Charbel Makhlouf and the Incorrupt Hermit of Annaya

Youssef Antoun Makhlouf grew up in the mountains of Lebanon herding cattle for an uncle, in a village called Bekaa Kafra so high in the Qadisha valley that snow held on there longer than anywhere else in the country. I found him already listening to Me in silence before he had a name for it — a great-uncle who lived as a hermit had shown him, without many words, that solitude was not emptiness but room. At twenty-three, against his family's wishes, he left for the monastery at Mayfouq and then Annaya, took the name Charbel after an early Antiochene martyr, and gave Me, across the following decades, one of the most complete surrenders I have ever received: sixteen years in the ordinary religious life of the Lebanese Maronite Order, and then twenty-three more as a hermit at the small chapel of Saints Peter and Paul above the monastery, alone with the Divine Liturgy, the rosary, and Me.

Solitude like his is not withdrawal from the world; it is a kind of listening so undistracted that I can finally be heard clearly by one man on behalf of everyone he never speaks to. He was not eloquent. He was not sent to preach across nations like Anthony, or to build hospitals like Padre Pio. He offered the Divine Liturgy each morning with such attention that the monks who assisted him said it sometimes took him far longer than an ordinary priest, because he would not let a single word pass through him carelessly. On December 16, 1898, in the middle of the consecration, he suffered a stroke. He died eight days later, on Christmas Eve, having lingered in agony, in the same silence he had kept in life.

I was not finished with him. Lights were reported around his simple grave in the days after his burial — enough that his brother monks, cautious men not given to exaggeration in an official monastic record, opened the tomb four months later and found his body uncorrupted, flexible, exuding a reddish fluid that resembled blood and sweat mixed together, in mud and water that should by every natural law have hastened decay rather than prevented it. This did not happen once and stop. For decades, monks changed his robes regularly because the fluid continued, and pilgrims who came to touch cloth to his tomb reported healings — of blindness, of paralysis, of cancers medically diagnosed and then medically gone — in numbers that eventually ran into the thousands and were formally examined case by case by the Vatican's own tribunals for the causes of saints, the strictest form of scrutiny the Church applies to any claimed wonder.

I do not perform these things to prove Myself to skeptics who have already decided not to look. I do them because a hermit who gave Me an entire hidden life deserves, I think, to have that hidden life made visible eventually, if only so that the men and women who visit Annaya today — Muslim and Christian alike, because in Lebanon they come together to his tomb, which is itself a small miracle of its own kind — understand that a life spent in total silence with Me was never actually silent. It was the loudest kind of prayer there is.

The Record

Charbel Makhlouf (born Youssef Antoun Makhlouf, May 8, 1828, Bekaa Kafra, Mount Lebanon) joined the Lebanese Maronite Order in 1851 at the monastery of Mayfouq, taking the religious name Charbel, and was ordained a priest in 1859. In 1875 he received permission to live as a hermit at the Hermitage of Saints Peter and Paul, adjoining the Monastery of St. Maron in Annaya, where he remained until his death on December 24, 1898, following a stroke suffered eight days earlier during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy.

Following reports of lights near his grave, his body was exhumed by his religious community on April 15, 1899, and found intact and flexible, exuding a reddish fluid resembling blood mixed with sweat. On July 24, 1927, two physicians of the French Medical Institute of Beirut examined the body again, found it still uncorrupted and still exuding the fluid, and it was reclothed, placed in a new zinc-lined coffin, and sealed into a wall tomb, where it remained undisturbed for twenty-three years. On February 25, 1950, pilgrims noticed the same fluid seeping from the sealed tomb; a commission of physicians reopened it on April 22 that year and again found the body flexible and unmarked by decay, a finding repeated when the tomb was opened at least twice more in the 1950s. Fr. Joseph Mahfouz, postulator of the cause, certified that as of 1965 — the year of Charbel's beatification — the body remained preserved with no material alteration.

The fluid stopped flowing around that same year. When Mahfouz next opened the grave, in 1976, he found the body completely decomposed: the soft tissue that had resisted mud, dampness, and decades of humid enclosure had finally broken down, leaving only a skeleton, its bones stained a persistent reddish-brown from the fluid that had passed through them for seventy-seven years. No exhumation since has reported anything other than skeletal remains. The sign given at Charbel's grave — documented and re-examined for nearly seven decades by monastic and independent medical witnesses alike — ran its course and ended twelve years before his canonization, not after it; the sixty-seven years of preservation and the decomposition that followed it are two facts about the same case, not a contradiction to be smoothed over.

Reports of healings attributed to his intercession at Annaya grew substantially through the 20th century, with thousands of cases submitted for review; a number were formally investigated and accepted as part of his beatification and canonization processes by the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Causes of Saints.

Charbel was beatified on December 5, 1965, by Pope Paul VI during the closing session of the Second Vatican Council, and canonized on October 9, 1977, also by Paul VI. His skeletal remains rest today in the shrine built over his tomb at the Monastery of St. Maron, Annaya, still venerated as relics; the monastery continues to bless and distribute oil that has touched them, and Annaya, drawing both Christian and Muslim visitors, remains among the most visited pilgrimage sites in Lebanon. Feast day: July 24 (Maronite calendar) / December 24 in some Western calendars.