What is a Third Order ?
“I’m a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic”
What is your first reaction on hearing those words?
If your instinctive response is “Um, what?” you’re like most people, even among well-informed Catholics!
Many, both inside and outside the Church, are familiar with friars and nuns in their distinctive habits.
On the other hand, “Third Orders” can be more difficult to recognize, and still more to explain.
To be lay and also belong to a religious order might seem at first like a contradiction, as though one were trying to live in a “halfway house” between lay life and vowed religious life.
From within, however, the reality is completely different.
Members of Third Orders—better known today as lay Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites, etc.—are true lay people; they own property, work at their jobs, marry and raise families, and all the things that ordinary people do.
At the same time, they are true members of their Orders insofar as their life is shaped, through a permanent commitment, by the spirituality and charism of the Order.
They thus enable the mission of the Order to reach their various spheres of influence in the world—their homes, workplaces, circles of friends—in ways that would often not be accessible to priests or habited religious.
Like beams of all colors streaming from a single prism, the various Orders pursue God’s glory and the sanctification of souls by means of a variety of charisms.