Angelus was born in Florence or near there; the year is unknown but it was before 1386. He was the first member of the reformed observance of Our Lady of the Wood, was many times prior of various houses and noted for his work in preaching the Word of God. He died in Florence in 1438.
Bartholomew Fanti was born in Mantua: the year is unknown, but in 1452 he was already a Carmelite priest of the Congregation of Mantua. For thirty-five years at the Order's church in Mantua he was spiritual father and rector of the Confraternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, for which he composed a rule and statutes. He is especially remembered for his love of the Eucharist. He died in 1495.
Frances was born in 1427, probably in Thouars in France. She was the wife of Peter II, Duke of Britanny. After his death, and under the direction of Blessed John Soreth, the prior general, she took the habit of the Carmelite Order in the monastery she had previously founded in Bondon. Afterwards she transferred to another foundation in Nantes, also erected by her, where she held the office of prioress and nourished the sisters with wise teaching. She is considered the foundress of the Carmelite nuns in France. She died in 1485.
Hilary Januszewski was born on 11 June 1907 in Krajenki (Poland). In 1927 he entered the Order of Carmel and was ordained on 15 July 1934. In 1939, Poland was occupied by the Germans and one year later, Fr. Hilary decided to present himself in exchange for an older and sick friar. He was sent to Dachau, where he was a model of prayer life, encouraging others and giving hope for a better tomorrow. He died from typhus on 25 March 1945, a few days before the liberation of the concentration camp. Fr. Hilary Januszewski was beatified by John Paul II on 13 June 1999.
Bl. Jacques Retouret was born at Limoges in France on 15th September 1746 to a merchant family. He was a serious young man, a lover of books and greatly gifted. At fifteen years of age, he entered the Carmelite house in his native city. After ordination, his zeal and learning were widely admired and large crowds of people were attracted by his way of preaching.
The French Revolution did not spare him. Like the majority of his fellow clergy, Jacques refused to accept the civil law, unilaterally introduced by the state. He was arrested and condemned, together with many other priests and religious, and sentenced to exile in French Guinea in South America. Jacques died at Madame Isle on 26th August 1794 at the age of 48 years. He was beatified, together with 63 other priests and religious, as martyrs for the faith, on 1st October 1995 by Pope John Paul II.
Mother Euphrasia was born on October 17, 1877. Her pious mother taught her to pray the rosary and to participate in the Holy Mass. She had a vision of Mother Mary at the age of nine and she offered her virginity to God eternally. Her father was opposed to her entering the Convent but eventually gave her permission to go to the Carmelite Convent in 1888. For the rest of her life she was immersed in prayer, in contemplation or praying the Rosary. People began to call her “The Praying Mother.” She was most devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and had a great longing to be with the Eucharistic Lord and participate in the Holy Mass and adore the Blessed Sacrament. She was canonized by Pope Francis on November 23, 2014 in Vatican City.
Saint Kuriakos Elias Chavara, co-founder and first prior general of the congregation of the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate, was born at Kainakary in Kersala, India, February 10, 1805. He entered the seminary in 1818, and was ordained priest in 1829. He made his religious profession in 1855, in the congregation he founded. Throughout his life he worked for the renovation of the church in Malabar. Above all, he was a man of prayer, zealous for the Eucharistic Lord and devoted to the Immaculate Virgin Mary. He died at Koonammavu in 1871. Kuriakose Kathanar was beatified on February 8, 1986 and canonized on November 23, 2014.
Born about 1305 in southern Perigord in France, Peter Thomas entered the Carmelites when he was twenty-one. He was chosen by the Order as its procurator general to the Papal Court at Avignon in 1345. After being made bishop of Patti and Lipari in 1354, he was entrusted with many papal missions to promote peace and unity with the Eastern Churches. He was transferred to the see of Corone in the Peloponnesus in 1359 and made Papal Legate for the East. In 1363 he was appointed Archbishop of Crete and 1364 Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. He won a reputation as an apostle of church unity before he died at Famagosta on Cyprus in 1366.
Raphael Kalinowski was born to Polish parents in the city of Vilnius in 1835. Following military service, he was condemned in 1864 to ten years of forced labor in Siberia. In 1877 he became a Carmelite and was ordained a priest in 1882. He contributed greatly to the restoration of the Discalced Carmelites in Poland. His life was distinguished by zeal for Church unity and by his unflagging devotion to his ministry as confessor and spiritual director. He died in Wadowice in 1907.
Letter to the Carmelite Family for the Celebration of the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel – July 16, 2014
Fr. Fernando Millán Romeral, O. Carm., Prior General of the Carmelites
Dear Brothers and Sisters in the Carmelite Family
The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is approaching, and another year has gone by. I would like to offer you my best wishes. The day means a lot to all of us, a joyous and deep-felt moment in which we celebrate our devotion to the Mother of the Lord, under the very popular title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. One year more: I would like to commend to her intercession, our dreams and projects, our missions and apostolates, our joys and our concerns. May the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Mother and Sister, enlighten, guide and accompany us, so that we may be always faithful to our vocation, and know how to respond generously to the insistent call from Pope Francis to the whole Church, for all to be true evangelisers.
As you may perhaps recall, last year I suggested a possible interpretation of an icon that is typical of devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel: the Blessed Virgin who descends into Purgatory and saves by her scapular all those who are suffering there. I would ask you therefore that, in imitation of Mary, we might each descend into the purgatories of today and in solidarity and compassion, help those who are suffering to emerge from those purgatories of every kind, of which there are many in the world of today.
On this occasion I would ask that every Carmelite, (friar, cloistered nun, sister of the apostolic life, tertiary, member of a confraternity, lay Carmelite member of one of the many groups that make up the Carmelite family) be united in contemplating, sharing, increasing the beauty which is all around us (even, if at times, somewhat hidden). Right from the beginning Carmel has been closely linked to beauty. Mount Carmel is synonymous with beauty in the First Testament, and we ourselves refer to Mary as the Mother and Ornament of Carmel (Mother and Beauty of Carmel). Our Order has been characterised down through the centuries by that tendency towards the poetic, the artistic ... the beautiful.
Therefore, my desire is that our lives should be a song of praise to God for the beauty that surrounds us, and also a generous commitment to ensure that beauty will not be diminished or tarnished by what is evil, by sin, by the suffering of so many innocent people, who are the victims of selfishness and all its ramifications, (injustice, violence, inequality...).
May our lives as Carmelites, each in accordance with our specific situation, become a song of praise to the Creator, and may each of us, in imitation of Mary, humbly proclaim the wonders that the Lord has worked and continues to work in our lives. (Lk 1:46-55) It may be that one of the most tragic features of the modern world is the inability to generate beauty or to discover beauty. At times, beauty finds itself reduced to something that is purely aesthetic, self-centred, with no notion of solidarity, and therefore no beauty at all, not authentic, producing only a sense of too much and of nothing. The ancient scholastics used to say, the good and the beautiful, “bonum” et “pulchrum” always coincide. That’s the way it is.
When we want to discover what is beautiful, Mary, the teacher and master of spirituality, points our gaze in another direction: towards what is small and humble, what is of no account ... Mary leads us to discover the beauty in the complexities of life, in all that is noble and heroic, which at times we fail to see in day to day life.
May the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, with its novenas and devotions, its liturgies and celebrations, be itself a humble and peaceful song to beauty. We must not settle for mere routine, half-hearted celebrations, the remains of a glorious but very distant past. We must also avoid mere external beauty, nothing more that pomp and rubrics. No, on that day we must lift up our hearts, through the calm beauty of the liturgy, over the misery of humanity, and look at the “star of the sea” so that she may guide us to Christ, Our Lord.
With brotherly affection,
Fernando Millán Romeral O.Carm.
Prior General
Photo of Fernando Millán Romeral, O.Carm: By Jtthoc - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia
ARTICLE SOURCE: Carmelites website
