Chapter (religion)
body of clergy in Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Nordic Lutheran churches
A chapter (Latin: capitulum or capitellum) is one of several bodies of clergy in Catholic, Old Catholic, Anglican, and Nordic Lutheran churches or their gatherings.
Name
The name derives from the habit of convening monks, friars or canons for the reading of a chapter of the Bible or a heading of the order's rule. The 6th-century St Benedict directed that his monks begin their daily assemblies with such readings, and over time expressions such as "coming together for the chapter" (convenire ad capitulum) found their meaning transferred from the text to the meeting itself and then to the body gathering for it. The place of such meetings similarly became known as the "chapter house" or "room".
Cathedral chapter
A cathedral chapter is the body ("college") of advisors assisting the bishop of a diocese at the cathedral church. These were a development of the presbyteries (presbyteria) made up of the priests and other church officials of cathedral cities in the early church. In the Catholic Church, they are now only established by papal decree.
In the event of an episcopal vacancy, cathedral chapters are sometimes charged with election of the bishop's replacement and with the government of the diocese. They are made up of canon priests. "Numbered" chapters are made up of a fixed number of prebendaries, while "unnumbered" chapters vary in number according to the direction of the bishop.
“Chapter (religion)” enters the record as body of clergy in Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Nordic Lutheran churches. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chapter, religion and body can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q216285. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chapter (religion)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.