Saint Brocard

Saint Brocard, also known in Latin sources as Brocardus and sometimes rendered Burchard, was a hermit of Mount Carmel and, according to Carmelite tradition, the second prior of the community of Latin hermits that became the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. Almost nothing about his early life can be established from contemporary documents. Later Carmelite writers described him as a man of French origin who had taken up the eremitical life in the Holy Land, though other traditions associated him with Jerusalem itself. Modern historians note that the earliest Carmelite narratives were composed generations after the events they describe, and that the personal biography of Brocard remains largely obscure.

In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries a group of Western hermits occupied cells on the slopes of Mount Carmel, near the fountain traditionally linked to the prophet Elijah. They regarded Elijah as their model of contemplative solitude. After the death of their first prior, remembered as Berthold, the hermits are said to have chosen Brocard as his successor. Seeking a written formula of life that would give canonical standing to their way of living, the community approached Albert Avogadro, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem. Albert, unable to reside in Jerusalem after its loss in 1187, governed from Acre. Between about 1206 and 1214 he issued a brief Rule addressed to Brother B., whom Carmelite tradition identifies as Brocard. That text, known as the Rule of Saint Albert, required the hermits to live in separate cells, to recite the psalms, to work with their hands, to observe poverty, chastity, and obedience, to gather daily for Mass, and to elect a prior. It became the foundational legislation of the Carmelite Order and was later approved by Pope Honorius III and mitigated by Pope Innocent IV.

Brocard's priorate coincided with a period of increasing instability in the Crusader states. Muslim pressure on the coastal plain and the interior made the eremitical settlements on Carmel precarious. Tradition holds that Brocard remained with the community in the East rather than joining the first migrations of Carmelite hermits to Cyprus and Europe. He is reported to have died of natural causes around the year 1231 on Mount Carmel. No contemporary necrology survives, and the date rests on later Order chronicles. His relics and burial were associated with the mountain itself; subsequent destruction of the Carmelite sites in the Holy Land, especially after the fall of the last Crusader strongholds, left no securely identified tomb.

Devotion to Brocard developed within the Carmelite liturgical calendar. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or Tridentine type; his cult is of the so-called pre-congregation kind, accepted through the Order's own tradition and later Roman recognition of Carmelite feasts. His feast came to be observed on 2 September. Beyond his traditional role as the prior who received the Albertine Rule, no securely documented patronages, miracles, or writings can be attributed to him. His historical importance lies in the identification of Brother B. with the man who helped give the Carmelite hermits their first written rule, thereby linking the Elijah-inspired solitude of Mount Carmel to the mendicant and contemplative order that spread across medieval Europe.