It is always sad when you come to the end of a Novena like this one to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. The beautiful habit of making your pilgrimage to the Carmel of St. Joseph with the prayerful intention of love and devotion to Our Lady is just so awesome and wonderful that it is a habit you don’t want to break!  It is a good and generous thing that the Sisters daily invite all to their chapel for Eucharistic Adoration of Our Blessed Lord — and may the faithful know that the Holy Rosary is prayed EACH night of the year at 7:45 p.m. in the chapel so you can keep your Novena going!

Tonight Mt. Carmel was especially blessed to have celebrating the final night of Novena Masses the new Archbishop of St. Louis, his Excellency Robert Carlson. The Archbishop told a story of his recent adventure 3,000 miles away in the mountains of Columbia where on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel he celebrated another Novena. The novena was celebrated with a Carmelite Community of Nuns which have been established there since 1584!  The Carmel is in a little village some 3 1/2 hours from Bogota.

“And so from South America to St. Louis we bridge two cultures and two different ways of honoring our Blessed Mother. And so tonight as we celebrate this mass we ask that Our Lady of Mt. Carmel would place the Archdiocese of St. Louis under her protective care,” said the Archbishop.

Wow! That certainly is a most wonderful blessing for our city of St. Louis.  We are so very thankful for the Archbishop to call upon our Mother and her maternal care under the most beautiful title of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.  It is her beautiful and loving mantle which wrap us in safekeeping and as we wear the garment of her brown scapular, we pledge our devotion to her.  Surely it is known that a most important mission of  Carmelites  to pray especially for Priests.  And so we will continue to do so for the Archdiocese and the world.

The Bishop was assisted tonight by Deacon Anthony Yates and the Rosary was led by Kenrick Glennon Seminarian, Peter Fonseca. The choir was from St. Mary Magdalene Parish in Brentwood.

You can pray along to the Most Holy Rosary and Benediction here.
You may listen to Archbishop Carlson’s Homily here.

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