Are Maronites Catholic?

1. Are Maronites Catholic? The Direct Answer

Maronites are Catholic in the full and ordinary sense of the word. The Syriac Maronite Church of Antioch is a Church sui iuris, meaning self-governing, in full communion with the Pope, and its members are as Catholic as a parishioner in Dublin or Manila. A Maronite baptism is a Catholic baptism. A Maronite priest is a Catholic priest. A Maronite bishop sits in the same worldwide college of bishops as every Latin bishop, and the Maronite eparchies appear in the Annuario Pontificio, the Holy See's own yearbook, next to every other Catholic diocese in the world.

The confusion behind the question is usually a confusion between the Catholic Church and the Roman Rite. The Roman Rite is the liturgical tradition of the Latin Church, which is the largest of the twenty-four Churches that together make up the Catholic Church. The other twenty-three are Eastern, and the Maronite Church is one of them. The Catechism of the Catholic Church names the Maronite rite explicitly in paragraph 1203, listing it among the liturgical traditions in use in the Church alongside the Latin, Byzantine, Alexandrian, Syriac, Armenian and Chaldean.

What Full Communion Actually Means Here

Full communion has a concrete content, and in the Maronite case every part of it is present. Maronites profess the same Creed. They hold the same seven sacraments. They accept the ecumenical councils, including the Western ones, and the definitions of the First and Second Vatican Councils. Their bishops are in communion with the Pope and their patriarch asks him for ecclesiastical communion after being elected. A Maronite may receive Communion at a Roman Rite Mass and a Latin Catholic may receive at a Maronite Qurbono, with no permission required in either direction.

Where Maronites differ from Latin Catholics is in rite, law and discipline. They celebrate a different liturgy, keep a different calendar, follow the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches rather than the Latin Code of Canon Law, and preserve a distinct spirituality, chant tradition and body of saints. The Second Vatican Council addressed exactly this in its 1964 decree Orientalium Ecclesiarum, which teaches that the Eastern Churches are of equal dignity with the Latin Church, that none is superior to the others by reason of rite, and that the Eastern Churches have the right and the duty to govern themselves according to their own traditions.

2. Who Saint Maron Was

Saint Maron was a Syriac hermit who lived on a hilltop in the region of Cyrrhus in northern Syria and died around the year 410. Almost everything known about him with confidence comes from a single near-contemporary source: Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, who devoted chapter sixteen of his Historia Religiosa, the Religious History, to Maron. Theodoret was writing about ascetics he had known or whose disciples he had known, and his portrait is short, admiring and specific.

Theodoret describes Maron as living in the open air beside a ruined pagan temple which he had reconsecrated to the true God, sheltering under a light tent only when the weather forced it. Maron practised severe fasting and long vigils, and Theodoret credits him with healing fevers and casting out demons. What matters for the later history is that Maron attracted disciples and trained them, and that he was remembered as a healer of souls as much as of bodies. Theodoret says he cultivated many plants of philosophy for God, meaning he raised up other ascetics, and he describes several of those ascetics elsewhere in the same work.

Maron Founded No Church

Maron founded no church, no rite and no order. He was a solitary who died and was buried, and a shrine grew up over his tomb because people wanted to be near him. The Church that carries his name formed around his memory over the following two centuries. Maronites therefore date their spiritual origin to a person rather than to a schism, a council or a treaty, which shapes how they tell their own story: the Maronite Church understands itself as a monastic movement that became a people.

The Feast and the Name

The Maronite Church keeps the feast of Saint Maron on 9 February, and the day is observed as a public holiday in Lebanon. The name Maron, Maroun in Arabic and Marun in Syriac, is thought to derive from the Syriac root for lord or master, the same root behind Mar, the honorific placed before the names of saints and bishops in the Syriac Churches. Maronite men and boys named Maroun are named for him directly, and hundreds of parishes across Lebanon, Brazil, Argentina, Australia and the United States carry his name.

3. How a Hermit's Followers Became a Church

The Maronite Church took shape in three stages: a monastery, a persecuted community, and a mountain refuge. Each stage is visible in the sources, and each left a permanent mark on how Maronites worship and how they think of themselves.

The Monastery of Saint Maron

A large monastery dedicated to Saint Maron was built on the Orontes river in Syria in the fifth century, and tradition credits its foundation to the Emperor Marcian, who convoked the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The monastery became a stronghold of the Chalcedonian faith in a region where many Christians rejected the council's definition that Christ is one person in two natures. That commitment made the monks conspicuous, and it made them targets.

Maronite tradition remembers 350 monks of the community killed by opponents of Chalcedon in the year 517, and a surviving letter from monks of Syria Secunda to Pope Hormisdas appeals to Rome after violence of exactly this kind. The episode is the earliest documented contact between the Maronite community and the papacy, and it set the pattern for everything that followed: a small Chalcedonian body in a hostile environment, looking west for recognition and support.

Into the Mountain

Warfare, Arab conquest and continued pressure pushed the Maronite community from the Orontes valley into the mountains of Lebanon over the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. The Qadisha valley in northern Lebanon, a gorge cut so deep that its caves and cliff monasteries are almost unreachable, became the heart of Maronite life. Qadisha means holy in Syriac. Monks carved churches into the rock, and the valley sheltered patriarchs, printing presses and hermits for the better part of a thousand years. Isolation preserved the Syriac liturgy and the Syriac language long after both had faded elsewhere.

John Maron and the First Patriarch

Maronite tradition holds that the community elected its first patriarch, John Maron, around the year 685, when the see of Antioch was effectively vacant and the community needed a head. Historians dispute the date, the person and the circumstances, and the sources for the seventh century are thin and late. What is not disputed is that by the time better documentation appears, the Maronites had a patriarch of their own who used the title of Antioch, and that the line has continued without a break to the present.

The Crusader Contact and Lateran IV

Latin Christians encountered the Maronites when the First Crusade passed through Syria and Lebanon at the end of the eleventh century, and the encounter produced the first sustained documentary relationship between Rome and the Maronite patriarchate. In 1215 the Maronite patriarch Jeremiah Al-Amshitti travelled to Rome and attended the Fourth Lateran Council, the first Maronite patriarch known to have made that journey. Pope Innocent III received him, and the relationship from that point is continuously documented in papal correspondence.

The Maronite College and the Synod of Mount Lebanon

Two later institutions shaped the modern Maronite Church. Pope Gregory XIII founded the Maronite College in Rome in 1584 to train Maronite clergy, and the college produced a remarkable line of Syriac scholars, among them Joseph Simonius Assemani, who became prefect of the Vatican Library and catalogued its Oriental manuscripts. The Synod of Mount Lebanon, held at Luwayzah in 1736 with Assemani present as papal legate, reorganised the Church: it fixed diocesan boundaries, regulated the clergy and the monastic orders, and gave the Maronite Church a written body of law. Rome confirmed its decrees in 1741. The synod is also the single largest source of Latin influence on Maronite practice, a point taken up in section thirteen.

4. Were the Maronites Ever Separated From Rome?

The Maronite Church holds that it has never been separated from Rome and has therefore never needed a reunion. The claim is the Maronite Church's own, made consistently in its official documents and liturgical books, and it distinguishes the Maronites from the other patriarchal Eastern Catholic Churches, each of which was formed when part of a separated Eastern body entered communion with Rome at a datable moment. The Melkite Greek Catholic Church dates from 1724, the Syriac Catholic Church from the eighteenth century, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church from the Union of Brest in 1595. No such founding union exists in the Maronite record.

The Monothelite Accusation

Against that stands a medieval accusation. William of Tyre, the twelfth-century crusader archbishop and historian, wrote that the Maronites had followed the heresiarch Maro and held the doctrine of one will in Christ, and that around 1182 they abjured that error and were received into the Latin Church. The Melkite historian Eutychius of Alexandria in the tenth century also associated the Maronites with Monothelitism. Monothelitism, the teaching that Christ has one will rather than a divine and a human will, was condemned at the Third Council of Constantinople in 680 to 681.

The accusation is not trivial, and it deserves to be stated as its sources state it rather than waved away. William of Tyre was writing about a community in his own territory, within living memory of the events he describes. Later Western and Eastern writers repeated him. A reader who encounters the claim in a history book has encountered a real strand of the evidence.

The Maronite Answer

Maronite scholarship has contested the charge since the seventeenth century, and the leading name is Patriarch Estephan Douayhi, who governed the Church from 1670 to 1704 and was a historian and liturgist of the first rank. Douayhi argued that the Maronites had held the Chalcedonian faith without interruption, that the Monothelite label was applied by Byzantine and anti-Chalcedonian rivals to a community whose real offence was loyalty to Chalcedon and to Rome, and that William of Tyre had repeated hostile hearsay. Modern Maronite historians have added that no Maronite liturgical text teaches one will in Christ, and that the surviving Maronite anaphoras are conspicuously orthodox on the two natures. His cause for canonization is open in Rome.

Historians outside the Maronite Church still divide. Some hold that a section of the community accepted the imperial Monothelite compromise in the seventh century, when the emperors were pressing it on everyone as a formula for unity, and later abandoned it. Others accept Douayhi's reconstruction. The honest statement is that the seventh century is disputed and the evidence is thin on both sides. The centuries since are not disputed at all: the Maronite Church has confessed Chalcedon and Constantinople III for the whole of its documented history, and confesses them now.

5. The Maronite Patriarch of Antioch

The Maronite Church is headed by the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, who resides at Bkerke in the hills above Jounieh, north of Beirut, and moves to Dimane in the Qadisha region for the summer. The patriarch governs the Church together with its synod of bishops, and within the patriarchal territory he appoints bishops, erects eparchies and holds a real jurisdiction that no Roman congregation exercises in his place.

How a Maronite Patriarch Is Chosen

The Maronite synod of bishops elects the patriarch. The Pope does not appoint him. Once elected, the new patriarch writes to the Pope requesting ecclesiastical communion, and the granting of that communion is the act by which the relationship with Rome is confirmed. The Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1990, sets out this procedure for all the patriarchal Eastern Catholic Churches. Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai was elected in March 2011 and was created a cardinal by Pope Benedict XVI in November 2012.

The arrangement is worth sitting with, because it answers a common misunderstanding about what communion with Rome costs an Eastern Church. A Maronite patriarch is elected by his own bishops, governs his own Church under his own code of law, ordains his own clergy including married men, celebrates his own rite in his own language, and keeps his own calendar. What he does not do is teach a different faith or refuse communion with Peter. Our guide to the papacy and papal authority works through the Catholic doctrine of primacy in more detail.

Five Patriarchs of Antioch

Five bishops currently use the title Patriarch of Antioch, which reflects how many times that ancient see has divided. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East is Eastern Orthodox. The Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch and All the East belongs to the Oriental Orthodox communion, which is a separate communion from the Eastern Orthodox and should never be conflated with it. The Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch and the Syriac Catholic Patriarch are both in communion with Rome, as is the Maronite Patriarch. The Latin titular patriarchate of Antioch was suppressed in 1953.

The Oriental Orthodox Churches (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Malankara) are a distinct communion from the Eastern Orthodox Churches and are not in communion with them. See our guides to the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Eastern Orthodox Church for the difference.

Why Antioch and Not Lebanon

The title points to Antioch because Antioch is an apostolic see, the city where the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26) and where tradition holds that Peter presided before going to Rome. The Maronite Church has never governed from Antioch in its documented history and does not claim to have done so. The title asserts continuity with the Antiochene patriarchate and with the Syriac Christianity of that region, which is where the Maronite liturgy, language and theology come from.

6. The Qurbono: the Maronite Divine Liturgy

The Maronite Mass is called the Qurbono, from the Syriac word for offering or sacrifice, and it belongs to the West Syriac liturgical family of Antioch. A Latin Catholic walking into a Maronite church will recognise the essentials immediately: a reading from the epistles, a reading from the Gospel, a homily, the Creed, the offering of bread and wine, the words of institution, the Our Father, Communion. The order and the texture around those essentials are different, and the differences are old.

The Roman Mass and the Maronite Qurbono offer the same sacrifice and produce the same Eucharist. Our guide to the structure and meaning of the Mass sets out the Roman Rite's shape in detail, and what follows here describes only what the Maronite liturgy does differently.

The Rite of Access and the Hoosoyo

The Qurbono opens with a rite of preparation at the altar, followed by the Hoosoyo, a long incense prayer of forgiveness that has no counterpart in the Roman Rite. The Hoosoyo has a fixed internal structure. The Proemion is a short introduction naming to whom the praise is offered. The Sedro is an extended poetic prayer, often twenty or thirty lines, which lays out the whole theology of the day's feast in imagery drawn from Scripture. Then comes the Qolo, a hymn, and the Etro, a concluding prayer of incense. Syriac liturgy is intensely poetic, and the Sedro is where that poetry lives.

The Trisagion

The Trisagion, the thrice-holy hymn, is sung in Syriac in almost every Maronite parish, and it is the moment a visitor is most likely to notice that the language is not Arabic and not Greek. The West Syriac Churches, the Maronites among them, understand the Trisagion as addressed to Christ rather than to the Trinity as a whole, and their liturgical commentaries read it that way explicitly. The Byzantine tradition understands the same hymn as addressed to the Trinity. Both readings are ancient and neither is a departure from the faith.

The Anaphora

The West Syriac tradition, which the Maronites share with the Syriac Orthodox, preserves an unusually large body of anaphoras, the great eucharistic prayers. Syriac manuscripts hold dozens of them, attributed to figures including James the brother of the Lord, Peter, John, Sixtus, Mark and the Twelve Apostles, and the modern Maronite service book prints a selection for use through the year. The most notable is the Third Anaphora of Saint Peter, known from its opening word as Sharar, a text of great antiquity closely related to the East Syriac Anaphora of Addai and Mari.

Two features of the Maronite anaphora stand out against Latin practice. The epiclesis, the calling down of the Holy Spirit on the bread and wine, is long, explicit and central, and the assembly usually responds to it. The words of institution are sung aloud by the priest in Syriac, and in many parishes the people prostrate or bow deeply as they are sung. For the doctrine of what happens at that moment, which Maronites and Latins hold identically, see our guide to the Real Presence in the Eucharist.

The Fraction, Signing and Commixture

After the Our Father, the Maronite rite has an elaborate rite of fraction in which the priest breaks the consecrated Bread, signs it with the Precious Blood, and places a particle into the chalice, accompanying each action with prayers that interpret it as the death and resurrection of Christ made present. The Roman Rite has the same three actions in compressed form. The Maronite rite draws them out and preaches on them as they happen, which is characteristic: the Syriac liturgy tends to explain itself in poetry as it goes.

What a Visitor Actually Sees

Expect a sung liturgy from beginning to end, often unaccompanied or with a small organ or drum, with the choir and people answering the priest constantly. Expect incense at several points. Expect the altar to be free-standing with the priest facing the people in most parishes, though ad orientem celebration survives. Expect Communion by intinction, the consecrated Bread dipped in the Precious Blood and placed on the tongue, which is the ordinary Maronite manner. Expect the whole thing to run about an hour, sometimes longer on feasts.

7. Syriac, Aramaic and the Words of Institution

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, and Aramaic is the language Jesus spoke in Galilee and Judea. That connection is real and it is the reason Maronites treasure their liturgical language, and it needs to be stated with precision rather than romanticised. Liturgical Syriac is the literary Aramaic of Edessa, a city in what is now southeastern Turkey, standardised in the early Christian centuries. Jesus spoke a western Aramaic dialect two or three centuries earlier. The relationship is close, and it is a relationship between related dialects rather than an identity.

Why the Institution Narrative Stays in Syriac

In most Maronite parishes the priest sings the words of institution in Syriac even when the rest of the liturgy is in Arabic or English. The practice preserves the oldest layer of the rite at its most solemn moment, and it makes an audible claim about continuity: the assembly hears the words of Christ in a form of the language Christ used. Maronite catechesis makes exactly that point, and Maronites in the diaspora often describe the Syriac institution narrative as the thing that most convinced them the rite was worth keeping.

The Language Shift to Arabic

Syriac stopped being the everyday speech of Maronites over a long period after the Arab conquests, and by the modern era Arabic was the household language of nearly all of them. Karshuni, Arabic written in Syriac letters, was widely used in Maronite manuscripts and is a visible artefact of the transition. Today the Qurbono in Lebanon is largely in Arabic, with Syriac retained for the institution narrative, the Trisagion, various hymns and responses, and often the Our Father. In the diaspora, English, Spanish, Portuguese and French carry the vernacular parts, and the Syriac core stays.

Beth Gazo, the Treasury of Chant

Maronite chant is organised in a collection called the Beth Gazo, the treasury or house of treasure, which preserves the melodies of the rite in eight modes. The melodies are transmitted largely by ear and by cantor training rather than by notation, and the same eight-mode system underlies Syriac Orthodox chant, which is one of many signs that the two Churches share a liturgical ancestry despite being in different communions. Learning a handful of Beth Gazo melodies is the fastest way for an outsider to feel at home in a Maronite church.

8. The Maronite Liturgical Year

The Maronite liturgical year runs on its own cycle of seasons, organised around the mystery of Christ and named in Syriac terms that have no Roman equivalent. It shares the great feasts with the Latin calendar, keeps Christmas on 25 December and calculates Easter with the Western Churches, and arranges the rest of the year quite differently. Our guide to the Catholic liturgical calendar covers the Roman cycle that most readers will know.

The Seasons

The Maronite year begins in early November with the Season of the Consecration and Renewal of the Church, two short seasons that consider the Church itself before turning to the coming of Christ. The Season of the Glorious Birth follows, the Maronite equivalent of Advent, and it is structured around a sequence of annunciations: to Zechariah, to Mary, the visitation, the birth of John the Baptist, the revelation to Joseph. Christmas is followed by the Season of the Glorious Epiphany, called Denho in Syriac, which centres on the baptism of Christ in the Jordan rather than on the visit of the Magi.

Great Lent, Sawmo in Syriac, begins on Ash Monday rather than Ash Wednesday, two days earlier than the Latin calendar, and it opens on the preceding Sunday with the Gospel of the wedding feast at Cana. Passion Week follows, then the Season of the Glorious Resurrection, then Pentecost, then the long Season of Pentecost, and finally the Season of the Glorious Cross, which runs from the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on 14 September to the start of the new year in November.

Feasts a Latin Catholic Will Not Recognise

Several Maronite feasts have no Roman counterpart or fall on different days. The feast of Saint Maron on 9 February is the patronal feast of the whole Church. The feast of Our Lady of Lebanon, honoured at the shrine at Harissa above Jounieh, is kept on the first Sunday of May. The Sunday of the Faithful Departed and the Sundays of the Priests and of the Righteous fall in the weeks before Lent. Maronite parishes also keep the Syriac commemorations of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, the most celebrated of the Syriac poets and a Doctor of the Church, whose hymns stand behind much of the poetic character of the rite.

9. The Sacraments in Maronite Practice

Maronites celebrate the same seven sacraments as Latin Catholics, called the holy mysteries in Syriac usage, with the same effects and the same requirements for validity. The differences are in ritual form and in the age and order at which they are given. Nothing in this section touches doctrine.

Baptism, Chrismation and First Communion

The ancient Eastern practice, which the Maronite Church shares, is to give baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist together in one service, so that an infant is fully initiated on the day of baptism. Maronite baptism is normally by pouring water over the head three times, with an anointing of the whole body in oil beforehand, and the rite includes a signing of the child's senses. Chrismation, which corresponds to what Latins call confirmation, is administered by the priest with holy chrism at the same service, without waiting for a bishop.

Practice on first Communion varies. Many Maronite parishes, especially in the diaspora, adopted the Latin custom of a first Communion around the age of seven or eight, which came in with the Latinising reforms of past centuries. Others have restored the ancient practice of communicating the newly baptised infant. Parishes differ, and asking the pastor is the only reliable way to find out what a given parish does. Our guide to Catholic baptism covers the doctrine common to both traditions.

Confession and Anointing

Maronite confession is the same sacrament with the same form and effect as Latin confession. The Maronite absolution formula is deprecative in its traditional shape, which is to say phrased as a prayer that God forgive rather than as a declaration in the first person, and this is the ancient Eastern pattern. Anointing of the sick is celebrated in the Maronite rite with its own prayers and, in its fuller form, with several priests.

Marriage

The Maronite marriage rite has two parts, a betrothal and a crowning, and the crowning gives the ceremony its distinctive character. The bride and groom are crowned, and in the Maronite form the crowning is understood as a sign of the martyrdom of self-giving and of the couple's royal share in Christ. The priest is the minister of the sacrament in the Eastern Churches, which differs from the Latin theology in which the spouses minister the sacrament to one another. The difference is a real one and it has never been treated as an obstacle to communion. Our guide to Catholic marriage sets out the Latin framework.

Holy Orders

Maronite ordinations are valid Catholic ordinations, conferred by a Maronite bishop in apostolic succession, and a Maronite priest may celebrate the Roman Rite with the permission of the competent authority just as a Latin priest may be given faculties for the Maronite rite. The Maronite Church has deacons, subdeacons and lectors in its clerical order. See our guide to the Catholic priesthood for the doctrine of orders that both traditions hold.

10. Married Priests and Maronite Clergy

Married men can be ordained priests in the Maronite Church, and this has been the discipline of the Christian East since antiquity. The rule is straightforward: a man may marry before ordination and not after it. A married deacon or priest continues in his marriage. An unmarried or widowed priest remains celibate. Bishops are chosen from among celibate clergy, in practice usually from the monastic orders.

Why This Is Not an Exception

Clerical celibacy is a discipline of the Latin Church rather than a doctrine of the Catholic Church, and the Eastern Churches never adopted it as a universal requirement. The Council in Trullo in 692 set the Eastern rule that permitted married priests and required celibate bishops, and the Eastern Catholic Churches carried it with them into communion with Rome. A married Maronite priest is ordained under the Maronite Church's own law, protected by Orientalium Ecclesiarum, which directs the Eastern Churches to keep their own disciplines. Rome grants no exception here, because none is needed.

The Suppression in the Diaspora and Its Reversal

Maronite emigration to the Americas and Australia from the late nineteenth century brought married Eastern priests into territories where Latin bishops governed, and the friction that followed produced a series of Roman decrees restricting the ordination of married men outside the traditional Eastern territories. The best known is Cum Data Fuerit of 1929, addressed to the Ruthenian Catholics of the United States, and comparable rules bound the other Eastern Catholic Churches in the diaspora, the Maronites among them. The restrictions caused lasting damage, and a substantial number of Eastern Catholic faithful in North America left for Orthodox jurisdictions over the dispute.

In 2014 the Congregation for the Oriental Churches, with the approval of Pope Francis, issued norms permitting the Eastern Catholic Churches to ordain married men outside their traditional territories, with procedures for consulting the local Latin bishop. The decision returned to the Eastern Churches a discipline that had been theirs, and Maronite eparchies in the diaspora have ordained married men since.

The Monastic Orders

Maronite monasticism is old and it remains vigorous. The Lebanese Maronite Order, the Mariamite Maronite Order and the Antonin Maronite Order are the principal male congregations, and there are Maronite women's communities alongside them. The monasteries of the Qadisha valley and of Annaya, Kfifan and Qozhaya are the spiritual centres, and Maronite bishops are drawn largely from these orders. Hermits still live in the Qadisha, keeping the form of life Saint Maron practised sixteen centuries ago.

11. Maronite Saints and Monasticism

The Maronite Church has given the universal Church three canonised saints in the modern era, all of them monastics from Mount Lebanon, and their canonisations are the most visible sign of how thoroughly Maronite holiness belongs to the whole Catholic Church. A Latin Catholic may pray to them, name a child after them and keep their feasts, exactly as with any other canonised saint. Our guide to the Catholic understanding of the saints explains why.

Saint Charbel Makhlouf

Charbel Makhlouf, born Youssef Makhlouf in 1828 in the village of Bekaa Kafra, entered the Lebanese Maronite Order and spent the last twenty-three years of his life as a hermit at the hermitage of Saints Peter and Paul near the monastery of Annaya. He died on 24 December 1898 after suffering a stroke while celebrating the Qurbono. Pope Paul VI beatified him in 1965 and canonised him on 9 October 1977. Devotion to Saint Charbel spread far beyond Lebanon and the Maronite Church, and his shrine at Annaya draws pilgrims of several religions.

Saint Rafqa

Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayes, born in 1832, was a member of the Lebanese Maronite Order of women who asked to share in the sufferings of Christ and spent the last decades of her life in blindness and severe pain, which she bore without complaint. She died in 1914 at the monastery of Saint Joseph in Jrabta. Pope John Paul II canonised her on 10 June 2001.

Saint Nimatullah Al-Hardini

Youssef Kassab, known as Nimatullah Al-Hardini, was born in 1808 and became a monk and teacher of the Lebanese Maronite Order, and Charbel Makhlouf was among his students. He was known for long hours before the Blessed Sacrament and for bookbinding, which he practised as manual work. He died in 1858 at the monastery of Kfifan. Pope John Paul II canonised him on 16 May 2004.

Saint Ephrem and the Syriac Fathers

Behind the modern saints stands the Syriac patristic tradition that formed the rite. Ephrem the Syrian, who died in 373 and was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XV in 1920, wrote theology in verse, and his hymns on the Nativity, on Paradise and on faith are the fountainhead of the poetic style that runs through every Maronite Sedro. Jacob of Serugh and Balai are other names a reader will meet in Maronite service books. Syriac Christianity thinks in images: the pearl, the bridal chamber, the medicine of life, the fire in the bread.

12. Maronites in Lebanon and the Diaspora

Maronites are concentrated in Lebanon, where they are generally reckoned the largest Christian community, and they have large diaspora communities spread principally across Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Australia, Canada, Mexico and West Africa. Reliable population numbers do not exist, and the reason is worth stating plainly rather than filling the gap with an invented figure.

Lebanon has not conducted an official national census since 1932, and confessional population figures for the country are estimates rather than counts. Membership figures for each Eastern Catholic Church are published annually by the Holy See in the Annuario Pontificio and are drawn from eparchial returns, which count registered faithful rather than practising members. Any specific number a source gives for Maronites worldwide should be read as an estimate and traced to its publisher.

The Maronite Place in Lebanon

Lebanon's political system distributes the highest offices among its religious communities by convention, and under the National Pact of 1943 the presidency of the republic is held by a Maronite, the premiership by a Sunni Muslim and the speakership of parliament by a Shia Muslim. The arrangement is a matter of documented constitutional practice. Maronite institutions, among them the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, run by the Lebanese Maronite Order, and a dense network of schools and hospitals, have shaped Lebanese public life for a long time, and the Maronite patriarchate at Bkerke has an established voice in national affairs.

Emigration

Maronite emigration began in earnest in the second half of the nineteenth century, driven by economic pressure and by the violence in Mount Lebanon in 1860, and it accelerated through the twentieth century. Brazil and Argentina received the largest waves. Maronite eparchies now exist for the United States at Brooklyn and Los Angeles, for Canada at Montreal, for Australia at Sydney, and for Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and several other countries, each headed by a Maronite bishop under the patriarch.

Suffering and Endurance

Maronite history includes long periods of persecution and displacement, from the Mamluk campaigns against Mount Lebanon in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries through the massacres of 1860 to the famine of the First World War, when a large part of the mountain population died, and the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990. Christians across the Middle East have continued to emigrate in large numbers, and the survival of an Arabic-speaking, Syriac-worshipping Catholic community in its ancestral land is not something anyone should assume is secure. Prayer for the Christians of Lebanon and Syria is asked for by name in Maronite parishes everywhere.

13. Latinization and the Recovery of the Rite

Latinization is the name for the long process by which Eastern Catholic Churches took on Latin practices that were not their own, and the Maronite Church absorbed more of it than most. Maronites lived in close contact with Rome for centuries, trained their clergy in Roman colleges, and often treated Latin usage as the standard of correctness. The results included Roman vestments, Latin devotions, altar arrangements borrowed from the West, the loss of the ancient order of initiation in many parishes, and the shortening or suppression of Syriac liturgical texts.

What the Council Asked For

The Second Vatican Council addressed this directly. Orientalium Ecclesiarum instructed the Eastern Catholic Churches to preserve their legitimate liturgical rites and their established way of life, to return to their ancestral traditions where these had been unduly departed from, and to acquire an ever greater knowledge and use of them. The Council issued this as a directive, and the Maronite Church took it up.

The Restoration Since the Council

Maronite liturgical reform since the 1960s has worked from the Syriac manuscript tradition back toward the older shape of the rite. The reformed Book of Offering restored anaphoras that had fallen out of use, recovered the fuller form of the Hoosoyo, and returned the rite closer to its West Syriac form. Vestments, church architecture and iconography have followed, with Syriac patterns replacing borrowed Roman ones in many new churches. The recovery is uneven, and parishes vary in how far they have gone, which is why two Maronite churches in the same city can feel noticeably different.

Why This Matters to a Latin Catholic

The Latin Church has an interest in the Eastern recovery, because the Catholic Church is poorer when one of its traditions is flattened into another. Pope John Paul II wrote in his 1995 apostolic letter Orientale Lumen that the Church must breathe with both lungs, East and West, and he meant it as a description of what the whole Church needs. A Latin Catholic who has never attended a Qurbono has never heard a large part of his own Church pray. Our guide to Sacred Tradition and its transmission takes up the underlying principle.

14. Attending a Maronite Church

Any Catholic may attend and receive Communion at a Maronite Qurbono, and doing so on a Sunday or holy day satisfies the Latin obligation, because the 1983 Code of Canon Law fulfils that obligation by assistance at Mass celebrated in any Catholic rite. No permission, registration or notice is needed. Walking in is enough.

Practical Notes for a First Visit

Arrive a few minutes early and take a book if one is offered, since the liturgy is sung throughout and following the text helps. Stand and sit with the congregation, and expect more standing than in a Latin parish. When Communion comes, approach as everyone else does and receive on the tongue, since intinction is the normal Maronite manner and receiving in the hand is generally not done. Most parishes in English-speaking countries print the Syriac parts transliterated, so a visitor can sing the Trisagion on a first visit.

Does Attending Change the Church You Belong To?

No. Every Catholic is ascribed to a particular Church sui iuris at baptism, normally the Church of the parents, and that ascription is not changed by where a person worships. A Latin Catholic who attends a Maronite parish every Sunday for twenty years remains a Latin Catholic. Formal transfer to another Church sui iuris requires the consent of the Holy See and is granted for serious reasons, most often marriage. Anyone considering it should speak to both pastors.

Marriage Between a Latin and a Maronite

Marriage between a Latin Catholic and a Maronite Catholic is a marriage between two Catholics, with no dispensation needed on the ground of rite. The couple decides which rite the wedding takes place in and which parish they will belong to, and the children are ordinarily ascribed to the father's Church sui iuris, with provision in the Eastern code for the parents to agree together on the mother's Church instead. The parish office handles the paperwork.

Finding a Parish

Maronite parishes exist in most large cities of the Lebanese diaspora, and eparchial websites list them. A parish will often be named for Saint Maron, Our Lady of Lebanon, Saint Charbel or Saint Rafqa, which makes them easy to identify. Many keep a weekday Qurbono as well as Sunday liturgies, and most are used to visitors and glad to have them.

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