Sister Lucy and the Brown Scapular

On September 13, 1917, the Virgin of Fatima had announced to the three children the coming of Our Lady of Mount Carmel the next month. On October 13, during the closing of the cycle of apparitions, when the conversation of Lucy with Our Lady of the Rosary was finished, while the crowd contemplated the grandiose cosmic miracle, the three shepherds enjoyed several visions. They were given to admire in the sky three successive pictures, the last of which was Our Lady of Mount Carmel calling to mind the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary. That same evening, Lucy would relate her vision to Canon Formigão: “At the end, the Virgin Who appeared to me ‘seemed to me to be Our Lady of Mount Carmel’.”

At the end of the 1940’s, while conversing with three Carmelite priests, Father Donald O’Callaghan, Father Albert Ward and Father Luis Gonzaga de Oliveira, Sister Maria-Lucia of the Immaculate Heart (known as Sister Lucy) recalled that the Blessed Virgin Mary wished that the devotion of the holy Scapular be propagated. If Our Lady, during Her last public apparition, had held it in Her hands, it was to urge us to wear it, quite like in the preceding apparitions, the presence of Her Rosary had clearly manifested the wishes of Her Heart.

The messenger of Heaven also explained it to Father Howard Rafferty when the priest questioned her in the name of the Father General of the Carmelites, on October 15, 1950: “Our Lady, Lucy told him, held the Scapular in Her hands because She wants us all to wear it.”