The Life of Saint Charbel and the Stages of His Canonization

Saint Charbel Makhlouf, or Mar Charbel, was a Lebanese Maronite monk, priest and hermit. Born Youssef Antoun Makhlouf in Bekaa Kafra, Lebanon, in 1828, he lived a life of monastic prayer and asceticism, and then chose the life of a hermit at the hermitage of Saints Peter and Paul in Annaya, where he spent the last years of his life. He died on Christmas Eve 1898, and the Church declared him a saint in 1977.

Here is the life of Saint Charbel, from his birth and his entry into the Lebanese Maronite Order, through his life at the Monastery of Saint Maron and the hermitage of Annaya, to his death, the stages of his beatification and canonization, and the spread of his miracles in Lebanon and around the world.

Saint Charbel’s birth and upbringing

Youssef Antoun Makhlouf was born on May 8, 1828, in Bekaa Kafra (North Lebanon), to Maronite parents, Antoun Zaarour Makhlouf and Brigitta Chidiac. He had two brothers, Hanna and Bechara, and two sisters, Kawn and Warda. Youssef received a Christian upbringing that gave him a love of prayer from childhood.

He was drawn to the monastic and hermit life, following the example of his two maternal uncles, hermits at the hermitage of the Monastery of Saint Anthony of Qozhaya, from whom he received the torch of heroic virtue.

His father died on August 8, 1831, in Ghirfine, a village near Amchit, on his way home after being forced into labour by the Turkish army, so his mother raised him as an orphan. She later married Lahoud Ibrahim, who became the parish priest under the name Abdel Ahad.

Youssef learned the basics of Arabic and Syriac at the village school. He was so devout that the people of his village called him “the saint”.

Every day he led his small flock to pasture, then went to a cave where he knelt before an image of the Virgin Mary and prayed. The cave became his oratory and his first hermitage, and later a place of prayer and pilgrimage for the faithful.

Saint Charbel enters the Lebanese Maronite Order

One morning in 1851, Youssef left his family and his village and went to the Monastery of Our Lady of Mayfouq to become a monk, where he spent the first year of his novitiate. He then moved to the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya, where he entered the Lebanese Maronite Order, taking the name Charbel, after a second-century martyr of the Church of Antioch.

On November 1, 1853, he made his religious vows in the same monastery, fully aware of the demands of these vows: obedience, chastity and poverty.

He completed his theological studies at the Monastery of Saints Cyprian and Justina in Kfifane, Batroun, under his teacher Saint Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini, who was an example to the monks and a living image of the great holy monks, both in his private and his public life.

On July 23, 1859, Brother Charbel Makhlouf was ordained a priest at Bkerké by the laying on of hands of Bishop Youssef Al-Marid, the Maronite Patriarchal Vicar.

Saint Charbel’s life at the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya and at the hermitage

Father Charbel lived at the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya for sixteen years. He was obedient to his superiors and kept the monastic rule strictly. He was also hard on himself in asceticism and mortification. He stripped himself of everything worldly to devote himself to serving his Lord and saving his soul.

At the beginning of 1875, God inspired Father Charbel to withdraw to the hermitage of Saints Peter and Paul, which belongs to the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya, even though superiors did not usually allow monks to become hermits easily. While the Father Superior was hesitating, he received a sign from heaven: the miracle of the lamp.

One night, Father Charbel asked the servant to fill his lamp with oil, but the servant filled it with water instead. And the lamp burned as usual. This sign opened the book of Charbel’s miracles and brought closer the day when the hermit would go up to his longed-for hermitage.

On February 15, 1875, Father Charbel moved permanently to the hermitage, where he was a model of holiness and asceticism. He spent his time in silence, prayer, adoration and manual work in the fields, and left the hermitage only on the orders of his superior.

There he followed the way of the holy hermit fathers, kneeling on a mat of reeds before the Blessed Sacrament, speaking with him and lost in him through whole nights.

He spent twenty-three years in the hermitage, devoted to the service of his Lord, keeping the hermits’ rule precisely and with full awareness.

The death of Saint Charbel

While celebrating Mass on December 16, 1898, he suffered a stroke and entered an agony that lasted eight days. He bore the pains of dying calmly and quietly, despite intense suffering.

Throughout his agony, Father Charbel kept repeating the prayer he had been unable to finish at Mass: “Father of truth, behold your Son, a sacrifice to please you!…”, as well as the names of Jesus, Mary, Saint Joseph and Saints Peter and Paul, the patrons of the hermitage.

Charbel’s soul flew, free and unbound, back to the Father’s house, like a drop of dew returning to the vast ocean, on December 24, 1898, Christmas Eve. He was buried in the cemetery of the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya.

The wondrous light that shone from Saint Charbel’s tomb

After his death, supernatural lights rose from the tomb. This led to his body, which was oozing sweat and blood, being moved to a special coffin, with the permission of the Maronite Patriarchate, and placed in a new tomb inside the monastery.

From then on, crowds of pilgrims flocked to seek his intercession, and God granted many of them healing and spiritual graces.

In 1925, the cause for his beatification and canonization was presented to Pope Pius XI by Abbot General Ignatius Dagher Al-Tannouri and his Procurator General, Father Martinos Tarabay. The cause was accepted in 1927, together with those of Father Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini and Sister Rafqa Al-Rayess.

In 1950, Father Charbel’s tomb was opened in the presence of the official commission and doctors. They confirmed that the body was intact, wrote a medical report and placed it in a box inside the coffin.

Healings of all kinds then multiplied suddenly and astonishingly, and tens of thousands of pilgrims of every denomination and community flocked to the monastery of Annaya to ask for the saint’s intercession.

Saint Charbel’s miracles and their spread around the world

Mar Charbel’s miracles have crossed the borders of Lebanon. The letters and reports kept in the records of the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya are clear evidence of how his holiness has spread throughout the world.

This unique phenomenon brought about a return to good morals, a return to faith and a revival of virtue in souls. Mar Charbel’s tomb has become a magnet that draws people of every class and age. Before it everyone is equal in reverence and supplication, without distinction of religion, denomination or community. For him, all are called children of God.

The healings recorded in the registers of the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya, worked by the Lord through the intercession of Saint Charbel, number in the tens of thousands, not counting the healings around the world, among people of different religions and denominations, that are not recorded in the monastery’s registers.

Ten percent of the healings involved unbaptized people. Each healing came about in its own way: through prayer and asking for his intercession, through oil and incense, through leaves from the oak trees of the hermitage, through soil taken from his tomb, through visiting his shrine and touching the door of his tomb, or through his picture or statue.

Some of these healings were physical, but the most important is the healing of the soul. How many penitents have returned to their Lord through the intercession of Mar Charbel, on crossing the threshold of the Monastery of Saint Maron in Annaya or the hermitage of Saints Peter and Paul!

The beatification and canonization of Saint Charbel

In 1954, Pope Pius XII signed the decree accepting the cause for the beatification of the hermit Charbel Makhlouf.

On December 5, 1965, Pope Paul VI presided over the beatification of Father Charbel at the close of the Second Vatican Council.

In 1975, Pope Paul VI signed the decree approving the miracle for the canonization of Blessed Charbel, which took place at a worldwide celebration on October 9, 1977.

From among the many miracles attributed to the intercession of the man of God, the Church chose two for his beatification and a third for his canonization:

• the healing of Sister Marie-Abel Kamari, of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts;
• the healing of Iskandar Naim Obeid, of Baabdat;
• the healing of Mariam Awwad, of Hammana.