July 15, 2024 News
Brown Scapular. This Tuesday, July 16, is the feast of Our Lady
of Mount Carmel. With this in mind, we will be enrolling
folks in the Confraternity and investing them with the Brown
Scapular after all Saturday and Sunday Masses next weekend,
July 20 and 21.
The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel memorializes
the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Simon Stock, a
Carmelite priest, and her gift to him of the “Brown Scapular” on
July 16, 1251. “Take, beloved son,” she said, “this Scapular of
your order as a badge of my confraternity and for you and all
Carmelites a special sign of grace; whoever dies in this garment,
will not suffer everlasting fire. It is the sign of salvation, a
safeguard in dangers, a pledge of peace and of the covenant.” The
Carmelites immediately began to wear this Scapular as part of
their regular habit, and very soon many non-Carmelites also
began to wear it, usually in a smaller form of two small pieces of
cloth bound by two strings, worn around the neck, hanging down
in front and back.
From the beginning, it was understood that in order to
participate in Our Lady’s promises the wearer of the Scapular
must be officially associated with the Carmelite order. So, the
Carmelites established the “Confraternity of the Blessed Virgin
of Mount Carmel,” which any Catholic may be enrolled in
through a short ceremony conducted by a priest.
Even so, the Scapular is in no way a “a good luck
charm.” As St. John Paul II wrote, it is a sign that evokes “the
awareness that devotion to her cannot be
limited to prayers and tributes in her honor
on certain occasions, but must become a
‘habit,’ that is, a permanent orientation of
one’s own Christian conduct, woven of prayer
and interior life, through frequent
reception of the sacraments, and the
concrete practice of the spiritual and
corporal works of mercy.”