The Vicar General's Canonical Role

A vicar general is a priest, or in some cases a bishop, appointed by a diocesan bishop as his principal deputy for the ordinary governance of the diocese, holding by law the same executive authority as the diocesan bishop himself in administrative matters, excluding those a bishop must exercise personally, such as ordination or specific reserved judicial acts. Canon law requires larger and more complex dioceses to have at least one vicar general and permits the appointment of additional vicars, episcopal vicars, with authority limited to a specific territory, category of persons or type of affairs within the diocese, allowing a bishop to delegate genuine governing power rather than merely administrative assistance.

The office developed as dioceses grew too large and administratively complex for a single bishop to manage every routine act of governance personally, particularly from the high medieval period onward as canon law itself became more elaborate and diocesan bureaucracy correspondingly more extensive. A vicar general serves at the discretion of the appointing bishop and his term ends automatically when the see becomes vacant, at which point the diocese's college of consultors elects an administrator to govern until a new bishop is installed, underscoring that the vicar general's authority is derivative of, and does not survive, the individual bishop who granted it.