The Head Of The Vatican Is The Pope. He is the secular and spiritual leader of this state. The temporal power of the Pope in its present form was established by the Lateran Treaty in 1929 between the government of Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. The official full title of the Pope is: Bishop of Rome, vicar of Jesus Christ, assistant Prince of the apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman province, monarch of the state-city of Vatican city. There have been 262 popes in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope is elected by the Conclave (College of cardinals) for life from among the higher clergy. From 1523 to 1978, the papal throne was occupied only by Italians (Two cases where the head of the Roman Catholic Church were French, are not recognized as legitimate). In 1978, the Polish — Karol Wojtyla-Archbishop of Cracow, who took the name of John Paul II (b. One thousand nine hundred twenty)

According to the Vatican Constitution, the Pope has the highest legislative, Executive and judicial power. The ruling body of the Vatican is called the Holy see. The Central administrative apparatus of the Roman Catholic Church is called the Roman Curia. The Roman Curia directs ecclesiastical and lay organizations operating in most countries of the world. In accordance with the reform that was carried out by Pope John Paul II in 1988, the Roman Curia includes a state Secretariat, 9 congregations, 12 councils. 3 tribunals and 3 offices that oversee various areas and forms of activity of the Church.

The state Secretariat organizes and regulates the Vatican’s activities in terms of domestic and foreign policy. The sacred congregations, the tribunals and secretariats engaged in the Affairs of the Church. The most important role belongs to the Sacred congregation for religious Affairs. This congregation is the successor of the medieval Inquisition, in the sense that its task is to control the activities of theologians, clergy in terms of compliance with their views, statements, behavior Orthodox Catholic doctrine.

Reform of the second Vatican Council and modern Catholicism.

The origins of the decisions of the second Vatican Council lie in the late XIX – early XX century, when the Church began to penetrate the so-called modernism, a philosophical trend, officially condemned by Pope Pius X in his Encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis and the decree Lamentabili. Under the rigid conservative rule of Popes such as Pius XI and Pius XII, there was no question of rehabilitating modernism. But once such a good-natured and liberal Pope as John XXIII had come to different moods in the Church, he would no longer be able to-

modernism felt slack in the monolith of the Church began again to raise its head. Moreover, there was a great chance to carry out their decisions in life-John XXIII decided to convene an Ecumenical Council. From the very beginning, it became clear that there were serious differences between the participants of the second Vatican Council. They were actually divided into 2 camps.

However, the liberal wing, the wing of the supporters of the so-called aggiornamento (the word they adopted

instead of the discredited word “modernism”) gained an advantage from the very beginning, since it took control of most of the organs of the Cathedral. As such an author as Michael Davies writes: “cardinal Ottaviani’s question-whether the fathers of the Council are planning a revolution-on behalf of the majority of the three thousand can certainly be answered in the negative, but not that the most influential perites-experts who accompanied the bishops to Rome-certainly, it was the revolution and planned. It is not an exaggeration to say that these liberal perits hijacked the Cathedral of Pope John, as terrorists hijack a plane…”. In addition, the liberals won a majority in the commissions, which then had to explain to the world the decisions of the Council. All the documents of the Council were thus seriously impressed by these liberal experts. Despite the staunch resistance of a large number of cardinals and bishops, led by cardinal Ottaviani and later known as the most famous leader of the traditionalists (i.e., Catholics who did not accept those