CURATE (from the Latin curare, to take care of), properly a presbyter who has the cure of souls within a parish, being the Latin equivalent of the Greek parochus. The term curate is used in this general sense in certain rubrics of the Anglican Prayer Book, in which it is applied equally to rectors and vicars as to perpetual curates. In a more limited sense it is applied in the Church of England to the incumbent of a parish who has no endowment of tithes, as distinguished from a perpetual vicar, who has an endowment of small tithes, which are for that reason sometimes styled vicarial tithes. The origin of such unendowed curacies is traceable to the fact that benefices were sometimes granted to religious houses pleno jure, and with liberty for them to provide for the cure; and when such appropriations were transferred to lay persons, being unable to serve themselves, the appropriators were required to nominate a clerk in full orders to the ordinary for his licence to serve the cure. Such curates, being not removable at the pleasure of the appropriators, but only on due revocation of the licence of the ordinary, came to be entitled perpetual curates. The term “curate” in the present day is almost exclusively used to signify a clerk who is assistant to an incumbent; and a clerk in deacon’s orders is competent to be licensed by a bishop to the office of such assistant curate. The consequence of this misuse of the term “curate” has been that the title of “perpetual curate” has fallen into desuetude in the Anglican Church, some inconvenience being found to result from the indiscriminate application of the term “curate,” in the case of perpetual curacies, both to the incumbent of the parish and to his assistant curate, and an Act of Parliament (31 and 32 Viet, ...