St Simon Stock and Simon of Mount Carmel

Thank you for printing my letter of July 5 on the subject of St Simon Stock. It was written necessarily in some haste, and I was not able to check my references. The arguments, which seem plausible, for identifying Simon Stock with the Simon of Mount Carmel, prior eiusdem ordinis, do not depend on the Chronicle of William of Sandwich. but on the 'Vitae Fratrum ("Lives of the Brethren") of Gerard of Frachet, OP (d.1271).
Medieval English records, and especially contemporary records; reveal no trace of Simon Stock whatever. The suggestion that he may be identifiable with the Simon of the Vitae Fratrum we owe to the late Fr Benedict Zimmerman, ODC, of happy memory, the great pioneer of modern Carmelite historical studies.
The Brown Scapular Devotion depends for its validity, of course. not on its precise historical origins, whatever they may be, but on the Church's approval of the devotion on account of its spiritual content. It can gain nothing from tangling it up with unfounded historical assertions.
The most recent findings on this question may be studied in a 30-page essay by Fr Keith Egan, Carm, a distinguished American scholar who specialised in English medieval Carmelite history while studying at Cambridge University. His "An Essay Toward a Historiography of the Origin of the Carmelite Province in England" was published in volume 19 of the Order's polyglot review Garments
(Rome, Institutum Carmelitanum, 1972).
(Fr) Brocard Sewell,
Whitefriars School, Carm Charlton Kings, Cheltenham.
I read the letter of July 5 by Fr Brocard Sewell, 0 Carm, on St Simon Stock, with bewilderment.
Fr Brocard says that the idea of the apparition of Our Lady to St Simon Stock has been propagated by enthusiastic American Carmelites and that the idea of the apparition has received very little support from Carmelites themselves.
That is not exactly the impression I have received from quite a number of visits to Aylesford unless Kent has become the 51st Slate of the Union. Nor indeed did I ever hear that the historicity of St Simon Stock was under any kind of investigation.
I cannot think that that great Carmelite, Fr Malachy Lynch, had doubts about St Simon Stock. Writing in the Aylesford Pilgrim's Newsletter about St Simon in June 1963. Fr Malachy wrote: "The first thing to know about him is that he is alive now, He is not just a name in a litany or on a scroll."
In the same issue Fr Malachy describes St Simon as returning to England with his fellow Carmelites in 1240 and, six years later. being elected PriorGeneral. He sought and obtained from the Pope mitigation of the hermit rule by which change the Carmelites became mendicant friars. lie had his troubles, apparently,: hut, writes Fr Malachy: "When all seemed lost Our Lady appeared in vision to her Saint.'
It would he interesting to hear from Er Brocard whose relics were brought back to Aylesford in 1949 and whose skull is in the large reliquary in the Shrine'? Guy J. M. Collis Manchester Hotel.
Knighton Fields Road East. Leicester.