15 Things Even the Pope Needs Permission For

15 Things Even the Pope Needs Permission For The pope is, by almost any definition you could construct, the most powerful religious figure on Earth. He holds absolute authority over a sovereign state. He commands the loyalty of 1.4 billion people across every continent. He can, under specific conditions, speak words that the Church holds to be protected from error by God himself. And yet, again and again, in ways that surprise even people who think they understand how the papacy works, the pope needs permission. Not from a superior — he has none. But from systems, structures, traditions, and institutional processes so deeply embedded in the architecture of the Church that even the man at the absolute top of it cannot simply walk around them. He needs his own security service to clear a destination before he can travel there. He needs his own conscience, examined privately before God, before he can resign an office that no one on Earth has the standing to fire him from. He needs the Church's accumulated doctrinal tradition to permit him to declare something infallibly — a permission so difficult to obtain that it has been granted only twice in over a century and a half. He needs a cardinal, standing on a balcony, to tell the world that what has already happened inside a locked chapel is now true. Absolute power, it turns out, is rarely absolute in practice. These are 15 things even the pope needs permission for — and what each one reveals about the strange, layered architecture of the oldest institution in the Western world.