Religious Order

Most members of Catholic religious orders are not monks, and superiors general are reliably unimpressed when told they are.

The thirteenth century produced the friars, and they were designed against the monastic model at almost every point. Where a monk vows stability to one house, a friar belongs to a province and can be sent anywhere in it or beyond. Where a monastery is endowed with land, the early mendicants refused endowment and begged. Where monasteries were founded in the countryside, friars went into the new cities, because that is where the population and the heresies were. Where a monastery is autonomous, the mendicant orders built a genuine command structure, with provinces, chapters and a superior general.

They were bitterly opposed at the time. Bishops objected to preachers operating in their dioceses under someone else's authority; university faculties objected to the chairs the Dominicans and Franciscans took; the secular clergy objected to the loss of funeral and confession income.

The sixteenth century added clerks regular, who dropped choral office and monastic habit altogether in favour of mission, education and administration, and who were organised more like an army than an abbey.

The largest group in numerical terms is different again: congregations of apostolic life, overwhelmingly of women, whose members take simple rather than solemn vows and who ran the schools, hospitals, orphanages and nursing services that constituted the largest organised welfare provision in much of the world for two centuries. Their history includes a long conflict with church authority, which repeatedly forced women's communities into enclosure against their founders' explicit intentions on the grounds that unenclosed religious women were improper. That restriction was not fully lifted until the twentieth century, and the institutional damage done in the meantime is well documented.

The category exists because a genuine alternative to monastic life had to be invented, and it was invented on purpose. Monks were defined by stability: a vow to remain in one house, supported by land and endowment, withdrawn from the world it prayed for. In the early thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi and Dominic of Guzman each founded a different kind of community, the friars, whose members moved between towns, owned no property individually or, in the earliest Franciscan practice, collectively, and supported themselves by begging rather than by rents. The friars were built for cities rather than for the countryside estates monasteries typically held, since preaching and hearing confessions required proximity to people rather than distance from them.

Rome recognized how great a jurisdictional break this was: mendicant orders were placed under papal authority directly rather than under the local bishop, freeing friars to preach and hear confession across diocesan boundaries that would otherwise have required a bishop's permission, a privilege that caused real friction with parish clergy for centuries. Later congregations pushed the same logic further still. The Jesuits, founded in 1540, dropped the daily choir office and much of the distinctive habit that even friars kept, becoming clerks regular whose entire form was built around mobility and active ministry rather than any fixed community life at all.