This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A religious office is a specific, named, institutionally defined leadership position within one particular body, the papacy, the Archbishopric of Canterbury, the presidency of a specific denomination's governing conference, rather than a generic kind of religious specialist found across many communities. That generic counterpart, priest or pastor or imam as a category anyone in many different bodies might hold, is recorded separately under Religious Role; an office is the one specific seat, and a role is the wider category a person filling that seat also belongs to.
Each entry here records how the office is filled, whether by election, hereditary succession, apostolic succession understood as an unbroken chain of ordination, or another mechanism entirely, what its term and scope of authority are, and where its holders through history are recorded elsewhere on the atlas. An office often outlasts any single body's doctrinal disputes, which is part of why succession to it is so frequently contested.
An entry also records the office's relationship to the wider tradition it serves, whether it speaks for the whole body, for one branch of it, or for a single national or regional expression of it, since the scope of an office's authority varies enormously even among offices that carry similar sounding titles.