6th Sunday After Pentecost (2025)

Sermon of Father John A. Perricone on the 6th Sunday After Pentecost given Sunday, July 20th, 2025 at Our Lady of Sorrows Church, Jersey City, New Jersey. Father reflects on the providential link between the scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the martyrdom of the Carmelite sisters of Compiègne, emphasizing the sacredness of the physical and the call to spiritual ascent through sacrificial love. Media courtesy of Cantantes In Cordibus. Please like the video, subscribe to the channel, and share with your Catholic Friends! 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.

By virtue of the mercy of Divine Providence, this past week, there was a conjunction of two quite special feast days. They happened one after another. On Wednesday was the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, but on the following day, July the 17th, Mother Church celebrated the newly canonized Carmelite sisters of Compiegne, who were martyred in France at the end of the 18th century. 

Why did Divine Providence allow these two feasts to have this unusual conjunction? And we should think about that this morning. First, the significance of the scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. We know that the scapular, as we wear it, was given by the Mother of God into the hands of Saint Simon Stock in the late part of the 13th century. Our Lady wanted to distribute to all the faithful on earth the many benefits that were accrued to the members of the Carmelite Order who wore the full scapular. It was placed over their head and went to their knees on both front and back. She provided Saint Simon Stock with an abbreviated form of the scapular that could be worn by all laity. That scapular had attached to it by the kindness of our lady, the great Sabbatine privilege. That all Catholics who devoutly wear that scapular, and I note devoutly because it is not a magical talisman. All Catholics who devoutly wear the scapular are promised by Our Lady that on the first Saturday of the month after their death, she will rescue them from the fires of Purgatory. 

There are two reasons why the scapular is of such paramount importance for Catholics. Number one, because it bespeaks the importance of the physical. Such a lesson is taught to us by the sacraments, by the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Our Lord's grace only comes to us through the physical signs that He has deemed would be the vehicles of sanctifying grace. Why the physical? Because God knew it would always be the temptation of man to live in his mind, to live in the world of his mind and therefore not respect the physical world and physical symbols. This temptation, of course, has been called throughout the centuries by different names. In the early Church, it was called the heresy of Gnosticism. Today, we simply refer to it as the perils of the psychologized person who lives in his own world and literally thinks that the physical is so unimportant he can manipulate it at his will, down to the very very point of thinking that his own sexual identity given to him by God can be manipulated by him according to his whim. You see, the hatred of the physical, as God has created it. And so Mother Church exalts the physical, hence the beauty of the sacred liturgy, every detail of physical beauty that can act to us as the pathway to Paradise. So we wear the physical scapular. 

The second purpose of the scapular is to remind us that it is given to us by Our Lady of Mount Carmel. That mountain of Carmel in Israel, where the prophets prayed, and the first altar was established there by monks to honor the Mother of God. It is important that we recognize it was a mountain. It indicates to all Catholics that our life on earth is an ascent up the mountain. The mountain is represented by this valley of tears, this life of ours, the very top of the mountain is heaven, where God dwells. We must remember every day that our life is an ascent. It's always going higher and higher, and still higher in the love of God. That love of God, we must strive every day to make more real, more generous, more perfect in all the details of our state in life, and every cross that we accept from God with great love and gratitude in all our prayers and duties. Always this ascent, going higher and higher. 

Who are the Carmelite sisters, the martyrs of Compiegne? At the beginning of the French Revolution, the Jacobin atheists tried to erase God and Holy Mother Church from the country of France, and they outlawed amongst many other things, religious life. Convents and monasteries were closed all throughout France, and brothers, and priests, and consecrated religious were thrown into the streets of France to live on their own. This group of Carmelite sisters in Compiegne decided they would remain together, some dozen or so of them, and continue to live their holy rule. They continued to live with their beautiful Carmelite habits until they were discovered by the Jacobins. All dozen or so were arrested and brought to Paris to face execution at the guillotine. As they approached the scaffolding of the guillotine, each and every one of the cloistered Carmelite sisters, still wearing their blessed habit, were there with their Reverend Mother Teresa. And as they awaited to ascend the steps, they sang together, La Venite Creato Spiritus to the mockery and jeers of the bloodthirsty crowds that surrounded the guillotine. As each sister, beginning with the youngest, approached the steps, first, she knelt before Reverend Mother, and she said, "Reverend Mother, please, your permission to die." Reverend Mother blessed them and each one, the last being Reverend Mother Teresa, were guillotined. As Reverend Mother made her way up the steps, she looked up to heaven and begged the Mother of God that the death of these Carmelite sisters would bring an end to the vicious reign of terror of Robespierre. 

Ten days later, the reign of terror in France ended, and the tyrannical fanatic Robespierre was himself guillotined. Those blessed martyrs, those Carmelite sisters, who went to the guillotine recognized that they wore their Carmelite habits as a sign of the protection of the Mother of God, who would give them the grace to mount Calvary here on earth, so they one day could be with Christ in heaven. And Our Lady did give them that grace, that equanimity, that peace to face the guillotine without fear. Remember, my Catholic friends, each day when you kiss your scapular, recognize that you are made for heaven, and no sacrifice, absolutely no sacrifice, is too great to win that treasure. 

God bless you.