The Diocese
A portion of the People of God.
What the Church means when she says diocese, archdiocese, province, and eparchy.
What a diocese is
In the law of the Latin Church, a diocese is a portion of the People of God which is entrusted to a bishop for him to shepherd with the cooperation of the presbyterium; adhering to its pastor and gathered by him in the Holy Spirit through the Gospel and the Eucharist, it constitutes a particular church in which the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church of Christ is truly present and operative.1
The definition is the Council’s own.2 Two things in it are easily missed. A diocese is a portion of the people, not of the map: territory ordinarily bounds it, but the diocese is the faithful, not the acreage. And each diocese is not a district of the Church but a true church, in which the whole Church of Christ is present and at work.
Archdioceses, provinces, and suffragan sees
Neighboring dioceses are ordinarily gathered into an ecclesiastical province, presided over by a metropolitan, the archbishop of the principal see; the other dioceses of the province are called suffragan.3 An archdiocese is thus not a “higher” church, for every diocese is fully a church, but a see of greater responsibility, whose archbishop convokes his province and watches over its discipline.
Some sees are joined in the person of one bishop; some are immediately subject to the Holy See and belong to no province; some are archdioceses without a province. The record keeps these distinctions as it finds them, for they are facts of the Church’s order, not ornaments.
The eparchy
In the Eastern Catholic Churches the same reality bears the name eparchy, and its bishop the name eparch; an archeparchy corresponds to an archdiocese. The Eastern code defines the eparchy in the Council’s own words: a portion of the people of God entrusted to a bishop to shepherd with the cooperation of the presbyterate.4 The name differs; the reality is one. The eparchies of the East are recorded in this register beside the dioceses of the West, under their own Churches, with the same care.
The dioceses in this record
Every diocese and eparchy of the Catholic Church is set down here with its see city, its cathedral, and its bishop, joined to the parishes within it. The cathedrals may be browsed openly; each diocese has its own page within the record.