page_title: Archpriest
section_title: Eastern Christianity
hierarchical_section_title: Archpriest / Eastern Christianity
context_page_description: The ecclesiastical title of archpriest or archpresbyter belongs to certain priests with supervisory duties over a number of parishes. The term is most often used in Eastern Orthodoxy and the Eastern Catholic Churches and may be somewhat analogous to a monsignor in the Latin Church, but in the Eastern churches an archpriest wears an additional vestment and, typically, a pectoral cross, and becomes an archpriest via a liturgical ceremony.
  The term may be used in the Roman Catholic Church instead of dean or vicar forane.
  In the 16th and 17th centuries, during the persecution of Catholics in England, an archpriest appointed from Rome had authority over all of the church's secular clergy in the country. In the present-day Church of England, a rural or area dean resembles an archpriest. In the Roman Catholic Church, traditionally a priest's first Mass has an archpriest assisting the newly ordained priest, functioning as the deacon otherwise does, but this is only for that event.
context_section_description: Archpriest, also protopope (Greek: πρωτοπαπᾶς, protopapas) or protopresbyter (Greek: πρωτοπρεσβύτερος, protopresbyteros), is a clerical rank, a title of honor given to non-monastic priests and is conferred by a bishop with the laying on of hands and prayer. An archpriest typically wears an epigonation, a vestment originally worn only by bishops; however, details vary locally, and in some places being given the epigonation is an honor that typically precedes being made an archpriest and in other places, it is an honor that is given to only some archpriests. An archpriest also wears a pectoral cross both as part of his street clothes and when vested.
  The ceremony for making an archpriest is analogous to other clerical promotions bestowed with cheirothesia: at the little entrance of the divine liturgy, the candidate is conducted to the ambo in the middle of the church where the bishop is at the time, and the bishop blesses him and says a prayer addressed to Christ asking to "... endue our brother (name) with Thy Grace, and adorn him with virtue to stand at the head of the Presbyters of Thy people, and make him to be a good example to them that are with him ..."
  In the Russian tradition, protopresbyter is a higher rank than archpriest, as explained in a translation by the Orthodox Church in America:
  Although entitled "for the making of a Protopresbyter" it is clear that what is now known as an "Archpriest" is what is usually meant. The rank of "Protopresbyter" as a distinction higher than "Archpriest" is a later addition. The same Order, naturally, is used for what is now called "Protopresbyter".
caption: A Russian archpriest in his street clothes – Feodor Dubyansky, confessor to the Empress Elizabeth and Catherine II (the portrait of Alexei Antropov, 1761)
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