Joachim Smet is Carmel's premier historian. Born on 9 October 1915, Joachim Frederick Albert Polydor Smet, apart from two years in Belgium, passed his childhood in Chicago. He entered the Carmelite minor seminary at Niagara Falls, Ontario, and there pronounced his first vows in 1935. Upon ordination in 1942 he was assigned to teach at Mount Carmel High School in Chicago. During "spare time" he earned a degree in Library Science from the University of Chicago. Called to Rome in 1948 he completed his doctoral work in Church History at the Gregorian University.
in 1951 he was among the group designated to inaugurate the institutum Carmelitanum: he was named first president of its historical section, and in 1954 he became director of the lnstitute's journal Carmelus. ln 1959 he was elected Assistant General of the Order. Especially dear to him is the Carmelite Library he founded at Whitefriars Hall in Washington, unquestionably the largest and most important collection of Carmelitana outside Rome. Though an historian by profession, Joachim is nevertheless a contemporary man: three years ago - as one confrere put it – he gave up his quill in favor of the computer. But above all, Joachim is a man of community, one whose door is never closed, whose work is never so important that it cannot be set aside to respond to someone else's problem, whose time is never too full to share a moment of fraternal cheer.