Vicar (Anglicanism)

Vicar

vicar wearing choir dress
Occupation
Names	vicar, rector, parson
Occupation type	vocation
Activity sectors	parish ministry within the Church of England
Description
Competencies	spirituality, personality and character, relationships, leadership and collaboration, faith, mission and evangelism, quality of mind
Education required	ministerial training, typically at degree level, followed by experience as a curate
Related jobs	bishop, priest in charge, curate

Vicar is the title given to certain parish priests in the Church of England. It has played a significant role in Anglican Church organisation in ways that are different from other Christian denominations. The title is very old and arises from the medieval situation where priests were appointed either by a secular lord, by a bishop or by a religious foundation. Wherever there is a vicar he shares the benefice with a rector (usually non-resident) to whom the great tithes were paid. Vicar derives from the Latin "vicarius" meaning a substitute.

Historically, Anglican parish priests were divided into rectors, vicars and (rarely) perpetual curates. These were distinguished according to the way in which they were appointed and remunerated. The church was supported by tithes: taxes (traditionally of ten percent) levied on the personal and agricultural output of the parish.

Parish churches in England originated as the personal property of (predominantly lay) patrons; who had the right to appoint and dismiss the parish priest, to receive an entrance fee on appointment, and to charge an annual rent thereafter. By the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century, almost all these rights were extinguished for lay patrons, who were able to retain the sole residual power to nominate the rector to a benefice, and many lay notables thereupon gave up parish churches into the ownership of religious houses; who were less inhibited by canon law from extracting fees and rents from rectors, and who could moreover petition for exemption from most such laws by papal dispensation. Around 40% of rectories in England passed into monastic possession. Initially it had not been unusual for religious houses in possession of rectories also to assume the capability to collect tithe and glebe income for themselves, but this practice was banned by the decrees of the Lateran Council of 1215. Thereafter, over the medieval period, monasteries and priories continually sought papal exemption from the Council's decrees, so as to be able to appropriate the income of rectoral benefices to their own use. However, from the 13th century onwards, English diocesan bishops successfully established the principle that only the glebe and greater tithes could be appropriated by monastic patrons in this manner; sufficient lesser tithes had to remain within the parochial benefice to ensure a competent living; the incumbent of which thenceforward carried the title of vicar. By 1535, of 8,838 rectories in England, 3,307 had thus been appropriated with vicarages; but at this late date, a small sub-set of vicarages in monastic ownership were not being served by beneficed clergy at all. In almost all such instances, these were parish churches in the ownership of houses of Augustinian or Premonstratensian canons, orders whose rules required them to provide parochial worship within their conventual churches; for the most part as chapels of ease of a more distant parish church. From the mid-14th century onwards the canons were able to exploit their hybrid status to justify petitions for papal privileges of appropriation, allowing them to fill vicarages in their possession either from among their own number, or from secular stipendiary priests removable at will; arrangements which corresponded to those for their chapels of ease.