HOLY ORDERS, the several ranks of the ministry of a church; also the power or author ity to exercise that ministry.
In the Roman Catholic Church, Holy Orders is one of the sacraments and there are seven orders of the ministry, viz.: priesthood, deacon ate, and sub-deaconate: these are the greater or sacred orders; and the four minor orders of lector, acolyte, exorcist, and doorkeeper. Usually the episcopate is classed, not as a separate order, but as the completion and extension of the priesthood. Though every candidate for the priesthood is inducted into the four minor orders and the sub-deaconate and deaconate before he receives priestly ordination, it hap pens very seldom that a man enters any of those inferior orders intending to remain there in: they are simply steps to the priesthood.
In the Oriental churches, both those in com munion with the Roman See—as the Greek Uniate, the Maronite, the United Armenian, etc., and those which are separated from Rome by schism or by heresy, the number of orders is less than in the Latin Church; in all the fore going churches only four orders or, counting the episcopate as a distinct order, five orders are recognized; those of bishop, priest, deacon and lector: and of these the first three, at least, are held to be of divine institution and sacra mental.
By the Anglican Church and the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States three orders are recognized: those of bishops, priests and deacons but in the 25th of the Articles of Religion those orders are expressly declared to be no sacrament generally recognized as valid by the Church of Rome; and when a priest of any of those churches is received into the Roman Catholic Church he is still regarded as a priest: but an Anglican or a Protestant Episcopal Minister enters the Latin Church as a simple layman even though he were in Anglicanism a bishop; for Anglican orders have ever been held by Rome to be invalid.
Generally, the non-episcopal churches, such as the Presbyterian and Lutheran, recognize but one order as having valid scriptural au thority, that of the teaching presbyter. Congre gationalists and Baptists recognize their pastors as members set apart • for the functions of ministry, but not as setting up any essential dif ference between them and laymen.