Religious Orders

The Benedictine Order, in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, comprises monks living under the Rule of Saint Benedict, commonly called the black monks. Saint Benedict did not, strictly speaking, found an order in the later sense of one family under one general. The Encyclopedia records that there is no evidence he planned the spread of his Rule beyond the houses he himself had established. Subiaco was the original foundation and the cradle of the institute. Saint Gregory tells of twelve further monasteries near Subiaco, and of the Abbey of Monte Cassino, founded when Benedict left that neighbourhood. Those fourteen are the only houses for which the Encyclopedia finds reliable evidence in his lifetime. Later stories of a mission of Saint Placid to Sicily, and of Saint Maurus carrying the Rule into Gaul in 543, are set aside there as not historical.

The bond is the Rule, not a superior general. There is no common head of all black monks other than the Pope. The order is a number of congregations, each autonomous, united by allegiance to the same Rule, which a house or a congregation may adapt to its circumstances. In the first centuries after Saint Benedict each monastery was an independent family, managing its own affairs. The Encyclopedia places his death about 543. It does not fix the year in which the Rule was written, and this file will not invent one.

The same article is sure of one personal fact, and cautious of another. It is certain that Saint Benedict was not a priest. It judges that he was probably only a layman. A monk not in sacred orders was eligible for any office in the house, even the office of abbot, and at the beginning comparatively few were advanced to the priesthood. The life was a household under a rule, not a college of clerics. Saint Gregory tells that Benedict's sister, Saint Scholastica, presided over a community of women in a monastery about five miles from Monte Cassino. Whether that house is the foundation of Benedictine nuns, or one community under his direction, the Encyclopedia leaves as an open question. It does not even claim to know what rule those women followed. What it will say is that, as the Rule spread, women as well as men formed houses in order to live by its principles.

What marks them is a stable house. The monk promises himself to one community, under an abbot, for the common prayer, the reading, and the work of that house. When Monte Cassino was sacked by the Lombards about 580, the monks fled to Rome, and Pope Pelagius II housed them beside the Lateran. They remained there for more than a hundred and forty years. The Encyclopedia judges it generally agreed that when Saint Gregory the Great embraced the monastic state, and turned his family palace into the monastery of Saint Andrew, it was the Benedictine form of the life that he took. From that house the prior, Saint Augustine, and forty companions set out in 595. They established the first English Benedictine monastery at Canterbury soon after their arrival in 597. That is the contribution a reader should keep: not a claim that Benedict invented schools or farming, but a rule of stability and common prayer which the Latin West received as its ordinary monastic life, and which a pope's monks carried to the English. By the end of the eighth century, the Encyclopedia says, the Rule had so far superseded earlier codes in France that Charlemagne could doubt whether monks of any kind had been possible before Saint Benedict. The doubt was too large. The spread was real.

The same pages record the failures without romance. A body of hundreds of houses and thousands of monks could not keep worldliness out of every cloister. Reforms, when they lasted, came from inside the family. Cluny, begun in 910 under Saint Berno, drew many houses into one obedience and for a time was a chief religious influence in the Latin Church. It remained Benedictine. Other reforms left the main body and became orders of their own. Cîteaux is the next of these pages.

The independence of the houses was not left entirely untouched. The Encyclopedia records that the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, by its twelfth canon, decreed that the monasteries of each ecclesiastical province were to unite in a congregation. The abbots were to meet every third year, to pass laws, and to appoint visitors from their own number. One abbot was to preside, with a limited authority that was not to cancel the authority of each abbot in his own monastery. England was the first, and for a time the only, country to give the decree a fair trial. After the bull Benedictina of Benedict XII, in 1336, other countries organised national congregations. That congregational system, with few exceptions, is the normal government of the black monks. It is still not the government of a single general over a single order. The Pope remains the common head. The Rule remains the bond.

The Cistercians are religious of the Order of Cîteaux, a Benedictine reform. The Catholic Encyclopedia states that it was established at Cîteaux in 1098 by Saint Robert, Abbot of Molesme, in the Diocese of Langres, to restore as far as possible the literal observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict. Robert had tried to reform houses already in his care, including Molesme, and had not succeeded. With companions, among them Alberic and Stephen, he obtained leave to begin again. Twenty-one men withdrew to the solitude of Cîteaux. On the feast of Saint Benedict, 21 March 1098, they began to build what their own account calls the New Monastery. By order of the legate, Robert received the pastoral staff and the brethren made their vow of stability. The New Monastery was thereby erected as an abbey.

The monks who had stayed at Molesme asked Pope Urban II for their abbot back. He was sent, after one year. Alberic was elected in his place. On 18 April 1100 Pope Paschal II, by letters dated at Troia, took the abbey and the religious of Cîteaux under the protection of the Apostolic See, saving their allegiance to the Church of Châlons. From that day Alberic and his brethren established the exact observance of the Rule, put off the black habit for the white, and, so that the choir monks could keep the Divine Office by day and by night, associated lay brothers with themselves for the manual labour and the material affairs of the house. Those conversi were not monks, and they were to be treated in life and in death as the monks were treated. Saint Alberic died in 1109. Stephen Harding, an Englishman who had been among the first to leave Molesme, succeeded him.

The founders did not set out to make a new order. They wanted a reaction against the laxity they saw at Cluny and elsewhere: manual labour resumed, a harder regimen, and a grave simplicity in the church and in the ceremonies. Colonies made the order. Saint Bernard entered Cîteaux in 1112, and thirty young noblemen of Burgundy with him, four of them his brothers. In 1113 the house sent out La Ferté. In 1114 it sent Pontigny. In 1115 Bernard founded Clairvaux, and in the same year Morimond was founded. These were the first four daughters. Clairvaux, in Bernard's lifetime, became mother of sixty-eight monasteries. Stephen completed the legislation. To the bond Cluny had already used, he added general chapters and regular visitation. The collection of statutes was called the Charter of Charity. With the book of usages, and some definitions of the early chapters, it received the approbation of Pope Callistus II. At Stephen's death in 1134 the order, thirty-six years old, counted seventy monasteries, fifty-five of them in France. In 1152 it counted three hundred and fifty abbeys, not including granges and priories.

The contribution is that literal life, kept from house to house by a chapter that could correct an abbot, and by work done with the community's own hands. The Encyclopedia records the agricultural labour, the house for the poor, and the infirmary, and it records that the same centuries also produced writers and builders. It does not say that the Cistercians invented farming, or Gothic building, or the care of the sick. Later ages knew relaxation, quarrels about the Charter, and reforms that broke away. The reform of La Trappe, associated with the Abbot de Rancé, kept a stricter observance through the Revolution by the flight of Dom Augustin de Lestrange and his brethren. In 1892, at the desire of Leo XIII, the Trappist congregations were united. On 30 July 1902 an Apostolic Constitution confirmed the restoration and gave the definite name Order of Reformed Cistercians, or the Strict Observance. The Common Observance remained a distinct branch. Both still profess the Rule of Saint Benedict. The white habit and the Charter are what a reader should remember, not a list of ruins.

The machinery of that memory is simple enough to state. During the early prosperity the general chapter met every year, an assembly of the abbots, and the Encyclopedia calls it the seat of the order's supreme authority. Every abbey was visited once a year by the abbot of the house on which it depended. Cîteaux itself was visited by the four first fathers, the abbots of La Ferté, Pontigny, Clairvaux, and Morimond. The visitor was told to correct abuses with prudence, and the abbot who was visited was told to show himself submissive. A later pope, the Encyclopedia notes, held the Cistercian chapter up as the form which other orders should follow. The Fourth Lateran Council commanded religious orders to hold general chapters, and to follow the form used by the Order of Cîteaux. That is a fact about government. It is not a claim that charity, or labour, or the chapter itself, had no existence before 1098.

The Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel does not begin, as the friars do, with a founder whose life the Church can date from a childhood in Italy or in Spain. The Catholic Encyclopedia states the quarrel plainly. The order has claimed the prophets Elias and Eliseus. Modern historians, from Baronius onward, deny any existence of the order before the second half of the twelfth century. The order's tradition, written into its constitutions and mentioned in papal bulls and in the liturgy, holds a moral succession of hermits on Carmel from the days of the prophets, organised in the Western manner at the time of the Crusades. The silence of pilgrims and chronicles before about 1150 has led historians to place the foundation in or about 1155, when documents of undoubted authenticity first speak of it. In 1698 the Holy See imposed silence on both sides of the literary war. In 1725 it permitted a statue of Saint Elias in the Vatican Basilica among the founders of orders. This file names the prophet as the order's tradition, and it does not tell that tradition as a chronicle.

What the Encyclopedia will affirm from the twelfth century is a hermit life on the mountain. The Greek monk John Phocas, who visited the Holy Land in 1185, met a Calabrian monk who had gathered about ten hermits near the grotto of the prophet. The life of Aymeric, Patriarch of Antioch, points to that monk as Berthold, and to a visit in 1154 or the following year. Under Berthold's successor, Brocard, Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, then residing at Tyre, wrote a short rule, about 1210, part of it taken from the rule associated with Saint Augustine. The hermits were to elect a prior and promise him obedience. They were to live in separate cells, recite the Divine Office, or other prayers if they could not read, and spend the time in meditation and manual labour. They met for Mass each morning. They were to have no personal property. They abstained from flesh meat except in great necessity, and they fasted from the middle of September until Easter. Silence ran from Vespers until Terce. The rule was written for the one community on Carmel. It is not a plan for provinces.

The rule received papal approbation in 1226. As the position of Christians in the Holy Land grew untenable, colonies went to Cyprus, Sicily, Marseilles, and Valenciennes about 1238, and English brothers made foundations on their return in 1241. Saint Simon Stock was elected general at the first chapter, at Aylesford, in 1247. Many prelates refused to acknowledge the order, holding that the Lateran Council of 1215 had forbidden new orders. The order as such was approved by the Second Council of Lyons in 1274. Before that, Saint Simon obtained from Innocent IV an interim approbation and modifications of the rule, in 1247. Foundations might then be made in cities. The solitary life was left for community life. Meals were in common. The order ceased to be eremitical and became mendicant. Its title became the Brothers of the Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. In 1287 the striped mantle was exchanged for one of white wool, and the people called them Whitefriars.

The contribution to remember is the prayer, and the reform that refused to let the prayer be dissolved into business. In the sixteenth century Saint Teresa of Jesus, at the convent of the Incarnation in Avila, resolved to found a house for a stricter keeping of the primitive aim. The first convent was established on 24 August 1562. The general, Rubeo, approved her work and allowed two convents of reformed friars in Castile. Saint John of the Cross, with Anton de Heredia, took up that life for the men. The reform was opposed, and Saint John was imprisoned at Toledo. In 1580 a special province was erected for the Discalced friars and nuns, still under the general. Saint Teresa died on 4 October 1582. By a bull of 20 December 1593 the Discalced Carmelites were separated from the rest of the order. She had wanted the nuns to pray and to offer their mortifications for the conversion of unbelievers and of heretics, and the friars to join that prayer to instruction of the ignorant. The Encyclopedia's judgement is that a later superior narrowed the work in ways she had not chosen. The mark of Carmel remains the cell and the prayer, under the title of the Blessed Virgin of the mountain.

The two branches do not keep that mark in exactly the same way, and the Encyclopedia distinguishes them. The Discalced, or Teresians, keep a perpetual abstinence except in weakness or illness, rise in the night for the Divine Office, and generally go barefoot. The Calced have adapted the rule to the needs of the times. They still use the liturgy of the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, a rite the Encyclopedia describes as Gallo-Roman and close to the use of Paris in the middle of the twelfth century, revised in 1584. The Discalced adopted the Roman liturgy in 1586. In both, a time is set for mental prayer morning and afternoon, made in common, to impress the soul with the presence of God. Some houses, called deserts, were built from 1592 so that friars who asked for it, and who were judged strong enough, could spend a stricter year in solitude and then return to the ordinary convent. A desert was not a prison for the guilty. It was a refuge for those who wanted a harder prayer. The reader who remembers Carmel as a fashion of a church interior has remembered the wrong thing.

The name Franciscan is used of the men and women who profess the Rule of Saint Francis of Assisi in one of its forms. The Catholic Encyclopedia gives the usual account, which is still the one generally received. Saint Francis founded three orders, and they grew by addition, not by the later division of a single confraternity, though some writers have argued the other way and the Encyclopedia does not treat that argument as proved.

The Friars Minor, the First Order, date from 1209. In that year Saint Francis obtained from Innocent III an unwritten approbation of a simple rule he had composed for his first companions. That first text has not come down. The saint rewrote the rule, and Honorius III solemnly confirmed it on 29 November 1223, by the letter Solet annuere. That second rule is the one professed throughout the First Order. What marks it is the following of Christ in poverty, in preaching, and in a common life that was not the stability of a Benedictine abbey. The friar can be sent. He does not root himself in one valley as the monk does.

The Second Order, the Poor Ladies, now called the Poor Clares, was laid in 1212. Saint Clare, having asked to embrace the new life, was established by Saint Francis at Saint Damian's near Assisi, with other women who had joined her. The Encyclopedia says it is an error to suppose that Francis drew up a formal rule for them. The rule imposed about 1219 by Cardinal Ugolino, afterwards Gregory IX, was recast by Saint Clare near the end of her life and approved by Innocent IV on 9 August 1253, again by a letter beginning Solet annuere. Enclosure and the poverty of the house are the mark. A later mitigation was granted by Urban IV in 1263. Saint Colette, who died in 1447, drew constitutions which Pius II approved on 18 March 1458.

Tradition assigns 1221 as the year of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, the Third Order. Saint Francis devised it as a middle state between the cloister and the world, for those who wished to follow him and were barred by marriage or by other ties from the First or the Second Order. The rule approved by Nicholas IV on 18 August 1289 is not, the Encyclopedia says, the original rule. Leo XIII modified the rule of the secular tertiaries on 30 May 1883. Beside that secular order there grew, early and disputed in its first dates, a Third Order Regular of men and women living in community. From about 1458 the Italian friars of that body have had their own minister general and have taken solemn vows. Many later congregations of men and of women have taken a tertiary rule as their base, often under the bishop, and the Encyclopedia warns that a number of them are Franciscan in name more than in the old habit and cord.

The First Order itself is now three bodies, each with its own minister general and its own constitutions, all professing the rule of 1223. The Friars Minor are the parent stem. The Friars Minor Conventual were constituted an independent order in 1517. The Friars Minor Capuchin were constituted an independent order in 1619. Lesser reforms were either extinguished or drawn back into the Friars Minor. The contribution is the poor man made into a rule: a vow of poverty for preachers who would not settle as monks, a cloister for women who chose the same poverty, and a rule of penance for people who stayed in their marriages and their trades. The Church did not thereby invent poverty, or preaching, or marriage. It recognised a family that would keep all three in view of Christ.

The First Order is one rule and three governments. Each body has its own constitutions and its own minister general, and each professes the rule confirmed in 1223. The Encyclopedia is equally plain that the early history of the Third Order Regular is uncertain and open to controversy. Some attribute a beginning to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in 1228, others to Blessed Angelina of Marsciano in 1395, who is said to have established at Foligno the first Italian monastery of enclosed tertiary nuns. What is certain, on those pages, is that early in the fifteenth century tertiary communities of men and of women existed in different parts of Europe, and that the Italian friars of the Third Order Regular were recognised by the Holy See as a mendicant order. Since about 1458 that body has been governed by its own minister general, and its members take solemn vows. The secular tertiaries remain in the world. The difference is the difference between a vow lived in a friary and a rule lived in a household.

The Church's own Office has kept the three together. The Catholic Encyclopedia quotes the third antiphon at Lauds in the Roman Breviary for 4 October, and prints the Latin: "Tres ordines hic ordinat: primumque Fratrum nominat Minorum: pauperumque fit Dominarum medius: sed Poenitentium tertius sexum capit utrumque." The sense of that verse, as the same article states it, is that Francis set three orders in order. The first he names the Friars Minor. The middle one is the Poor Ladies. The third, of penitents, takes either sex. A study of the Franciscans that tells only the friars has not told the order the liturgy names.

The Order of Preachers is the work of Saint Dominic. The Catholic Encyclopedia ties the legislation to the history, and the history begins with preaching. The preaching of Dominic and his first companions in Languedoc led to letters of Innocent III dated 17 November 1205, which created, for that age, a type of apostolic preacher patterned on the Gospel. In the same year he founded the monastery of Prouille, in the Diocese of Toulouse, for women he had brought back from heresy, and he made that house the centre of his missions. He gave it the Rule of Saint Augustine and particular institutions for the sisters and for the brothers who served them. The Encyclopedia also speaks of the primitive type of religious at Prouille in 1206. The two wordings sit side by side in the same article. This file will not force them into one day.

Dominic and his companions, authorised by Innocent III to choose a rule with a view to approbation, adopted the Rule of Saint Augustine in 1216 and added constitutions for the ascetic and canonical life, drawn in large part from Prémontré and adapted to preachers. The order was solemnly approved on 22 December 1216. A second letter of Honorius III determined the vocation. The Encyclopedia gives his words in this sense: expecting the brethren of the order to be the champions of the Faith and true lights of the world, he confirmed the order. On 15 August 1217 Dominic sent his companions out from Prouille. The principal centres were Toulouse, Paris, Madrid, Rome, and Bologna. In May 1220, at Bologna, the first general chapter drew up the constitutions that completed the earlier customs. The preachers gave up possessions and revenues and took a strict poverty. They would not call a convent an abbey. Annual general chapters became the legislative power.

The canonical title is itself the definition, and the constitutions are plainer. The Encyclopedia quotes them: "Our order was instituted principally for preaching and for the salvation of souls." Study is the means. A convent was not to be founded without a doctor. The friars adopted the three vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, the choral Office said briefly, a white tunic and a black cloak, and, from the chapter of 1220, the scapular in place of the canon's rochet. They did not take a vow of stability. They suppressed manual labour for the choir religious and gave the household work to lay brothers. The superior may dispense from an observance when it would hinder study, or preaching, or the good of souls, because the order was established for preaching and the salvation of souls. In 1236 a general chapter declared that the constitutions do not bind under sin, but under a penance. That is a lawyer's mercy inside a strict house, and it has been disputed inside the order itself. It is part of how the Preachers kept study and the choir in one life.

The sisters are cloistered. They take the three vows, recite the Hours, and work with their hands. Humbert of Romans, the fifth master general, unified their constitutions, and the general chapter of Valenciennes in 1259 received them as sisters of the Order of Preachers. Munio de Zamora wrote a rule in 1285 for the Brothers and Sisters of Penitence of Saint Dominic. Honorius IV gave that fraternity a canonical existence by a privilege of 28 January 1286. They were to be zealous for the Catholic faith, under a priest of the order.

The contribution is the preacher who has been made to study. The two doctors a reader already knows from the study of contributions, Albert and Thomas, are what this arrangement was built to make ordinary, not what it happened to produce once. The Encyclopedia can say that the Roman Church declared the Preachers specially charged with the office of preaching, and that from 1220 no convent of theirs was to lack a doctor. The Church did not invent the sermon, or the university, or the book. It approved an order whose proper work was to learn the faith and then to speak it.

An old saying, which the Encyclopedia records, puts the difference of place in one line: Bernard loved the valleys, Benedict the mountains, Francis the towns, and Dominic the populous cities. It is a saying, not a charter. It fits the legislation. At the beginning only large convents were allowed, and they were placed in important cities, with a prior to govern and a doctor to teach. The church and the buildings were to be plain. The convent owned nothing and lived on alms. Outside the Office, the time belonged to study. The lecture in theology was for the whole community, the prior included, and it was open to secular clerics. The friars vowed themselves to preaching inside the house and outside it. They were clerics first. The letter of foundation, that they were to be champions of the Faith and lights of the world, could apply, the Encyclopedia says, only to clerics. The lay brother has his place. He is not the preacher.

The Hermits of Saint Augustine, generally called Augustinians, are not the Canons Regular who also bear Augustine's name, and they are not a thirteenth-century survival of the bishop's own household. The Catholic Encyclopedia is plain about the distance. Saint Augustine of Hippo lived a common life, first with friends and then, as bishop, with his clergy. Vows were not obligatory. Private property was prohibited. Instructions in his writings, especially the work on the labour of monks and a letter which became the early Augustinian rule for nuns, were later taken as a rule. Canons who wanted a common apostolic life adopted it after the Lateran Synod of 1059. Other Italian hermit companies adopted it too, and kept the peculiarities of dress and custom that their own founders had handed down. They were confused with one another, and with the Friars Minor.

Pope Alexander IV moved to unite them. He commanded two delegates from each hermit monastery to meet at Rome under Cardinal Richard of Sant'Angelo. The first meeting was on 1 March 1256, and it produced a union. Lanfranc Septala of Milan, prior of the Bonites, was appointed the first prior general. A uniform black habit was adopted. The bull Licet ecclesiae catholicae, of 4 May 1256, ratified the proceedings and is regarded as the foundation charter of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine. Hermit houses that had sent no delegates were commanded to conform. The original branches named in the bull were houses of Saint William, houses of the Order of Saint Augustine, houses of Brother John Buoni, houses of Fabali, and houses of the Brittinians. Blessed John Buoni, a hermit who died at Mantua in 1249, had given the new order its first general. Some of the Williamites, who had already passed to the Rule of Saint Benedict, objected to the milder Augustinian rule and obtained leave to stay as they were.

The order spread quickly, in part because it did not grow from a single mother-house, and in part because most of the communities took up the active life, after the example of the Friars Minor and the Dominicans. Only the Brittinians, in 1260, were allowed to remain contemplative. The mark is therefore a double one: the Rule drawn from Saint Augustine, and the work of preaching, teaching, and the cure of souls, which the name Hermit no longer fully describes. Pius V placed them among the mendicant orders and ranked them next to the Carmelites. From the end of the thirteenth century the sacristan of the papal palace has been an Augustinian, a privilege later granted to the order in perpetuity. That office is a sign of trust. It is not the work that defines them.

The Encyclopedia records relaxation in the fourteenth century, and reforms of observance that remained under the prior general, and it records that in the sixteenth century many of the Saxon congregation followed Martin Luther out of the Catholic faith, while other Augustinians opposed him in writing and in preaching. The order is not the story of that departure. Its durable work, in the same article, is teaching, study, the parish, and the missions, above all in Mexico, in South America, and in the Philippine Islands, where Augustinians were the first missionaries of the Spanish settlement that began in earnest in 1565. A later Augustinian priest, Gregor Mendel, belongs to the study of contributions and is not repeated. What belongs here is the union of 1256: scattered hermits made into one order, under a rule older than the union, and then sent to preach.

The habit is black, with a leather girdle and a long cowl. The order is governed by a prior general, elected by the general chapter, with assistants, and each province by a provincial. The Encyclopedia names saints the order has produced, among them Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, who died in 1305, Saint John of Sahagún, and Saint Thomas of Villanova, who died in 1555. It also names a devotion the order has spread: the veneration of the Blessed Virgin under the title of Mother of Good Counsel, whose picture is kept in the Augustinian church at Genazzano. A devotion is not a foundation charter. The charter remains the bull of 1256, and the work remains the cure of souls by men who are still called hermits because that is what their several companies were on the day they were made one order.

The Society of Jesus was founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola. He designated it the Company of Jesus, to name its true leader and its soldier spirit. The title was put into Latin as Societas Jesu in the bull by which Paul III approved the first formula of the institute. The Catholic Encyclopedia, in the text publicly indexed under the Society, states that the bull is Regimini militantis Ecclesiae, of 27 September 1540. The word Jesuit was first a reproach, and the founder did not use it. Members and friends later accepted it in a good sense. The Society ranks as a mendicant order of clerks regular: priests organised for apostolic work, following a religious rule, and relying on alms.

The order's own Curia gives the short history that matches the Encyclopedia. In 1538 the companions of Paris, with Ignatius as their leader, found that their plan to go to the Holy Land could not be carried out. They went to Rome and offered their services to the Pope for the missions he would entrust to them. The following year Ignatius submitted a draft for the group. Paul III welcomed it verbally. On 27 September 1540 he promulgated the bull that recognised the Society as a religious order. The Encyclopedia adds the earlier steps. The companions, among them Peter Faber and Francis Xavier, had made vows of poverty and chastity at Montmartre, in Paris, on 15 August 1534, and a further vow to go to the Holy Land after two years. When that journey proved impracticable they offered themselves to Paul III. The first formula was approved by word of mouth on 3 September 1539, and formally on 27 September 1540. The bull at first limited the Society to sixty members. That clause was abrogated after two years. In April 1541 Ignatius was elected the first general, against his own wish.

The Curia states the fundamental goals as the greater glory of God and the service of the men and women to whom the companions would be sent. The Encyclopedia gives the motto of the Society as Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, to the greater glory of God. It also gives the mark which distinguishes the professed. Besides the three usual solemn vows, they make a fourth, of special obedience to the Pope in the matter of missions, undertaking to go wherever they are sent, without even requiring money for the journey. The Exercises of Saint Ignatius are, on the same pages, the chief test of a novice and the basis of the Constitutions, the life, and the activity of the Society. Obedience, in that account, means a sincere respect for authority, accepted as expressing for the time the will of God as nearly as it can be known, through the Pope, the bishops, and the religious superior.

The colleges are already told in the study of contributions. They are a great work. They are not a licence to say that the Society invented the school. The Encyclopedia does say that the Society was the first order which enjoined, by its very Constitutions, devotion to the cause of education, and that its ministry includes preaching, catechism especially to children, the sacraments, parish missions, and foreign missions. The same article is explicit about what the Society was not founded to be. Neither the papal letters of approbation nor the Constitutions mention opposition to Protestantism as the object of the new foundation. Ignatius's early plan, the Encyclopedia judges, was rather the conversion of Mohammedans. The men were later sent where the Church was under attack, and they became instruments of the Catholic recovery. That is a consequence. It is not the vow. The vow is to go where the Pope sends them.

Two further facts from the same article keep the picture from the legends that have stuck to the name. There is no special Jesuit habit. The novice wears the clerical costume. And there are no secret Jesuits. The Society can, as other orders can, give friends a share in its prayers. It cannot make them members unless they live the life of the order. The professed of the four vows are the kernel. Novices, formed scholastics, and formed coadjutors, priests or lay brothers, are the other grades, living the same community life in food, clothing, lodging, and rule. The general resides at Rome. He cannot change the Constitutions. A general congregation can. The Encyclopedia records that the Constitutions drafted by Ignatius and adopted in 1558 have not been altered. The man a reader meets is a priest, or a brother, or a scholastic, under that law, sent, and not a hidden agent.

The Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools is a society of lay men, approved by the Church and not taking Holy Orders. The Catholic Encyclopedia states its object as the personal sanctification of its members and the Christian education of youth, especially the children of artisans and the poor. It may direct other schools for boys, provided that the teaching of Latin is excluded. Its principal object is the elementary school given without charge. It was founded in 1680 at Reims by Saint John Baptist de La Salle, then a canon of the metropolitan church of that city. He had first helped to secure a congregation for the education of poor girls, in keeping with the will of his director, Canon Roland, and he had seconded a layman, M. Nyel, in multiplying schools for poor children. The institute that followed was to have no other mission than Christian education.

The Encyclopedia refuses the boast that the Church had cared little for the children of the people before the end of the seventeenth century. Councils from Vaison in 529 and Aachen in 817 had urged clergy and monks to instruct children. The Third Lateran Council in 1179 had ordained that the poor be taught without charge. Trent in 1547 had decreed a master at every church for poor children and for young students preparing for orders. France already had small schools. What it lacked was a permanent supply of teachers, because the abler men left the poor for the paying pupil. Other founders had tried. De La Salle's part, in the Encyclopedia's words, was not to create the free school, but to furnish it with teachers and with fixed methods.

In 1680 the new teachers began at Reims. In 1682 they took the name Brothers of the Christian Schools. In 1684 they opened their first regular novitiate. In 1688 the work was planted in the parish of Saint-Sulpice at Paris. In 1705 the novitiate moved to Saint-Yon at Rouen, and there the founder composed the rules, called two general chapters, resigned the office of superior, and died in 1719. He was beatified in 1888 and canonised in 1900. The brothers take the three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. As educators they add a vow to teach the poor gratuitously, according to the rule, and a vow to remain in the institute, which they may not leave of themselves even to enter an order counted more perfect. De La Salle forbade them to teach Latin, so that the prohibition itself would hold them to the poor.

Two methods, set down in the Conduct of the Schools, printed at Avignon in 1720 after his death, are the pedagogical fact the Encyclopedia isolates. The brothers taught a whole class the same lesson at the same time, instead of hearing one child while the rest waited. And they taught the child to read the language he spoke before they put a Latin book in his hands. Catechism remained the principal subject. Louis XV granted letters patent on 24 September 1724. The bull of approbation of Benedict XIII, on 26 January 1725, admitted the institute among the congregations canonically recognised by the Church. At the founder's death there were 27 houses, 274 brothers, and 9,000 pupils. The Revolution suppressed the institute in 1792, after a decree that it had deserved well of the country, and brothers were imprisoned and killed, among them Brother Salomon, secretary general, massacred at the Carmelite house in Paris. The restoration after the Concordat is a later chapter. The contribution to remember is the brother who is not a priest, vowed to a free school and to the catechism, and kept from the Latin class so that the poor child would not lose him.

The spirit of the institute, as the Encyclopedia describes it, is a spirit of faith and a spirit of zeal. Faith is to see God in all things and to sanctify oneself. Zeal draws the brother to children, to instruct them in the truths of religion and to set the maxims of the Gospel as the rule of their conduct. De La Salle named three means: vigilance, good example, and instruction. The brothers have therefore always counted catechism as the most important subject in the school. They are catechists by vocation and by the will of the Church. A brother who taught a paying Latin class to clever boys, and left the poor child without a catechism, would have left the institute even if he had kept the habit. The prohibition of Latin is part of the vocation, not an insult to learning.

The Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy states, on its own account, that it is an international Catholic religious congregation founded in Dublin in 1831 by Catherine McAuley. The chronology kept by the Mercy world site is more exact about the day. On 12 December 1831, at George's Hill, Catherine McAuley and two companions, known in religion as Mary Ann Doyle and Mary Elizabeth Harley, professed their vows and thereby founded the congregation. The same page gives the words of the profession: each vowed perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience, and "to persevere until the end of my life in the Congregation called the Sisters of Mercy, established for the Visitation of the Sick Poor, and charitable instruction of poor females." On 13 December 1831 Archbishop Daniel Murray appointed Catherine the first superior. No bull of approbation was in the pages fetched for this file, and none is dated here.

They returned at once to the House of Mercy in Baggot Street. On 23 January 1832 seven further women received the habit. By the spring, three hundred poor girls were in the school on Baggot Street, and women and girls were received in the shelter. The cholera of 1832 then struck Dublin. Mary Elizabeth Harley had died of consumption on 25 April. Catherine nevertheless agreed to staff a cholera hospital in Townsend Street. The sisters nursed in shifts, from morning until eight in the evening, for seven months. The first profession ceremony in the house itself was in January 1833. In December 1833 Catherine sent to Rome two chapters of a future rule, on the visitation of the sick and the protection of distressed women, to be added to the Presentation rule which she was revising for her own congregation. The pages fetched do not record the date on which Rome confirmed the whole. The work did not wait for the parchment.

The congregation's own chronology does not hide the cost of that first year. Mary Elizabeth Harley died on 25 April 1832. Another sister, received on her deathbed, had already died in February. Catherine's niece, Mary Teresa Macauley, professed in a private ceremony on 3 November 1833 and died just after midnight on 12 November. In October 1834 the parish priest of Saint Andrew's, Dr Walter Meyler, closed the convent chapel to the public and cut off the collection on which the House of Mercy had depended. The sisters stayed. The school, the shelter, and the cholera ward are the vocation as it was lived before it was a story told on several continents. The later spread is the same vocation continued, not a different one.

The congregation's own description of the years since is that the House of Mercy became an anchor for the Irish people, and that from Baggot Street a path of Mercy spread over Ireland and across the seas, in education, in medical care, and in the relief of poverty. It records that the sisters were once known as the walking nuns, and that they keep that tradition: the school, the hospital, the street, and the chapel, with the door open. The mark is in the vow already quoted. They are not an enclosed choir. They are women who promised to visit the sick poor and to instruct poor girls and women, and who did both in the first year, in a school of three hundred and in a cholera ward. The Church already knew the visitation of the sick. Catherine McAuley gave that visitation a congregation that could be sent, and that would still be there when the epidemic was over.

A reader who keeps only one sentence for each will not have wasted the file.

The Benedictine is a monk of a stable house, under the Rule of Saint Benedict, with no superior general but the Pope, and with a life of common prayer that a mission from Rome carried to Canterbury. The Cistercian is a Benedictine who went back to the letter of that Rule, in a white habit, with lay brothers on the land and a Charter of Charity to bind the abbeys. The Carmelite began as a hermit on the mountain under a rule of Albert, became a mendicant friar of the Blessed Virgin of Carmel, and was called back to the cell by Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross. The Franciscan is one of three orders of Saint Francis: friars under the rule confirmed in 1223, Poor Clares under the rule confirmed in 1253, and tertiaries for those who stay in the world. The Dominican is a preacher under the Rule of Saint Augustine, approved in 1216, instituted for preaching and the salvation of souls, and therefore made to study. The Augustinian Hermit is a member of the order Alexander IV united in 1256, under Augustine's rule, for the active work of the Church as well as for the cloister. The Jesuit is a priest of the company Paul III approved in 1540, offered to the Pope for the missions, and schooled by the Exercises. The Brother of the Christian Schools is a lay religious, not a priest, vowed since the work of De La Salle at Reims to teach the poor without charge. The Sister of Mercy is a woman who, from the vows of 12 December 1831, exists to visit the sick poor and to instruct poor females.

None of them invented the thing they serve. Monks did not invent prayer, nor Cistercians labour, nor Carmelites silence, nor Franciscans poverty, nor Dominicans the sermon, nor Augustinians the common life, nor Jesuits the mission, nor the Brothers the school, nor the Sisters the visitation of the sick. The Church recognised each family for a rule and a work, and the work is what the pages above have tried to name without the boast and without the blank. Other orders have the same right to be known. These nine are enough to stop a reader treating every habit as the same habit.

No photograph is fastened to this file. None was fetched and confirmed for it, and an empty frame is not a source. The habits are named in words, where the sources name them: black for the Benedictine and for the Augustinian Hermit, white for the Cistercian and for the Carmelite mantle, white tunic and black cloak for the Preacher. The Jesuit has the dress of a cleric, not a habit of his own. The brother and the sister are known by the work as much as by the cloth.

The sources fetched for this file are the Catholic Encyclopedia on New Advent, in the articles on the Benedictine Order, the Cistercians, the Carmelite Order, the Franciscan Order, the Order of Preachers, the Hermits of Saint Augustine, the Society of Jesus, and the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools; the Curia of the Society of Jesus, on the approval of 27 September 1540; the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy; and the Mercy chronology of the early years. The words given as quotations are taken from those pages and not enlarged.