Discalced Carmelites

The Discalced Carmelites are friars and nuns, who dedicate themselves to a life of prayer. The Carmelite nuns live in cloistered (enclosed) monasteries and follow a completely contemplative life. The Carmelite friars, while following a contemplative life, also engage in the promotion of spirituality through their retreat centres, parishes and churches. Lay people, known as the Secular Order, follow their contemplative call in their everyday activities. Devotion to the Virgin Mary is a characteristic of Carmelites and is symbolised by wearing the brown scapular.[1]

Carmelites trace their roots and their name to Mount Carmel in the Holy Land. There, in the 13th century, a band of European men gathered together to live a simple life of prayer. Their first chapel was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and they called themselves the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel.[2]

The first Carmelites came as pilgrims to Mount Carmel to live a solitary lifestyle. These early hermits were mostly laity, who lived an unofficial religious life of poverty, penance and prayer. Between 1206 and 1214, St. Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, brought the hermits on Mount Carmel together, at their request, into community. He wrote them a rule, which expressed their own intention and reflected the spirit of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land and of the early community of Jerusalem. They were also inspired by the prophet Elijah who had been associated with Mount Carmel. That influence can be seen by the words of Elijah, "With zeal have I been zealous for the Lord God of hosts" (IKg 19:10) on the Carmelite crest. Within fifty years of receiving their rule the Carmelite hermits were forced to leave Mount Carmel and settled in Europe.[3]

Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), Doctor of the Church and co-founder of the Discalced Carmelites.

A combination of political and social conditions that prevailed in Europe in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries – the Hundred Years' War, Black Plague, the Reformation and the Humanist revival – adversely affected the Order. Many Carmelites and even whole communities succumbed to contemporary attitudes and conditions diametrically opposed to their original vocation. To meet this situation the rule was "mitigated" several times. Consequently, the Carmelites bore less and less resemblance to the first hermits of Mount Carmel.[4]

St. Teresa of Avila considered the surest way to prayer to be a return to Carmel's authentic vocation. A group of nuns assembled in her cell one September evening in 1560, taking their inspiration from the primitive tradition of Carmel and the discalced reform of St. Peter of Alcantara, a controversial movement within Spanish Franciscanism, proposed the foundation of a monastery of an eremitical kind.

With little resources and often bitter opposition, St. Teresa succeeded in 1562 in establishing a small monastery with the austerity of desert solitude within the heart of the city of Ávila, Spain, combining eremitical and community life. On 24 August 1562, the new Convent of St. Joseph was founded. St. Teresa's rule, which retained a distinctively Marian character, contained exacting prescriptions for a life of continual prayer, safeguarded by strict enclosure and sustained by the asceticism of solitude, manual labor, perpetual abstinence, fasting, and fraternal charity. In addition to this, St. Teresa envisioned an order fully dedicated to poverty.[4]

Working in close collaboration with St. Teresa was St. John of the Cross, who with Anthony of Jesus founded the first convent of Discalced Carmelite friars in Duruelo, Spain on 28 November 1568.[5]

The Discalced Carmelites were established as a separate province of the Carmelite Order by the decree Pia consideratione[6] of Pope Gregory XIII on 22 June 1580. By this decree the Discalced Carmelites were still subject to the Prior General of the Carmelite Order in Rome, but were otherwise distinct from the Carmelites in that they could elect their own superiors and author their own constitutions for their common life. The following Discalced Carmelite Chapter at Alcala de Henares, Spain in March 1581 established the constitutions of the Discalced Carmelites and elected the first provincial of the Discalced Carmelites, Fr. Jerome Gratian, OCD. This office was later translated into that of Superior General of the Discalced Carmelites.[7]

Discalced Carmelites from Argentina

Discalced Carmelite and novice outside their convent in Zarautz, the Basque Country

Monastery of Discalced Carmelites in Czerna, Poland

The heart of the Carmelite charism is prayer and contemplation. The quality of prayer determines the quality of the community life and the quality of the service which is offered to others. Prayer and contemplation for the Carmelite are not private matters between the individual and God but are to be shared with others since the charism is given for the whole world. Therefore, there is an emphasis in the order on the ministry of teaching prayer and giving spiritual direction.[8]

For a Carmelite, prayer is guided by the teachings and experience of St. Teresa of Ávila and St. John of the Cross, as well as the saints who have followed in their steps, such as Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face, Elizabeth of the Trinity, Teresa of the Andes, and martyrs like Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Père Jacques and the sixteen Martyrs of Compiegne.

Fraternity, service and contemplation are essential values for all Carmelites. The hermits were forced to leave their home on Mount Carmel and settle in Europe. There they changed their style of life from hermits to friars. The major difference is that friars are called to serve the People of God in some active apostolate. Some congregations were founded for a specific work, but the Carmelite Order tries to respond to what it sees as the needs of the Church and the world which differ according to time and place, and so many friars work in parishes, schools, universities, retreat centres, prisons and hospitals. The kind of service in which each individual friar is involved will depend on the perceived needs of the people in whose midst he lives and his own particular talents.[8]

Each day is marked by silence for prayer. In addition to the daily celebration of the full Liturgy of the Hours, two hours (one in the morning, one in the evening) are set aside for silent prayer. Communities should not have more than 21 members. The friars practice a broadly-based discipline of study.

• Byzantine Discalced Carmelites
• Carmelites of Mary Immaculate
• Carmelites of the Ancient Observance
• Hermits of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel
• Monks of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel
• Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites
• Sisters of the Apostolic Carmel
• Third Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel
• Episcopal Carmel of Saint Teresa

• Book of the First Monks
• Constitutions of the Carmelite Order
• Monastery of Mary, Mother of Grace
• St. Raphael Kalinowski
• Jan Tyranowski
• Discalced Carmelite Convent of San José and Santa Teresa (Puebla)
• Reisach Priory
• St. Joseph's Carmelite Church

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Discalced Carmelite Order.

• Official website
• No Greater Love, a 2009 documentary about the nuns at the monastery of the Most Holy Trinity, in London's Notting Hill