He is the head of the Catholic Church. There's no one higher in hierachy.

He is God's representative on earth (to Roman Catholics).

A Catholic Priest explained it to me like this once. In heaven God is the final answer, since often his will is difficult to discern here on earth, the Pope is that final answer. Kinda like the President of the U.S. to Americans, but to Roman Catholics.

The Pope is the earthly representative of St Peter . Father to all Roman Catholics. Both titular and religious head of the Church. www.newadvent.org/cathen/07006a.htm

The Pope is NOT God's representative on earth, he is the Vicar of Christ, a human being, who succeeded another human whose spiritual ancestry is traced back to St. Peter, named as Christ with a new name ROCK, Petra/Petrus, the keystone of the human foundation of the Church. The Pope is infallible, that is THERE IS NO ERROR when he uses a special formula which shows what he teaches is what the Church has always taught. In that sense there is not the slighest comparison with the President of the US, the Supreme Court or Congress or the men in Salt Lake City. The Pope cannot change one single item of the Church's teaching, he simply is in touch with the whole Church, through which the HOLY SPIRIT is working, teaching and correcting and he neither adds nor subtracts from that. The slow and complicated process by which the Church around and with the Pope comes to understand something is interesting, so an issue is believed anbda ccepted for a long time before it is articulated, the only two (theological) doctrines ever declared infallibly by modern Popes are about Mary's preparation in her mother's womb to be free of original sin to be ready for Jesus' conception there, and her Assumption to heaven, the culmination of the fact that she went to heaven at the end of her earthly life, we wait until the end of the world! Those were always believed and taught by the sense of the faith, sensus fidei, which is present in the whole Church and articulated by the Pope in union with the hierarchy. The Pope can be brilliant or dumber than some US Presidents, Bishops can be highly educated or intellectually challenged, brilliant theologians can stray from the Truth- but by the time the saints, scholars of every dsicipline, the whole Church of laity, clergy and hierarchy and the Pope are finished with the guidance of the Holy Spirit the truth is known. People who ask "where is that in the Bible' ask a wrong question. St. Augustine, one of the most brilliant theologians of the Church, died 431, says 'I do not beleive in the Church because of the Bible, I beleive in the Bible because of the Church." Today's hype over the "lost Gospels" and the Da Vinci Code, the Celestine Prophecies are nonsense because the Bishops of the Church in Council decided that these books were Bible, and there were not. End of story, because they found that the rejected ones denied what the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, all the Letters and Revelation taught. The basic wording of the doctrines were hammered out in Councils, but the actual teaching was in the Bible and always accepted and beleived by the Church, taught, guided and corrected by the Holy Spirit. Some topcis are still in discussion, the ordiantion of women might be a settled issue, but the process is not over yet; the absoliute ban on chemical or artificial birth control within marriage might be a wise teaching accepted more universally than now, or it might be modified- the Pill (original checmical form of female birth control) was developed in 1960, 47 years of studying its effect on the female body and the souls of women and men is very little for a definitive answer- see what we learned from generations of cigarette smoking only in recent years! Keep an open mind, do not listen to the ignorance or propaganda, dig a little deeper, ask questions and pray!