Our Lady of Mount Carmel, or Virgin of Carmel, is a Roman Catholic title of the Blessed Virgin Mary venerated as patroness of the Carmelites of the Ancient Observance and the Discalced Carmelites.

The first Carmelites were hermits living on Mount Carmel in the Holy Land during the late 12th and early to mid-13th century. They built in the midst of their hermitages a chapel which they dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, whom they conceived of in chivalric terms as the "Lady of the place." Our Lady of Mount Carmel was adopted in the 19th century as the patron saint of Chile.

Since the 15th century, popular devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel has centred on the Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, also known as the Brown scapular. Traditionally, Mary is said to have given the Scapular to the Carmelite Simon Stock (1165–1265). The liturgical feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is celebrated on 16 July.

The liturgical feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was probably first celebrated in England in the later part of the 14th century. Its object was thanksgiving to Mary, the patroness of the Carmelite order, for the benefits she had accorded to it through its difficult early years. The institution of the feast may have come in the wake of the vindication of their name, Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at Cambridge, England, in 1374. The date chosen was 17 July; on the European mainland this date conflicted with the feast of Saint Alexis, requiring a shift to 16 July, which remains the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on the Roman Calendar of the Catholic Church. The Latin poem Flos Carmeli (meaning "Flower of Carmel") first appears as the sequence for this Mass.

Origin of the devotion

The name of Mount Carmel comes from Karm-El (Hebrew for garden or vine of God). Mount Carmel can be found in Israel, between the Mediterranean sea and the vale of Jezreel. It appears in the book of Isaiah 35:2, as a beautiful place. The prophet Elias, lived around Carmelo. In this place, Elias demonstrated the power of The Lord to the pagans of Baal. In Stock's vision, Mary promised that those who died wearing the scapular would be saved. This is a devotional sacramental signifying the wearer's consecration to Mary and affiliation with the Carmelite order. It symbolizes her special protection and calls the wearers to consecrate themselves to her in a special way.

In 1642, the Carmelite friar John Cheron named published a document which he said was a 13th-century letter written by Simon Stock's secretary, Peter Swanington. Since the early 20th century, historians have concluded that this letter was forged, likely by Cheron himself.

But Stock's vision was long embraced by many promoters of the scapular devotion. The forged Swanington letter claimed that 16 July 1251 was the date of the vision (16 July being the date of the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel), which led for centuries to a strong association between this feast day and the scapular devotion. Based on available historical documentation, the liturgical feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel did not originally have a specific association with the Brown scapular or the tradition of Stock's vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This tradition grew gradually, as did the liturgical cult of Saint Simon. The latter has been documented in Bordeaux, where Stock died, from the year 1435; in Ireland and England, from 1458; and in the rest of the order, from 1564. Historians have long questioned whether Stock had the vision of Mary and the scapular. The festival culminates with the celebration of the liturgical feast of Our Lady on July 16.

In the Bronx neighborhood of Belmont (Little Italy), a procession is held on 187th street, where the parish church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is located.

In the town of Hammonton New Jersey the feast is commemorated each year with a week long festival culminating with a parade of saints on the sixteenth. Celebration of the feast has been ongoing since 1875 and is widely recognized as the longest running Italian American festival in the United States.

Carmelite devotion

The Carmelites consider the Blessed Virgin Mary to be a perfect model of the interior life of prayer and contemplation to which Carmelites aspire, as well as a model of virtue, in the person who was closest in life to Jesus Christ. She is seen as the one who points Christians most surely to Christ. As she says to the servants at the wedding at Cana, "Do whatever he [Jesus] tells you." Carmelites look to the Virgin Mary as a Spiritual Mother. The Stella Maris Monastery (Star of the Sea) on Mount Carmel, named after a traditional title of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is considered the spiritual headquarters of the order.

Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene de' Pazzi, a revered authority on Carmelite spirituality, wrote that devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel means: