In July 1990, six people — a would-be priest, his parents, and three others — gathered in the family thrift store in Belvue, Kansas and held what they called a papal conclave. On the first ballot they elected one of their own, 30-year-old David Bawden, who took the name Pope Michael.
Bawden had come to believe that the Catholic Church went astray at the Second Vatican Council and that no legitimately elected pope had existed since Pius XII died in 1958. He had invited hundreds of independent bishops and sedevacantists to the election; none showed up. Because he had never been ordained, he could not even celebrate Mass, and pinned his hopes on some bishop behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtain hearing of him and ordaining him. He went on living with his parents.
His brother Brian summed up the family's bafflement: "I'm not for him; I'm not against him; and I don't understand what he's doing." Bawden was finally ordained and consecrated a bishop in 2011, by an itinerant clergyman who had himself been consecrated only a month earlier. He died in 2022; his obituary called him simply "Father David" and never mentioned the papacy.
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• The other other pope
