Abstract

The article inspects how major world historiographies illustrated in last twenty years the creations, unions, abolition of Roman catholic dioceses between XVI and XXI century; it first examines the general trend to neglect administration history in favour of perceptions history; then, it tries to extract from a set of representative works features which can be common to the whole phaenomenon and to distinguish its peculiarities in time (before the concordats, during their effectiveness, after their abandonment) and space (different mechanisms among latin-germanic Europe, European edges, hispano-portuguese America and the Philippines, french-british America and Oceania, Africa, India, China). The research underlines that modifying Church institutions has different meanings in respective contexts, but it is anyhow the result of precise political choices and social balances where Papacy, individual bishops and Churches, governments, local administrations, political parties and personalities, lobbies and laity structured groups do interact, in different degrees according to every situation.