when I was a novice in a monastery here in uk, one of the great stumbling blocks for me (there were lots of others) was the third vow: obedience to the abbot of the monastery -whatever he asked me to do.
The abbot of course was obedient in his turn to the pope and it was at a time when the then pope (John-Paul 2) was bringing in a lot of what felt to me like reactionary blocks on positive things that had been happening in the church after Vatican 2. (one such change being brought in at that time was a ban on using church buildings to perform secular music. As a musician I was appalled by this.)
We had to write an essay about this vow of obedience and I tried to address it from the bottom up (I still have it somewhere) and square it with our contemporary understanding of individual conscience but it was extremely difficult. Again and again I found the Nazis goosestepping into my young imagination. After all, these people had taken obedience to a whole new level hadn't they? Here were people who were even prepared to sacrifice their own souls out of obedience to their leader . . . .Abraham and Isaac often butted in there somewhere as well . . .
What was the difference between monastic obedience and obedience to a political leader? Ideally of course the abbot would be a man of deep prayer and therefore able to discern the will of God for his monks. Similarly one hopes that the pope is also a man of prayer and would seek the will of God in everything that he did and said . . . and then I thought of Oliver Cromwell. This was a leader who was also a man of deep prayer and yet he perpetrated massive crimes in his wars against the Irish - presumably believing that Catholics were synonymous with evil and therefore quite expendable to God . . . .but how wrong how wrong!
I wrote the essay and persuaded myself that it would be possible to obey the abbot over simple things like my job in the monastery or tasks that he might ask me to do but to say that I would obey him whatever was really impossible (and, in retrospect, I'm not sure I was actually being asked to do this though it certainly seemed so to me at the time.)
On the other hand, of course, how is little me going to reach a wiser conclusion about things than an abbot or a pope? Decisions have to be made at times - even when a leader is not in full possession of the facts. (Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are a possible example here). At such times a monastery is a little like an army and everyone has to get on with it because otherwise the whole thing falls apart.
I can't answer these questions even now. This forum is a good example of the way in which, provided we thrash things out openly and are also able to listen and alter our views, it is possible to discern - amidst the cacophony - new possibilities and altered visions and here, I think, is a veritable sign of the presence of God amongst us. . . .