In the Roman Catholic Church, the pope is seen as the highest clergy and as the head of the church. In short, anything the pope says in his function of head of the church is valid for the whole church. The pope has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered: that, in brief, "the Pope enjoys, by divine institution, supreme, full, immediate, and universal power in the care of souls." This means that the situation of the pope is similar to that of an absolute monarch or the leader of a Fascist state.