section_path: Orders, groups, and societies/Canons Regular
section_name: Canons Regular
paragraph_text: Canons Regular
  
  The Canons Regular follow the more ancient form of religious life which developed toward the end of the first millennium and thus predates the founding of the friars. They represent a clerical adaptation of monastic life, as it grew out of an attempt to organize communities of clerics to a more dedicated way of life, as St. Augustine himself had done. Historically it paralleled the lay movement of monasticism or the eremitical life from which the friars were later to develop. In their tradition, the canons added the commitment of religious vows to their primary vocation of pastoral care. As the canons became independent of the diocesan structures, they came to form their own monastic communities. Orders of Augustine canons regular include the Canons Regular of Premontre, the Canons Regular of the Lateran, the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross and Canons Regular of St. Augustine (CRSA).