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An abbey is a type of monastery used by members of a religious order under the governance of an abbot or abbess. Abbeys provide a complex of buildings and land for religious activities, work, and housing of Christian monks and nuns .
A monastery is a building or complex of buildings comprising the domestic quarters and workplaces of monastics, monks or nuns, whether living in communities or alone ().A monastery generally includes a place reserved for prayer which may be a chapel, church, or temple, and may also serve as an oratory, or in the case of communities anything from a single building housing only one senior and ...
The Benedictines and their offshoots (Cistercians and Trappists among them), the Premonstratensians, and the military orders distinguish between conventual and simple or obedientiary priories. Conventual priories are those autonomous houses that have no abbots , either because the canonically required number of twelve monks has not yet been ...
An Obedientiary Prior heads a monastery created as a satellite of an abbey. When an abbey becomes overlarge, or when there is need of a monastery in a new area, the abbot may appoint a group of monks under a prior to begin a new foundation, which remains a dependency of the mother abbey until such time as it is large and stable enough to become ...
Unlike an abbey, a convent is not placed under the responsibility of an abbot or an abbess, but of a superior or prior. In modern English usage, since about the 19th century, the term convent almost invariably refers to a community of women, [3] while monastery and friary are used for communities of men.
The abbey is a species of "exempt religious" in that it is, for the most part, answerable to the pope, or to the abbot primate, rather than to the local bishop. The abbot wears the same habit as his fellow monks, though by tradition he adds to it a pectoral cross.
Benedictine monks, for instance, have often staffed parishes and been allowed to leave monastery confines. Although the English word nun is often used to describe all Christian women who have joined religious institutes, strictly speaking, women are referred to as nuns only when they live in papal enclosure; otherwise, they are religious ...
Minster is an honorific title given to particular churches in England, most notably York Minster in Yorkshire, Westminster Abbey in London and Southwell Minster in Nottinghamshire. The term minster is first found in royal foundation charters of the 7th century, when it designated any settlement of clergy living a communal life and endowed by ...