The office of the papacy exists in act. In is not in potency to anything ...
Enter the hidden premise of Aristotelian crypto-nominalism to turn that in a false dichotomy between the Papacy only existing in acts of the Pope or otherwise only in potency!
The Papacy exists, actually, whether or not there is any particular pope holding the office, and your denial of this is only made possible through your Aristotelian refusal to acknowledge the actual existence of universals outside of their particular instantiations, the reality of forms apart from matter, and objectivity of our ideas outside of minds to conceive of them - a trait you share with every philosophy that has helped dig the hole of the modern world.