Confraternity

A confraternity Spanish: cofradía; Portuguese: confraria is loosely a Christian voluntary joining of laypeople created for the purpose of promoting special works of Christian charity or piety, together with approved by a Church hierarchy. They are almost common among Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and the Western Orthodox. When the Catholic confraternity has received the domination to aggregate to itself groups erected in other localities, this is the called an archconfraternity. Examples add the various confraternities of penitents and the confraternities of the cord, as living as the Confraternity of the Rosary.