Vicar General

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.

Canon law distinguishes the vicar general from two related offices a diocese may also have. An episcopal vicar exercises the bishop's ordinary power over only part of the diocese, a specific territory, a particular group of the faithful, or a defined area of church business, while the vicar general's authority extends over the whole diocese in general administrative and judicial matters. A judicial vicar, by contrast, heads the diocesan tribunal and exercises judicial rather than executive power, and canon law requires that the two offices be held by different people wherever possible. A diocese must have a vicar general, and canon law allows a bishop to appoint more than one when the diocese is large, each holding the same general executive competence rather than a divided portion of it.

The office ends automatically when the diocesan bishop's own governance ends, whether through death, resignation, transfer, or removal, and the diocese passes into a vacancy governed by its consultors until a new bishop is appointed and, in turn, appoints his own vicar general. In practice many dioceses also style the vicar general as moderator of the curia, coordinating the work of the chancery's other offices day to day, so the post functions as much as an administrative chief of staff to the bishop as a purely canonical deputy exercising delegated authority in his name.