A sedevacantist is defined as a Catholic who believes there has not been a valid Pope since 1958. Fr. Jim Altman is not a sedevacantist. I know Fr. Altman in real life. We have mutual friends who are sedevacantists and we admire them, but we are not in that camp.
To recap: Sedevacantist in Latin means empty-chair. Sedevacantist in English means one who believes no valid Pope since 1958 due to modernist heresies in them.
If you were speaking exclusively Latin, you could accurately call Fr. Altman “a sedevacantist” due to his recent video on the papacy. But while speaking English, it would be entirely dishonest and a false-accusation to call Fr. Altman “a sedevacantist” because of his recently-explained stance on the Chair of Peter.
Why isn’t it sufficient to imply the Latin for sedevacantist when speaking English? Because we have thousands of English cognates based on Latin root words where the English word means something slightly different or entirely different from the original Latin root word.
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