At the age of twenty-four he entered the priesthood, becoming one of two curates under the incumbent of Pingjum, a village near his birthplace.
The Roman Catholic chaplains are classed as parish priests, curates and assistants, and are subject to an army Vicar Apostolic. In war, at an army headquarters there are a "field-rabbi," a "military imam," an evangelical minister, as well as the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
The term is used in this general sense in certain rubrics of the English Book of Common Prayer, in which it is applied equally to rectors and vicars as to perpetual curates.
Formerly Brazil constituted an ecclesiastical province under the metropolitan jurisdiction of an archbishop residing at Bahia, with 11 suffragan bishops, 12 vicars-general and about 2000 curates.
Early in Elizabeth's reign, however, he wrote a larger catechism, to serve as a statement of Protestant principles; it was printed in 1570, and in the same year appeared his "middle" catechism, designed it would seem for the instruction of "simple curates."