He's the Bishop of Rome, and Leader of the Western Branch of Catholic Christianity.

It used to be that each Bishop was the autonomous ruler of his church, and there used to be four big ones who had huge churches with lots of power: 1) Bishop of Rome, 2) Bishop of Constantinople, 3) Bishop of Antioc, and 4) Bishop of Alexandria, but there were lots of other Bishops with varying degrees of power.

Some time around the 11 century the eastern and western churches got into a dispute over which Bishop, if any, had, or should have, the most authority, and it divided roughly along lines corresponding to the political domains in which their churches resided.

The western group thought there should be one Bishop with more authority than the others, and the eastern group thought it should continue the way it always had been, so they split, and because, of the big Bishops, only one of them, the Bishop of Rome, was in the western group, he became the defacto leader of the western group.

For awhile there was a dispute in the western group, where there were two Popes each claiming to be the great leader of the western group, but eventually they sorted it out and got back to having just one.

Permalink | Report