[4] In the Roman Catholic Church, a rector is a person who holds the office of presiding over an ecclesiastical institution.
They are not the property of his vicar, who is not an office-holder but an employee, remunerated by a stipend, i.e. a salary, payable by his employer the rector.
In some religious congregations of priests, rector is the title of the local superior of a house or community of the order.
There are some other uses of this title, such as for residence hall directors, such as Father George Rozum CSC, at the University of Notre Dame which were once (and to some extent still are) run in a seminary-like fashion.
[4][a] Permanent rector is an obsolete term used in the United States prior to the codification of the 1917 Code of Canon Law.
Canon Law grants a type of tenure to pastors (parochus) of parishes, giving them certain rights against arbitrary removal by the bishop of their diocese.
A perpetual curate held the cure of souls in an area which had not yet been formally or legally constituted as a parish, and received neither greater nor lesser tithes, but only a small stipend in return for his duties.
This is called chancel repair liability, and affects institutional, corporate and private owners of land once owned by around 5,200 churches in England and Wales.
However, in some dioceses of the Anglican Church of Canada rectors are officially licensed as incumbents to express the diocesan polity of employment of clergy.
In the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, the "rector" is the priest elected to head a self-supporting parish.
However, some diocesan canons do define "vicar" as the priest-in-charge of a mission; and "curate" is often used for assistants, being entirely analogous to the English situation.