The Brown Scapular: Its Modern Day Significance

From Mount Carmel:

The Brown Scapular is a miniature form of the habit worn by Carmelites. The significance of the Scapular to Carmelites is very much tied up to the place of Mary in the Order. It summarizes Marian devotions and piety. The Scapular does not have any value or meaning, if it is not contemplated in relation to Mary. This is because this sacramental of the Church came to us through the initiative of Mary. To understand Mary’s role and place in our modern day existence is to understand well the significance of the Brown Scapular of Carmel in our lives and the world. What does this tiny, brown piece of cloth, have anything to do with our Christian life?

The Brown Scapular embodies Mary’s spirit. In our world of noise and frenzied activities, the Scapular invites us to remember our origin and roots as Carmelites. Anyone who wears the Brown Scapular implicitly ties him or herself to the spirit and life of Carmel. We should remember that we were founded in the caves of Mount Carmel, in the spirit of Elias, to contemplate God “in whose presence we stand.” The Brown Scapular calls us to silence and contemplation and intimacy with God. This intimacy must be sought not just by the “contemplatives” of the Order but by anyone who wears the Carmelite scapular.

In our world of consumerism and materialism, the Brown Scapular reminds us of the simplicity of Mary in Nazareth, content with what God had to offer. The simple brown cloth worn as an apron should remind us of the Gospel call to service and humility. At the Last Supper, our Lord put on an apron and began to wash the apostles feet. It should be a constant reminder to us of an interior disposition to make ourselves available in any way we are called upon to serve. The brown color of the Scapular reminds us of earth from which we were formed in creation and a reminder that it is through our frail humanity that we ascend to God. The Scapular, which is worn over the shoulder, is a “yoke” that we put on. Once we put on this yoke, we freely commit ourselves to a “way of life” that will lead us to the mountain of Carmel which is Christ. I emphasize "way of life" because the Brown Scapular should signify a life- changing commitment. We try to re-orient our life and gear it to the Gospel ideals embodied by the Scapular, daily, and with determination. It is not just the act of wearing it but a firmness of purpose to live out the challenge. It is entering into a covenant.

The Brown Scapular, being totally Marian, symbolizes the virtue of chastity. We are "clothed in the habit of our Lady", as St. Teresa of Avila loved to remind her nuns. How can we worthily wear the Scapular of Mary Most Pure, if we don't shun impurity in all shapes and forms? In this modern culture glamorizing sex and the idolatrous worship of the body, we have the work cut out for us. We do not mean to be prudish here since we acknowledge the fact that we are not angels but endowed with a human body, with all of its normal operations, desires and processes. But the virtue of chastity is first of all born in the will. "It is not what enters a man's heart from the outside which renders him impure, but rather what comes out of him," as Jesus wisely stated. We must try to shun occasions against the virtue of chastity but it may happen that a situation beyond our control presents itself. We must simply turn our heart away from it and invoke Mary's help to keep us pleasing to God, and remain at peace. Temptations against chastity are often better dealt with flight than fight. It is not worth our time fighting it in its face but to simply ignore it and to elevate our intentions to a higher level.

In our modern age, there is a growing fascination with different schools of spirituality. More and more people show a growing thirst for spiritual things. I believe that there is a richness to be re-discovered in the Brown Scapular. There is a growing awareness , even within the Order, of the great treasure we have in the Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. A final document pertaining to this topic was published by the Order. This document is named "The Official Teaching of the Church and of Carmel on the Scapular Devotion." This document was released by the Congregation for Worship in Rome and was published in “Carmel in the World,” a publication of the Order. (Read more.)

St. Teresa de los Andes

Today is the feast of the Chilean Carmelite saint.

"Saint Teresa of Jesus of the Andes was born in Santiago, Chile, on July 12, 1920. Her secular name was Juanita Fernández Solar. Her father was Miguel Fernández and her mother was Lucía Solar de Fernández. She was baptized at the parish Church of Saint Ann in Santiago on the vigil of the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which is Chile's titular feast. At baptism the little girl was named Juana Enriqueta Josefina of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

The Fernández family was a religious family. The young girl was surrounded by evidence of Christian virtues. From the time she was six, her mother and aunt Juana took her to daily Mass. Juanita loved to assist at Mass and was most eager to receive the Eucharist. She made her first Holy Communion at ten. She noted in her Diary: 'It was on that day that I heard the sweet voice of my Jesus for the first time' (D6).

Her parents enrolled their gifted daughter in schools conducted by the Religious of the Sacred Heart so that she would be given a sound academic education, where her character would be formed according to the ideals of the Christian faith and where she would grow in holiness.

When she was eighteen, Juanita entered the Carmel of Los Andes, Chile, and was given the name Sister Teresa of Jesus in honor of the great Carmelite saint of Avila. Overcome with humility by the grace of being called to the religious life, she wrote to a friend, 'What has God seen in us, that He loves us to the point of wanting us to be His friends and brides of His Heart' (L51).

Sister Teresa lived in the Monastery of Los Andes for eleven months, wore the habit of Carmel less than five and then was stricken with typhus. In danger of death, she was permitted to make her religious vows and thus died as a professed Carmelite Sister.

Immediately after her death in 1920, extraordinary things began to happen. People from all walks of life were moved by God to see in this young Chilean girl a model of perfect holiness. Many also found her to be a wonderful friend and intercessor before God. The fame of her holiness grew. As a result, she was beatified on April 3, 1987, in Santiago and solemnly canonized in Rome by the same Pope on March 21, 1993. On that occasion, Pope John Paul II called her 'an eminently contemplative soul' and proposed her as a model for youth. A short time later, the bishops of Chile declared her the patroness of children, especially homeless children or children in juvenile prisons." -- Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus of the Andes translated by Fr Michael D Griffin, ocd

St Teresa of the Andes, pray for us!

The Heart of St. Joseph

From St. Joseph, Our Guide:

St. Joseph is known as “the just man” and, as such, was a man of singular virtue. This strength of character, this reign of virtue, extended to all aspects of his life and his person—including his heart. His whole being was oriented to his God. His love was properly ordered, his affections purified. Unlike St. Joseph, we tend to struggle, and oftentimes fail, with matters of the heart. Our culture certainly does not hold the virtue of chastity in high esteem. Therefore, it can seem incredible to us that a man like Joseph was able to rise to the lofty challenge presented to him: to be the “chaste guardian of the Virgin” (and of all virgins) and the foster-father of the Son of God. Such a task requires both remarkable human virtue and unexcelled amounts of God’s grace. St. Joseph had both.

The tradition with regard to the age of St. Joseph varies (the Eastern Church holds that he was an old man, while the West concedes that he may have been much younger), but at the heart of the issue is the fact that it was Joseph’s virtue—not merely old age, lack or virility, or lethargic passions—that safeguarded the perpetual virginity of the Mother of God, and allowed him to guide and protect Mary and Jesus with such strength of pure love.

This should be a great consolation to us who still wander in this vale of tears, striving for holiness. St. Joseph was a great man with a “most chaste heart” but whose love was certainly not cold. For this reason, the Diocese of Charlotte’s logo for the Year of St. Joseph depicts his Most Chaste Heart inflamed with love and adorned with the white lily of purity. The heart of St. Joseph should give us great hope that purity of heart lies within our reach, thanks to the grace of God and the intercession of Joseph-most-chaste! (Read more.)

 

 From St. Joseph: Our Patron:

I am convinced that by reflection upon the way that Mary’s spouse shared in the divine mystery, the Church – on the road towards the future with all of humanity – will be enabled to discover ever anew her own identity within this redemptive plan, which is founded on the mystery of the Incarnation. This is precisely the mystery in which Joseph of Nazareth ‘shared’ like no other human being except Mary, the Mother of the Incarnate Word. He shared in it with her; he was involved in the same salvific event; he was the guardian of the same love, through the power of which the Eternal Father ‘destined us to be His sons through Jesus Christ.’ (Eph. 1:5) ~St. John Paul II (Read more.)

Life: A Battlefield of Many Wounds

 From Church Life Journal:

“Men and women are flesh and bone, hands and feet, the pierced side of Christ—his mystic body,” adds the author concealed by the pseudonym Moine de l’Eglise d’Orient. “In them we can achieve the reality of resurrection by our actions.” He challenges us to see Christ not only in the socially needy, the sick, the poor, and the abandoned, but above all in people who are remote from us and that we don’t like: “Christ is imprisoned once more in many of those men and women—in wicked and criminal people. Free him by recognizing him quietly and silently and you will invoke him in them.”

These are difficult, demanding words. Who can listen to them? And who has the courage to put them into practice, or at least try? We are accustomed from many sermons to being challenged to help people in social distress, and maybe we do so from time to time. There are not too many sermons about loving one’s enemies—and when there are, one often has the embarrassing feeling that neither the preacher nor his listeners take it too “literally,” or, more likely, they don’t take it seriously at all. That’s just something they say in church! We have already mentioned that the main difficulty with that saying of Jesus is that we take the concepts of love and hate to be simply emotions (and not attitudes and conscious decisions, the focus of our life). Naturally we are well aware that “there is no accounting” for emotions and that feelings of resentment persist in spite of our good intentions to fulfill Jesus’s outlandish command.

Here the pseudonymous author presents us with a new theological and spiritual stimulus to have the courage to accept those people whom we would normally not be inclined to—“the wicked and criminal.” He doesn’t tell us to love and accept their wickedness, or to ignore, downplay, or forgive their wicked deeds and characteristics. Nor does he urge us to have any emotional attachment toward them. He simply tells us that Christ is present in the humanity of everybody through the mystery of the Incarnation. He is “imprisoned” in the “wicked” because they have not allowed him his freedom, they have not allowed him to reign in their hearts and actions.

By realizing that they too “belong to Christ” (and hence to us too) we do not liberate those people from evil. So far we only liberate our relationship to them—by allowing Christ to enter our attitude to them as the faithful image of the Father, who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Just how much our attitude toward them and our way of thinking about them influences our behavior and actions, and how much our behavior can retroactively affect them, influence them and possibly change them, is another open chapter of this story.

Christ only ever comes as a challenge, a proposition, an invitation to follow him, an open possibility—as The God Who May Be. It is entirely foreign to him to pressure us to manipulate us or not respect our freedom. The God that Christ presents us with (through his words and his personality) addresses us and challenges us but never forces us to do anything. That is what our Christian witness should be like: we are here to broaden the horizon of “possible” (i.e., anticipated, usual, “logical,” “natural” behavior—the way things are done, the way of the world) to include what to people who do not know God and don’t take Christ seriously naturally seems impossible. This also—being here as an “alternative”—is part of our ministry of healing, liberation, and “driving out evil,” of which many have a somewhat romantic perception.

The “supernatural” in day-to-day “exorcism” (driving out evil) does not consist of what gripping films about exorcists luridly describe. It is something quite different: the breaking down of the boundaries of “the possible,” or what the world around us regards as “normal” and natural, by our “impossible” behavior. Yes, we are called on to perform miracles—if we understand miracles, not in a romantic or Enlightenment sense of “breaking natural laws,” but as what they really are: events that we have no right to expect in the given circumstances. (Read more.)

St. Joan and the Royal House of France

 

 Most Catholics, I have concluded, do not have trouble accepting the fact that St. Joan of Arc donned male apparel and led armies to victory. What seems to disturb many people, however, is that she gave her help to a king, and worse yet, to a King of France. Many Americans seem to be convinced that monarchy is an intrinsically evil institution. They are not able to see beyond their own time and their own political process. I recently read a comment in which someone said that St. Louis of France was a saint "in spite of being a king." May I be so bold to say that St. Louis saw his kingship as a vocation in which he served God and man. What is more, he saw it as a calling to share in the Kingship of Christ, from Whom he held his authority and to Whom he had to render an account. St. Joan, in her simple piety, viewed kingship in a similar manner. She honored her King Charles VII, although he was far from being a saint, because in doing so she gave honor to Christ the King. The office was deserving of respect, even if the man was not. On her banner she bore an image of Christ the King surrounded by the fleur de lys, the lilies of royal France.

In a small volume entitled Joan of Arc In Her Own Words there are many quotations of St. Joan which make explicit reference to the fact that she was called to serve God by assisting the French monarch. She said: "[St. Michael] told me the pitiful state of the Kingdom of France. And he told me that I must succour the King of France." To Robert de Baudricourt she insisted: "The Kingdom of France is not the Dauphin's but my Lord's. But my Lord wills that the Dauphin shall be made King and have the Kingdom in custody. The Dauphin shall be King in spite of his enemies, and I shall lead him to his anointing." She welcomed the Duc d'Alencon by saying: "The more there are gathered together of the blood of the King of France, the better it will be." In her letter to the English lords, Joan dictated: "Do justice to the King of Heaven; surrender to the Maid, who is sent here from God to uphold the blood royal."

Joan placed great store upon the mystical aspects of the coronation ceremony, telling the royal council: "When once the King is crowned and anointed, his enemies' strength will steadily grow less, and finally they will have no power to harm him or the Kingdom." At her trial she announced: "As for the good work I have done...I must needs leave that with the King of Heaven, who sent me to Charles, son of Charles King of France, who shall be King. And you shall see that the French will very soon achieve a great task which God will send to the French, and such that almost the whole Kingdom of France will tremble. And I say it, so that when it comes to pass it will be remembered that I said it." The Maid believed her country had a mission from God, a task to fulfill.

There are also some odd connections between St. Joan and Queen Marie-Antoinette. At first glance no two people appear to be as different from each other as the Habsburg archduchess and the peasant girl from Domremy, other than a shared love for children and needlework. Joan has often been referred to as the "Maid of Lorraine" or even as "Joan of Lorraine." Father Jean-Marie Charles-Roux, in building a case for the martyrdom of Marie-Antoinette in his book Louis XVII: La Mère et l'Enfant martyrs, points out that the queen's full name was Marie-Antoinette-Josephe-Jeanne de Lorraine, even as the Maid was Jeanne de Lorraine. Both women were called to their "mission" at age thirteen. At thirteen, Joan began to hear her voices; at thirteen, Marie-Antoinette was told she was to marry the heir to the French throne. Both were known for their staunch purity, and yet both were branded by enemies with the epithet of "whore." Both the queen and the peasant have had their reputations shredded beyond recognition. Both suffered the ordeal of a long imprisonment in which they suffered outrages against modesty. Both were forced to defend themselves against calumnies and half-truths amid the scrutiny of a public trial. Both persisted in their loyalty to the Holy See. Both were condemned to an ignominious death and each were taken to the scaffold in a cart. Unlike St. Joan, Marie-Antoinette never had a posthumous retrial. She was never officially vindicated and her name continues to be slandered in books and movies to this day. May the prayers of St. Joan bring the truth to light.

How True Stories of the Dying Can Help the Living

 From Francis Slobodnik at TFP:

The prism of death often provides an excellent perspective to influence how to live. Thus, the book Life Stories of Dying Penitents or Sick Calls from the Diary of a Missionary Priest invites the reader to make serious, profound, hopeful and tragic reflections. Originally published in the late nineteenth century, the book is a compilation of accounts of sick calls to the dying written by an anonymous Irish priest at a parish in London, England.

In the Litany of the Saints, there is the invocation: “From a sudden and unprovided death, deliver me, O Lord.” After reading this book, the reader can see why the Church makes this plea. Death comes to all, and it is best to be prepared.

The rich descriptions in the book provide a snapshot of how death visits all the social classes. It offers insights into the complex situations priests faced at the time.

Most accounts end happily with the priest hearing the final confession and administering Extreme Unction. However, others are tragic. Some cases involved situations where the family contacted the priest on behalf of a dying relative who had not practiced the Faith for a long time. It is pretty sobering to consider that such dying people often refuse to confess and repent despite the pleadings of the priest and family members. The tragedy contradicts the Hollywood narratives, where everything turns out fine in the end. As Saint Alphonsus Liguori wrote, “most die as they lived.” (Read more.)

Novena to Our Lady of Good Counsel

The feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel is April 26. Let us pray for the Holy Father.

Novena Prayer

Holy Virgin, moved by the painful uncertainty we experience in seeking and acquiring the true and the good, we cast ourselves at thy feet and invoke thee under the sweet title of  Mother of Good Counsel.  We beseech thee: come to our aid at this moment in our worldly sojourn when the twin darknesses of error and of evil that plots our ruin by leading minds and hearts astray.

Seat of Wisdom and Star of the Sea, enlighten the victims of doubt and of error so that they may not be seduced by evil masquerading as good; strengthen them against the hostile and corrupting forces of passion and of sin.

Mother of Good Counsel, obtain for us from thy Divine Son the love of virtue and the strength to choose, in doubtful and difficult situations, the course agreeable to our salvation. Supported by thy hand we shall thus journey without harm along the paths taught us by the word and example of Jesus our Savior, following the Sun of Truth and Justice in freedom and safety across the battlefield of life under the guidance of thy maternal Star, until we come at length to the harbor of salvation to enjoy with thee unalloyed and everlasting peace. Amen.

(By Pope Pius XII, 23 January 1953)

Litany of Our Lady of Good Counsel

 

Lord, have mercy on us.

Christ, have mercy on us.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Christ, hear us.

Christ, graciously hear us.

God the Father of Heaven, Have mercy on us.

God the Son, Redeemer of the world, Have mercy on us.

God the Holy Ghost, Have mercy on us.

Holy Trinity, One God, Have mercy on us.

Beloved Daughter of the Eternal Father, pray for us.

August Mother of God the Son, pray for us.

Blessed Spouse of God the Holy Ghost, pray for us.

Living temple of the Holy Trinity, pray for us.

Queen of Heaven and earth, pray for us.

Seat of Divine Wisdom, pray for us.

Depositary of the secrets of the Most High, pray for us.

Virgin most prudent, pray for us.

In our doubts and difficulties, pray for us.

In our tribulations and anguish, pray for us.

In our discouragements, pray for us.

In perils and temptations, pray for us.

In all our undertakings, pray for us.

In all our needs, pray for us.

At the hour of death, pray for us.

By thine Immaculate Conception, pray for us.

By thy happy nativity, pray for us.

By thine admirable presentation, pray for us.

By thy glorious Annunciation, pray for us.

By thy charitable Visitation, pray for us.

By thy Divine Maternity, pray for us.

By thy holy Purification, pray for us.

By the sorrows and anguish of thy maternal heart, pray for us.

By thy precious death, pray for us.

By thy triumphant Assumption, pray for us.

Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world, Spare us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world, Graciously hear us, O Lord.

Lamb of God, Who takest away the sins of the world, Have mercy on us.

V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God,

R. And obtain for us the gift of good counsel.

Let Us Pray.

V. Lord Jesus, Author and Dispenser of all good, Who in becoming incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin hast communicated to her lights above those of all the Heavenly intelligences, grant that in honoring her under the title of Our Lady of Good Counsel, we may merit always to receive from her goodness counsels of wisdom and salvation, which will conduct us to the port of a blessed eternity.

R. Amen.