Bishop

Eastern Orthodox canon law requires that a bishop be unmarried, drawn specifically from the monastic clergy rather than from the married parish priesthood that forms the great majority of ordinary Orthodox clergy, a requirement with no direct Roman Catholic equivalent and one that ties Orthodox episcopal governance closely to monastic life even where a bishop, once consecrated, exercises administrative authority far removed from a monastery's daily rhythm. A widowed priest may become a bishop only after formally entering monastic life, and the requirement has historically meant that an Orthodox diocese's bishop, whatever his prior parish experience, brings a monastic formation to the office in a way ordinary married parish clergy do not share.

Within his diocese, called an eparchy in Orthodox usage, a bishop governs with authority the Orthodox Church understands, similarly to Catholic teaching, as directly continuing the apostles' own commission, exercised in communion with his fellow bishops through the Holy Synod of his autocephalous church rather than under any single universal jurisdiction of the kind Roman Catholic teaching ascribes to the Pope; this synodal rather than centrally governed structure is one of the most consistently cited differences between Orthodox and Catholic church governance.

An Orthodox bishop is consecrated by at least two, and ordinarily three, already-consecrated bishops, a plurality required for validity that parallels Catholic practice and traces to shared early church custom before the two traditions' eleventh-century separation. Election to a vacant see is carried out by the Holy Synod of the relevant autocephalous church, typically from a slate of eligible monastic clergy, a process that varies in its specific procedures from one Orthodox church to another since each autocephalous church governs its own internal affairs, including episcopal elections, without a shared universal canon law of the kind the Roman Catholic Church's single Code of Canon Law provides across all Latin dioceses worldwide.

Larger or historically significant dioceses may have auxiliary or vicar bishops assisting the diocesan bishop, and some Orthodox churches maintain titular sees, historic dioceses no longer functioning territorially, to which auxiliary bishops or bishops serving in diaspora and missionary roles outside the church's traditional territory are formally assigned, a practice that keeps the ancient territorial names of dioceses lost to conquest or population change, many in formerly Christian regions of the Middle East and Asia Minor, in continued canonical use.