Benefits of having a Pope from your faction?

Playing as England and got my cardinal to become the Pope but I see no benefits or changes to gameplay at all. Am I missing something here? What are the benefits to doing this?

Everything appears the same as if another faction produced the Pope.

isnt your aproval rating now really high?

one major benefit of having a high aproval rating is that you can request the pope to call a crusade. pick a city that is advantageous to you (- if one of your neighbours has been excomunicated you might want to use a crusade to take them out) load up on the high qualtiy cheap crusader mercs and off you go.

whilst you are on a crusade it is advisable to try and take more than just the crusade target e.g sack a few byzantine and turkish cities on the way to the holy land. thus whatever kind of crusade you pick you should end up with some good troops, new land and loads of money. its a win win scenario

I suspect that the main benefit is that priests from the pope's faction are more likely to be promoted to cardinals. When I started they were a really mixed bag, as the games progressed countries seemed to get more control with first Spain then Poland having 2 to 3 cardinals each, the last two popes were Spanish & Polish.

I've now all but 2 of the seats in the cardinals, & I'm one move away from taking out the two Poles for a clean sweep of English cardinals. The pope is English & is allied with me, and unless something really weird happens Vatican city will be speaking English for a long time to come.

Other than that, your rating with the pope's increased, as mentioned before, which means you have to spend less money on bribing him.

You dont really get excommunicated that easy eaither, when i have my pope and i get a warning not to attack someone even if i do i usually do not get excommunicated.