“After the division of the Order into two branches at the end of the 16th century some differences naturally sprang up between the two branches and each life developed along separate lines. But as early as the 17th century we find this divergence already reduced to the smallest compass through an internal reformation in the Calced Carmelites which quickened the old spirit in a splendid way and proved that even with some mitigations of the Rule the spirit of Carmel can live and flourish. It is a remarkable dispensation of Providence that shortly after the splitting up of the Order, a man was raised up in the branch of the Old Observance who became the soul of a new reform and who was elevated by God so high in the mystical life of Carmel that he ranks with the great St. Teresa and the Doctor Mysticus, St. John of the Cross, as a mystical writer. His first biographer, Father Donatianus, writes: ‘God has predestined him in matters of the inner life to be one of the brightest flames of our small observance.'”
St. Titus Brandsma
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