The Maronite Church

Denomination·Founded 410 CE·est. ~3.5 million, well over half of them outside Lebanon — Brazil, Argentina, the United States and Australia.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → The Eastern Catholic Churches → The Maronite Church

The Maronite Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, Bkerke

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Community of The Maronite Church

Bkerke, and the chair in Baabda.

The patriarch sits at Bkerke above Jounieh and speaks weekly on the state of the country. Since the National Pact of 1943 the Lebanese presidency has been held by a Maronite, and no Maronite patriarch has been able to keep out of that fact.

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How you joinBy baptism and chrismation together, in infancy
Who leadsThe Maronite Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, at Bkerke
The unitThe parish and the village; and outside Lebanon, the eparchy
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The patriarch is elected by the Maronite synod of bishops and confirmed by the pope; Bechara Boutros al-Rahi has held the office since March 2011 and was made a cardinal in 2012. Bkerke is a political address as well as an ecclesiastical one, and the patriarch's Sunday homily is reported as national news. The 1943 National Pact — an unwritten agreement — fixed the presidency for a Maronite, and the Taif Accord of 1989 that ended the civil war reduced the president's powers while keeping the confessional allocation. The Maronite church's own institutions, its schools and the Université Saint-Joseph and the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik among them, remain among Lebanon's largest employers, and they have been hit hard by the currency collapse since 2019.

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