Metropolitan

A metropolitan is a senior bishop ranking above ordinary bishops and, in most Eastern churches, below a patriarch, originally the bishop of the chief city of a province.

Bishop of the mother city

The title derives from the bishop of the metropolis, the chief city of a Roman province, who came to hold a precedence and a limited oversight over the other bishops of the province, so the metropolitan is the senior bishop of a province, presiding over its bishops and its common affairs while each bishop governs his own diocese. As with the other senior titles, the office is a rank of jurisdiction built upon the order of bishop, not a further ordination.

East and West

In the Eastern churches the metropolitan is a standard rank in the hierarchy, above the ordinary bishops and, where there is a patriarch, below him, and in some Orthodox churches the metropolitan heads an autocephalous or autonomous church, so the exact standing varies. In the Western church the corresponding office is that of the archbishop who presides over a province, and metropolitan and archbishop denote much the same function, the senior bishop of a province, in the two halves of Christendom. Entry is by appointment or election to the see that carries the rank. The metropolitan thus represents the senior provincial bishop of the Eastern churches, the counterpart of the Western archbishop, holding a precedence and a limited oversight over the bishops of his province while remaining, in order, a bishop among bishops.

Before the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1589, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church held the title metropolitan rather than patriarch, first as Metropolitan of Kiev and later of Moscow, answerable in principle to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople from which Russian Christianity had originally received its bishops; the elevation of the Moscow see to a patriarchate in 1589, negotiated with Constantinople partly under considerable political pressure from the Russian state, marks the point at which a church that had operated for centuries under a metropolitan as its highest authority formally gained the more senior title, illustrating that metropolitan has, at different times and places, functioned as the actual summit of an entire national church rather than only as a mid-level provincial rank.

A comparable pattern persists in several smaller autocephalous Orthodox churches today, including the Orthodox Church in America and the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, whose primates are titled metropolitan rather than patriarch even though each heads a fully independent, self-governing church, showing that the historic hierarchy of titles, metropolitan below patriarch, does not track a strict hierarchy of actual ecclesiastical independence, since a metropolitan-led church can be every bit as autocephalous as a patriarch-led one.