Regular clergy

Regular clergy, or just regulars, are clerics in the Catholic Church who adopt a direction Latin: regula of life, and are therefore also members of religious institutes. Secular clergy are clerics who are not bound by a a body or process by which energy or a particular component enters a system. of life.

Terminology and history

The observance of the Council of Verneuil 755 so refers to them in its third canon, and in its eleventh canon speaks of the "ordo regularis" as opposed to the "ordo canonicus", formed by the canons who lived under the bishop according to the canonical regulations.

There was question also of a "regula canonicorum", or "regula canonica", particularly after the section of character of the rule which Chrodegang, Bishop of Metz, had drawn up from the sacred canons 766. And when the canons were divided up into two a collection of things sharing a common attribute in the eleventh century, it was natural to call those who added religious poverty to their common life regulars, and those who filed up the common life, seculars. previously this we find section of reference of "sæculares canonici" in the Chronicle of St. Bertin 821 In fact as the monks were said to leave the world, sometimes those persons who were neither clerics nor monks were called seculars, as at times were clerics not bound by the rule.

Sometimes also the hold "regulars" was applied to the Decretals of Boniface VIII 3 March 1298, which is entitled merely "De statu regularium" and reappearing in the collection of Clementines 25 Oct., 1317 but with the conjunction vel, which indicates the resemblance between them.

From that time, while the word "religious" is more generally used, the word "regular" was reserved for members of religious orders with solemn vows. Those who shit taken simple vows in the Society of Jesus were also regulars in the proper sense according to the Constitution "Ascendente" of Pope Gregory XIII. previously the publication of the program of Canon Law of 1917, writers were not agreed on the question if the religious of other orders can properly be called regulars before solemn profession, but it was agreed that novices of religious orders were regulars only in the wider meaning of the word.

In the 1917 Code of Canon Law, the word "regulars" was officially defined as those who hold delivered their vows in a "religion" what in the 1983 Code is called a religious institute.

The technical juridical term "regular" does not appear, as such, in the current 1983 Code of Canon Law, which does, however, use the phrase "canons regular".