§ 117. District Church Superintendencies

In the beginning several parishes together, in the dioceses concerned, were entrusted to the oversight of a chorepiscopus.[1] When, by the 6th canon of the Council of Sardica, it was established that bishops must not be appointed in small places, the oversight of several parishes was then entrusted to special presbyters, the periodeutae, who exercised that oversight either by residing permanently in designated places of the diocese, or by making the rounds of the parishes concerned at times ordered by the diocesan bishop.[2] From this there afterward developed the permanent district church superintendencies in the dioceses concerned, and the persons who were to conduct that oversight are called, in the canonical sources, by names differing from those of the other presbyters, the most usual being: protopapades (πρωτοπαπάδες).[3]

This institution of district church superintendencies developed less in the Greek Church, and much more strongly in those churches where Greek is not spoken. The reason for this is that in the Greek Church the number of bishops and bishoprics is much greater, and consequently the number of parishes composing the dioceses concerned is smaller, so that it is also easier for the diocesan bishops to oversee the subordinate parishes themselves and directly, without the need to appoint other special overseers; so that in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, for example, there is today no trace at all, in the dioceses concerned, of our usual division into district superintendencies, or, as we call them, “protopresbyterates,” but each diocese is divided into a certain number (from 50 to 150) of parishes with their own chief parish priest and two or more assistants to him, who stand in direct dependence and correspondence with the central diocesan authority, without any other official mediation. For the rest, these chief parish priests in the Greek dioceses may, in a certain—of course much more limited—respect, and according to their rights relative to the rest of the clergy of the parish concerned, be considered almost equal to the district superintendents in the other, non-Greek dioceses.