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The Carmelite Nuns

The origin of the women’s Carmel, or Second Order, is linked to the fact of aggregation of the laity to Carmelite convents, already in existence at the second half of the thirteenth century. Women, for a long time, could not be part of the Order except through the "oblation" accompanied by a legal deed. In documents written in the vernacular they came to be called "pinzochere”, “mantellate” and “sisters". Gradually with the spread of these sisters, both professed and non-professed, there arose the need for a clarification regarding their status. Thus, the initiative to ask Pope Nicholas V for an intervention to clarify and define their situation with pontifical authority came about. With the Bull Cum nulla of Nicholas V on the 7th October 1452 and later completed with another Bull, the Dum Attenta of Sixtus IV (28th November 1476), these pious women were admitted into the Order.

The commitment to live “in the following of Jesus Christ” the Charismatic gift of the Order developed its own form among the Nuns as an expression within the Church of the contemplative ideal with which Carmel was born and in which it lives. The Nuns participate with their experience of the cloister, welcoming with joy and generosity those who come to them while promoting liturgical prayer in the local Church, listening to the values ​​of the Spirit, in fidelity to their kind of life and the norms of the enclosed life (Constitution of the Carmelite Nuns n. 21).

In the likeness of Elijah, the spiritual origin of Carmel, a Carmelite nun takes on a prophetic role as a characteristic of the life, oriented towards a deeper listening to the Word of God and giving a particular witness to the living God and the supreme demands of his Kingdom. In intimate union with Mary, "the book in which our Rule is written because the Word is written in her"; she seeks to live the mystery of her interior life and of the essential union with God in Christ Jesus. Thus, the monasteries will be upper rooms. where, in the company of Mary, Mother of Jesus, the nuns will pray for the action of the Holy Spirit in the permanent Pentecost of the Church (Constitution of the Carmelite Nuns n. 22).

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