Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Mount Carmel is a ridge above the bay of Haifa, and its religious history begins long before any Christian order. It is where the first book of Kings sets the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal, and where Elijah's servant, sent to look out to sea seven times, at last reports a little cloud rising out of the water the size of a man's hand, which breaks a three year drought. Carmelite tradition reads that cloud as a figure of Mary, and the reading ties the order's two founding attachments together in a single verse.

Latin hermits were living on the mountain by about 1200 and received a rule from Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem. As the crusader position collapsed they migrated to Europe, reconstituted themselves as a mendicant order, and carried the mountain with them in their title: the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel.

The feast follows the order rather than the other way round. Carmelites kept a commemoration of their patroness from the fourteenth century; it spread with them; and in 1726 Benedict XIII extended it to the whole Latin church, on 16 July. The calendar reform of 1969 reduced it to an optional memorial in the general calendar, which changed its rank without making the slightest difference to how it is kept in the places that keep it.

The brown scapular is what most people associate with the day. The account attached to it has the Virgin appear to Simon Stock, an English Carmelite, on 16 July 1251, giving him the scapular with a promise that whoever dies wearing it will not suffer eternal fire. The account first appears in writing well over a century after the date it gives, in a source whose reliability historians have not been able to establish, and the modern Carmelite orders themselves present the scapular in terms of consecration and devotion rather than resting on the narrative. A further tradition, the Sabbatine privilege, promising release from purgatory on the first Saturday after death, rests on a document whose authenticity has long been doubted, and the Holy See has restrained the preaching of it in those terms.

What the church teaches about the scapular is that it is a sign of belonging to Mary and of a way of life undertaken, and not an object that works of itself.

The day itself belongs to the street. It is kept with processions, fireworks and fairs across southern Italy, Malta, Spain and Latin America. Chile keeps the Virgen del Carmen as its patroness. In coastal Spain and Latin America she is patroness of fishermen and the sea, and the image is carried out on decorated boats. In New York the East Harlem feast, kept since the 1880s by an Italian immigrant community, still lifts its tower through the streets each July.