What is the difference between the various religious orders?
We hear about Benedictines, Franciscans, Jesuits, etc.
From the first centuries of Christianity, men and woman have been drawn to seek God by living apart from the “world”. Going out to the desert, for example, was a common phenomenon. There, these people would often draw others who wanted to share their simple life of prayer, and the first groups of monks came into being. The word monk comes from the word mono, which means alone.
Our patron Benedict wrote a rule for his monks, a very basic kind of guide for living this simple life of prayer. Following his death, as other communities of monks and their female counterparts, called nuns, were formed, this rule was sometimes adapted or a new one written, depending on the main focus of the life—work and prayer, liturgical ministry, study, and hospitality to travelers. Sometimes education was added as the monks or nuns, because they were among the few who could read and write, taught the children of the nobility.
St. Augustine was another author of a rule, although he was not a monastic. Augustine was a bishop who lived among the people he served. We can find references to “orders” of men and women who called themselves after the rule as Benedictines, Augustinians, Carthusians, etc. Once the 13th century arrived, there was a movement for people to embrace poverty as they believed it was set forth in the Gospel. Instead of staying put in abbeys and monasteries, a new kind of religious came into being. They were called friars, after the Latin word for “brother”. Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites are the communities we know from this time that still exist today. The women, though, remained in the cloister, and so were still considered “nuns”.
After the Renaissance and resulting from the time of the Reformation, new communities that were known as “apostolic” were founded. These groups of priests, brothers and sisters, were not cloistered. They worked among the people in everyday life as teachers, nurses, missionaries, preachers, and they founded universities and hospitals as part of their mission. Service to the poor was usually a major focus of these new orders. Often, they took the rule of an older group like the Franciscans or Benedictines and applied it to their active lifestyle. So we have what we call third order Franciscan and Dominican sisters who staffed schools and founded hospitals and traveled as missionaries from Europe to the Americas, and then to Africa and Asia.
One of the new communities, the Jesuits, was founded as a response to the rise of the Protestant movement, and the priests and brothers of this order went with explorers who left from France and Spain for the New World. St. Vincent de Paul founded the Daughters of Charity in response to the needs of the poor in his native France. Today, they are the largest community of women religious. Here in the States, Mother Seton knew of these sisters and based her Sisters of Charity on his rule. Bishop O’Connor, the founding bishop of our diocese, brought the Sisters of Mercy from Ireland with him in 1843. They were a new group dedicated to serving the poor and ended up doing this here in the Pittsburgh area through education and healthcare.
It might be a surprising moment for those who were taught by or worked with sisters and brothers to look into those communities and see how they began. Often from very humble and difficult beginnings—and at times without much support from the institutional Church—great things have been accomplished. They responded to the needs of their times. We owe them a debt of gratitude.
Next week: My daughter is getting married to someone who is not a Catholic. Is it possible to have a priest and a non-Catholic minister perform the ceremony?
