Cathedral church：Cathedral | Gothic architecture

cathedral, in Christian churches that have an episcopal form of church[1] government, the church in which a residential bishop[2] has his official seat or throne, the cathedra[3]. Cathedral churches are of different degrees of dignity. There are cathedral churches of simple diocesan bishops, of archbishops or metropolitans, of primates, patriarchs, and, in the Roman Catholic Church[4], of the pope[5]. A cathedral church is not necessarily large and magnificent, although most cathedrals have become so. Since the territorial organization of the early church[6] followed that of the Roman Empire, cathedrals from the first were established wherever possible in towns, not in villages. In the early European Middle Ages, the town in which a cathedral church was situated became known as the cathedral city.

In the Roman Catholic church, canon law[7] makes no architectural conditions for a cathedral. The only canonical[8] requirement is th...