There are a great many bishops who have never had a cross on their bosom, nor a mitre on their head, who appeal not to the authority of the Pope at Rome, but to the Almighty Dollar, a pope much nearer home.

The pope, in addition to being the Bishop of Rome and spiritual head of the Catholic Church, is also the Patriarch of the Latin Rite.

The whole, however, may be judged from this fragment: " We Irish, though dwelling at the far ends of the earth, are all disciples of St. Peter and St. Paul ... we are bound to the Chair of Peter, and although Rome is great and renowned, through that Chair alone is she looked on as great and illustrious among us ... On account of the two Apostles of Christ, you pope are almost celestial, and Rome is the head of the whole world, and of the Churches ".

No longer would kings and emperors think themselves equals of the pope, or the head of the Church in their kingdom.

Thus, despite widely held popular belief outside the Orthodox cultures, there is not one bishop at the head of the Orthodox Church ; references to the Patriarch of Constantinople as a leader equivalent or comparable to a pope in the Roman Catholic Church are mistaken.

No pope may say that he is the head, for he cannot say that he is elect or even a member of the Church.

The pope is also head of state of Vatican City, a sovereign city-state entirely enclaved within the city of Rome.

The Catholic Church teaches that Jesus personally appointed Peter as leader of the Church and in its dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium makes a clear distinction between apostles and bishops, presenting the latter as the successors of the former, with the pope as successor of Peter in that he is head of the bishops as Peter was head of the apostles.

In recent centuries, when a pope was judged to have died, it was reportedly traditional for the Cardinal Chamberlain to confirm the death ceremonially by gently tapping the pope's head thrice with a silver hammer, calling his birth name each time.

Putting himself at the head of a faction of the nobility, he revolted against Christopher, and asked Sergius to return to Rome to become pope.

The Holy See, of which the current pope is head ( often referred to incorrectly as the Vatican or Vatican City State, a distinct entity ) claims sovereign immunity for the pope, supported by many international agreements.

The head of state of the Vatican is the pope, elected by the College of Cardinals, an assembly of Senatorial-princes of the Church, who are usually clerics, appointed as Ordinaries, but in the past have also included men who were not bishops nor clerics.

His lifework was based on his conviction that the Church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law ; that, in her capacity as a divine institution, she is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state ; and that the pope, in his role as head of the Church, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity.

In 1417, the council deposed all three popes and elected a new one, maintaining all the while that the council, and not the pope, was the supreme head of the church.

In the Constitution of the Roman Republic, religious freedom was guaranteed by article 7, the independence of the pope as head of the Catholic Church was guaranteed by article 8 of the Principi fondamentali, while the death penalty was abolished by article 5, and free public education was provided by article 8 of the Titolo I.

" Thus the emperor proposed a free discussion in council ; the pope required the unqualified acceptance of orthodoxy, and submission to himself as head of Christendom, before he would treat at all.

In 533 A. D. Justinian, the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, legally recognized the bishop ( pope ) of Rome as the head of all the Christian churches.

It was based on his conviction that the Church was founded by God and entrusted with the task of embracing all mankind in a single society in which divine will is the only law ; that, in his capacity as a divine institution, he is supreme over all human structures, especially the secular state ; and that the pope, in his role as head of the Church under the petrine commission, is the vice-regent of God on earth, so that disobedience to him implies disobedience to God: or, in other words, a defection from Christianity.

The Bull lays down dogmatic propositions on the unity of the Catholic Church, the necessity of belonging to it for eternal salvation, the position of the pope as supreme head of the Church, and the duty thence arising of submission to the pope in order to belong to the Church and thus to attain salvation.

The pope then affirms that, as the unity of the body of the Church so is the unity of its head established in Saint Peter and his successors.

The pope might choose not to give the visitor his own zucchetto, but rather place the gift zucchetto on his head for a moment then return it.

This right remained a bone of contention between the church authorities and the slowly emancipating universities, but was granted by the pope to the University of Paris in 1213 where it became a universal license to teach ( licentia ubiquie docendi ).

But the decision proved the precursor of the long Avignon Papacy, the " Babylonian captivity " ( 1309 – 77 ), in Petrarch's phrase, and marks a point from which the decay of the strictly Catholic conception of the pope as universal bishop may be dated.

One of the most direct public notices of the universal authority of the pope came in Innocent III ’ s “ Papal Decree on the choice of a German King, 1201 ".

Within the Roman Catholic Church, Ultramontanism achieved victory over conciliarism at the First Vatican Council with the pronouncement of papal infallibility ( the ability of the pope to define dogmas free from error ex cathedra ) and of papal supremacy, i. e., supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary jurisdiction of the Pope.

* December 19 – Pope Anastasius I dies at Rome after a 2-year reign, and is succeeded by Innocent I as the 40th pope proclaiming his universal power over the whole of Christendom.

In a letter of about 446 to a successor bishop of Thessalonica, Anastasius, Leo reproached him for the way he had treated one of the metropolitan bishops subject to him ; after giving various instructions about the functions entrusted to Anastasius and stressing that certain powers were reserved to the pope himself, Leo wrote: " The care of the universal Church should converge towards Peter's one seat, and nothing anywhere should be separated from its Head.

This right remained a bone of contention between the church authorities and the slowly emancipating universities, but was granted by the pope to the University of Paris in 1213 where it became a universal license to teach ( licentia ubiquie docendi ).

It was about this time that some of the leading theologians of the Roman Catholic Church, wishing to emphasize, as well as to define more clearly, the authority of the pope, advised Pius IX to declare papal infallibility a dogma of the universal Church.

It declared that the Roman church was founded by God alone-that the papal power ( the auctoritas of Pope Gelasius ) was the sole universal power ; in particular, a council held in the Lateran from 24 to 28 February the same year decreed that the pope alone could appoint or depose churchmen or move them from see to see.

The infallible sacred magisterium includes the extraordinary declarations of the pope speaking ex cathedra and of ecumenical councils ( traditionally expressed in conciliar creeds, canons, and decrees ), as well as of the ordinary and universal magisterium.

Examples of infallible teachings of the ordinary and universal magisterium are harder to point to, since these are not contained in any one specific document, but are the common teachings found among the Bishops dispersed through the world yet united with the pope.

The reputation of the Avignon Papacy led many to question the absolute authority of the pope in governing the universal Catholic Church.

Contradicting the idea of Papal infallibility, Marsilius claimed that only the universal church is infallible, not the pope.

If the source of their authority was uncertain, so was their competence to convoke the universal Church and to elect a pope.

While such a territory can be classed as a particular church, according to canon 371. 1 of the Latin Code of Canon Law, a vicar apostolic's jurisdiction is an exercise of the jurisdiction of the Pope — the territory thus comes directly under the pope as " universal bishop ", and the pope exercises this authority through a “ vicar ” or delegate.

The Roman Catholic Church attributes to the primacy of the Pope " full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered ", a power that it attributes also to the entire body of the bishops united with the pope.

The constitution of the Church is not, by Christ's institution, monarchical, and the pope, though entitled to a certain primacy, is subordinate to the universal Church.

In this matter he did not accept the universal primacy of the emperor, the authority of the pope ( because the pope, according to him, lacked temporal power ), nor the claim of voluntary submission or conversion of the Native Americans.

To make this connection clear, the pope concluded each of these passages in Evangelium Vitae with a reference to the " ordinary and universal magisterium " and a footnote that cited Lumen Gentium § 25.

The infallible sacred magisterium includes the extraordinary declarations of the pope speaking ex cathedra and of ecumenical councils ( traditionally expressed in conciliar creeds, canons, and decrees ), as well as of the ordinary and universal magisterium.

Examples of infallible teachings of the ordinary and universal magisterium are harder to point to, since these are not contained in any one specific document, but are the common teachings found among the Bishops dispersed through the world yet united with the pope.

The ordinary and universal Episcopal magisterium is infallible as it relates to a teaching concerning a matter of faith and morals that all the Bishops of the Church ( including the pope ) universally hold as needing to be accepted by all the faithful.