Carmelites and Miracles

Introduction: The Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel were a religious order of Roman Catholic hermits that gathered together in the early 1200s to live a semi-monastic lifestyle in the mountain range of Carmel, near Haifa in present-day Israel. The Carmelites, as they came to be called, followed a rule of life written by Saint Albert, the Latin-rite patriarch of Jerusalem, and approved by Pope Honorius III in 1226. Due to military conquests in the region by Muslims, the Carmelites soon migrated to various parts of Europe and were transformed into a mendicant order, although their rule specified a preference for the contemplative life. Initially they had difficulty justifying their status as a mendicant order, since their origins were shrouded in mystery without a clear founder