Feast Day: March 23
Canonized: June 10, 2001 — Pope Saint John Paul II
Beatified: November 17, 1985 — Pope Saint John Paul II
Declared Venerable: February 11, 1982 — Pope Saint John Paul II
Order / Vocation: Lebanese Maronite Order (Baladiyya); previously: Daughters of Mary of the Immaculate Conception (Mariamettes); religious name: Sister Rafqa of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Patron of: Lebanon · the sick · those who have lost parents · the Middle East · those who carry chronic suffering as a spiritual offering
"Why, O my God, have You distanced yourself from me and abandoned me? You have never visited me with sickness! Have you perhaps abandoned me?" — Sister Rafqa, in prayer before her illness began, October 1885
She Prayed to Be Sick
On the first Sunday of October 1885, Sister Rafqa of the Sacred Heart of Jesus did not accompany her community on their regular walk. She stayed behind in the chapel of the Monastery of Saint Simon el-Qarn in Aito, Lebanon. As the sisters departed, each came to her and asked her to pray for them. She agreed, and settled into the church alone.
She was fifty-three years old. She had been a Maronite nun for fourteen years, in the rigorous enclosed tradition of the Lebanese Maronite Order. She had never been seriously ill. The health she had maintained through a life of manual labor, austerity, and the hard winters of the Lebanese mountain monasteries was still essentially intact.
Alone in the chapel, she looked at the crucifix. And she prayed, in what she later described to her superior as a prayer that emerged from a growing anxiety: "Why, O my God, have you distanced yourself from me and have abandoned me? You have never visited me with sickness. Have you perhaps abandoned me?"
That night, she felt a violent pain above her eyes, spreading outward. By morning, her head was wrapped in agony. By the days that followed, the pain was established as something that would not go away. By the years that followed, it was established as the defining condition of her remaining life — twenty-nine years of chronic suffering that progressively eliminated her sight, disrupted her spine and joints, immobilized her, and eventually left her completely blind and bedridden.
She had asked to be visited with sickness. The visitation was complete.
She did not rescind the prayer. She did not ask God to take it back. She embraced what had arrived with the same complete acquiescence that the prayer had expressed, understanding — as the tradition of mystical suffering in the Catholic Church had always understood — that there is a form of suffering that is itself a vocation, a participation in the Passion of Christ that is as genuine and as demanding as any apostolate, and that the person in whom it operates most fully is the person who receives it not as an assault to be survived but as a gift to be inhabited.
Rafqa is for everyone who carries pain they did not choose and must find a way to inhabit. She is for the person whose suffering has lasted so long they cannot remember what it felt like not to hurt. She is for Lebanon — the country of her birth, which has known so much pain and from which she is the only canonized saint — and for the Church in the Middle East, which has endured since her death more than she could have anticipated and which needs, desperately, the witness that suffering embraced in love can become.
Himlaya, Damascus, and the Formation of a Child Who Lost Her Mother
She was born on June 29, 1832 — the feast of Saints Peter and Paul — in Himlaya, a village in the mountains of Northern Metn in Lebanon. She was baptized Boutrossieh, the feminine form of the name Peter, which is also the Arabic version of the name she would later take in religion: Rafqa, which is the Arabic form of Rebecca. She was an only child.
Her mother died when she was seven years old.
Her father, in financial difficulty shortly afterward, sent her to Damascus at the age of eleven to work as a servant in a private household — the practicality of nineteenth-century Lebanese poverty, which redistributed children to households that needed labor in exchange for their maintenance. She worked in Damascus for four years and returned home in 1847 to find that her father had remarried.
The stepmother and the maternal aunt both had candidates for her marriage — the stepmother wanting her to marry her brother, the aunt wanting her to marry her son. She was fourteen years old. She did not want to marry either of them. The discord between the competing plans was loud and persistent, and she carried it to God in the most direct way available to her: she overheard her stepmother and aunt exchanging insults with each other about whose candidate should prevail, and she went straight to a convent.
The convent of Our Lady of Liberation at Bikfaya received her. She was fifteen, technically old enough in the period's conventions to make such a decision. She entered not simply to escape the marriage dispute — she was honest enough about her own motives to examine them — but as the answer to a call she had been hearing since childhood. Her devotion to the Virgin Mary, learned from her mother before her mother died, had been the thread running through her years of servitude and displacement. She wanted to follow it to its end.
The Mariamettes, the Massacre, and the Transition
She joined the Daughters of Mary of the Immaculate Conception — the Mariamettes, as they were known in Lebanon — a congregation dedicated to the education and formation of girls. She received the habit in March 1861 and made her first vows at thirty years of age on March 19, 1862. She was assigned first to the kitchen of a Jesuit school at Ghazir, then sent as a teacher, then deployed to Deir-el-Qamar in the Shouf mountains.
Deir-el-Qamar in 1860 was one of the focal points of the sectarian violence that had been building in Mount Lebanon for years and that erupted that summer in a massacre by Druze fighters against the Christian population of the Shouf. The sources give the scale: seven thousand and more killed, three hundred and sixty villages destroyed, five hundred and sixty churches, schools, and convents devastated. Sister Rafqa was at the center of this violence.
During the worst of it, she saved a child's life by hiding him under the skirts of her habit as soldiers pursued him. The image is specific and physical — a nun using the fabric of her religious dress as the literal cover of sanctuary, the kind of detail that survives because it is the kind of thing witnesses carry for the rest of their lives.
She was deeply affected by what she had seen. The years that followed were years in which a woman who had already understood suffering in the personal sense — the orphaned child, the displaced servant, the girl whose marriage was being argued over her head — encountered suffering in its collective and catastrophic form. The faith that sustained her was not abstract. It had been tested against what human beings do to each other in mountains and valleys and had not broken.
In 1871, the Mariamette congregation dissolved, merging with another order. Sister Rafqa was offered the choice to join the new congregation, return to lay life, or find another religious community. She entered the church of Saint George in the town of Maad and prayed for guidance. She heard a voice saying: "You will remain a nun." That night she dreamed of three figures — identified in the tradition as Saints Anthony, George, and Simon the Stylite — who directed her to join the Lebanese Maronite Order.
She was admitted immediately. She received the Maronite habit on July 12, 1871, and pronounced her perpetual vows on August 25, 1872, taking the name Sister Rafqa of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She was thirty-nine years old. She was entering a cloistered, contemplative life.
Twenty-Nine Years of Suffering
The prayer in October 1885 opened the long final chapter of her life.
What followed was a progression of deterioration documented with unusual precision because her superiors understood what was happening and preserved the record. The eye disease developed rapidly. She submitted to a medical examination at Tripoli — painful, inconclusive. She consulted doctors across Lebanon over the following two years; all declared that nothing could be done. An American physician eventually recommended the removal of the affected eye.
When the time for the operation arrived, the doctor offered anesthesia. Rafqa declined. She sat down. The doctor inserted a long scalpel into the eye. The eye, in the account of Father Estefan who witnessed it, "popped out and fell on the ground, palpitating slightly." He records: "Rafqa didn't complain."
She didn't complain in the surgery. She didn't complain in the years that followed. The remaining eye deteriorated. By 1899 she was completely blind. By the end of her life she was also completely paralyzed — the accumulation of spinal deterioration, joint dislocations in her clavicle, hip, and leg, and the slow failure of a body that had been under severe stress for nearly three decades.
She lay bedridden in the Monastery of Saint Joseph al-Dahr at Jrabta, in the mountains of Batroun. She continued to knit socks — her hands remained functional when the rest of her body had surrendered — and to pray, and to receive visitors who came increasingly as petitioners rather than as community members: people who had heard of the nun in the mountains who had carried such suffering for so long and who received it with such evident peace, and who wanted what she had found.
Three days before her death, she told Sister Ursula: "I am not afraid of death which I have waited for a long time. God will let me live through my death."
On March 23, 1914, four minutes after receiving the Last Rites and the plenary indulgence, she died.
Lebanon's Only Saint
She is the only canonized saint of Lebanese origin — a fact that carries its full weight when considered against the history of Lebanon's Christian community, which has been present since the apostolic age, which has produced Maronite theology and the great patriarchs of the Antiochene tradition, which has suffered through the Ottoman period and the sectarian conflicts of the nineteenth century and the civil war of the twentieth century, and which has maintained in the cedar mountains of the Levant an expression of Catholic faith that is genuinely distinct and genuinely ancient.
John Paul II's canonization homily placed her explicitly in the context of the suffering Middle East: "May Saint Rafqa watch over those who know suffering, particularly over the peoples of the Middle East who must face a destructive and sterile spiral of violence." He said this in June 2001, the year of the Second Intifada and the continuing reverberations of Lebanon's civil war. The context gave the canonization an urgency beyond the biographical.
Her patronage of Lebanon is self-explanatory: she is its saint. Her patronage of the sick is autobiographical: she carried sickness for twenty-nine years and taught, by the manner of her carrying it, that illness can be inhabited with joy. Her patronage of those who have lost parents reaches back to the seven-year-old child whose mother died, whose father sent her away in poverty, and who found in the Virgin Mary — the only constant she had — a devotion so deep that it became the axis of her entire life.
The first miracle accepted in her cause was the cure of Elizabeth Ennakl — a woman who was healed of uterine cancer in 1938 at Rafqa's tomb. The miracle that permitted her canonization completed the canonical process. She was canonized in the Jubilee Year, in Rome, in the company of other witnesses to the faith's capacity to inhabit suffering and not be destroyed by it.
Her body reposes in the Monastery of Saint Joseph at Jrabta. Pilgrims continue to come.
| Born | June 29, 1832, Himlaya, Northern Metn, Lebanon — baptized Boutrossieh (feminine of Peter); feast of Saints Peter and Paul |
| Died | March 23, 1914, Monastery of Saint Joseph al-Dahr, Jrabta, Batroun, Lebanon — four minutes after Last Rites; age 81 |
| Feast Day | March 23 |
| Order / Vocation | Lebanese Maronite Order (Baladiyya); previously Daughters of Mary of the Immaculate Conception; religious name: Sister Rafqa of the Sacred Heart of Jesus |
| Canonized | June 10, 2001 — Pope Saint John Paul II |
| Beatified | November 17, 1985 — Pope Saint John Paul II |
| Declared Venerable | February 11, 1982 — Pope Saint John Paul II |
| Body | Monastery of Saint Joseph al-Dahr, Jrabta, Batroun, Lebanon |
| Patron of | Lebanon · the sick · those who have lost parents · the Middle East |
| Known as | Rafka; Saint Rebecca; The Lily of Himlaya; The Little Flower of Lebanon; The Purple Rose |
| Witness of | Druze massacre at Deir-el-Qamar, 1860 — survived; saved a child's life |
| Suffering | 29 years of chronic illness: eye disease (1885); eye removal without anesthesia; complete blindness (1899); total paralysis (c. 1907); spinal and joint deterioration |
| Prayer that began it | "Why, O my God, have You distanced yourself from me? You have never visited me with sickness!" — October 1885 |
| First miracle | Cure of Elizabeth Ennakl of uterine cancer at Rafqa's tomb, 1938 — accepted for beatification |
| Their words | "I am not afraid of death which I have waited for a long time. God will let me live through my death." — three days before her death |
Prayer to Saint Rafqa
Lord Jesus Christ, who allowed Your servant Rafqa to share in the suffering of Your Passion for twenty-nine years, and who sustained her through blindness, paralysis, and isolation with a joy the world could not explain, grant through her intercession that those who suffer chronic illness may find in her a companion who understands what they endure, and may find in Your Cross the meaning that suffering alone cannot provide. May Saint Rafqa watch over the people of Lebanon and the Middle East, and may the peace she found within her immovable body be given to a region that has not yet found rest. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
 |
| Saint Rafka ill in bed in her latter days |
%20Virgin%20and%20Martyr.jpeg)