Provincial Authority In The Anglican Communion

An Anglican archbishop presides over an ecclesiastical province, a grouping of dioceses, and holds a metropolitan authority over its bishops broadly comparable to the Roman Catholic metropolitan's, though considerably lighter in practice: the Church of England's two provinces, Canterbury and York, are each headed by their own archbishop, and other Anglican churches worldwide, most organized as independent, self-governing provinces since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the British Empire's colonial churches became autonomous national bodies, are typically headed by their own archbishop or, in smaller provinces, a bishop styled primate without the archiepiscopal title.

Anglican archbishops beyond Canterbury and York generally hold no authority over provinces other than their own; unlike the Roman Catholic papacy, the Anglican Communion has no single archbishop or other figure with jurisdiction spanning the whole Communion, and the Archbishop of Canterbury's widely recognized status as first among equals across the Communion is one of moral and historical standing rather than of governing power over provinces outside England itself, a structure that has become a source of real strain as member provinces have taken sharply differing positions on contested questions in recent decades.