New York’s Hudson River Valley is dotted with many serene settings. The missus and I found our favorite in Middletown — an idyllic, 60-acre tract whose heart is the National Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

This shrine is an ideal place to renew familiarity with the brown-scapular devotion. After all, Irish Carmelites founded this shrine and remain its guardians to encourage scapular-based devotion to Our Lady.

At the same time, the shrine reacquainted us with some well-known Carmelite saints and blesseds, and introduced us to some unfamiliar ones.

Driving up to the shrine chapel, we wondered: Who is that saint greeting us at the head of the driveway? We soon learned he’s St. Albert of Trapani, a preacher known for his prayerfulness and purity. Canonized in 1476, he’s patron of Carmelite schools.

Near the entrance to the main chapel, we encountered the La Bruna Shrine, named for its glorious reproduction of a 13th-century Tuscan-school image of Our Lady and the Christ Child, much like an icon. It’s considered the oldest depiction of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. A glorious, though not large, stained-glass window reminded us of the origin of the brown scapular, for it captures the moment the Blessed Mother gave the first one to St. Simon Stock on July 16, 1251.

This chapel is the unmistakable heart of the site, which spreads over several acres dotted with outdoor shrines. It’s also part of a larger building with a long cloister; the effect is of walking inside monastery grounds.

The Stations of the Cross under the covered walk have a unique character related to Carmelite saints. Recently canonized St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and Blessed Titus Brandsma — both martyred in concentration camps — appear at each station.

But it’s the chapel, with its tall A-frame style roofline, that seems to make the first call on pilgrims before they visit the outdoor shrines. The sanctuary and nave, once for Carmelite seminarians before this place became a shrine, are simple and humble. Yet they have a wealth of beauty, spiritually and artistically, on a smaller scale.

Look of the Little Flower

Directly behind and above the green marble altar, Our Lady of Mount Carmel appears in a large bas-relief oval on the brick wall, high enough to look out lovingly on visitors.

The simple architecture has plenty of liturgical reminders to keep us praying and meditating. The high wood ceiling rises in steep angles and suggests hands with “fingertips” that point prayerfully to heaven as a reminder to us to do the same.

On the side of the sanctuary, a single stained-glass window draws our eyes to its Crucifixion scene. Near the pulpit, one of the ever-present reminders of the Carmelites appears in a very attractive sculpture of the Holy Family greeting St. Thérèse of Lisieux. By this scene we venerated a relic of the Little Flower.

Thérèse catches our eye and draws our attention in other places, too. At the Infant of Prague shrine, there she is again — one of four Carmelite saints paying homage to the child Jesus. She certainly reminds us here of her full religious name.

 The Little Flower is honored in a side altar shrine. In front of her image carved of wood, two golden angels on bended knee hold aloft an ornamental gold reliquary topped with a cross. It’s inscribed with her well-known promise, “I will let fall from heaven a shower of roses.” And it displays her major relics — a piece of bone, locks of hair, a swatch of cloth.

The friars have found colorful ways for the shrine to teach us about the Carmelite saints and blesseds. Every stained-glass window along the nave pictures Carmelites; placards in English and Spanish encapsulate their stories.

We lingered at several. The scene in a World War II concentration camp depicts Blessed Titus Brandsma — Carmelite priest, advisor to Catholic journalists and champion of the Catholic press and education. He was killed at Dachau.

The next window shows us Jesus crowning St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, an Italian Carmelite nun who died in 1607 and prayed especially for the renewal of the Church. Alongside her, a pair of powerhouse Carmelites appears together — Sts. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

In the next window, there’s little-known, 15th-century Blessed Bartholomew Faute, known for his love of the Eucharist.

Next is another relatively unknown Carmelite in this country: Blessed Nuno Alvarez, who hailed from 15th-century Portugal and was especially devoted to Mary.

The colorful window honoring St. Andrew Corsini shows him celebrating Mass as the Blessed Virgin Mary appears by the altar and blesses him. Here we learned that St. Corsini, a 14th-century bishop, received a vision of our Blessed Mother, who told him: “My order of Carmel shall stand until the end of time.”

Seminarians Afoot

Another window presents to us St. Albert of Jerusalem, in red robes, and St. Brocard, kneeling before him. The former was a bishop, martyr, lawgiver of Carmel and patriarch of Jerusalem in the early 13th century who wrote a Rule for Carmelites. The latter, a prior, received the Rule from St. Albert and was later buried on Mount Carmel.

Because of the Irish roots of the shrine’s Carmelites of St. Elias Province, who came to the United States as missionaries, there’s a shrine of St. Patrick, too. The reliquary here contains not only a relic of his, but also relics of St. John the Evangelist, St. Lawrence O’Toole, St. Brigid and Blessed Oliver Plunkett.

Named after the Prophet Elijah, this Carmelite province founded Our Lady of Mount Carmel Shrine first in Manhattan in 1941. During World War II, the shrine made millions of scapulars for the armed forces.

In 1991, with Cardinal John O’Connor’s approval, they moved the shrine to Middletown, where they’d maintained some form of seminary formation since 1917. There are still seminarians in one of the buildings on the grounds.

Outdoors, the first of several shrines with marble statues to grace these grounds was Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Her peaceful location is by the lake.

Wherever we turned we found a peaceful place for prayer, from shrines to Our Lady of Knock and to St. Joseph, where the gazebo is a nice place to rest and reflect, to the new Mary Garden.

The garden is part of Our Lady’s Scapular Vision Shrine. Here, Mary and the child Jesus offer the scapular to St. Simon Stock. One hand on his heart, the other accepting the scapular, he still teaches us, over 750 years later, that we should receive the same gracious gift with the same grateful heart.

Joseph Pronechen writes from

Trumbull, Connecticut.