This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Religious Governing Body gathers twelve bodies that govern religion by ancient custom, modern reconstruction, or national law.
Two are ancient priestly colleges. The Delphic Amphictyony, a league of twelve Greek peoples, governed Apollo's sanctuary at Delphi and administered the Pythian Games. Rome's Collegium Pontificum, headed by the Pontifex Maximus, maintained the state religious calendar and issued binding rulings on sacred law.
Two are modern reconstructions that won the standing older churches already held. The Supreme Council of the Ethnikoi Hellenes, founded in 1997, represents revived worship of the ancient Greek gods and has spent two decades pursuing Greek legal recognition. Asatruarfelagid, Iceland's Heathen organization, was recognized by the state in 1973, the first modern reconstruction of Germanic Heathen practice to gain standing equal to older churches.
Two are instruments of a government's direct religious authority. Turkey's Diyanet, established in 1924 under Ataturk, administers mosques and pays imams' salaries as an instrument of state control within a secular republic. Denmark's Folkekirken is constitutionally established, run through dioceses under a government minister's statutory responsibility.
Four are German public law churches funded by the church tax mechanism dating to the Weimar Constitution: the Catholic Church in Germany and the Evangelical Church in Germany nationally, the Archdiocese of Cologne and the Evangelical Church in Wurttemberg regionally, each publishing its own annual financial report.
Two are Roman Catholic institutions of a different kind: the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, created during Vatican II and twice renamed since, and Opus Dei, the Church's only personal prelature, founded in 1928.