The word "hierarch" is correct and commonly used in written English
It can be used to describe a person who holds a high position of authority or ranking in a religious, political, or social structure. Example: The bishop was the highest hierarch in the church, responsible for overseeing all priests and making important decisions for the congregation.
This year Patriarch Bartholomew, the senior hierarch of the Orthodox world, left the job to a deputy because he had flu.
He has urged the Canadian government to set aside funds to make it easier for pregnant women to keep their babies, and welcomed the government's declared reluctance to fund abortion in other countries.Meanwhile a hierarch associated with fractionally more liberal positions on abortion was moved sideways.
His mandate follows a "doctrinal assessment" by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2011 which spoke of "certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith" which had allegedly entered the discourse of the American sisters.But it was the sisters, not the hierarch, who delivered to the world a report on the outcome of the two sides' deliberations.
Under the benign gaze of Richard Chartres, who as bishop of London is the third-ranking hierarch in the Church of England, it was announced that a Centre for the Study of the Jordanian Lead Books has been established (as a not-for-profit limited company) with some distinguished figures lending their weight to the project.
Relations between the local leaders of the Catholic and Protestant churches have improved immeasurably; an Anglican bishop and a Catholic hierarch escorted the Dalai Lama across the bridge.
As a hierarch whose job is to uphold all the teachings of early church councils, he is not the sort of careless syncretizer who thinks that all religions are basically the same.
Wresting control from the Greek hierarchs ultimately required diplomatic exchanges at the highest level between the courts of Abdul Hamid, the Ottoman sultan, and Tsar Nicholas II.With a new cold war looming over Ukraine, and Syria still engulfed by endless carnage, is it too much of a luxury to be poring over these exotic but largely forgotten episodes from the annals of diplomacy?
She is referring not to the church's top hierarchs, but to a broader community of people, including scholars and public intellectuals.When the church is in the news, she acknowledges, "the image that comes to mind is of an army of archbishops and abbots...operating in conspiracy with the country's authoritarian rulers in the Kremlin".
The fact that it was blessed by both Catholic and Anglican hierarchs suggests that old inter-Christian rivalries are being set aside for the sake of a broader mission.In a similar vein, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said this week that Anglicans and Catholics were now "two churches standing in the middle of a secular and unfriendly environment" with similar tasks.
Along with his counterpart at nearby St Panteleimon's, who was struggling to keep order, the abbot appealed to a higher authority.By the spring of 1913, dissent on Athos was surging out of control; a blockade, a rebuke from the Patriarch of Constantinople Orthodoxy's main bishop and massive pressure from some hierarchs in Russia had failed to bring the name-glorifiers to heel.
In a welcome speech to his fellow hierarchs, Patriarch Bartholomew I made a plea in sonorous quasi-classical Greek which echoes the sentiments of many Western Christian leaders.
