“This was St. Simon Stock. The magnitude of his achievements places him in the ranks of the great. In his lifetime, the enormous work of adaptation to new conditions was accomplished and the Order given a form and direction which needed little alteration during the succeeding centuries. Providentially, need called him forth. His accomplishments were such as to demand not only energy but great sanctity. He was endowed with a capacity not only for extension but what is more important, for consolidation. We find him leaving England to take part in the foundation of cloisters in Cologne, Haarlem, Brussels and in several of the towns of France. He made many journeys to consult the Holy See concerning the affairs of the Order. After a life which was truly crowded with achievement, he died in 1265 at Bordeaux. He had ruled the Order for twenty years. It is to his lasting merit to have established discipline and order in that difficult time and to have inspired an activity which did not do violence to the life of prayer and the original spirit of the Order. The adaptation of the Rule sanctioned by Innocent IV was so perfectly in harmony with the traditional spirit of Carmel, that St. Teresa accepted it as the embodiment of the true life of the order. It is this mitigated Rule and not the earlier one that St. Teresa uses in her reform. That in itself is a great tribute to the spiritual genius of St. Simon.”
Bl. Titus Brandsma
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