Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Religious Order

Apostolic Union of Secular Priests

Catholic Religious Orders and Congregations
Origin from 1862

The Apostolic Union of Secular Priests is an association of Roman Catholic secular priests, meaning priests who are not monastics and do not belong to a religious institute. The modern association revives the seventeenth-century Institutum clericorum saecularium in communi viventium, founded in 1640 by Bartholomew Holzhauser and known in its own day as the Bartholomites or United Brethren, whose members were sometimes called Communists for their communitarian principles; that original institute had died out by the end of the 1700s, but its rule of life guided the 1862 reorganization that established the present-day Apostolic Union, intended to ease the isolation of priests scattered without a community through a uniform rule of life. Pope Pius X placed the union under his special protection in 1903, and it was reorganized again in France in 1913 under Canon Lebeurier. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Belief
Defining Doctrinal Position
Catholic Apostolic Magisterial Authority 2
Practice
Liturgical Language
The vernacular 2
Liturgical Language
Latin 2
Organisation
Ordination
Holy Orders / Apostolic Succession 2
Classification
Apostolate
Preaching 2
Who may join
Ordained or Clergy Only 2
Origins
Origin Period
from 1862 1
Status
Status Today
Living tradition, practised today 1
Connections

Uses Liturgical Language

Latin, Languages

Entity-backed identity for the language enum value this record already carries, resolved to the live divinity language entity that value names, per the phase 3 entity-backed browse bucket conversion (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decisions 2026-09-28, w-bucketconv-divlang2-0929, mapping corrected). The language fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the record unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the value already names.

Entity-backed identity for the language enum value this record already carries, resolved to the live divinity language entity that value names, per the phase 3 entity-backed browse bucket conversion (docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md, owner decisions 2026-09-28, w-bucketconv-divlang2-0929, mapping corrected). The language fact itself, with its own citation, stays on the record unchanged; this relationship only adds the durable entity identity the value already names.

Sources
1. Apostolic Union of Secular Priests (Wikipedia)
2. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History
Alexander Knysh, Brill
Wikidata: Apostolic Union of Secular Priests
Wikidata Q1202196, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.