The home parish church for that school was located directly across from our little South Philly rowhouse. It was a matter of feet from our front door to the side entrance of the church itself.
OLMC provided me with a tremendous education, and my experiences there were some of the most memorable and valuable of my life. I'll get to some of them in a future post.
But one thing that I can say for sure is that never during the entire eight years that I spent at what was known to us simply as 'Mount Carmel' do I recall being told just who or what was our namesake.
So it's well past time to take a little trip to the web libraries and find out just what and whom the namesake of my original and still thriving parish is all about.
Per Wikipedia, Mount Carmel is a coastal mountain range in northern Israel and the West Bank, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea towards the southeast. It is characterized by a 'richly fertile hillside', thus its name which means 'plantation of high quality trees' and its tradition of being known as 'the vineyards of God.' Israel's 3rd largest city of Haifa is located in its northern slopes.
What is regarded as 'one of the most important human fossils every found' was located in one of Mount Carmel's caves during excavations there in the early part of the 20th century, in the form of the skeleton of a female neanderthal now named Tabun I.
These excavations were able to trace human developments passage from hunter-gatherer groups to more complex agrigultural societies over what has been estimated as a span of roughly one million years of human evolution.
