Th Church is not as “top down” as you think. The papacy itself was developed as the result of a push from below, as the major survivor of the “great” patriarchies of the Roman world, as the rest were submerged by first a German and then a rising Muslim sea. In the West, Rome served as a focus for the evangelization of the Germans, as Constantinople was for the evangelization of the Rus and other Slavs in the east. At times Rome itself was almost submerged by barbarism by survived in large part by its union with the monastic orders. other bishops as often as not under the thumbs of the nobility. Rome rose with the re-emerge of civilization but had to contest the kings and the emperor for control. At its height, the medieval papacy was the virtual head of Europe, but during the “Babylonian Captivity” of the popes in Avignon, when it reached the peak of bureaucratic efficiency. it lost its spiritual edge. It had led the Crusades but they had failed, and as the Turkish menace increased, its failure to mount another ended with the papacy immersed in petty Italian politics, more concerned about its land and the building of memorial churches than its spiritual mission. The Reformation stripped away even the support of half the people and princes of Europe, and even the “Catholic” one tended to treat the pope as more a figure head than one to be heeded. There was a Catholic Reformation, but the end of corruption was accompanied by horrific wars that discredited Christianity
itself in the eyes of many of the educated. The Scientific Revolution gave rise to a new view of the world known as the Enlightenment, which looked upon the papacy as a bastion of superstition. As a consequence, the French revolutionaries saw it as no more than just another medieval survival to be overthrown. Napoleon’s defeat found the papacy more in control of the local churches than before, but it was not until after Vatican I, and the end of the papacy as a territorial sovereign that the pope began to gain administrative control of the whole Church. Even today, the papacy seems more powerful than it is. Vatican II weakened the pope’s hold on the Church in many ways. Religious orders such as the Society of Jesus are in virtual rebellion.
Without the pope's approval and cooperation, nothing new moves, - no Vatican II, no new mass, no admittance of effeminate men into the clergy, no Catholic Pentecostalism and other non-Catholic practices, no ad-libbed changes (mass facing the people, biased ideology incorporated into vernacular translations of mass, communion in the hand,etc)