The Solemnity of Our Holy Father Augustine, which we recently celebrated on August 28th, is always a day of joy for the Church, and especially for us Norbertines. This year it carried a particular weight, since the Successor of St. Peter is himself an Augustinian friar. His presence on the Chair of Peter invites us to reflect more deeply on our Augustinian roots and to recall what it means that Norbertines are Augustinian canons regular.
Our Holy Father belongs to a mendicant order—an order in which members do not vow stability to a single house, but rather but profess vows in the order as a whole. Other friars of this sort are the Friars Preachers, known as Dominicans, and the Servants of Mary, known as Servites. All of these follow the Rule of St. Augustine of Hippo.
Yet the Rule of Augustine is far older and broader than the mendicant movement. More ancient orders also follow it, the largest of which is the Order of Prémontré, called the Norbertines after our founder, St. Norbert of Xanten. But Norbertines are not friars, nor are we monks. We are canons regular.
The distinction is important. A monk—whether Benedictine or Basilian—follows the Rule of St. Benedict or St. Basil. Though he may be ordained, his primary vocation is the monastic life itself: to live stability, prayer, and work in the cloister. Priesthood is not essential to his state. Monks may be ordained as their communities may need them to be, but it is not their first calling.
A canon regular, by contrast, is first of all an ordained cleric. He lives under a rule, and he lives in common with other clergy, precisely so that his priesthood may be strengthened by the discipline of a common life. In this sense, the monk comes to the priesthood from monastic life, while the canon comes to monastic life from the priesthood. The canon thus lives under a rule and in a monastery of clergy at the service of the faithful.
This way of life is most often shaped by the Rule of St. Augustine. At the turn of the fifth century, Augustine renewed the common life of the clergy, and this renewal spread throughout Roman North Africa, southern France, northern Italy, and eastern Spain. Originally, canons regular lived together with their bishops, making vows to the local church to which they belonged.
In the late eleventh century, Pope St. Gregory VII sought to restore this vision. He desired that all diocesan clergy live a common life as the context for their apostolic ministry—the vita apostolica. His reform succeeded in re-establishing celibacy, but it did not succeed in restoring the poverty and common property that were at the heart of Augustine’s vision.
Out of this desire arose new communities of clergy who longed to live the canonical ideal. The most notable of these was the Order of Prémontré, founded by St. Norbert. From its motherhouse in northern France, the Order spread widely across Europe and the Holy Land: from Latvia to Sicily, from Donegal to Hungary, from Cyprus to Jerusalem itself. Like other canonical communities of the twelfth century, the Norbertines were marked by the ideals of the Crusades and by a devotion to the liturgical traditions of the holy places.
Today, the Norbertines of St. Michael’s Abbey—and Norbertines everywhere—understand our vocation as a demanding religious observance within the monastery, lived in the context of service to the local diocesan Church. At the same time, we retain exemption from the direct authority of the local bishop in matters concerning our common observance and identity, even while serving faithfully under his pastoral authority.
St. Norbert himself had preferred Augustine’s original model: a clerical community headed by the bishop, supplying the priests for the diocese. This was realized in Magdeburg and in several other German sees, such as Brandenburg. But most secular clergy resisted this radical identification of diocesan vocation with common life, wishing instead to maintain private property and independence. For this reason, communities of canons regular came to be governed not by bishops but by their own provosts or abbots—a structure later codified in canon law as exemption.
Canons regular engage in every apostolate open to diocesan priests, but center their clerical life around the solemn, daily celebration of the Mass and Divine Office in common. Such a life requires a stable community. Practically speaking, the Order of Prémontré—the Norbertines—exists to express the priestly and apostolic life in all its fullness, after the pattern of the original twelve apostles themselves.
The Norbertines of St. Michael’s Abbey descend from these ancient roots: from Jerusalem, through Prémontré in France, to western Hungary, and at last to southern California. Today in Silverado Canyon, the vita apostolica continues to flourish in an abbey of more than one hundred confreres.
