Familiar
A familiare (plural: the familiare) is the name given to a member of an institute of familiars. These are lay members of religious orders who are “in the world” outside the monastery , who want to live the spirituality of the respective order in their respective living conditions in everyday life and who support the order within the scope of their possibilities.
The Teutonic Order in particular calls its lay members familiars (abbreviation: FamOT), but more recent foundings, such as the friends of the German Orthodox Trinity Monastery in Buchhagen , also use this term.
Other orders have a so-called third order instead of an institute of familiars or the possibility of joining a monastery as an oblate .