Carta Caritatis

In terms of canon law, the Carta Caritatis is a document of unprecedented significance, since it introduced the systematic regulations that made a group of monks at Cîteaux into the first religious order in Church history.

The name Carta Caritatis is often misunderstood as referring to mystical unions or the ties of friendship in the monastic community.

Around 1100 Pope Urban II asked Robert to return to Molesme and institute reform of the community.

[3] The Carta orders relations about several Cistercian monasteries, arranging them according to filiation, thus conceptualizing them as a series of mother and daughter abbeys in one big family tree.

Its success is based on two main legislative and administrative methods: frequent Visitation and an annual General Chapter in Cîteaux, the mother abbey for all the Cistercian world.

Annual general chapters were portrayed there as exemplary and made obligatory for new monastic orders, which were multiplying rapidly at the time.