The popes also supervised the regular clergy, which included the religious orders of monks, canons regular (secular clergy who lived collegiately according to a rule), and mendicants. Each of these orders had a superior, who was advised by a chapter general that comprised representatives of the religious houses of the order. Orders, like dioceses, were organized according to regions, each having a regional superior and holding regional chapters. Individual religious houses were headed by an abbot or abbess (the mendicant orders had a slightly different organization) and administered by a chancellor and chamberlain. Provosts and deans usually supervised the property of each house.

In the 12th century, new devotional movements (movements devoted to Jesus or the saints) led to outbursts of religious dissent (with new forms of ecclesiastical discipline devised to control them) and equally passionate expressions of orthodox devotion. Although monasticism was by then an old institution, one of the great themes of the century was the search for the apostolic life as monks, canons, and laypeople might live it. The canons regular were one result of this movement, as were new monastic orders, particularly the Cistercian Order. But the most dynamic movement was that of the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, founded in the early 13th century.

The Order of Friars Minor, founded by the layman Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) to minister to the spiritual needs of the cities, spread widely and rapidly, as did the Order of Preachers, founded by the canon of Osma, Dominic of Guzmán (c. 1170–1221). These and other devotional movements of laypeople were supported by Pope Innocent III and his successors. The mendicant orders greatly influenced popular piety, because they specialized in preaching in new churches that were built to hold large crowds. Indeed, during this time the sermon came into its own as the most effective mass medium in Europe. The mendicants also increased devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the infant or crucified and suffering Jesus, rather than to the figure of Jesus as regal and remote.

Other forms of devotional life took shape during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries. The Cistercian Order, for example, instituted the status of lay brother, who was usually an adult layman who retired from the world to undertake the management of monastic resources. Still other members of the laity retired to the sequestered life of hermits and recluses, usually under the supervision of a chaplain.

During the 13th and 14th centuries, devotional movements arose that were neither monastic nor clerical in any other sense. The most notable of these was the Beguines, an order of devout women (and occasionally, but more rarely, men, who lived in all-male communities and were called Beghards) who lived together in devotional communities within towns, especially in the Low Countries and the Rhineland, followed no rule, and took no vow. They worked in the towns but lived collectively and might leave for marriage or another form of life at any time. Some of the most important devotional literature of the period was written by and for Beguines.

The vast movements of reform, ecclesiastical organization, and pastoral care of the 12th and 13th centuries reached their greatest intensity in the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216). Lothar of Segni, as he was originally known, was the son of a landholding noble family outside Rome; he was educated in the schools of Paris and attached to the Roman Curia in 1187. Innocent issued the strongest and most tightly argued claims for papal authority, and he launched Crusades and instituted the office of papal judge-delegate to combat clerical crimes and heterodox belief. He also supported the new mendicant orders, paid particular attention to the needs of popular devotion, reformed and disciplined the Curia, and assembled the fourth Lateran Council in November 1215. Innocent came as close to realizing the ideals of reform and renewal in ecclesiological practice as any pope before or since.

The organization of normative religion, the formal rules and norms of practice in the faith, was intended to give regularity and order to lived religion. Daily religious life was characterized by the acceptance of tradition and authority and by belief in the saints as patrons of local communities and belief in the parish priest as a conveyor of grace by virtue of his sacramental powers (conferred by ordination) and his legal powers (conferred by the bishop). During the 12th century, institutional structures for official acts of canonization were established, but the enthusiasm for the saints remained an important part of both popular devotion and the official cult of the saints (the system of religious belief and ritual surrounding the saints). The cult of the saints was celebrated by clergy and laity in the observance of feast days and processions, the veneration of saints’ relics, pilgrimages to saints’ shrines, and the rituals of death and burial near the graves of saints. The liturgical dimension of pastoral care regulated the major events of the day, week, season, and Christian year, according to whose rhythms everyone lived. Priests blessed harvests, animals, and ships and liturgically interceded in the face of natural or man-made disasters.

Religious devotion strengthened the presence of normative religion in marriage and the family, the sacred character of the local community and the territorial monarchy, and the moral rules by which lay affairs were conducted. The fourth Lateran Council largely institutionalized the work of the 12th-century moral theologians at Paris, who had begun to apply the principles of doctrine and canon law to the lives of their contemporaries.