The Brown Scapular

A scapular (from Latin scapula, shoulder) was originally part of a monk’s habit: a long strip of cloth worn over the shoulders. The Brown Scapular is a small form of the habit of the Carmelites: two squares of brown wool joined by strings, worn front and back, as a sign of belonging to Our Lady and to her Carmelite family.

Who the Carmelites are. The Order takes its name from Mount Carmel, the ridge above the sea in the Holy Land where the prophet Elijah (Elias) prayed and called Israel back to the one true God (3 Kings 18). Around the end of the twelfth century, in the time of the Crusader states, a group of hermits settled there by the spring called Elijah’s fountain, living in prayer and silence in his spirit, with a little chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary. About 1209 St. Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, gave them a short written way of life, the Rule of St. Albert, centred on remaining in one’s cell, meditating day and night on the law of the Lord and keeping watch in prayer. As Muslim forces retook the Crusader lands, the brothers moved west to Cyprus, Sicily, France and England, where they became known as the White Friars.

St. Simon Stock. Simon was an Englishman, born in Kent in the late twelfth century and so also called Simon Anglus. According to tradition, at twelve years old he went into the woods to live as a hermit in the hollow trunk of an oak, which is said to be how he came by the name “Stock”. He lived on herbs, roots and wild apples, and drank only water. When the first Carmelites arrived in England from Palestine, he was drawn by their love of Our Lady and their life of prayer, and he joined them. In 1247, at the Order’s first general chapter in the West, held at Aylesford in Kent, he was elected prior general. Although he was by then an old man, he led the Order through its great change from hermits on a mountain to friars serving the towns of Europe. Pope Innocent IV approved the adapted rule, and Simon opened houses in the university cities: Cambridge (1248), Oxford (1253), and Paris and Bologna (1260). He died at Bordeaux on 16 May 1265, and his feast is kept on that day.

The scapular vision. Those were hard years, and the young Order met resistance on every side. Carmelite tradition holds that Simon turned in prayer to the Virgin Mary, the Order’s patroness, and that in 1251 she appeared to him holding the brown scapular of the Order, saying: “This shall be the privilege for you and for all the Carmelites, that anyone dying in this habit shall be saved.” From then on the habit, and later the small scapular, was given to friends of the Order, from kings and nobles to ordinary families, as a pledge of Mary’s protection and of a share in the Carmelites’ prayers.

Carmelite saints. The Order has given the Church many of its great teachers of prayer: St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) and St. John of the Cross (1542–1591), who renewed the Order in Spain and are both Doctors of the Church; St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897), the “Little Flower”, also a Doctor of the Church; and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) (1891–1942), the philosopher and Jewish convert who died at Auschwitz.

The Sabbatine privilege (from the Latin for Saturday) is a further Carmelite devotion. In 1613 the Holy Office, under Pope Paul V, allowed the Carmelites to preach that the faithful may piously believe that the Blessed Virgin will help, by her continual prayers and special protection, the souls of members who died wearing the scapular, lived chastely according to their state of life and prayed, especially on Saturdays, the day the Church dedicates to her.

Since 1910 a scapular medal (with Christ’s Sacred Heart on one side and Mary on the other) may be worn instead of the cloth by those already enrolled.

1. Ask a priest or deacon to enrol you (invest you) in the scapular, using the Church’s rite. Carmelite parishes often hold enrolments, sometimes on July 16, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
2. Wear it over the shoulders, one square on the chest and one on the back, as a sign of belonging to Mary.
3. Let it remind you to pray daily, to live chastely according to your state of life, and to imitate Mary’s faith.
4. If it wears out, replace it; a new one does not need a new enrolment. A scapular medal may be worn instead.

The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (2001) §205 calls the scapular “an external sign of the filial relationship” with Mary and says enrolment should be done seriously, after preparation, with the faithful taught that it is a reminder that “in Baptism we have been clothed in Christ.” It warns against seeing it as a charm. Sacramentals are “sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments” (CCC 1667). They “do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church’s prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it” (CCC 1670). The Church is clear that they are not charms: to attribute power to prayers or sacramental signs by “their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition” (CCC 2111). Popular devotions “extend the liturgical life of the Church, but do not replace it” (CCC 1675).