St. Sharbel Makhluf

St. Sharbel Makhluf (1828–1898) was a Lebanese Maronite monk, priest, and hermit whose hidden life of prayer has made him one of the most beloved saints of the Eastern Catholic churches. He was born Youssef Antoun Makhlouf on May 8, 1828, in Bekaa Kafra, a mountain village in northern Lebanon said to be the highest in the country. Raised in a poor and devout family and orphaned of his father as a small child, he spent his boyhood tending the family flock and praying at a hillside grotto. In 1851 he left home to join the Lebanese Maronite Order, taking the name Sharbel after a second-century martyr. He made his monastic profession at the Monastery of St. Maron in Annaya and was ordained a priest in 1859. After sixteen years of exemplary community life, he received permission in 1875 to withdraw to the monastery's hermitage of Sts. Peter and Paul. There he spent his last twenty-three years in silence, manual labor, severe fasting, and long hours of adoration, with the celebration of the Divine Liturgy at the center of each day. Sharbel suffered a stroke while celebrating the liturgy in December 1898 and died on Christmas Eve of that year, at the age of seventy. In the months after his burial, an unusual light was reported around his tomb, and when the grave was opened his body was found remarkably preserved. Over the following decades, an extraordinary number of healings were reported by pilgrims to Annaya, carefully documented by the monastery, and devotion to the humble hermit spread far beyond Lebanon. Pope St. Paul VI beatified Sharbel in 1965, at the close of the Second Vatican Council, and canonized him on October 9, 1977. His feast is kept on July 24 in the General Roman Calendar. A patron of Lebanon, he is venerated at his tomb at the Monastery of St. Maron in Annaya, a major pilgrimage site that draws Christians and Muslims alike seeking healing and peace through his intercession.