Decades ago, it was common in some communities for Catholic children to be clothed with a brown scapular when they received their first communion. The scapular, which looks like two pieces of cloth on opposite ends of a string necklace, remains a popular Catholic practice.
Starting in the late 12th century, some veterans of the Crusades began making their home on Mount Carmel, located near what is now Haifa, Israel. Tired of war, they sought to live in seclusion where the prophet Elijah was believed to have defeated prophets of Ba’al (1 Kings 18:20–40). Unlike the Franciscans and the Dominicans, the Carmelites weren’t founded by a charismatic saint but by men drawn to a life of peace.
Some Carmelites eventually made their way back to Europe and discovered that their way of life, suitable to a mountain, was harder to sustain outside Palestine. They needed to adapt their charism to life in medieval Europe. One serious challenge was adopting a European-style habit. Many Carmelites wanted to keep their original garb of Palestinian mountain dwellers. Their superiors believed it would be easier to persuade church officials to accept the order if the Carmelites’ clothing imitated that of the already established mendicant friars.
Then, an English Carmelite prior named Simon Stock (c. 1165–1265) claimed to receive a vision of Mary holding the child Jesus on one arm and a brown scapular on the other. Simon said Mary offered him the scapular, a large piece of cloth worn over the shoulders that is part of the habit of a consecrated religious, and told him that anyone who wore it would not go to hell.
Not surprisingly, the Carmelites quickly standardized their habits.
Over time, laypeople began to wear smaller versions of these scapulars. Instead of the large scapulars that consecrated religious draped over their shoulders, laypeople wore tabs of cloth attached by strings. The Carmelites’ scapular, which became known as the brown scapular, became the most popular because of the “promise” that those who wore it would not go to hell.
Scholarly evidence for the historicity of Simon and his alleged apparition is scant, however. There is some evidence that Simon himself existed. He is venerated as a saint and has a feast day (May 16), but the church has never formally approved the apparition attributed to him. These days, the two branches of the Carmelite Order promote wearing the brown scapular out of devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel but also distance themselves from Mary’s “promise” to Simon, seeing it as superstitious.
In the Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, the church cautions against a “utilitarian view of some forms of popular piety,” saying that “one’s commitment to live the Christian life” must be paramount, lest we end up with “symbolic gestures [that] run the risk of degenerating into empty customs or mere superstitions.” With the scapular, an assurance of salvation should be understood within the context of Christians living their lives as disciples of Christ. Expectation that merely wearing the scapular is sufficient counts as superstition.
This article also appears in the November 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 11, page 49). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: WIkimedia Commons
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