National Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

The story of the National Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel begins not in Middletown but on East 28th Street in Manhattan, where four Irish Carmelite friars arrived in March 1889 to found a parish for poor Irish immigrants. Their new church, Our Lady of the Scapular of Mount Carmel — the first Carmelite church in the United States — was dedicated by Archbishop Michael Corrigan on December 22, 1889. From that Manhattan foundation the Carmelites built what became the North American Province of St. Elias, spreading to the Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester, Orange County, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Florida. On July 16, 1941 — the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel — the Most Rev. Hilary Doswald, O.Carm., Prior General of the Carmelite Order, designated Our Lady of the Scapular parish as the National Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the parish's pastor, Fr. Lawrence Flanagan, O.Carm., declared that the Shrine's first apostolate would be supplying Brown Scapulars to members of the U.S. armed forces. The Shrine's first director, Fr. Gabriel Pausbach, O.Carm., founded the Scapular Militia to manufacture and distribute them; by the end of World War II, hundreds of volunteers had produced millions of scapulars for servicemen and women. Over the next two decades, the Shrine's reach grew well beyond the five boroughs of New York City, drawing ever more pilgrims each year. To accommodate them, the parish opened a Marian Center with exhibits on Carmelite history, rooms for meetings and lectures, and a book and gift store. When the Carmelites assumed administration of the nearby parish of St. Stephen the Martyr in 1988, Our Lady of the Scapular and St. Stephen's merged in 1990 into Our Lady of the Scapular–St. Stephen. Meanwhile, the Carmelites had already purchased property in Middletown in 1917 for a junior seminary named St. Albert's. After the seminary closed in the 1980s, the friars petitioned Cardinal John O'Connor to relocate the National Shrine there. On February 25, 1991, the Cardinal approved the move, and on July 16, 1991, a statue of Our Lady of Mount Carmel from Portugal — connected to Servant of God Lucia dos Santos of Fatima and sculpted by José Ferreira Thedim (the sculptor of the original Our Lady of Fatima statue) — was carried in procession to the new Shrine site. A little over a year after the move, the Shrine was incorporated as a New York not-for-profit corporation, and Fr. Matthias Des Lauriers, O.Carm., Prior of the Province of St. Elias, was named the relocated Shrine's first director. Since then the Shrine has grown into a true pilgrimage campus. The original Carmelite parish on East 28th Street was torn down in 1991 and replaced by a 16-story apartment building, and the Carmelites eventually withdrew from that Manhattan parish in 2007; when the parish closed in 2014, the St. Elias Province reclaimed the historic Portuguese Our Lady of Mount Carmel statue, which arrived at Middletown in July 2015 and was solemnly enthroned on February 4, 2017, the 100th anniversary year of the Fatima apparitions. In 2006 the Provincial offices — including the Office of Lay Carmelites — moved to the Middletown campus. The Shrine continues to host hundreds of pilgrim groups, parish retreats, confirmation classes, prayer services, feast-day and healing Masses, and Lay Carmelite conferences each year, and in 2025 was named one of eight official Jubilee of Hope pilgrimage sites in the Archdiocese of New York.