Catholic Saint of July 16

Our Lady of Mount Carmel is the title given to the Blessed Virgin Mary in her role as patroness of the Carmelite Order, particularly within the Catholic Church. The first Carmelites were Christian 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. Our Lady of Mount Carmel was adopted in the 19th century as the patron saint of Chile.

A tradition first attested to in the late 14th century says that Saint Simon Stock, an early English prior general of the Carmelite Order had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary in which she gave him the Brown Scapular. This formed part of the Carmelite habit. 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.

The solemn 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 title "Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary" at Cambridge, England, in 1374.

There was a massive earthquake in Palmi, Italy, in 1894. For 17 days preceding this earthquake, many of the faithful had reported strange eye movements and changes in the colouring of the face in a statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. The local and national press had reported these occurrences.

In the evening of 16 November, the faithful improvised a procession carrying the statue of the Virgin of Carmel on their shoulders through the streets. When the procession reached the end of the city, a violent earthquake shook the whole district of Palmi, ruining most of the old houses along the way. But, only nine people died out of a population of about 15,000 inhabitants, as almost all of the population had been on the street to watch the procession and were not trapped inside the destroyed buildings.

In Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, there has been particular devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, who has been adopted as a patron saint of several places, as she has been in other Catholic-majority countries.

The feast day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is celebrated for ten days each July in the Williamsburg neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, where an approximately sixty-five foot tall "giglio" – a tower with a statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel affixed atop it – is lifted and paraded on multiple dates during the festival. The festival culminates with the celebration of the liturgical feast of Our Lady on July 16.

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.

Other Saints of the Day
1. Saint Tenenan
2. Saint Mary Magdalen Postel
3. Saint Helier
4. Saint Fulrad
5. Saint Domnio

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