Metropolitan Rank In Other Church Traditions

The title metropolitan did not stay confined to the Eastern Orthodox churches that use it as an intermediate rank between diocesan bishop and patriarch. Several Eastern Catholic churches, which are in communion with Rome but retain Byzantine or other Eastern liturgical traditions, also organize their bishops into metropolitan provinces headed by a metropolitan archbishop, a structure inherited directly from the same late antique administrative pattern.

The Coptic Orthodox and other Oriental Orthodox churches likewise use metropolitan as a rank above ordinary bishop for sees of particular historical importance. The underlying pattern in every case traces to the late Roman Empire's civil administration, in which a metropolis was the chief city, the seat of government, of a province, and the bishop of that city naturally came to hold a coordinating role over the other bishops of the province at regional synods. As dioceses multiplied and church structures grew more complex in the centuries after Constantine, that coordinating role hardened into a fixed rank with defined rights, including the consecration of new bishops within the province and presidency of the provincial synod. Because the underlying pattern was administrative rather than doctrinal, it transferred cleanly across the later divisions between Chalcedonian and non Chalcedonian churches and, later still, between Rome and the East, so the same word describes a genuinely comparable office in traditions that otherwise differ considerably in theology and liturgy.