Governing Body

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.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Traditions have settled on strikingly different answers to the same basic problem, how legitimate authority passes from one holder of an office to the next. The Catholic and Orthodox churches, and the Anglican Communion as well, ground their bishops' authority in apostolic succession, an unbroken chain of ordination reaching back, they hold, to the apostles themselves, so that legitimacy runs through the act of consecration rather than through popular choice. Presbyterian and congregational churches instead vest that authority in elected bodies, elders or the gathered congregation choosing their own leadership directly. Some traditions outside Christianity, and some office lineages within it, instead pass a position hereditarily within a family understood to carry the necessary standing.

Because so much rests on which of these an observer accepts as valid, a contested succession has repeatedly split a body in two, each side holding the other's claimed office illegitimate; several historical papal schisms and any number of smaller denominational splits followed exactly that shape. The mechanism a tradition uses to fill an office is rarely incidental to it; it is usually close to the center of what makes the office authoritative at all.