we’ve got a centralized Church, and it’s too centralized. A “good pope” can suppress undesirable things in terms of its tradition, but a bad pope can do what he likes and suppress the good things, because the Church has become “The Pope,” which is a thoroughly undesirable situation. It has no relationship to what the papacy was, even in the post-Reformation period. This is a modern 200-year phenomenon. And it’s a disastrous mix. It encourages servility among the bishops particularly. And of course, if you become servile and you lose your integrity in that sort of way, it’s going to affect not only what you do in the Church, it’s going to affect your relationship with the secular powers as well. I mean, when you think about the relationship with, for example, the Communist Party of China, you really wonder what on earth is going on.
https://edwardpentin.co.uk/professor-rist-the-catholic-church-could-be-facing-a-crisis-worse-than-the-arian-controversy-of-the-4th-century/
