History & overview · every faith gets one
A church built around a hermit, and a country built around the church.
The Syriac Catholic church of Lebanon, gathered around the fifth-century hermit Maron and his monastery, in full communion with Rome and, by its own account, never out of it. Its liturgy is West Syriac with the words of institution still said in Aramaic; its patriarch sits at Bkerke, and Lebanon's presidency has been reserved for a Maronite since 1943.
The founding
Maron lived on a hilltop in northern Syria and left no rule and no order; after his death a monastery took his name, and its monks and their villagers moved into the mountains of Lebanon under pressure from empires and neighbours. The church says it never broke communion with Rome. The Latin chronicler William of Tyre recorded a Maronite return from monothelitism in 1182, and historians have argued about that sentence ever since.
Its founding is bound to Maron, a Syrian hermit who died around 410 — 410 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A creation that includes the mountain — Maronite identity is inseparable from a particular landscape..
The divine. One God in three persons; Chalcedonian christology in a Syriac liturgical dress..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; the Catholic teaching, with a strong domestic practice of remembering the dead..