According to Roman law, he was only the representative of the people; the community had delegated all its rights incorporate to him; but in it alone was omnipotence vested.

According to canon law, omnipotence was vested solely in God; it is not the Catholic community which possesses this and delegates it to the Pope;[5341] his rights accrue to him from another and higher source.[5342] He is not the elect of the people, but the interpreter, vicar and representative of Jesus Christ.
III.

The Church today.
Existing Catholicism and its distinctive traits .-- Authority, its prestige and supports .-- Rites, the priest, the Pope.
-- The Catholic Church and the modern State .-- Difficulties in France born out of their respective constitutions .-- Such is the Catholic Church of to-day, a State constructed after the type of the old Roman empire, independent and autonomous, monarchical and centralized, with a domain not of territory but of souls and therefore international, under an absolute and cosmopolite sovereign whose subjects are simultaneously subjects of other non-religious rulers.

Hence, for the Catholic Church a situation apart in every country, more difficult than for Greek, Slavic or Protestant churches; these difficulties vary in each country according to the character of the State and with the form which the Catholic Church has received in them.[5343] In France, since the Concordat, these difficulties are of greater gravity than elsewhere.
When, in 1802, the Church initially received her French form, this was a complete systematic organization, after a general and regular plan, according to which she formed only one compartment of the whole.
Napoleon, by his Concordat, organic articles and ulterior decrees, in conformity with the ideas of the century and the principles of the Constituent Assembly, desired to render the clergy of all kinds, and especially the Catholic clergy, one of the subdivisions of his administrative staff, a corps of functionaries, mere agents assigned to religious interests as formerly to civil matters and therefore manageable and revocable.

This they all were, in fact, including the bishops, since they at once tendered their resignations at his order.