Archbishop

The archbishop holds jurisdiction over a province of dioceses, and the essential point about the office is that it is a rank of authority and not a higher grade of ordination.

Jurisdiction, not a new consecration

An archbishop is a bishop who presides over an ecclesiastical province, exercising a limited oversight of the other bishops within it and of his own diocese, but there is no separate consecration for the office: an archbishop is consecrated a bishop like any other and then appointed to the greater jurisdiction, so the fullness of holy orders is already his as a bishop. This distinction, between the sacramental order of bishop and the offices of authority built upon it, runs through the structure of the episcopal churches and explains why archbishop, metropolitan and patriarch are ranks rather than orders.

Where the office is found

The title is used in the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and some Lutheran churches, its powers varying from real jurisdiction over a province to a largely honorary primacy, and the greatest archbishops, such as those of the historic sees, carry a weight far beyond their own dioceses. The office corresponds closely to the metropolitan of the Eastern churches, both denoting the senior bishop of a province. Its powers are those of coordination and limited supervision rather than direct rule over the internal affairs of another bishop diocese, which remain the affair of that bishop.

The archbishop office grew directly out of Roman civil geography: the early church organised its provinces to match Roman administrative provinces, and the bishop of the provincial capital, the metropolis, gained a customary precedence over the other bishops of the province that hardened into the office of metropolitan or archbishop by the fourth and fifth centuries. Councils of the period, including Nicaea in 325, already assume the metropolitan's right to a role in consecrating the bishops of his province.

That Roman-shaped geography still marks the office today, even where the empire that produced it is thirteen centuries gone. Canterbury and York in England, the ancient patriarchal sees of the East, and the primatial sees of national Catholic and Anglican churches all descend from the same logic of a senior city bishop overseeing a province. In practice the power attached to the title now varies enormously: an archbishop of a small, honorary province may have almost no authority over his suffragans, while the Archbishop of Canterbury, without any formal jurisdiction over other Anglican provinces at all, functions as the symbolic centre of the entire Anglican Communion, a role that recent disputes over sexuality have strained close to breaking.