently, no date was fixed, but in the June 2023 issue of the Vatican in Exile’s newsletter: The Olive Tree the group makes an official announcement on the conclave. It will be held in late July. Surprisingly, the electors will not gather in the United States but in Vienna.

“On Conclave
It’s almost a year ago when His Holiness Pope Michael of happy memory met his Creator. We are dilapidated by his passing away but we are grateful to the Lord for giving him to us. Pope Michael has left us a legacy that is priceless. That is from mere sedevacantism to conclavism. He did not mind the persecution, what matters is the good of the Church. His reputation was maligned yet what matters to him is ” sentire cum ecclesiae ” i.e.thinking with the mind of the Church.

On Pentecost, 5 June 1995, Maurice Archieri (1923–2016), a retired car mechanic living in the Parisian suburb of Le Perreux-sur-Marne, received an intellectual vision where the Holy Ghost made him the Vicar of Christ.  Archieri took the name Pierre II–Peter II–but clarified that he was not the pope.  According to his understanding, John Paul II materially occupied the Holy See.  However, he was not a valid–formal–pope but the leader of a new non-Catholic religion.  Based on private revelations and apocalyptical writings, Archieri claimed that there could be no pope in the current era and that he, as the Vicar of Christ, was the leader of the Catholic remnant in the age of general apostasy.

See the Alternative Pope Project Working Paper “Maurice Archieri (1923-2016): The Vicar of Christ in Le Perreux-sur-Marne”, which also includes a collection of texts written by Pierre II.

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