He is the absolute ruler of a sovereign nation, leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and lives in the glittering splendour of a centuries-old palace.
But even the Pope has problems with customer service: his bank hung up on him believing he was a prank caller.
Just a few weeks after he was elected pontiff last May, Pope Leo XIV called up his bank in his hometown of Chicago.
It was one of those mundane chores he needed to attend to after being anointed as the head of the Catholic Church.
Identifying himself as Robert Francis Prevost, he asked to change the address and phone number that the bank had in its records.
He was asked the wearily familiar series of security questions and breezed through them without difficulty.
Sadly, it was not quite as simple as that, according to the Rev Tom McCarthy, a close friend of the Pope, who recounted the story.
The woman on the other end of the line told the Pope – better known as Father Bob during his time in Chicago – that he would have to come to the bank in person.
“He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do that,’” Father McCarthy told a gathering of Catholics in Illinois last week as he recounted his friendship with the Pope. “I gave you all the security questions.”
Unable to hide his growing frustration with the bank employee, he then said: “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?”
The woman at the end of the line promptly hung up.
“Could you imagine being known as the woman who hung up on the Pope?” said Father McCarthy. “That’s how humble he was – he could have had a secretary or an assistant do it. But he thought, ‘Oh well I will just call.’”
The Pope then contacted a priest he knew who in turn contacted the head of the bank.
The banker initially said: “That is our policy,” before relenting and saying: “We don’t want to lose the account of the Pope.” The Pope’s number and address were eventually updated.
It turns out that even the Vicar of Christ faces the same bureaucratic entanglements and frustrations as the rest of us.
As did his predecessor, Pope Francis. During his papacy, the late Argentine Pope had a habit of calling up ordinary Catholics who faced adversity of various kinds, or who had written to him in Rome. He would announce himself simply with the words: “Hello, I’m Pope Francis.”
But he, too, was sometimes taken for an impostor. In 2015, for instance, he called up an Italian man who was ill, hoping to offer him some comfort.
The man, Franco Rabuffi, thought it was a prank call and hung up – twice.
It was only when the Pope rang back a third time that Mr Rabuffi took him seriously. “I was speechless, but Francis came to my rescue, saying that what had happened was funny,” he told L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s newspaper.
He later came to a papal audience in St Peter’s Square and apologised for his error.