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Notes -
And this is a newer position of the Catholic church, too. St. Augustine very specifically says that the church councils can err (contrasting their fallibility with that of Scripture); even the Catholic church admits that the pope's authority was not something that was universally acknowledged or understood in the early church, but rather "gradually interpreted as a prerogative that was his because he was successor of Peter, the first of the apostles" and papal infallibility was only defined dogmatically in 1870 or so.
If you let me get on my hobby-horse, I'll argue that the Catholic Church as we understand it today is fundamentally an early modern institution - it's an enlightened absolute monarchy, ruled by a philosopher-prince. Its understanding of itself is shaped much more by secular forces than it would like to admit.
All churches exist in history and are shaped by forces beyond themselves, but then, Protestant churches generally make 'lower' claims about themselves. We are the locally and historically contingent expression of the universal church in this particular place and time.
And I suspect this arrangement was pretty adaptive to a lot of the pressures of the time. Protestantism is a very literate and democratic religion, culturally - while a church could hold its doctrines without literacy, I think the counterfactual for "the West but with Protestant doctrine" is likely the Eastern Orthodox moreso than the Southern Baptist Convention, or what have you.
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