The Canons Regular are religious, most of them priests, who live in community according to the Rule of St Augustine, attached to a monastery or church, and dedicated to the liturgy and the apostolate. Their lives comprise a triptych: life in common, the contemplative life and apostolic life.

The common life is lived in the spirit of the community of the apostles, so dear to Saint Augustine, the famous bishop of Hippo. Members of that community, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, "had but one heart and one soul... everything was held in common between them" (Acts 4,32). The primacy of theological and fraternal charity is a fundamental "note" of our life in the context where, as everybody knows, unity is so fragile in all institutions.

- Their own vocation -

The liturgy, the Divine Office, is part of immemorial tradition. Pope John Paul II, speaking to the Confederation of Canons in 1984, reminded them: "You are charged, as canons, with the solemn divine worship of the Church, which consists mainly of the choral celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours and the Eucharist, remembering that the liturgy is the summit to which the action of the Church tends, and at the same time, the source from which it derives all its powers."

As contemplatives, the Canons Regular also have to devote themselves to study so that they can “preach the Kingdom of God". The parish apostolate around their church is a privileged form of their mission, whenever that is possible, by which they contribute strongly to the formation of the Christian fabric of society. But they are available for any sort of work. Who could be unaware of the hospitaller Canons of the Great Saint Bernard, or the work of the late Father Werenfried van Straaten, Canon of Prémontré and founder of Aid to the Church in Need? There is also the educational work of the Canonesses of Our Lady, founded by St Pierre Fourrier and Blessed Alix Le Clerc.