Abandoning the intellectual seriousness and linguistic rigor of my first reply --
While I share the common Protestant feeling that the RC Church makes too much of the role of the Pope, I'm tempted to think in overall Christian history, the Papacy has had some good consequences.
In my opinion, it is a bad thing for Christianity where the government runs the church, but Constantine launched that model and it went on for some time. In some ways, the medieval Popes as temporal rulers were part of this model, but in other ways, having disagreements with kings, they limited it. The King couldn't decide everything about the church in his realm, because the Pope had authority too.
