Norbertines (Premonstratensians)

The Premonstratensians, or Norbertines, are an order of canons regular founded in the twelfth-century wave of reform, and they occupy a particular place between the monk and the parish priest.

Canons, not monks

The order was founded by Norbert of Xanten at Premontre near Laon in 1120, and its members are canons regular rather than monks: they live in community under the Rule of Augustine and the vows, as monks do, but they are ordained and undertake the active pastoral care of parishes, preaching and administering the sacraments in the world around their abbeys. This combination of a disciplined common life with an outward pastoral mission is the defining character of the order, distinguishing it from the enclosed monastic bodies on one side and the wholly active clergy on the other.

Spread and survival

Norbert, later archbishop of Magdeburg, launched the order into the reforming energy of his age, and it spread rapidly across the German lands, the Low Countries and beyond, its white-habited canons serving abbeys that doubled as centres of pastoral care. The order suffered heavily in the dissolutions of the Reformation and the French Revolution, which swept away many of its houses, and it was rebuilt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It continues as a body of canons serving parishes and schools from their abbeys, keeping the founding pattern of contemplative community joined to active ministry.

Norbert of Xanten deliberately built his new community at Premontre in 1120 around a different legal category than the monastic orders already flourishing around it: his canons were ordained priests bound to communal life under Augustine's rule, but their vocation was defined by pastoral and sacramental ministry to the surrounding population, not by the monk's withdrawal from parish work. That distinction let Premonstratensian houses take on pastoral responsibilities, staffing parishes and hearing confessions, in ways a purely monastic house of the period generally did not, and it let the order expand rapidly across France, the Low Countries, Germany and beyond within a few generations of its founding, eventually counting several hundred houses at its medieval height, including a substantial number of communities for women following the same rule under Norbertine direction in the order's early history.

The order's later centuries brought the familiar cycle of decline and reform common to most medieval religious families, with numbers falling sharply after the disruptions of the Reformation and the French Revolution before a series of nineteenth and twentieth century revivals restored Premonstratensian houses in several countries, continuing a canonical, pastoral model of religious life distinct from the stricter monastic withdrawal practiced by their Cistercian contemporaries founded only decades earlier.