Everything today in the Church now revolves around the pope, from devotional practices to parish life to constant fiddling with Church teachings. As a result, a bad or even below-average pope has a huge negative impact on the Church, far more of an impact than such a pope had in previous eras. The hard truth is that Catholics have become addicted to the papal drug, completely dependent and obsessed with whomever is the current occupant of the papacy.
Again, this is not how Catholics in previous ages lived. In fact, they could not have lived that way even if they wanted to. Just as Protestantism was not possible without the invention of the printing press, so too a papal-centric understanding of Catholicism is not possible without modern methods of communication. It simply wasn’t feasible for every diocese in the world to wait for the pope to pick their bishops in ancient or medieval times. Only in the modern world can the pope’s thoughts on any and every subject be disseminated far and wide. Without today’s technology, a billion-plus member organization like the Catholic Church simply couldn’t be as centralized as it is.
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