The origin of the women’s Carmel, or Second Order, is linked to the fact of aggregation of the laity to Carmelite convents, already in existence at the second half of the thirteenth century. Women, for a long time, could not be part of the Order except through the “oblation” accompanied by a legal deed. In documents written in the vernacular they came to be called “pinzochere”, “mantellate” and “sisters”. Gradually with the spread of these sisters, both professed and non-professed, there arose the need for a clarification regarding their status. Thus, the initiative to ask Pope Nicholas V for an intervention to clarify and define their situation with pontifical authority came about. With the Bull Cum nulla of Nicholas V on the 7th October 1452 and later completed with another Bull, the Dum Attenta of Sixtus IV (28th November 1476), these pious women were admitted into the Order.
The commitment to live “in the following of Jesus Christ” the Charismatic gift of the Order developed its own form among the Nuns as an expression within the Church of the contemplative ideal with which Carmel was born and in which it lives. The Nuns participate with their experience of the cloister, welcoming with joy and generosity those who come to them while promoting liturgical prayer in the local Church, listening to the values of the Spirit, in fidelity to their kind of life and the norms of the enclosed life (Constitution of the Carmelite Nuns n. 21).