Exarch

In the Eastern churches an exarch is a bishop or other cleric exercising authority delegated by a patriarch, historically a rank between patriarch and metropolitan.

Authority held for another

The exarch exercises an authority that is delegated rather than his own, acting on behalf of a patriarch over a territory or a body of faithful, so the office is defined by its representative character: the exarch stands in for the higher authority from whom his powers derive, which distinguishes it from the ordinary bishop who governs his diocese in his own right. Historically the title marked a rank between the patriarch and the metropolitans, an office of considerable standing within the hierarchy.

Varied modern uses

In modern usage the title is applied in several ways: to a bishop governing a body of faithful that has not yet been raised to a full diocese, to the head of an exarchate that functions as a church in formation, and to the representative of a patriarch in a particular place, so the exarch may be the leader of a community on the way to fuller status or the delegate of a higher authority. The office is found in the Eastern Orthodox and the Eastern Catholic churches. Entry is by appointment by the authority whose power is delegated. The exarch thus represents the cleric who governs or represents by delegation in the Eastern churches, an office defined by the derived and representative nature of its authority, whether as a historic rank of the hierarchy or as the modern head of a community not yet fully constituted.

Before it settled into its present ecclesiastical sense, exarch was a secular administrative title: the Byzantine Emperor Maurice established the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Exarchate of Africa in the late sixth century as consolidated military and civil governorships covering Italian and North African imperial territory under sustained external pressure, each exarch holding combined civil and military authority considerably broader than an ordinary provincial governor's, a Byzantine innovation born of crisis rather than routine administration.

The ecclesiastical use of exarch as a delegated church authority developed alongside and partly in imitation of this secular office, borrowing the same basic idea, a delegate holding real authority over a defined territory on behalf of a higher power based elsewhere, and applying it to church governance instead of imperial government; the secular Exarchate of Ravenna itself fell to the Lombards in 751, ending the political institution centuries before the ecclesiastical title that borrowed its name and structure had run anywhere near its own course through the later history of the Eastern churches.

The title survives in ordinary present-day use through the apostolic exarchate, a canonical structure the Catholic Church uses for Eastern Catholic communities living outside their traditional homeland, such as Ukrainian or Syro-Malabar Catholics settled in Western Europe or North America, where a bishop titled exarch governs the diaspora faithful of that particular church much as an ordinary bishop governs a diocese, a modern administrative application of the same underlying idea of delegated authority over a defined body of the faithful that the historical rank always expressed.