Then, out of your own mouth, He uses us for at least one thing. If there is one, there can be others. He could have proclaimed the Gospel to us directly, too, writing it in the sky or something. Yet that would be pushing our free will to accept or reject Him too far, to the point where it would not exist. In like manner, He could directly rule the Church, but that would also destroy our free will (if God, clearly manifested as God, told any person on earth to do or not do some thing or other, who would really be free to refuse Him?).
Therefore, He has given His authority to Peter, the Apostles and their respective successors, the popes and bishops, in order, to a large degree, to preserve our free will in assenting to belief in Him. This should not be so hard to understand! It is not that the popes are infallible through their own human power, or the bishops, collectively, through theirs. No! It is a charism of God Himself that is imparted to them through His condescension, not because of their own power or even their own personal holiness.
Sometimes, in your zeal to ensure that God is thought of as the only one with power and authority, you non-Catholics get ridiculously impractical. Yes, only God has power and authority because of who He is; but to simply admit that He established a hierarchical structure called "the Church" in order to derivatively exercise His authority is hardly to diminish God! To say that He can't do this is to diminish Him!
Your worldview is either incredibly naive, or simply to dug-in to a set of impractical propositions to see the clear path of God's own choices. Clearly, He chose not to govern His Church, post-Resurrection, directly. One clear reason why has already been noted. Clearly, Jesus Himself could have personally written, with pen and parchment, every Word of the Bible, and then some. But He didn't, choosing to use sinful human beings as conduits for what He wanted to say, inspiring them, yes, but still using them as true authors, calculating into the mix their writing styles, education, facility with Greek (in the New Testament), and so forth. Why? Who can say? Free will would be not nearly as compromised if Jesus, appearing as a man, wrote all of the NT personally and handed it whole to the Apostles. But He wrote the NT through the sacred writers anyway, establishing a track record of voluntary "reliance" on mere men.
Papal authority is exercised in the same way, through the same set of Godly condescensions. God doesn't "need" us, but He to use us anyway. To rebel against that, and scream that you will never submit to the authority of a mere man - a sinner! - who arrogates to himself God-like authority is to entirely miss the point! Indeed, according to the general non-Catholic Christian worldview, man's actions are so inconsequential, and his salvation, once he imagines he has attained it, so divorced further from his actions, that one wonders why God preserves Himself in a certain level of obscurity instead of simply saving who He wills right from their creation and translating them directly to Heaven! The incoherency of the Protestant position on these points is truly astounding!
blah, blah, blah. RCC dogma bores me. It’s one thing to acknowledge that God’s Word tells us we are to proclaim the Gospel to spiritually dead people. It’s a whole ‘nother thing - one called heresy - to claim that man can do anything that supplements the finished work of Christ. Romans 1:16 (among others) tells us God uses the Gospel to save people - people don’t save people. Romans 10 tells us that same thing - this paradox that God chooses Whom He will save, that His work on the cross is all that needs be done to redeem sinful man, and salvation is a gift of grace and not by works, AND He uses those He has saved to proclaim saving Truth to those who are perishing.
No authoritarian, borg-like man-made hierarchical organization such as the RCC has been ordained by God; no authority has been passed down to modern-day would-be apostles. Man’s imagination is most vain. The vile self importance of the RCC is repugnant to the entire message of the New Testament.