MEDIEVAL DEVOTION TO MARY AMONG THE CARMELITES

Eamon R. Carroll, O.Carm.^*

The word Carmel virtually defines the religious family that calls itself the Carmelite Order. It is a geographical designation (as in also Carthusian and Cistercian), not a person’s name like Francis, Dominic and the Servite Seven Holy Founders. In the Church’s calendar, Carmel is one of three Marian sites celebrated liturgically, along with Lourdes and St. Mary Major. It may be asked: Who founded the Carmelites on Mount Carmel? There is no easy answer, though some names have been suggested, beginning with the letter B—Brocard, Berthold, . . .What is known is that during the Crusades in the late eleven-hundreds some Europeans settled as hermits on Mount Carmel, in the land where the Savior had lived. Mount Carmel, a promontory facing the Mediterranean, near the city of Haifa, was biblically sacred to the memory of Elijah and his followers. Christians for centuries had chosen to live lives of prayer and penance in this remote site. A good trivia question would be: What are the existing survivors of the Latin Kingdom of the Crusades? Actually, there are three: first, the Commissariat of the Holy Land, still in the care of the Franciscans (under the embattled conditions of waning Christian and Catholic witness in the state of Israel); second, the Knights of Malta (with full title "Sovereign Military Order of the Hospital of St. John, of Rhodes and of Malta"), a religious and military order dating from the eleventh century; and third, the Order of Carmel.

The bond between devotion to Mary and Mount Carmel is reflected well in the entrance prayer of the Carmelite liturgy for July 16, "Lord God, you willed that the Order of Carmel should be named in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of your Son. Through her prayers as we honor her today bring us to your holy mountain, Christ our Lord . . . (emphasis added)." This prayer evokes the physical Carmel, a reference to the holy mountain who is Christ himself, and evokes the mystical imagery of the "ascent of Mt. Carmel," as in the writings of St. John the Cross. The English translation of this collect in the current Roman Sacramentary unfortunately misses the significant allusion to the holy mountain, a point Pope John Paul II has underscored more than once, most recently in his letter to the Carmelite superior generals for the Carmelite Marian Year commemorating the 750th anniversary of the Scapular (March 25, 2001).

For the origins of Carmelite devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, we must return to the heights of Carmel. The patriarch of Jerusalem, then resident at Acre, the Italian-born St. Albert of Avogadro, acceded to the request of the hermits on Mt. Carmel for approval of their way of life, some time between 1206-1214 (dates he was patriarch); his murder, in 1214, is an event recalled on September 17 in the Carmelite calendar. In 1247 Pope Innocent IV gave the Church’s approval.¹ 

^* Father Eamon R. Carroll, O.Carm., is professor emeritus of theology at Loyola University (Chicago) and a member of the faculty of the International Marian Research Institute of the University of Dayton.

¹ On July 25-28, 2001, the Carmelite Institute in Washington, D.C., embracing both branches of the Order, sponsored a conference in San Antonio, Texas, on the "Rule of Carmel: A Mystical Way." Speakers included the two Generals: Joseph Chalmers, O.Carm., and Camilo Maccise, O.C.D. A similar Mariological seminar was held in Sassone/Rome (June 14-21, 2001), on the Order’s Marian patrimony.