Feast day: July 24

St. Sharbel Makhlouf

Priest, Hermit · 1828–1898

Patron of Lebanon

A Lebanese Maronite monk who spent his last twenty-three years as a hermit in silence, prayer, and hard labor, and after whose death many cures were reported at his tomb.

Sharbel Makhlouf was a Maronite Catholic monk and hermit of Lebanon, born in 1828 in a mountain village to a poor peasant family and raised in deep piety by his widowed mother. Drawn from boyhood to solitude and prayer, he left home as a young man to enter a Maronite monastery, taking the name Sharbel after an early Christian martyr.

After years of the ordinary monastic life and ordination as a priest, he received permission to withdraw to a hermitage attached to his monastery, and there he spent the last twenty-three years of his life in extraordinary austerity, silence, and unceasing prayer. He ate little, slept on the ground, and gave himself wholly to the Eucharist, before which he would spend long hours.

He lived almost entirely unknown to the world, a hidden monk in the Lebanese mountains. But after his death on Christmas Eve of 1898, a strange light was reported around his grave, and many miracles and cures were attributed to his intercession, drawing pilgrims of every faith — Christian and Muslim alike — to his tomb.

Canonized in 1977, Sharbel became the great modern saint of Lebanon and of the Eastern Catholic Churches, honoured as a patron of his country and a witness to the power of the hidden, contemplative life.

A simple mountain hermit little known in life, he became after death one of the most beloved miracle-working saints of the Middle East.

Image: Unknown (Old Photo) (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2025/december/documents/20251201-libano-san-charbel.html