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The connection between the Carmelite Order and the Royal House of France originated in the Middle Ages, when St. Louis IX encountered the hermits on Mt. Carmel and brought them to France. When the Discalced Reform came to France from Spain in the early seventeenth century, the royal family assisted the nuns with their patronage. The French court was shaken in 1674 when Louise de la Vallière , the former mistress of Louis XIV, publicly begged the queen's forgiveness and entered a Carmelite monastery. In his book To Quell the Terror , William Bush details the many connections of the later Bourbons with Carmel, particularly the patronage of Queen Marie Lesczynska and her daughter Madame Louise . When Louise herself chose to become a Carmelite nun in 1770, it cemented the spiritual ties between those in the worldliness of Versailles and those in the austerity of the cloister. Marie-Antoinette of Austria married the Dauphin in the same year that Madame Louise entered the mo

If you have ever walked along the beach after a storm, you know that the wind and the waves churn up and leave a myriad of sea stuff along the shore line, some of it is good like the pretty sea glass and seashells, some of it not so nice like the bits of jellyfish and other dead matter. The storms in our lives can be a bit like that as well, churning up and exposing a whole lot of bits and pieces of life matter. Here too some of it is good and some can be rather unpleasant or painful. Keeping our eyes on Jesus is the key. In today's Gospel St Peter, in his fear, takes his eyes off Jesus as he attempts to walk on the water to Jesus. How much like Peter I can be! Letting the stuff that life's storms throw in my face distract me, I take my eyes of Jesus and splat, down I go. It is in those moments I have to remember to do as Peter did and pray the prayer he prayed," Lord save me!" Today is the feast day of St Alphonsus Liguori. In a reflection in Magnificat today, thi