We are not baptized into the hierarchy; do not receive the cardinals sacramentally; will not spend an eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. St. John Fisher could say in a public sermon, "If the pope will not reform the curia, God will." A couple of years later, he laid his head on Henry VIII's block for papal supremacy; followed to the same block by Thomas More, who had sepnt his youth under the Borgia pope, Alexander VI; lived his early manhood under the Medici pope Leo X; and died for papal supremacy under Clement VIII, as time-serving a pope as Rome ever had.

Christ is the point. I myself admire the present pope, but even if I criticized him as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I sometimes find the Church as I have to live with it, a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing a Pope [or a priest] could do or say would make me wish to leave the Church, although I might well wish that they would leave. Israel, through its best periods as through its worst, preserved the truth of God's oneness in a world swarming with gods and a sense of God's majesty in a world sick with its own pride. So with the Church. Under the worst administration we could still learn Christ's truth, receive his life in the sacraments, be in union with him to the limit of our willingness. In awareness of Christ I can know the Church as his mystical body, and we must not make our judgment by the neck's sensitivity to pain.

-Frank Sheed (1897-1981)