Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (16 July 2008)

In our spiritual calendar, today is the commemoration day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, the title under which we honor the Mother of our Lord as she is patroness of the life of prayer and contemplation. This is because Mount Carmel, a place in northwest Palestine, has been associated with hermits, holy men and women, and especially the Old Testaments prophets Elijah and Elishah since long before the time of Our Lord.In our secular calendar, July 16, 1945, marked the beginning of the atomic age in world history. It is interesting to reflect on how clearly the Mother of God indicated her involvement in the history of our nation. Early in the 1800s, when our nation was very young, the six or eight American bishops, in one of their meetings in Baltimore, chose Our Blessed Lady under her title of Immaculate Conception, as the patron saint of the young nation and especially of its Catholic population.

During World War II, she made it abundantly clear that she was taking her role as our patroness very seriously. On December 8, 1941, the day after the sneak attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan. It was the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Then, on July 16, 1945, the American military exploded the highly secret atomic bomb over the proving grounds of New Mexico. It performed exactly as it was supposed to, and less than a month later, an atomic bomb was dropped over the city of Hiroshima in Japan, totally obliterating that city and causing the deaths of 180,000 people. Three days later, the Japanese government still had not agreed to surrender unconditionally, so a second atomic bomb over the city of Nagasaki. Again, the death toll was horrendous, and caused Japan to surrender and bring World War II to a close in the Pacific theater. The date of the Japanese surrender, and therefore of the end of the war was August 15: the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady into heaven. Opinions as to the morality of using atomic bombs may differ, but we can hardly miss the connection between World War II and the feasts of our national patroness.

May the Immaculate Mother of God pray for us and give us peace now and in the future.

Thank you for seeking God’s truth. God bless you. Father Victor Brown, O.P.