Princes of the Church

The term Prince of the Church is today used nearly exclusively for Catholic cardinals. However, the term is historically more important as a generic term for clergymen whose offices hold the secular rank and privilege of a prince (in the widest sense) or are considered its equivalent. In the case of cardinals, they are always treated in protocol of Catholic countries as equivalents of royal princes.

Informally, other members of the higher echelons of the Church are in recent times also occasionally called "Princes of the Church", in which case this title can sometimes be intended more or less ironically by the speaker.

By analogy with secular princes, in the broad sense of the ruler of any principality regardless of the style, it made perfect sense in a feudal class society to regard the highest members of the clergy, mainly prelates, as a privileged class ('estate') similar to the nobility, ranking just below or even above it in the social order; often high clerical ranks, such as bishops, were given high protocollary precedence amongst the nobility, and seats in the highest assemblies, including courts of justice and legislatures, such as Lord Bishops in the English (later British) House of Lords (where a fixed set of senior Anglican bishops and archbishops retain and use their rights to sit) and Prince primates in the Kingdom of Hungary.

In Europe, as it became common for younger sons of dynastic houses to seek careers in the church hierarchy, especially when they were expected to be excluded from the succession, members of royal families and the began to occupy many of the highest prelatures; examples include Henry, Cardinal-Duke of York, the second grandson of James II of England, and Henry, Cardinal-King of Portugal, the fifth son of Manuel I of Portugal. Even popes openly created Cardinal nephews from their own family. However, these are individual cases; the term Prince of the church applies rather to the following institutionalized cases.

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