Giuseppe Siri - Conclave Speculation

Conclave Speculation

According to the supporters of the Siri Thesis Cardinal Siri received the majority vote in a papal conclave twice: in 1958 and 1963 (even announcing after his acceptance that he wished to be known as Pope Gregory XVII). Given that the conduct of conclaves is strictly confidential and that any cardinal revealing such details would face automatic excommunication, no documentary evidence has ever substantiated or disproved the widely claimed rumour. Other rumours maintain that Cardinal Grégoire-Pierre Agagianian, a prominent Armenian rite cardinal, was also elected Pope in 1958. Rumors and speculation about the 1958 and 1963 conclaves may have received added attention because it was under the Popes who were then elected that the Second Vatican Council was held and its decrees were implemented.

Although claimed by one sedevacantist group that Siri had actually been elected to the papacy in 1958 and 1963, only to be displaced by Angelo Roncalli (Pope John XXIII) and then Giovanni Battista Montini (Pope Paul VI), Siri entirely submitted to the authority of the official popes and remained in full communion with the Church, refusing to support any sedevacantist organization. One small sedevacantist group, centered in Houston, Texas still claims him to have been the actual pope, despite Siri's own silence as to this claim. This small group, known as "Sirianists", have yet to offer any reasonable explanation for the fact that Siri failed to support the sedevacantist movement, that he recognized John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II as legitimate popes, that despite his conservatism he celebrated the Mass according to the reformed 1970 Roman Missal and the other revised sacraments, and that he signed all of the documents of the Second Vatican Council. The Cardinal even somewhat defended the Council, as long as it was interpreted in the light of Tradition, though he did remark that, "If the Church were not divine, this Council would have buried it". To explain Siri's silence as to what happened in the conclaves, supporters of the Siri Thesis have suggested that Siri was silenced by the conspirators' use of the Seal of the Confessional, a method of silencing prelates suggested in other literature.