Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Lords Spiritual
Summary
The Lords Spiritual are the bishops of the Church of England who serve in the House of Lords of the United Kingdom. Twenty-six out of the 42 diocesan bishops and archbishops of the Church of England serve as Lords Spiritual (not counting retired archbishops who sit by right of a peerage). The Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian, and the Anglican churches in Wales and Northern Ireland, which are no longer established churches, are not represented. The Lords Spiritual are distinct from the Lords Temporal, their secular counterparts who also sit in the House of Lords.
There are 42 dioceses in the Church of England, each led by a diocesan bishop. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, as Primate of All England and Primate of England, respectively, have oversight over their corresponding provinces. The occupants of the five "great sees"—Canterbury, York, London, Durham and Winchester—are always Lords of Parliament.
Of the remaining 37 bishops, the 21 most senior sit in the House of Lords, although the normal operation of this rule was suspended in 2015 (following the decision of the Church to begin to appoint women as bishops), instead meaning that until 2025 every woman appointed as a diocesan bishop will automatically be appointed as a Lord Spiritual when a vacancy next arises, regardless of seniority, so as to balance out the representation of female bishops in the House. Otherwise, seniority is determined by total length of service as an English diocesan bishop (that is to say, it is not lost by translation to another see). The Bishop of Sodor and Man and the Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe may not sit in the House of Lords regardless of seniority as their dioceses lie outside both of England and of the United Kingdom.
Theoretically, the power to elect archbishops and bishops is vested in the diocesan cathedral's college of canons. Practically, however, the choice of the archbishop or bishop is made prior to the election.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.