Pope Paul VI asks Maronites to pray to St. Sharbel for Lebanon

ROME, October 12, 1977 AD — At the general audience in Rome on Wednesday, Pope Paul VI spoke in French to the Maronite Catholics who had come for Sunday’s canonisation of the Lebanese hermit St. Sharbel Makhluf. The Pope told the pilgrims he shared their pride in the new saint and asked them to pray with him to St. Sharbel for Lebanon. The pilgrims numbered two thousand, from Lebanon, Cyprus, Australia and America, among them parishioners of St. Maron’s church in Detroit.

St. Sharbel, widely known as St. Charbel, was a priest and monk of the Lebanese Maronite Order. He spent the last twenty-three years of his life as a hermit on the mountain above the monastery of Annaya. No monk of Lebanon had ever been declared a saint by a Pope before him. A canonisation is that declaration: by canonising St. Sharbel on Sunday, Pope Paul VI said, he was extending the honour paid to the hermit to the whole Church. In his homily that day the Pope said of Lebanon, “La tourmente des récents événements a creusé des rides profondes sur son visage” (the turmoil of recent events has cut deep lines into its face).

St. Sharbel was born Youssef Makhlouf in the village of Bekaa Kafra, into a family of hardworking peasant farmers. His uncle and guardian, Tanios, opposed his wish to become a monk, because Tanios wanted the young man as a partner in his work. In 1851 AD, at twenty-three, Youssef Makhlouf left home without telling even his mother and entered the Lebanese Maronite Order. He took the religious name Sharbel, after a martyr he venerated, and was ordained a priest in 1859 AD.

St. Sharbel lived sixteen years among the monks of Annaya before his superiors let him move, in 1875 AD, to the Hermitage of Sts. Peter and Paul on the ridge 200 metres above the monastery. There he wore a cheap tunic and a hair shirt, ate once a day and never meat, and slept on boards covered with a skin. Pope Paul VI’s letter of canonisation says he lived by a monks’ saying, esse solum cum Solo (to be alone with the One who is alone), the One being God. He died in the hermitage on Christmas Eve 1898 AD.

St. Sharbel’s body was buried inside the monastery. It did not decay, and it gave off a fluid. Pope Paul VI beatified him in St. Peter’s on December 5, 1965 AD, as the Second Vatican Council closed.

In 1966 AD Mariam Assaf Awad, a Lebanese woman of fifty-seven, was ill with a malignant cancer of the right tonsil. Once St. Sharbel’s help was sought for her, the cancer disappeared at once, ceu fumus (like smoke). Pope Paul VI approved her healing as the miracle required for the canonisation on October 3, 1975 AD.

On Sunday cardinals, bishops, lay people and monks of the Lebanese Maronite Order came in great numbers to St. Peter’s Basilica. The Maronite Patriarch, Antoine Pierre Khoraiche, was there with a delegation from Lebanon’s government and parliament. Pope Paul VI pronounced the formula in Latin: sanctum esse decernimus, et definimus, ac Sanctorum Catalogo adscribimus (we decree and define that he is a saint, and enter him in the Catalogue of Saints). At the Angelus the same day, Pope Paul VI called the new saint “un umilissimo fiore di montagna” (a most humble mountain flower) who was “un vero santo” (a true saint), as great as “un cedro del Libano” (a cedar of Lebanon). The Pope prayed for “quel paese tanto provato e tanto sofferente” (that country so tried and so suffering), that it might have concord, peace and prosperity.

On Wednesday, inside St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Paul VI greeted the audience’s groups one by one, and told the Lebanese pilgrims: “Vous êtes venus honorer avec Nous le nouveau saint Charbel Makhlouf. Nous partageons votre fierté!” (You have come to honour the new saint Charbel Makhlouf with Us. We share your pride.). He said he had held up to the whole world “ce saint moine d’Annaya, tout entier livré à Dieu seul, dans la solitude et l’austérité” (this holy monk of Annaya, given wholly to God alone, in solitude and austerity). Yet the hermit had stayed close to people, the Pope said, to their troubles and to a desire for conversion that they did not know they had. He asked the pilgrims to pray to St. Sharbel with him “pour le réconfort humain et la destinée spirituelle de ce cher pays du Liban” (for the human comfort and the spiritual destiny of this dear country of Lebanon).

Pope Paul VI then told the pilgrims not to forget the “chemin paradoxal” (paradoxical path) St. Sharbel had followed. Priests, men and women in religious orders, lay people and the young all needed St. Sharbel’s self-mastery and hard discipline, the Pope said. They needed his times of silence and his willing obedience. Before giving them his blessing, the Pope left the pilgrims with a charge: “Comme lui, ne vous laissez pas empêtrer dans les fausses richesses ou les passions déréglées de ce monde: cherchez l’essentiel.” (Like him, do not let yourselves be tangled up in the false riches or the disordered passions of this world: seek what is essential.)