Saint Charbel Makhlouf (1828-1898)

Birth at Bekaa Kafra, the highest village in Lebanon

Youssef Antoun Makhlouf was born on May 8, 1828 at Bekaa Kafra, a village in North Lebanon perched at more than 1,550 meters above sea level — the highest in Lebanon.^[16][17] He was one of the five children of Antoun Zaarour Makhlouf, a muleteer and humble peasant, and of Brigitta Chidiac, in a family of poor but united peasants, enlivened by a robust faith and familiar with the liturgical prayer of the village.^[18][19] His father died on August 8, 1831, when Youssef was only three years old, returning from a corvee imposed by the Ottoman administration.^[20][21] His mother then remarried a man, Lahoud Ibrahim, who would be ordained a priest and become the village parish priest — a home where piety grew still more intense.^[22]

Paul VI himself, in his canonization homily, stresses the mark of this home: “a family of humble, hardworking, united peasants; enlivened by a robust faith, familiar with the liturgical prayer of the village and devotion to Mary; uncles devoted to the hermit life, and above all an admirable mother, devout and mortified to the point of continual fasting.”^[23] Two of his maternal uncles did indeed live as hermits at the Monastery of Saint Anthony of Kozhaya, in the holy valley of Qadisha — an example that deeply marked the child.^[24][25]

The grotto of the Virgin, a shepherd boy’s first hermitage

Entrusted with watching the family’s small flock, the child would lead his animals near a grotto where he set up an icon of the Virgin Mary, and there spend long hours in prayer — a place his biographers readily call “his first hermitage.”^[26][27] His fellow villagers already nicknamed him, while still a child, “the saint,” so strikingly did his devotion and uprightness set him apart for his age.^[28]

A mother’s words and the irresistible call

Paul VI reports, in his canonization homily, the words Charbel’s mother is said to have spoken after her son’s departure for the monastery — words that sum up the spirit of that whole Christian home:

“If you were not to be a good religious, I would say to you: Come back home. But I know now that the Lord wants you in his service. And in my sorrow at being separated from you, I say to him, resigned: May he bless you, my child, and make you a saint.” — Brigitta Makhlouf, as reported by Fr. Paul Daher, Charbel, un homme ivre de Dieu, Monastery of Saint Maron, Annaya, 1965, p. 63^[29]

Paul VI also quotes, as a summary of the decisive call felt by the young man, a formula taken from the Gospel of Saint Mark: “Leave everything, come! Follow me!”^[30]

The night-time departure and entry into Our Lady of Mayfouq

At twenty-three, in 1851, Youssef leaves his village of Bekaa Kafra and his family by night, without warning, never to return.^[31] He makes his way to the Monastery of Our Lady of Mayfouq, in the Lebanese mountains, where his monastic formation begins according to the rule of the Lebanese Maronite Order (OLM).^[32][33]

The Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya and the taking of the habit

Shortly afterwards, the novice is transferred to the more secluded Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya, in the district of Byblos (Jbeil), where he receives the monastic habit and takes the religious name of Charbel, in honor of a Christian martyr of the second century who died at Antioch.^[34][35] It is in this monastery that he makes his solemn profession on November 1, 1853, pronouncing the three final vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.^[36][37]

Theological studies at Kfifane, under a master who became a saint

After his profession, Brother Charbel pursues studies in philosophy and theology at the Monastery of Saints Cyprian and Justina of Kfifane, in the district of Batroun.^[38][39] One of his teachers of moral theology is none other than Fr. Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini (1808–1858), himself later recognized as a saint: Charbel numbers among his disciples, and the future professor discerns his holiness very early on.^[40] Fr. Al-Hardini dies of pneumonia at Kfifane on December 14, 1858, after ten days of agony, in the freezing cold of the mountain winter — and it is Charbel himself who assists him in his final hour.^[41]

Priestly ordination at Bkerke (July 23, 1859)

Charbel Makhlouf is ordained a priest on July 23, 1859, at Bkerke, seat of the Maronite Patriarchate.^[42][43] He is then thirty-one years old, with eight years of religious life behind him — having entered the monastery in 1851 —; thirty-nine years remain for him to live, almost all of them devoted to the willed obscurity of the cloister and then of the hermitage.

An “edifying” priest and monk

Back at the Monastery of Annaya after his ordination, Fr. Charbel leads there for sixteen years a life as monk and priest marked by severe asceticism, exercising his priestly ministry and his monastic duties in a manner witnesses describe as “edifying.”^[44][45] This period of community life is anything but incidental in Maronite spirituality: it is the obligatory passage and the place of trial before the Order exceptionally authorizes the move to eremitical solitude.

The request for the hermit life

After some twenty years of monastic life judged exemplary, Charbel asks his superiors for permission to withdraw to a hermitage. Paul VI sums up this moment in a single sentence: “After progressing in virtue during some twenty years of monastic life, he then devotes himself, on the orders of his superiors, to the hermit life.”^[46] The wording is significant: in the tradition of the Lebanese Maronite Order, the hermitage is never a spontaneous individual choice, but an act of obedience — the monk does not withdraw on his own initiative; he is sent there by those charged with discerning his vocation.

A six-square-meter cell

On February 15, 1875, Charbel obtains from the abbot of the monastery permission to join the Hermitage of Saints Peter and Paul, a chapel with a group of cells dependent on Annaya, at some distance from the monastery.^[47][48] His cell there measures barely six square meters.^[49] He will live there for twenty-three years, until his death, sharing this solitude with a few other hermits subject to the same strict rule.^[50]

Poverty, silence, manual labor

The hermit’s life obeys a rule of rare exactingness: the poorest lodging possible, a single garment, one frugal meal a day, hard manual labor in the harsh climate of the Lebanese mountains.^[51] Paul VI stresses the chastity lived with an intransigence he himself calls “legendary,” and a total obedience — toward superiors, toward fellow hermits, toward the very rule of the hermitage — which expresses, he says, “his complete submission to God.”^[52]

Mass and Eucharistic adoration, the center of the day

At the heart of this austere existence, Mass holds a central place: Paul VI speaks of “a life entirely centered on the celebration of Mass, on silent prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and the heroic practice of the virtues of obedience, poverty and chastity.”^[53] This Eucharistic centrality — almost unbroken converse with the Lord, personal participation in the sacrifice of Christ, rigorous penance joined to intercession for sinners — is, according to the pope, the key that makes intelligible a life otherwise “strange” in the eyes of the modern world.^[54]

A man already venerated in his lifetime

Charbel does not wait for death to be recognized as a saint by those around him. Paul VI stresses it: “Even in Charbel Makhlouf’s lifetime, his holiness radiated; his countrymen, Christians or not, venerated him, flocked to him as to a physician of souls and bodies.”^[55] This sentence already anticipates the most striking trait of his posterity: an influence that very early overflows the confessional boundaries of Lebanon.

“Father of Truth”: struck down during the consecration

On December 16, 1898, around eleven o’clock, as he celebrates Mass alone in his hermitage chapel, Fr. Charbel is struck with paralysis at the very moment of the consecration, while pronouncing the words of the Maronite anaphora: “Father of Truth, behold your Son who offers himself to give you satisfaction...”^[56][57] He cannot finish the prayer begun.

“Father of Truth, behold your Son, who suffered death to justify me; behold the offering, receive it with pleasure from my hands, and forget the faults I have committed before your Majesty.” — Charbel Makhlouf, words of the Maronite anaphora repeated during his agony, December 1898^[58]

Eight days of agony and death on Christmas Eve

During the eight days of his agony, the paralyzed monk tirelessly repeats the words of the unfinished Mass.^[59][60] He dies on December 24, 1898, Christmas Eve, late in the day, at the age of seventy.^[61][62] He is buried in the cemetery of the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya on Christmas Day.^[63]

A phenomenon examined in a dedicated article

A few weeks after the burial, witnesses report unexplained lights visible at night above the tomb. Exhumed at the beginning of 1899, the body is found intact; shortly afterwards begins a flow of reddish liquid, attested from 1899 until the mid-twentieth century — the body is still judged intact in 1965, and is reduced to a skeletal state only in 1976.^[64] This remarkable case — successive exhumations and openings from 1899 to 1976, medical examinations in 1927 and 1950 — is examined in detail, with its sources and methodological limits, in the article on the incorrupt bodies of the Catholic Church: in 1927, Professors Geoffroy and Melconian of the French Faculty of Medicine in Beirut saw in it the effect of the evisceration performed in 1899 combined with a mummifying desiccation, with an underlying slow adipocere decomposition — a partial explanation, subsequent to the first findings of the intact body, which accounted neither for the initial state nor for the moisture still produced on the body and the coffin in 1950, for which the 1950 commission declared it could offer “no sufficiently convincing and satisfactory explanation.”^[65] At the 1927 exhumation, a cloth laid upon the body — which was then exuding, according to the monastic reports, sweat and blood — revealed a few features of his face and hands, a phenomenon which remains, notes the historian Jean-Christian Petitfils, beyond all comparison with that of the Holy Shroud.^[66]

Opening of the process and Rome’s acceptance in 1927

The diocesan process for the beatification and canonization of Charbel Makhlouf is submitted to Rome in 1925 by Abbot Ignace Dagher Tannoury and his vicar general, Fr. Martin Tarabay.^[67] The case is accepted in Rome in 1927 — the same year in which the causes of two other great figures of the Lebanese Maronite Order are jointly accepted: Fr. Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini, Charbel’s former teacher at Kfifane, and Sr. Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayes (1832–1914), a nun of the same Order.^[68] The table below places these three Lebanese causes accepted together in 1927, whose outcomes would stretch over nearly half a century.

This table alone shows the exceptional spiritual density of the Lebanese Maronite Order in the nineteenth century: three causes accepted in Rome in the same year, three canonizations spread over nearly forty years, all issuing from the same monasteries of the Lebanese mountains.^[69]

The two healings retained for the beatification

For the beatification, the Congregation retains two healings attributed to Charbel’s intercession, both occurring in 1950: that of Sr. Marie-Abel Kamari, a religious of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, healed in July 1950 of a digestive ulcer from which she had suffered for fourteen years, and that of Iskandar Naim Obeid, a blacksmith of Baabdat, healed of blindness in his right eye caused by an irreversible tearing of the retina.^[70][71]

The beatification of December 5, 1965 — in the closing days of Vatican II

On December 5, 1965, three days before the solemn closing of the Second Vatican Council (December 8, 1965), Paul VI presides in Saint Peter’s Basilica over the beatification ceremony of Charbel Makhlouf — a few weeks after that of Fr. Jacques Berthieu, Jesuit missionary and martyr beatified on the preceding October 17.^[72] The pope at once places the event in an ecumenical and ecclesial perspective:

“Behold, at the close of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, a hermit of the Lebanese mountains is enrolled among the blessed, the first confessor of the East raised to the altars under the present procedure of the Catholic Church. What a symbol of union between East and West! What a sign of ecclesial brotherhood among the Christians of the whole world!” — Paul VI, address at the beatification of Charbel Makhlouf, December 5, 1965^[73]

The Maronite Patriarch, Cardinal Paul Peter Meouchi, himself speaks during the ceremony to stress the importance of the day for the Maronite Church and for all Lebanese Catholics.^[74]

The miracle retained for the canonization

For the canonization, the Congregation retains the healing of Mariam Assaf Awad, a native of Syria residing at Hammana: operated on three times for cancer between 1963 and 1965 — of the stomach, the intestines, then the right side of the neck — and declared incurable by the doctors, she then finds her throat affected to the point of being unable to swallow without atrocious pain; after earnest prayer to Blessed Charbel, she wakes healed one morning in 1967 and comes on pilgrimage to Annaya to give thanks.^[75][76]

The canonization of October 9, 1977

Twelve years later, on October 9, 1977, Paul VI canonizes Charbel Makhlouf, in the presence of the Maronite Patriarch Anthony Peter Khoraiche and of Lebanese civil and religious delegations.^[77] The pope opens his homily with a sentence that remains famous:

“The whole Church, from East to West, is invited today to a great joy. Our heart turns toward Heaven, where we now know with certainty that Saint Charbel Makhlouf shares in the immeasurable happiness of the Saints, in the light of Christ, praising and interceding for us.” — Paul VI, homily for the canonization of Charbel Makhlouf, October 9, 1977^[78]

The paradox of asceticism before the modern world

The 1977 canonization homily is not a mere exercise in piety: in it Paul VI directly confronts the objection that Charbel’s life spontaneously raises in a modern culture wary of radical renunciation. He states the objection himself with remarkable frankness: “Even Christians will ask: did Christ really demand such renunciation [...]? Worse still, will certain proponents of modern humanism not go so far [...] as to suspect this uncompromising austerity of contempt [...] for the healthy values of the body and of love, of friendly relations, of creative freedom, of life in a word?”^[79]

The pope’s answer in no way softens Charbel’s radicality; it shifts its meaning. To reason as if eremitical asceticism were merely “a human performance,” says Paul VI, “is to show a grave misunderstanding [...] it is to forget the love of God that inspires it, the Absolute that draws it; it is to ignore the grace of Christ that sustains it and makes it share in the dynamism of his own Life.”^[80] He recalls that Christ himself laid radical demands upon his disciples — “Follow me... and let the dead bury their dead” (Lk 9:59–60) — and that the spiritual life, far from impoverishing man, leads him to “a depth, a vitality, a mastery of being, a balance all the greater for not having been sought for their own sake.”^[81]

Charisms in the Body of Christ

Paul VI then situates the hermit vocation within the whole of the charisms that give the Church life, drawing on Saint Paul (Rom 12:4–8):

“Pastors are needed [...]. Theologians are needed [...] and a Magisterium to watch over it. Evangelizers and missionaries are needed [...]. Catechists are needed [...]. People are needed who devote themselves directly to helping their brethren... But people are also needed who offer themselves as victims for the salvation of the world, in freely accepted penance, in unceasing prayer of intercession, like Moses on the mountain, in a passionate search for the Absolute, witnessing that God is worth being worshipped and loved for himself.” — Paul VI, homily for the canonization of Charbel Makhlouf, October 9, 1977^[82]

The hermits’ way of life, the pope specifies, “is not proposed to all as an imitable charism”; but in its pure state, it embodies a spirit from which no faithful is exempt, and it exercises in the Church a function she cannot do without.^[83]

The hermit vocation, “a salutary path for all”

Paul VI concludes his homily with a reflection on the timeliness of the hermit life — in which he notes himself, in 1977, a renewed interest that he explains not only by the crisis of modern society:

“This witness, far from being a survival of a bygone past, appears to Us very important for our world, as for our Church.” — Paul VI, homily for the canonization of Charbel Makhlouf, October 9, 1977^[84]

In the part of his homily delivered in Italian, the pope adds that contemporary social life, marked by exuberance, excitement and the insatiable pursuit of comfort, will only recover its balance through growth in self-mastery, asceticism, poverty, peace, simplicity, interiority and silence — virtues of which, he says, “the hermit life teaches the example and the taste.”^[85]

One of the most remarked traits of the devotion to Charbel Makhlouf is its power to draw to the shrine of Annaya pilgrims who are not Catholic: Christians of other confessions, Muslims and Druze come there to pray and to seek his intercession, in a country marked by religious coexistence and by the wounds of several conflicts.^[86] This ecumenical and interreligious influence, already noted by Paul VI regarding the veneration Charbel enjoyed in his lifetime among his “countrymen, Christians or not,” has grown still further since his canonization.^[87] The detailed record of the tens of thousands of accounts of favors gathered on this subject, their discernment and their methodological limits, is the subject of the article devoted to the miracles attributed to Saint Charbel.^[88]

Patron of Lebanon and international shrine

Charbel Makhlouf is venerated as the patron saint of Lebanon. The Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya, where his tomb rests, has become a place of international pilgrimage, visited each year by hundreds of thousands of faithful from Lebanon, the Near East and the Lebanese diaspora throughout the world.^[89] On December 1, 2025, Pope Leo XIV, visiting Lebanon, came to the shrine of Annaya to pray before the saint’s tomb, entrusting, in his own words, “Lebanon and its people to the protection of Saint Charbel, that they may always walk in the light of Christ.”^[90]

Worldwide spread of the devotion

Devotion to Charbel has spread far beyond Lebanon. On October 28, 2017, a shrine was dedicated to him at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, with a mosaic and a relic offered in honor of his parents by a Lebanese-American donor.^[91] Monasteries and places of worship bearing his name have since been founded in several countries, notably in Belgium, Canada and France — including a new monastery opened at Villiers-sur-Marne on September 20, 2025.^[92]

Liturgical feast and memory

The feast of Saint Charbel is celebrated on July 24 in the Roman calendar, and on the third Sunday of July in the proper calendar of the Maronite Church; in Lebanon, his memory is also honored on December 24, the anniversary of his death.^[93][94] Bishop Francis Zayek, in 1977, thus sums up Charbel’s place in the Eastern tradition: “Saint Charbel is called the second Saint Anthony of the desert, the perfume of Lebanon [...] the honor of our Aramean Antiochian Church, and the model of spiritual values and renewal.”^[95]

• Incorrupt bodies — the complete record of the exhumations and of the exudation observed on Saint Charbel’s body between 1899 and the mid-twentieth century.
• The 29,000 miracles of Saint Charbel — the tens of thousands of accounts of favors gathered at the shrine of Annaya.
• Miraculous healings — medical criteria and the Catholic discernment of healings attributed to saints.
• The Eastern Catholic Churches — the place of the Maronite Church among the sui iuris Catholic Churches.
• Eastern liturgy — for understanding the Maronite anaphora that Charbel could not finish on the day of his seizure.