Carmel Under Absolutism

In the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment ushered in the de-Christianization of Europe. Monarchism, deeply imbued with Illuminism and often only vaguely Christian, sought to nationalize the Church and complete its subjection to the State. The religious orders, reduced in numbers, discredited by the intelligentsia, and for the most part intellectually and spiritually stagnant were in no condition to meet the onslaught of secular reformers and abolitionists. The orders became subject to various forms of interference by Catholic rulers. France set the tone with a series of royal decrees. It saw the membership in religious orders drop from 22,499 to 14,868 in less than 25 years. Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II saw religion as a blight on society. In 1781 he suppressed all religious establishments not dedicated to teaching, care of the sick, or scholarship—eliminating the Bohemia-Hungary-Austria province and it 202 members. The Bavarian rulers promulgated a series of laws including the prohibition of questing, setting the age for profession, and that three houses in Bavaria necessitated the establishment of an independent Bavarian province. Travel to General Chapters was banned as was receiving commands from superiors outside the kingdom. Belgium fell under the benevolent absolutism of the Hapsburgs declaring in November 1781 that Belgian religious were independent of foreign superiors. A year later, in 1782, recruiting to religious life was suspended. Less than five months after that, “useless” convents, especially of the contemplatives, were suppressed. In the First Partition of Poland, a number of Carmelite houses fells under Austrian rule. In 1792, half of these were suppressed. Carmelite Mark Jandowicz became an ardent supporter of the movement to drive the Russians from Poland, circulating among the troops and encouraging them with his fiery words and prayers. Northern Italy too came under tighter control. Royal consent was required to erect a church or priory. An annual tabella, listing the names of the members of each house together with its incomes and debts had to be submitted. The year 1769 saw the closure of grancie and hospices, and the suppression of small houses. Other houses were lost when religious houses outside the territories were cut off. The once flourishing Lombardy province, extending over the whole of northern Italy, perished. Venice, never very submissive to the Church, placed religious under the jurisdiction of the bishops (1768), required that religious travel in pairs and set a curfew of 11PM, and suppressed all houses with less than twelve members (1770). The Grand Duchy of Tuscany required religious superiors to send full information regarding taxes sent to Rome (a practice eventually forbidden), incomes of each house, houses incapable of maintaining more than five members, the number of religious who are Tuscan and the number of foreigners, all legacies and doweries. In 1787, the reception of novices was forbidden, and current novices were to be dismissed without profession. The Bourbons, through their regent in Southern Italy, adopted many of the same practices. Small convents were suppressed (1768). Many provinces are only found in history books now.

The French Revolution

The Church, which constituted the influential First Estate of the France, was swept away, along with the monarchy to which is was inseparably bound. The aristocratic hierarchy and French theologians had made every effort to divorce the Gallican Church from Rome and strengthen its ties to the crown. Bishop Talleyrand of Autun proposed the nationalization of Church property (including that of the religious orders) and the support of the clergy by the state. The action, decreed in 1789, eliminated the social function of the Church in France. Because the Enlightenment saw no purpose to religion other than its social service, the Church became excess baggage. The Assembly declared all vows abolished and a state pension offered. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) required an oath of the clergy— of which half the clergy but only seven of 160 bishops complied. The Legislative Assembly and the National Convention (1791-1795), replacing the Assembly, held non-juring clergy suspect and liable for expulsion from the commune upon testimony of twenty “active” citizens. Later only six citizens were necessary for conviction. The Reign of Terror resulted in thousands being brought to the guillotine or other means for adjudication. Priests and religious were not overlooked. An estimated 2,000-5,000 priests were killed. Another 20,000 priests and 46 of the 85 constitutional bishops publicly apostasized. Between 30,000 to 40,000 non-juring priests, a tenth of them religious, managed to escape to England, Spain, and the Papal States. In 1795, the National Convention decreed the separation of Church and State. The latter recognized no religion and forbade its external signs but guaranteed its free exercise. The final blow came in September 1797 when three members of the Directory staged a coup and took power. Thousands of priests were deported or imprisoned. Carmel suffered through each step of the revolution. The members took their options: in Lyon two members elected to remain, three said they would stay if there were no changes in their way of life, one would only answer after he knew where he would be assigned, and seven chose to leave and receive the pension. More unusual was the example of the priory at Bordeaux: twenty-four members, all but one, chose the religious state and refused the State’s “liberty.” Some of the most enthusiastic apostles of the Revolution were former religious, and an occasional Carmelite. After the suppression of the religious orders, Carmelite convents, churches, and their contents were sold at public auction. Most of the churches were torn down for their building material or to make way for new edifices, thoroughfares, or squares. Priories were sometimes converted into public buildings or private dwellings. Some artifacts survive in museums and private collections. Thirty-four members of the Order are known to have suffered death or imprisonment. Martinien Pannetier, of Bordeaux, with the assistance of the youngest member of the community, took to rescue the relics of St. Simon Stock from the now abandoned church. Eventually he was guillotined as were Carmelites Michael Barrot and John Baptist Bedouin. A decree of August 1792, specified that non-juring priests should be deported to French Guiana. But the war with England prevented the French ships from sailing so the prisoners were confined to ships off the coast of Brittany. Rochefort, at the mouth of the Charente, became the prison for deportees from the north and east of France. Among the Carmelites at this hellhole was Blessed James Retouret from the Carmelite house in Limoges. At least four others shared these tortures and are buried on the Island of Aix or Madame Island. Other Carmelites were deported from Bordeaux. Ships that held 50 slaves now held 250-350 priests. Two hundred and fifty priests had already died before boarding the ships. Statistics on the clergy who escaped from France are fragmentary; those concerning the Carmelites are nonexistent. 

Carmel Under Napoleon

In 1803 a general secularization took place. The extinction of what was left of the Order in Germany was completed. Only Straubing, the Aussterbekloster where the German Carmelites were allowed to go to die, managed to survive although Neustadt, the other Aussterbekloster, survived until 1848. The second and third partitions of Poland (1792, 1795) and the brief hegemony of Napolean entailed few if any losses for the Order in Eastern Europe. The Carmelite house in the Catholic Sovereignty of Boxmeer remained open until 1812 when it was dissolved. After Napolean’s defeat, the community returned only to find later that the dissolution would remain in effect but only after the deaths of the community members. Napolean overran the northern part of Italy. After he became emperor, the general law of June 2, 1810, suppressed religious orders throughout the Italy he controlled. This spelled the end of the Order in northern Italy. All the houses of the Piedmont province were suppressed. The Republic of Genoa was annexed to France. The six houses of the Province of Venice and the nine of the Province of Tuscany ceased to be. Only half of the Carmelite houses in the Papal States survived Napolean. Some church buildings continued to exist although not always used for worship. Having survived the Bourbons, the Carmelites of the Kingdom of Naples did not fare as well under Napoleon (1806-1815). The Carmine Maggiore in Naples survived and when religious orders were restored under the Bourbons in 1820, the Carmelites returned but in much reduced numbers. Nothing is now known about the 83 houses in the provinces of the Kingdom of Naples. The Carmels of Sicily remained intact because of British protection. Although the two foundations in Malta were separated from the Sicilian Province of San Angelo, they continued without difficulties. This was something they actually wanted to happen. The French occupation of Italy had the same deleterious effect on the nunneries. Few of the thirty-odd foundations on the Italian peninsula saw the second decade of the 19th century. The Order in Spain was caught in country’s struggle between monarchism and republicanism. Political change was seen as only possible after the destruction of the religious orders. Two houses were actually the focus of fighting— Zaragoza and Toledo. In comparison to the members of the Order in other countries, the Spanish Carmelites were most persistent in their vocation. Each community remained intact because each time the friars chose to return to their ruined homes and resume their lives as religious. In 1835, thirty-three Carmelite houses were suppressed, leaving 227 homeless. The closures were often accompanied by scenes of mob violence, the murder of religious, and the destruction of historic buildings and works of art. In March 1836, the Order in Spain was suppressed except those teaching or nursing. The law suppressed all monasteries of cloistered nuns with less than 20 members. No novices were to be accepted and the nuns’ property was sequestered, removing their means of support. Likewise, the Order in Portugal and Brazil was suppressed. King Peter IV, in 1834, abolished all religious orders, confiscated their properties and pensioned off the religious. The Portuguese nuns were allowed to stay but not to accept novices. When the French invaded Portugal in 1807, the king fled to Brazil and the religious there found themselves now constricted to live under many of the same rules Europe had endured. The third quarter of the nineteenth century saw the dissolution of what little was left of the Carmelites in Italy after Napoleon finished with them. In Sicily and the Papal States, the last considerable concentration of Carmelites was disbanded, the central administration was disrupted, and the Order teetered on the brink of extinction. Angelo Savini, the vicar general at this time (1863-1889), was blessed with qualities suited to the times: tenacious endurance and alertness to emerging opportunities. Three years after accepting his ministry, the Order was suppressed in Italy. Traspontina was taken away. The Risorgimento united the various political realities of the Italian peninsula but left the Church in pieces. Savini supported efforts to restore or implant the Order in other countries that allowed, no matter how grudgingly, the necessary freedom.

The year 1876 is the low tide in the Order’s fortunes since its initiation. The last of the suppressions had taken place but the revival had not yet definitely set in. The world contained 58 Carmelite houses, not including the eight houses in North America. The nuns had lost two centuries of growth. Forty monasteries remained.

The Resurgence of Carmel

Outside Italy, however, the Order slowly began to come back to life, even with stirrings on the lands beyond the seas. The Concordat of 1851 of Spain with the Holy See opened the door to the re-establishment of religious orders. John Torrents and Joseph Barcons share credit for Spain’s revival. Jérez de la Frontera was the first house and church to come back. Carmen of Onda (1879) and Caudete (1888) were next. In January 1890, the prior general Aloysius Galli established the Spanish province of the Most Holy Name of Mary. Carmel north of the Alps boasted the Polish Provinces. Straubing, the oldest house in the Order, did its part for new growth by sending two Carmelites to the work with German immigrants in Kentucky. By 1890, a very desperate group of Carmelites, working in several locations in the United States and Canada, were united into the Province of the Most Pure Heart of Mary. The Province of Ireland, made strong progress towards revival and even supplied young men to other emerging foundations. One of its most illustrious sons, John Spratt, worked to found the Dublin Carmel on Whitefriar Street with new church and a long list of philanthropic works undertaken on behalf of the desperately impoverished Catholics of Dublin. A project dear to the heart of the vicar general Savini was the recovery and restoration of the hermitage near the fountain of Elijah on Mount Carmel. The Province of Ireland also undertook to establish its own province in the USA among the Irish emigrants of New York City. Arriving in 1889, the Carmelites were offered a slice of St. Stephen’s parish with the care of Bellevue Hospital. Before the turn of the century, a second foundation was made in Tarrytown, New York. In 1881, the Carmelites settled in Gawler, Australia to minister at a parish that covered 700 miles and included 10 towns. By the departure of the 19th century, the Order was reviving in Brazil as well—this time with an assist from the Spanish province. The number of men had diminished and they had gotten old.  

Spiritual Writings of Carmel

The trials of the 1800 almost dealt a fatal blow to the Order. However, the Order was still blessed with a few souls who were determined to live their vocation to religious life but had to skill to teach others about the life. A member of the Aragon province, Roque Alberto Faci, wrote over fifty books. One, reprinted in 1979, described thousands of images, crucifixes, and relics venerated in the cities and towns of Aragon and often no longer existent. He added three titles to the literature on Teresa of Avila. The provincial of the San Angelus province in Sicily published two “manuals”— one for the Carmelite novice and a second for Carmelite priors. Even the prior general, Joseph Cataldi, published. His four-volume collection of his works comes with the apology for unsighted sources since he wrote the book in two months while in a place with the source material was not available. Thomas Chais’ work on the scapular went through three editions, indicating that scapular devotion was still alive and well. Perhaps the most notable Carmelite contribution to spiritual literature of these years was the translation into German of the works of St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila by Gallus Schwab of the Bamberg monastery pre-suppression.

Carmel and Vatican II

Often described as the most significant religious event of the 20th century, the Second Vatican Council was opened by Pope John XXIII in 1962 after several years of preparation. Catalonian Carmelite Bartolomew Xiberta was appointed in 1960 to be a member of the Preparatory Theological Commission of the Second Vatican Council. In 1962, he was appointed advisor to the Spanish Episcopate for the Council. He was well-respected as a theologian and philosopher and has been described as “probably one of the outstanding theologians of the last century and no doubt the outstanding Carmelite theologian.” His doctoral dissertation is widely recognized as breaking new ground in the Church’s understanding of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Xiberta established that the sacrament in the early Church was social and communal in character and oriented toward the reconciliation of the penitent with both the Church and God. Also participating in the Council were the prior general Kilian Healy and seven Carmelite bishops from various parts of the world. Without a doubt the most important intervention by the Carmelites was from Bishop Donal Lamont, the bishop of then Umtali, Rhodesia which is now the Diocese of Mutare in Zimbabwe. When the question of Ad Gentes, the document on missionary life came up, he took an active part and spoke eloquently about the importance of it. When the first draft of the document came out however, he gave voice to the thoughts of many other bishops, complaining that what was presented was very inadequate— that it was like bones without any flesh (referencing the Prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones). The document underwent a major rewrite as a result. A number of other theologians and experts accompanied the Council members as consultants and technical helpers. One of the most significant impacts from the Council on religious life was the call for religious institutes to return to their roots. The Carmelite Family as a whole gained much from the deep introspection of returning to a study of St. Albert’s Rule and what is calling us to.