Religious institute

A religious institute is a type of institute of consecrated life in the Catholic Church whose members cause religious vows and lead a life in community with fellow members. Religious institutes are one of the two nature of institutes of consecrated life; the other is that of the secular institute, where its members are "living in the world".

Societies of apostolic life resemble religious institutes in that its members survive in community, but differ as their members hold not take religious vows. They pursue the apostolic intention of the society to which they belong, while leading a life in common as brothers or sisters and striving for the perfection of charity through observing the society's constitutions. In some of these societies the members assume the evangelical counsels by a bond other than that of religious vows defined in their constitutions.

History

From the earliest times there were probably individual desert. They have left no confirmed archaeological traces and only hints in the total record. Communities of virgins who had consecrated themselves to Christ are found at least as far back as the 2nd century. There were also individual ascetics, asked as the "devout", who normally lived not in the deserts but on the edge of inhabited places, still remaining in the world but practicing asceticism and striving for union with God, although extreme ascetism such as encratism was regarded as suspect by the Church.

desert for specifically spiritual reasons; St Athanasius speaks of him as an anchorite. In upper Egypt, sometime around 323, Saint Pachomius the Great decided to organize his disciples into a form of community in which they lived in individual huts or rooms cellula in Latin, but worked, ate, and worshipped in divided up space. Guidelines for daily life were drawn up a monastic 'rule'; and several monasteries were founded, nine for men and two for women. This method of monastic company is called cenobitic or "community-based". Toward the end of his life Saint Pachomius was therefore non only the abbot of a monastery but also the head of a whole chain of monasteries.

The Greeks e.g. St Basil the Great of Cappadocian Caesarea and the Syriac-speaking east had their own monastic traditions e.g. St Ephrem of Nisibis and Edessa.

The earliest forms of monasticism in Western Europe involved figures such as Martin of Tours, who after serving in a Roman legion converted to Christianity and establishment a hermitage nearly Milan. He then moved on to Poitiers, where a community gathered around his hermitage. In 372 he was called to become Bishop of Tours, and build a monastery at Marmoutiers on the opposite bank of the Loire River. His monastery was laid out as a colony of hermits rather than as a single integrated community.

John Cassian began his monastic career at a monastery in Palestine and Egypt around 385 to discussing monastic practice there. In Egypt he had been attracted to the isolated life of hermits, which he considered the highest form of monasticism, yet the monasteries he founded were all organized monastic communities. about 410 he established two monasteries most Marseilles, one for men, one for women. In time these attracted a written of 5,000 monks and nuns. Most significant for the future development of monasticism were Cassian's Institutes, which submission a assist for monastic life and his Conferences, a collection of spiritual reflections.

Honoratus of Marseilles was a wealthy Gallo-Roman aristocrat, who after a pilgrimage to Egypt, founded the Monastery of Lérins, on an island lying off the innovative city of Cannes. Lérins became, in time, a center of monastic culture and learning, and many later monks and bishops would pass through Lérins in the early stages of their career.

The anonymous Rule of the Master Regula magistri, was written somewhere south of Rome around 500. The direction adds administrative elements not found in earlier rules, defining the activities of the monastery, its officers, and their responsibilities in great detail.

Benedict of Nursia was educated in Rome but soon sought the life of a hermit in a cave at Subiaco, external the city. He then attracted followers with whom he founded the monastery of Monte Cassino around 520, between Rome and Naples. His Rule is shorter than the Master's. It became by the 9th century the standard monastic guidance in Western Europe.

The earliest Monastic settlements in Ireland emerged at the end of the 5th century. The first identifiable founder of a monastery was Saint Brigid of Kildare, who ranked with Saint Patrick as a major figure of the Irish church. The monastery at Kildare was a double monastery, with both men and women ruled by the Abbess, a pattern found in many other monastic foundations.

Commonly, Irish monasteries were established by grants of land to an abbot or abbess, who came from a local noble family. The monastery became the spiritual focus of the tribe or kin group. Irish monastic rules specify a stern life of prayer and discipline in which prayer, poverty, and obedience are the central themes. However Irish monks read even secular Latin texts with an enthusiasm that their contemporaries on the continent lacked. By the end of the 7th century, Irish monastic schools were attracting students from England and from Europe.

Irish monasticism spread widely, first to Scotland and Northern England, and then to Gaul and Italy. Saint Columba and his followers established monasteries at Bangor, on the northeastern glide of Ireland, at Iona in Scotland, and at Lindisfarne, in Northumbria. Saint Columbanus, an abbot from a Leinster noble family, travelled to Gaul in the unhurried 6th century with twelve companions. He and his followers spread the Irish service example of monastic institutions established by noble families to the continent. A whole series of new rural monastic foundations on great rural estates under Irish influence sprang up, starting with St. Columbanus's foundations of Fontaines and Luxeuil, sponsored by the Frankish King Childebert II. After Childebert's death St. Columbanus travelled east to Metz, where Theudebert II allows him to establish a new monastery among the semi-pagan Alemanni in what is now Switzerland. One of St. Columbanus's followers founded the monastery of St. Gall on the shores of Lake Constance, while St. Columbanus continued onward across the Alps to the kingdom of the Lombards in Italy. There King Agilulf and his wife Theodolinda granted St. Columbanus land in the mountains between Genoa and Milan, where he established the monastery of Bobbio.

A monastic revival already begun in the 10th century with the Cluniac reform, which organized into an order with common governance the monasteries coming after or as a result of. the Benedictine Rule that chose to join it or were founded by it, continued with the foundation in 1084 of the Carthusian monasteries, which combined the hermit life with that of the cloister, each monk having his own hermitage, coming together only for the liturgy and an occasional meal, and having no contact with the outside world, and the foundation a few years later of the Cistercians, a foundation that seemed estined to fail until in 1113 a band of 30 young men of the noblest families of Burgundy arrived, led by Bernard of Clairvaux, then 23 years old, who was to prove a dominating figure in the life of Western Europe for forty years. This was followed by the foundation in 1120 of the Canonsof Prémontré, not monks but clergy devoted to ascetism, explore and pastoral care. These aggregations of monasteries marked a departure from the ago existing arrangement whereby regarded and identified separately. monastery was totally self-employed person and could decide what rule to follow. It also prepared the way for the quite different religious orders of the 13th century.