: OCD; sometimes called in earlier times, Latin: Ordo Carmelitarum Excalceatorum), is a Catholic mendicant order with roots in the eremitic tradition of the Desert Fathers.

The Carmelite friars, while following a contemplative life, also engage in the promotion of spirituality through their retreat centres, parishes and churches.

At their request he wrote them a rule, which expressed their own intention and reflected the spirit of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land and of the early community of Jerusalem.

Around 1238, within fifty years of receiving their rule, the Carmelite hermits were forced by the Saracens to leave Mount Carmel and to settle in Europe.

[5] A combination of political and social conditions that prevailed in Europe in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries – the Hundred Years' War, Black Plague, the Reformation and the Humanist revival – adversely affected the Order.

A group of nuns assembled in her cell one September evening in 1560, taking their inspiration from the primitive tradition of Carmel and the discalced reform of Peter of Alcantara, a controversial movement within Spanish Franciscanism, proposed to found a monastery of an eremitical kind.

[citation needed] With few resources and often bitter opposition, Teresa succeeded in 1562 in establishing a small monastery with the austerity of desert solitude within the heart of the city of Ávila, Spain, combining eremitical and community life.

Teresa's rule, which retained a distinctively Marian character, contained exacting prescriptions for a life of continual prayer, safeguarded by strict enclosure and sustained by the asceticism of solitude, manual labor, perpetual abstinence, fasting, and fraternal charity.

[6] Working in close collaboration with Teresa was John of the Cross, who with Anthony of Jesus founded the first convent of Discalced Carmelite friars in Duruelo, Spain on 28 November 1568.

[citation needed] When the Carmelites were forced to leave Mount Carmel, they changed their practice from being hermits to friars.

Some congregations were founded for a specific work, but the Carmelite Order tries to respond to what it sees as the needs of the church and the world - which differ according to time and place.