Exarchate

An exarchate is a diocese of an Eastern Church in the diaspora , but otherwise hardly differs from an eparchy in the ancestral area of ​​the church. Both forms of jurisdiction correspond to the "diocese" of the Latin Church . The diocesan bishop is exarch .

An exarchate is set up for believers outside the ancestral territory of a church and can extend over a very large area, including several states, for example the Apostolic Exarchate Germany and Scandinavia or the exarchate of the Orthodox communities of Russian tradition in Western Europe .

The name is derived from the Byzantine administrative district Exarchat .

Eastern Catholic Churches

The exarchates of the Eastern Catholic Churches consist of three different forms of jurisdiction: the Apostolic Exarchate is directly subordinate to the Apostolic See , the Archbishop's Patriarchate and the Patriarchal Exarchate to the major archbishop or patriarch of a rite church . The Catholic exarchates are often located in areas that also have a Latin hierarchy, but the territories are each delimited independently of one another.

literature

• Hans-Georg Beck: History of the Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (=  The Church in its History - a manual ). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980, ISBN 978-3-525-52312-4 .