Maronite Church

The Maronite Church is one of the Eastern Christian Churches which have their own liturgy but acknowledge the authority of the Pope and are therefore part of the Roman Catholic Church. (Such Churches are known as Uniate Churches.) The name 'Maronite' derives from Maron, an ascetic Syrian monk who lived near Apamea on the river Orontes in northwest Syria. After his death in 410 CE his disciples founded a monastery which became the nucleus of the Maronite Church.

Many of the details of the first millennium of Maronite history are obscure, but it is clear that the Maronites were often the victims of persecution. Christian theology in the first half of the fifth century was dominated by the controversy between those (known as Dyophysites) who held that Jesus, as the son of God, had two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, and those (known as Monophysites) who held that Jesus had only one nature, his human nature being in some way included within his divine nature. Monophysitism was condemned as a heresy by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but many Eastern Churches remained committed to the doctrine, and this was often a ground for hostility between the Maronites, who were Dyophysites, and their Monophysite Christian neighbours - early in the sixth century, e.g., Monophysites in Antioch murdered 350 Maronite monks. It was probably in part as a response to such acts of violence that the Maronites began to move to the relative safety of the mountains of Lebanon, where many of them are still to be found. Whether the early Maronites were completely orthodox is a matter of dispute. According to many sources they accepted Monothelitism, i.e., the doctrine that Jesus had only one will - a doctrine promoted by the emperor Heraclius in the first half of the seventh century in an attempt to reconcile Monophysites and Dyophysites, but condemned as a heresy by the Council of Constantinople in 680-81. The Maronites themselves, however, contest this and deny that their Church was ever Monothelite.

With the Muslim conquest of the region in the eighth century and the conversion of much of the population to Islam, the Maronites felt themselves even more under threat, but in the mountains of Lebanon they succeeded in preserving their identity and their autonomy. They naturally welcomed the arrival of the Christian Crusaders at the end of the eleventh century and fought with them against the Muslim armies, and in 1182 they formally proclaimed their religious allegiance to the Pope in Rome. In the sixteenth century, after the Ottomans had replaced the Mamluks as the imperial power in the region, the position of the Maronite community significantly improved. The Sultan appointed a Druze noble, Fakhir al-Din al-Maani I, to exercise authority in Lebanon as his representative, and Fakhir al-Din persuaded the leading Druze and Maronite families in the mountains of Lebanon to form an alliance which allowed the two communities to live together harmoniously and to prosper. Although it sometimes broke down - there was conflict between the Druze and the Maronites in the middle of the nineteenth century and in the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990 - this alliance lasted for centuries and formed the basis of the present Lebanese state.

Today the Maronite Church has about 3,500,000 members world-wide. There are nearly 1,000,000 Maronites in Lebanon, where they constitute a little over one fifth of the population, but there are also large numbers of Maronites in South America - 750,000 in Argentina and 550,000 in Brazil - as well as smaller numbers in some of the Middle Eastern countries which border Lebanon - 50,000 in Syria and 7,000 in Israel.

The religious beliefs of the Maronites are those of the Roman Catholic Church, but they have their own liturgy, which uses the ancient Syriac language (i.e., Christian Aramaic), and there are other differences between the practices of the two Churches, e.g., Maronite parish priests are not required to remain celibate. The head of the Maronite Church is the Maronite Patriarch of Antioch, whose episcopal residence is at Bkerké above the bay of Jounieh, about 30 kms north of Beirut.