Carmel and St Elias

According to Fr Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, today is St Albert of Jerusalem's Feast, who wrote the original Carmelite Rule. In his notes on the Life of St Albert, he says:

Some writers have endeavoured to prove that from Elias, and his successors the sons of the prophets, an uninterrupted succession of hermits had inhabited mount Carmel down to the time of Christ and his apostles; and that, having embraced early the Christian faith, they continued their succession to the twelfth or thirteenth century, when having obtained this rule they introduced their Order into Europe. The learned Papebroke, a continuator of the Acta Sanctorum commenced by Bollandus, treated this claim to so high an antiquity as chimerical, and dated the origin of the hermits of mount Carmel only in the twelfth century. The contest grew so warm, that the affair was laid before the popes Innocent XI. and XII. But neither of them chose to declare whether the monuments, produced in favour of the succession aforesaid, were decisive or not. And the latter, by a brief dated the 29th of November, 1698, enjoined silence on that subject for the time to come.

I, for one, prefer to believe the ancient tradition that our Order was founded by St Elias who is invoked in the Carmelite Confiteor as 'Our Holy Father Elias' and whose feast is kept by both Orders on 20 July.