Friar

A friar belongs to a mendicant order, and the difference between a friar and a monk is not a nicety but a difference of whole purpose.

Mobile, not enclosed

A monk is bound by the vow of stability to a single house and lives an enclosed life ordered to prayer, while a friar belongs to an order, Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite or Augustinian, whose members are mobile, not tied to one monastery, and directed outward to preaching, teaching and the care of souls in the towns. The word means brother, and the friar lives by the mendicant ideal of poverty, historically supported by the labour and the alms of the communities he serves rather than by the endowed lands of a monastery, so the whole economy and orientation of the life differ from the monastic.

A thirteenth-century innovation

The friars were a deliberate innovation of the thirteenth century, an answer to the needs of the growing towns that the older rural monasticism did not meet, and their combination of poverty with an active urban ministry of preaching and study reshaped the medieval church. A friar enters by novitiate and profession into an order governed centrally, in contrast to the autonomous monastery, and he may or may not be ordained a priest. The distinction between the enclosed, stable monk and the mobile, preaching friar is one of the basic divisions of Western religious life, and confusing the two misses the reforming purpose the friars were created to serve.

The two great mendicant orders trace to specific founders within a few years of each other: Francis of Assisi gathered the first friars around 1209 on a rule of radical poverty approved informally by Pope Innocent III, while Dominic de Guzman founded his order in 1216 with a particular focus on preaching against heresy and on the theological training that made the Dominicans a scholarly order from the start, producing figures such as Thomas Aquinas within a century of its founding.

The Franciscan ideal of owning nothing, individually or in common, proved impossible to sustain at scale, and by the fourteenth century the order had split into factions over how strictly to keep it, the Spiritual Franciscans insisting on the founder's absolute poverty and the Conventuals accepting communal ownership of property, a dispute serious enough that Pope John XXII condemned the strict position as heretical in the 1320s. Later reform movements, including the Observant and Capuchin reforms, repeatedly tried to recover the founder's original austerity.

The mendicant orders remain active worldwide, with Franciscan and Dominican friars engaged in education, missionary work and parish ministry across every populated continent, though, like most Catholic religious life in the West, their numbers in Europe and North America have declined since the mid twentieth century even as some provinces in Africa and Asia have grown.