Carmelites

“ After a time however they began to combine together, and to live in edifices specially constructed for their use, and for the last thousand years the Carmelites have constituted a well known and numerous religious order, having spread from their original seat and centre to every part of Europe, and taken a very active and important part in the ecclesiastical affairs of modern times. ”

“ The Carmelites, or White Friars, pretended to be of great antiquity, and were originally established at Mount Carmel, from whence they were driven by the Saracens about the year 1238. They were brought into England in 1244, and settled first at Alnwick in Northumberland, and at Ailesford in Kent.
About the date (or a little before) of our poem, the Carmelites appear to have been very active in asserting in a boasting manner the superiority of their order over the others. ”

“ Thus was founded the Order of Barefooted Carmelites, a body of priests and nuns, who have in their peculiar way accomplished very much for charity, gentleness, and self-help in the world, and whose schools and convents have been instituted in all parts of the earth. ”

“ Every religious order of the Roman Church prides itself on the antiquity of its origin, and the traditions of the Carmelites for a long time carried back the history of their society to a very remote period indeed—not merely to the Christian era, but from the time of Christ and the apostles back to Elijah, and from Elijah to Enoch. ”

“ Of a Carmelite monk who came to preach at a village and after his sermon, he went to dine with a lady, and how he stuffed out his gown, as you will hear.
It is the custom of all countries for religious mendicants—Jacobins, Cordeliers, Carmelites, and Augustinians—to go through all the towns and villages, preaching against vice, and exalting and praising virtue.
It happened once that a Carmelite, from the convent of Arras, arrived one Sunday morning, at Libers, a pretty, little town of Artois, to preach—which he could do piously and eloquently, for he was a learned man and a good orator. ”

“ The Discalced Carmelites spread rapidly all over Catholic Europe, and then to Spanish America and the East, especially India and Persia, in which lands they have carried on to this day extensive missionary undertakings. Both observances suffered severely from the various revolutions, but they both still exist, the Discalced being by far the most numerous and thriving. There are in all some 2000 Carmelite friars, and the nuns are much more numerous. In England and Ireland there are houses, both of men and of women, belonging to each observance. ”

“ The Carmelites have every reason to hope for the beatification of their aged Prioress, and among the nuns of the Perpetual Adoration is one who has recently received the ineffable grace of the vulnus divinum. ”

“ I will take my oath that we shall find a good Carmelite there, who will give the Spanish gentleman Christian burial in a grave somewhere on the gardener's premises."
"You are too much of a Huguenot, Adamas," said Monsieur d'Ars. "The Carmelites are not such dissolute fellows as you imply."
"I say no evil of them, messire; I am speaking of a single one, whom I know, and who has nothing of the monk except the frock and the paternosters. It is Jean le Clope, who followed monsieur le marquis to the war, and for whom monsieur le marquis procured admission to the convent as a disabled veteran." ”

“ The historical origin of the Carmelites must be placed at the middle of the 12th century, when a crusader from Calabria, named Berthold, and ten companions established themselves as hermits near the cave of Elias on Mount Carmel. A Greek monk, Phocas, who visited the Holy Land in 1185, gives an account of them, and says that the ruins of an ancient building existed on Mount Carmel; but though it is likely enough that there had previously been Christian monks and hermits on the spot, it is impossible to place the beginning of the Carmelite institute before Berthold. ”

“ Many strange legends had gone to weave round the Convent of the Carmelites—so long the centre of fashionable Catholicism—an atmosphere of romantic mystery.
Tradition taught that the order had been founded on the summit of Mount Carmel by Elias himself. Its earliest members were the mysterious Essenes, but they were converted to Christianity by Saint Peter’s Pentecostal sermon, and built on the mountain a chapel to the Blessed Virgin Mary, she herself becoming a member of their order. ”

“ The good Carmelites, too, if our self-pride did not greatly mislead us, marked this day with a white stone; and long after the pursuits and interests of a busier life have dimmed its recollections with the majority of their guests, will continue to treasure every incident of their visit.
My leave-taking of the good monks of Jesi was soon followed by a long farewell to Ancona and its kindly people. ”

“ When the Revolution broke out, Compiègne suffered like other towns; some of its churches were destroyed, others pillaged; the Carmelites, whose convent had been the prayerful retreat of so many queens of France, were imprisoned in the Conciergerie, after appearing before Fouquier Tinville on a charge of having had arms concealed in their cellars. To this preposterous accusation, Mère Térèse de S. Augustin, their superioress, drawing a crucifix from her breast, answered calmly: “Behold our only arms! They have never inspired fear but to the wicked.” ”

“ From the fact that those of the reform wore sandals in place of shoes and stockings, they have come to be called the Discalced, or bare-footed, Carmelites, also Teresians, in distinction to the Calced or older branch of the order. In 1580 the reformed monasteries were made a separate province under the general of the order, and in 1593 this province was made by papal act an independent order with its own general and government, so that there are now two distinct orders of Carmelites. ”

“ The Carmelites were divided into two main branches, the Calced and the Discalced; the Franciscans were divided into three main bodies, the Conventuals, the Observants, and the Capuchins; the Dominicans made various efforts to restore the ancient discipline especially from about the beginning of the fifteenth century; while many of the Augustinians who were determined on reform established new congregations, as for example, the Discalced Augustinian Hermits, who spread themselves over France, Spain, and Portugal. ”

“ Carmelites, a monastic order, originally an association of hermits on Mount Carmel, at length mendicant, called the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, i. e. the Virgin, in consecration to whom it was founded by a pilgrim of the name Berthold, a Calabrian, in 1156. The Order is said to have existed from the days of Elijah.
Carmen Sylva, the nom-de-plume of Elizabeth, queen of Roumania; lost an only child, and took to literature for consolation; has taken an active interest in the elevation and welfare of her sex ”

“ In accordance with this desire, at the age of twenty years, she entered the convent of Carmelites, and chose as her life work the reforming of the order of Mount Carmel, as well as the establishment of a number of convents for men. ”

“ In point of fact, their particular function is not at all to bury themselves under the accumulated dust of ages, nor even to accept in substitution the sins and woes of others as the Orders of pure mortification do—the Carmelites and the Poor Clares. ”

“ Entering the Carmelites in 1563, he was professed a year later and sent to the great University of Salamanca. He was ordained in 1567 but, shrinking from the apostolate of a priest in the world, considered entering the Carthusians, a hermitical order. ”

“ To cope with existing evils Eugenius IV. approved in 1431 of a rule notably milder than that of 1247, but many houses clung to the earlier rule; thus arose among the Carmelites the same division into “observants” and “conventuals” that wrought such mischief among the Franciscans. During the 15th and 16th centuries various attempts at reform arose, as among other orders, and resulted in the formation of semi-independent congregations owing a titular obedience to the general of the order. ”

“ Another remarkable instance of the active and [Pg 83] energizing powers of the Church of God, unimpaired and uncrippled, may be gathered from the record which follows of the sudden and effectual cure of Françoise-Geneviève-Philippe, which took place in the church of the Carmelites of Pontoise on the 16th of July, 1784, upon the Festival of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. ”

“ The bells of the Carmelites, on the north side of the city, of the Dominicans on the south, of the Franciscans in the Grassmarket, and other large establishments, were all ringing for morning mass, when the cavalcade returned; and Roland, sick at heart, and dispirited, without bidding adieu to the king (who with his company passed on to prayer in the abbey church) , dismounted at the door of his own lodgings, and throwing the bridle of his horse to his servant, demanded breakfast, for he was in too furious a mood to attend mass. ”

“ The prestige which the order of barefooted Carmelites enjoys in all Catholic countries is so great that the most powerful influences will be invoked, and possibly not invoked in vain, in their favor. Strong articles have already appeared on the subject in the Continental press of Europe. ”

“ The Carmelites and Augustinian hermits won recognition after a long struggle, and became established Orders, forming, with the Franciscans and Dominicans, the four Mendicant religions. Others, less reputable, or more independent in spirit, were condemned, and when they refused to disband they were treated as rebels and heretics. In the tension of the spiritual atmosphere, any man who would devise and put in practice a method of life assimilating him most nearly to the brutes would not fail to find admirers and followers ”

“ The Carmelites derive their pedigree, in regular succession, from the prophet Elijah, (see the Theses of Beziers, A.D. 1682, in Bayle’s Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, Oeuvres, tom. i. p. 82, &c., and the prolix irony of the Ordres Monastiques, an anonymous work, tom. i. p. 1-433, Berlin, 1751.) Rome, and the inquisition of Spain, silenced the profane criticism of the Jesuits of Flanders, (Helyot, Hist. des Ordres Monastiques, tom. i. p. 282-300,) and the statue of Elijah, the Carmelite, has been erected in the church of St. Peter, (Voyages du P. Labat tom. iii. p. 87.) ”

“ Their principles, like those of modern dissenters, propagated schism; they split amongst themselves; and the four orders tore the coat, which should be without seam, into as many parts. Mutual abuse, instead of cordial co-operation, was their maxim. The poor ploughman who sought instruction in his creed at the hands of the Friars Minors, was only told, as he valued his soul, to beware of the Carmelites; the Carmelites promoted his edification by denouncing the Dominican; the Dominicans in their turn by condemning the Augustins. “Be true to us,” was the language of each ”

“ A woman cannot enter a monastery of the order of St. Bruno without a special permission from His Holiness, and the rule here is equally stringent. No man may enter a convent of Barefoot Carmelites unless he is a priest specially attached to the services of the house by the Archbishop. ”

“ He entered the Carmelite order, and studied at Oxford, where he graduated D.D., and subsequently at Paris. In 1309, at a congregation of the order held at Genoa, he was elected provincial of the Carmelites in England and Scotland, and in 1327 was provided by John XXII to the see of Meath, and consecrated at Avignon, his temporalities being restored to him on 24 July. He held the see for twenty-two years, and died in July 1349. ”

“ We have too hastily passed by the Carmelites, and without noticing that extraordinary woman St Theresa—at a very early age a candidate for martyrdom—who with her brother, when they were children of eight and nine years of age, went begging into the country of the Moors, in hopes of being martyred for their faith at the hands of the infidels. ”

“ The materials for a modern editor are to be found, not in the documents left by P. Andrés, but in such Carmelite archives as still exist, and in the National Library of Spain, to which many Carmelite treasures found their way at the beginning of the last century.
The work sent by P. Andrés to his superiors was kept in the archives of the Discalced Carmelites, but no new edition was prepared till a hundred and fifty years later. In the nineteenth century such a task was made considerably more difficult by religious persecution ”

“ From the Town to this last, in Summer time, there is a large covering of Canvas, propt up with tall Poles; under which People walk to avoid the scorching heats of the Sun.
As I was passing by the Chapel of the Carmelites, I saw several blind Men, some led, some groping the Way with their Sticks, going into the Chapel. I had the curiosity to know the Reason; I no sooner enter'd the Door, but was surprized to see such a number of those unfortunate People, all kneeling before the Altar, some kissing the Ground, others holding up their Heads, crying out Misericordia. ”

“ Many persons of note have dwelt in this old street. No. 25 (arrondissement V) is an ancient Carmelite convent, built, tradition says, on the site of a pagan temple: an oratory-chapel dedicated to St. Michael covered part of the site in early Christian days and a public cemetery. An ancient crypt still exists. It was in the convent here that Louise de la Vallière came to work till her death, in 1710. That first convent and church were razed in 1797. The Carmelites built a smaller one on the ancient grounds in 1802, and rebuilt their chapel in 1899. ”

“ There's no rule so strict as that of the Carmelites. The bad women in the reformatories are fine ladies to them. They wear old brown cloaks—so the femme de chambre told me—that you would n't use for a horse-blanket. And the poor Countess was so fond of soft-feeling dresses; she would never have anything stiff! They sleep on the ground," Mrs. Bread went on ”