The name of Carmel comes from Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, the "vineyard of God." There, as the Books of Kings recount, the prophet Elijah gathered a company of young men devoted to prayer. In a season when a great drought scorched the land, Elijah climbed the mountain to beg for rain and saw rising from the sea a little cloud of luminous whiteness from which water poured in abundance. Tradition has long read that cloud as a figure of the Immaculate Virgin, the pure maiden from whom the awaited Savior would come to bring down a rain of blessings upon the earth. From that time, the tradition continues, the community of Carmel prayed for the future Mother of the Redeemer, and so the devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel was born.
Tradition also relates that after the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of her Son, and before her own passage to heaven, Mary visited the hermits of Carmel and encouraged them to persevere in their prayer. When later invasions swept over the Holy Land, the sons of Carmel did not abandon their prayer but carried it with them into Europe. In the thirteenth century, Saint Simon Stock, superior of the Carmelite Order, was at prayer, distressed by fresh persecutions, when the Mother of God appeared to him and gave him the scapular of the Order with the promise that whoever should die piously wearing it would not suffer eternal fire. Pope Gregory XIII, after serious examination and in view of the favors received by those who wore the scapular, declared the apparition true; the tradition of the Order also recounts a further apparition to Pope John XXII, in which the Virgin promised to bring her devout children out of purgatory on the first Saturday after their death.
The scapular itself is older than the tenth century in its origins, when a band of cloth taken from a religious habit was worn over the shoulders — hence its name, from the Latin word for the shoulder blades — as a sign of union with an order and its spirituality by those who remained in the ordinary life of the world. Reduced over time to the small form known today, and permitted to be replaced for daily use by the corresponding medal, it is never an amulet or a magical object: it is a sacramental sign that makes present the love of the Virgin for those who are good children of God, living in His friendship and grace and keeping His law. Indulgences are attached to the day of its reception and to the feasts of the Order, above all to the Solemnity of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on 16 July.
The devotion, carried through Europe by saints of the stature of Saint Teresa of Jesus and Saint John of the Cross, crossed the ocean to America, where the native peoples venerated Our Lady of Carmel from the middle of the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century the image now venerated in Mendoza was already there, the gift of Don Pedro de Núñez, "a gentleman of great fortune and devotion," who donated both the sacred image and all that was needed for her worship. She was first enthroned in the church of the Jesuit Fathers, where a confraternity was founded in her honor; in 1776, following the expulsion of the Society, the image was transferred to the church of San Francisco, from which she would preside over one of the most beautiful days in the history of the Argentine nation.
In 1814 José de San Martín came to Cuyo and began to turn its peaceable inhabitants into heroic soldiers and forgers of liberty — men who would need a Mother to shelter them and to give meaning to so much sacrifice. The Liberator's profound devotion to the Virgin led him to name her Generala of his army, overcoming the human respect of an age in which liberalism had imposed the notion that religion is a private affair. He weighed the matter with his general staff, and, as Espejo records in his work "The Crossing of the Andes," devotion to Our Lady of Carmel was so deeply rooted in Cuyo, and nearly all the soldiers wore her scapular, that she was the one preferred. On 5 January 1817 the brilliant ceremony took place: San Martín placed his baton of command in her hands, proclaimed her Generala, and had the Flag of the Andes blessed, greeted by reveilles and by the band with drums and clarions, while a salute of twenty-one cannon thundered before the army in full dress and all the people of Mendoza.
After his victories the Liberator returned his baton to her definitively, this time in the silence that accompanies all great things, leaving behind the well-known letter in which he confessed that the protection given to the Army of the Andes by its Patroness and Generala, the Virgin of Carmel, was too visible to be denied. Both relics, the baton and the letter, are kept today in the Virgin's camarín, silent witnesses to the share she had in the greatness of soul of the Liberator. As Generala of the Argentine Army, she is accompanied by the national flag and its sash, and also by the flags of Peru and Chile, since under this title she is patroness of both neighboring countries.
At the initiative of Fray Leonardo Maldonado, Pope Saint Pius X decreed that the sacred image of the Virgin Mary under the title of Carmel, venerated in the church of San Francisco in Mendoza, should be solemnly crowned with a crown of gold. He founded his decision on the abundant evidence of the popular veneration of the image, of her fame and celebrity, and of the admirable and heavenly graces and gifts abundantly granted through her. The crown, an offering of her devotees, was imposed in a memorable ceremony on 8 September 1911, and in memory of that solemnity the day was decreed the patronal feast of the province.
Since 1950 the Most Holy Virgin of Carmel of Cuyo has been honored on that day with particular solemnity in the schools of Mendoza as Patroness of the Primary School, established in that character by superior decision, and by the decree of 30 August 1980 as patroness of education at its three levels. In 1982 she was declared Patroness of the VIII Mountain Brigade. Thus the Mother who first appeared to Carmel's prophet as a cloud bearing rain continues to pour her blessings on soldiers, teachers, children, and a whole people who wear her scapular and call her Generala.
May Our Lady of Mount Carmel of Cuyo obtain for us the grace to place our own baton — every ambition and every fear we carry — into her hands today, and to wear her scapular not as a charm but as a pledge of a life lived in the friendship of God.
