It is interesting, by the way, to look at the titles and roles claimed by this pope for himself under the church’s Code of Canon Law, revised in 1983. Psychoanalyst Luigi De Paoli, president of We Are Church Italy, lays them out in a paper, A Pontificate Weighed in the Balance, ADISTA, 24/5/03, http://www.adista.it/:

Supreme Administrator and Steward of all ecclesiastical goods (Canon 1273); Supreme Judge for the whole Catholic world (1442); he has pre-eminent ordinary power over all particular churches and their groupings (333); he alone summons or dissolves an Ecumenical Council (338); he feely appoints bishops (377); he convokes the Bishops’ Synod and sets the subjects to be discussed (344); appoints his legates both to States and local churches (362); has responsibility for the overall direction of initiatives and activities concerning missionary work (782) grants dispensations from the obligation of celibacy and from formally valid but unconsummated marriage (1698); has direct and exclusive authority over institutes of religious life (593), and can dispose of their temporal goods (584); he supervises all the Sacred Liturgy (838); authorizes the publication of the Holy Scriptures (833); has power to remit punishment (1354); is judged by no one (1404), consequently there is no appeal or recourse against a judgment or decree of the Roman Pontiff (333/3); ratifies the decrees and official acts of the Bishops Conferences (455).

Also, under the “New Law of the Vatican City State” (Feb. 22, 2001), the Pope relates to the whole world of governments such as the UNO, the European Union, World Trade Association and the like:

Representation of the state in foreign affairs and with other entities operating under international law, for diplomatic relations and for the conclusion of treaties, is the exclusive province of the Sovereign Pontiff through the Office of the Secretary of State.

It is sobering to think that one individual claims so much power for himself and that it is so freely given to him by the entire apparatus of the institutional church.