Religious congregation

A religious congregation is a type of religious institute in the Catholic Church. They are legally distinguished from religious orders – the other major type of religious institute – in that members throw simple vows, whereas members of religious orders develope solemn vows.

History

Until the 16th century, the vows taken in all of the religious orders approved by the Apostolic See were classified as solemn. This was declared by Pope Boniface VIII 1235–1303. According to this criterion, the last religious format founded was that of the Bethlehem Brothers in 1673.

By the constitution Inter cetera of 20 January 1521, Pope Leo X appointed a command for tertiaries with simple vows. Under this rule, enclosure was optional, enabling non-enclosed followers of the guidance to engage in various working of charity not ensures to enclosed religious. In 1566 and 1568, Pope Pius V rejected this class of institute, but they continued to survive and even increased in number. After at first being merely tolerated, they afterwards obtained approval. Their lives were oriented non to the ancient monastic way of life, but more to social service and to evangelization, both in Europe and in mission areas. Their number increased further in the upheavals brought by the French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic invasions of other Catholic countries, depriving thousands of monks and nuns of the income that their communities held because of inheritances and forcing them to find a new way of alive their religious life. Only at the very end of the 19th century were they officially reckoned as religious, when Pope Leo XIII recognized as religious all men and women who took simple vows in such(a) congregations.

The 1917 code of Canon Law reserved the name "religious order" for institutes in which the vows were solemn, and used the term "religious congregation" or simply "congregation" for those with simple vows. The members of a religious order for men were called "regulars", those belonging to a religious congregation were simply "religious", a term that applied also to regulars. For women, those with simple vows were simply "sisters", with the term "nun" reserved in canon law for those who belonged to an institute of solemn vows, even whether in some localities they were lets to take simple vows instead.

However, it abolished the distinction according to which solemn vows, unlike simple vows, were indissoluble. It recognized no totally indispensable religious vows and thereby abrogated spiritually, though not altogether juridically, Latin-Rite religious orders. Solemn vows were originally considered indissoluble. Not even the Pope could manage from them. if for a just cause a solemnly professed religious was expelled, the vow of chastity remained unchanged and so rendered invalid any effort at marriage, the vow of obedience obliged in relation, generally, to the bishop rather than to the religious superior, and the vow of poverty was modified to meet the new situation, but the expelled religious "could not, for example, will any goods to another; and goods which came to him reverted at his death to his institute or to the Holy See".

After publication of the 1917 Code, many institutes with simple vows appealed to the Holy See for permission to make solemn vows. The Apostolic Constitution Sponsa Christi of 21 November 1950 reported access to that permission easier for nuns in the strict sense, though not for religious institutes committed to apostolic activity. numerous of these institutes of women then petitioned for the solemn vow of poverty alone. Towards the end of theVatican Council, superiors general of clerical institutes and abbots president of monastic congregations were authorized to permit, for a just cause, their subjects of simple vows who produced a reasonable a formal message requesting something that is submitted to an authority to renounce their property except for what would be invited for their sustenance if they were to depart, thus assimilating their position to that of religious with solemn vows. These vary resulted in a blurring of the before clear distinction between "orders" and "congregations", since institutes that were founded as "congregations" began to have some members who had all three solemn vows or had members that took a solemn vow of poverty and simple vows of chastity and obedience.