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Right. The Church recognizes the principle of subsidiarity which is not coincidentally part of its social teaching.

Modern media has allowed the pope to receive unceasing attention that the papacy never possessed historically, but what is important to emphasize is that this is not a reflection of how the Church is administered or how authority is distributed. The idea that the pope is "running the Church" or "watching every member of the one and a half billion member flock like a busybody hawk" is a fiction drawn from jejune ignorance. Rome is notoriously slow to act, which should in general not be seen as a sign of incompetence, but as an expression of subsidiarity. It is much better to view the pope as the ultimate referee rather than some oppressive overlord. The moral ball is in your court, as it were.

W.r.t. absorbing what's around it, the Church has always recognized logos spermatikos or seminal reason, meaning, it recognizes reality as an intelligible creation of God, it recognizes the inherent rational nature of every human being, and thus it recognizes that every human being has an in principle capacity to recognize and know reality, to one degree or another. So, it sees no reason to suppose that there is nothing good or true or beautiful outside the Church and plenty of reason to recognize it and embrace it. What is good is good, what is true is true, what is beautiful is beautiful. When the Church encounters a culture, it seeks what is good within it and seeks to transfigure it in order to rescue its goodness and perfect it. Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit.

> Historically this was the result of the fact the church predates modern communications. It was not possible for a Pope to direct things

That's not really accurate. All bishops were essentially "autocephalus" in antiquity. Whether they could even be removed by a council of other bishops was something that was really not resolved for many centuries. There were many occasions of competing councils declaring each other heretics and shenanigans like that.

The Orthodox still practice this system of governance (although sovereignty has been moved up from diocesan bishops to the patriarch of each autocephalus church).

You are right and that history is another reason: the starting point was that. However, even when popes started claiming greater authority there was a practical constraint on centralisation.

Your theory seems to be that the speed of information significantly increased the power the pope can wield and this is what allowed for the centralization of power.

I don't think the historical record shows that. The speed of information changed little from the time of the Nicean council to the council of Trent, yet the primacy of the pope was very much established by the latter, even if it was only formalized in the 1st Vatican council.

Even to this day church politics plays out over many months and years (just look at the recent SSPX situation which was a slow-mo train wreck), the speed of information doesn't seem very significant.

There is an offshoot of the Catholic church in the Netherlands were the bishop is not chosen by the Vatican.

Dutch people really handle hierarchy poorly and prefer "flat" organisation style. Anyone who acts as the boss doesn't last long.

There are many such because the Church's own belief is that a bishop always remains a bishop (even if removed from their diocese) and can make others bishops.

A fun one is the Anglican Ordinariates which are in full communion with Rome and permit existing clergy to remain married while serving as Catholic priests.

The Anglican Ordinataries are actually a rather mild example as they're still under the Roman Catholic church.

The eastern Catholic churches are also in communion with Rome but have a far longer history of independence and also allow married men to become priests, even if they weren't married clergy before joining, which the AO doesn't allow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Catholic_Churches

> Historically this was the result of the fact the church predates modern communications. It was not possible for a Pope to direct things the way a CEO of a modern corporation does

These traditions settled over a very long time. I don't think a few months to send a letter would be a real barrier to deciding what's acceptable doctrine.

>It has a hierarchy, but it has multiple hierarchies.

the Church has been "multipolar" on multiple levels for about as long as it's existed.

A very easy to parse political example from recent history is during ww2 when Croatia had the catholic fascist Ustase collaborating with Nazi Germany and Italian fascists whilst in Poland the Nazis were actively suppressing the church and sending the clergy and other religious to the concentration camps.

A theological example would be the "conflict" (and I use the term lightly) between Franciscan Scotists and Dominican Thomists wrt stuff like the Univocity of Being