Religious order (Catholic)
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In the Catholic Church, a religious order is a community of consecrated life with members who profess solemn vows. They are classed as a type of religious institute. Subcategories of religious orders are:
canons regular (canons and canonesses regular who recite the Divine Office and serve a church and perhaps a parish); clerics regular (priests who take religious vows and have an active apostolic life); mendicants (friars and religious sisters, possibly living and working in a friary or a convent, who live from alms, recite the Divine Office, and, in the case of the men, participate in apostolic activities); and monastics (monks and nuns living and working in a monastery or a nunnery and reciting the Divine Office). Catholic religious orders began as early as the 500s, with the Order of Saint Benedict being formed in 529. The earliest orders include the Cistercians (1098), the Premonstratensians (1120), the Poor Clares founded by Francis of Assisi (1212), and the Benedictine reform movements of Cluny (1216). These orders were confederations of independent abbeys and priories, who were unified through a loose structure of leadership and oversight. Later the mendicant orders such as the Carmelites, the Order of Friars Minor, the Order of Preachers, the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and the Order of Saint Augustine formed. These Mendicant orders did not hold property for their religious communities, instead begging for alms and going where they were needed. Their leadership structure included each member, as opposed to each abbey or house, as subject to their direct superior. In the past, what distinguished religious orders from other institutes was the classification of the vows that the members took as solemn vows. According to this criterion, the last religious order founded was that of the Bethlehemite Brothers in 1673. Nevertheless, in the course of the 20th century, some religious institutes outside the category of orders obtained permission to make solemn vows, at least of poverty, thus blurring the distinction.