While Catholics may be most familiar with the secular or diocesan priest of their local parish, the Catholic clergy who live the Gospel through prayer and ministry also includes monks and friars who belong to religious orders.
All Catholic priests are called to be obedient to their superiors. Diocesan priests of most Catholic parishes obey their bishop, while religious priests are under the authority and responsibility of the abbot or provincial of their order.
All priests promise to pray the Divine Office and to imitate the simplicity and celibacy of Jesus. Priests of religious orders make additional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience according to the rule and charism of their founder.
The terms “monk” and “friar” are not interchangeable. Although they have many similarities, Catholic friars and monks are unique and should be distinguished from one another.
Catholic monks belong to orders including the Benedictines, Carthusians, and Cistercians or Trappists. For these men, a hidden and contemplative life secluded from the world allows them to more freely pursue God.
The monastic life is one of prayer, study, and work in a monastery, priory, or abbey. Monks spend their whole life in one place, supporting themselves by producing and selling various items.
Belonging to mendicant orders like the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Carmelites, Catholic friars depend on the generosity of others, begging to support themselves.
Friars live in friaries or fraternities but go out to meet people where they are. As itinerant preachers they share the Gospel with different people, in different places, at different times.
Some monks and friars choose not to be ordained as priests but to serve their orders as religious brothers, working in schools or in missions instead of at the altar.
The Catholic Church has different types of priests:
Different ways of living and preaching the Gospel:
Diocesan priests and religious priests work hand-in-hand:
“They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world. And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.”
John 17: 16-19
Friars and monks are different:
Friar means brother. Monk means alone:
“From the God-given seed of the counsels a wonderful and wide-spreading tree has grown up in the field of the Lord, branching out into various forms of the religious life lived in solitude or in community. Different religious families have come into existence in which spiritual resources are multiplied for the progress in holiness of their members and for the good of the entire Body of Christ.”
Catechism of the Catholic Church 917
The rich diversity of religious life:
A variety of religious traditions and charisms:
The West has also known, down the centuries, a variety of other expressions of religious life, in which countless persons, renouncing the world, have consecrated themselves to God through the public profession of the evangelical counsels in accordance with a specific charism and in a stable form of common life, for the sake of carrying out different forms of apostolic service to the People of God. Thus there arose the different families of Canons Regular, the Mendicant Orders, the Clerics Regular and in general the Religious Congregations of men and women devoted to apostolic and missionary activity and to the many different works inspired by Christian charity. This is a splendid and varied testimony, reflecting the multiplicity of gifts bestowed by God on founders and foundresses who, in openness to the working of the Holy Spirit, successfully interpreted the signs of the times and responded wisely to new needs. Following in their footsteps, many other people have sought by word and deed to embody the Gospel in their own lives, bringing anew to their own times the living presence of Jesus, the Consecrated One par excellence, the One sent by the Father. In every age consecrated men and women must continue to be images of Christ the Lord, fostering through prayer a profound communion of mind with Him, so that their whole lives may be penetrated by an apostolic spirit and their apostolic work with contemplation.
Pope John Paul II, Vita Consecrata, 25 March 1996
Seeking a more rigorous expression of Christianity:
Deciding to live like Jesus:
The Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of the Catholic Church
The Church always comes first:
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