Saint Sharbel Makhluf

Priest

Feast Day

July 24

Life

1828–1898

Canonized

1977

Order

Lebanese Maronite Order (OLM)

Born

Bekaa Kafra, Mount Lebanon (Ottoman Empire)

Saint Sharbel Makhluf was born Youssef Antoun Makhluf at Bekaa Kafra, in the high mountains of Lebanon, on May 8, 1828, into a poor Maronite Catholic farming family. After the death of his father he was raised by an uncle, a hermit at the monastery of Saint Anthony of Quzhaya. In 1851 he entered the Lebanese Maronite Order at the monastery of Our Lady of Mayfouq, taking the religious name Sharbel after a second-century Antiochene martyr. He completed his novitiate at the monastery of Saint Maron at Annaya and his theological studies at the monastery of Saint Cyprian at Kfifan, where his teachers included the future Saint Nimatullah Kassab al-Hardini. He was ordained priest at the patriarchal monastery of Bkerke on July 23, 1859.

For sixteen years Sharbel lived in the cenobitic community at Annaya in great austerity. In 1875 his superiors granted his repeated request to live as a solitary hermit at the Hermitage of Saints Peter and Paul, dependent on Annaya, where he spent the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He celebrated the Holy Qurbono (the Maronite Eucharistic Liturgy) daily at noon, after a long preparation, and lived in continuous silence, fasting, and prayer of the Divine Office and the Rosary. His diet consisted of one daily meal of boiled vegetables; his sleep was on the bare floor with a wooden block for a pillow.

While celebrating the Maronite liturgy on the eve of Christmas, December 16, 1898, Sharbel was struck with a paralytic illness as he lifted the chalice; he lingered for eight days, repeating the words O Father of truth, behold thy Son, a sacrifice well pleasing to thee, and died on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1898. He was buried in the simple monastic cemetery at Annaya. From his tomb, beginning in 1899, an unexplained luminescence and uncorrupted body, with continuous exudation of blood-mingled fluid, were attested by canonical investigations conducted in 1899, 1927, 1950, and 1965, and by numerous reported miraculous cures.

Pope Saint Paul VI beatified Sharbel on December 5, 1965, during the closing days of the Second Vatican Council, and canonized him on October 9, 1977. The Memorial in the General Roman Calendar is observed on July 24, the date of his religious profession.