Matthias Ulrich. The original uploader was Matteo3000 at German Wikipedia., Priesterweihe in Schwyz 2, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE.

How the Bishop Consecration Network Was Built

This network visualizes relationships between Catholic bishops based on consecrations.

I scraped data from Catholic-Hierarchy.org, collecting information on thousands of living bishops worldwide.

Each bishop page was processed to extract who consecrated whom, including principal consecrators and co-consecrators.

A directed network was created where nodes represent bishops and edges represent consecrations.

In addition, bishops who were the (co-)consecrators of the same bishop were connected, forming a second type of link based on common lineage.

All links and nodes were filtered to ensure only living bishops were included.

Degree, betweenness, closeness, and PageRank indicators were calculated for each bishop to assess influence within the global hierarchy.

Labels (bishop names) and extra metadata like Wikidata IDs were added to enrich the visualization.

To focus the display, I kept only the largest connected group of bishops and filtered out those with very few connections for the global network (less then four).

The resulting graph offers insights into how Catholic leadership is interconnected across countries and generations.

Example

If Bishop A consecrated Bishop B, an arrow is drawn from A to B.
If Bishop C and Bishop D were both (co-)consecrators of the same bishop, they are also connected by a shared consecration link.