{"id":788,"date":"2010-02-02T22:30:59","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T05:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=788"},"modified":"2010-02-04T10:05:54","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T17:05:54","slug":"field-guide-to-catholic-religious-orders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2010\/02\/02\/field-guide-to-catholic-religious-orders\/","title":{"rendered":"Field Guide to Catholic Religious Orders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are at least a half-dozen types of Catholic religious orders:\u00a0 mendicants, monastics, canons regular, clerics regular, clerical religious congregations, and lay religious congregations.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><strong>Mendicants<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Mendicants take a vow of poverty but extend that to not owning property at all, neither individually nor collectively.\u00a0 Franciscans, Carmelites, and Dominicans &#8212; what I conventionally think of as &#8220;friars&#8221; &#8212; are examples of Catholic mendicant orders.\u00a0 In an ultimate sense, mendicants are beggars. (Theravadan Buddhist monks are mendicants.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Monastics<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The monastic orders &#8212; e.g., the Carthusians (of the Charterhouse) &#8212; do not take ordination and are tied to a place, their monastery.\u00a0 This is probably the best known type.\u00a0 (It&#8217;s parallel to many Mahayana Buddhist monastic orders.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>Canons Regular<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This is where the complexity of Catholic religious orders really takes off.\u00a0 Canons Regular, like monastics, are tied to place and take vows of poverty and chastity and obedience.\u00a0 But they&#8217;re ordained as priests (canon=clerk=cleric=priest) and they serve in ministry.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Clerics Regular<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Clerics Regular are also priests, but they&#8217;re tied more to their order than to their monastery.\u00a0 Jesuits are Clerics Regular.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Religious congregations<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Religious congregations (lay and clerical) are distinguished from other orders by their type of vow; members of religious congregations take simple, not solemn, vows.\u00a0 The distinction between the two types of vows is pretty obscure to me; fortunately, the<em> Catholic Encyclopedia<\/em> of 1913, incorporated into <em>Wikipedia<\/em>, has <a title=\"simple vows\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Simple_vow\">details<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are at least a half-dozen types of Catholic religious orders:\u00a0 mendicants, monastics, canons regular, clerics regular, clerical religious congregations, and lay religious congregations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[140],"tags":[14656],"class_list":["post-788","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","tag-monasticism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-cI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":803,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788\/revisions\/803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}