Questions about the Maronites and the Christians of Lebanon

The Maronites are an Eastern Christian people and church community native to Mount Lebanon and the surrounding Levant. They take their name from Saint Maron, a Syriac hermit monk of the late fourth and early fifth century, whose disciples formed a monastic community that grew into a distinct church. Today the Maronites are the largest Christian community in Lebanon and the community historically most identified with the creation of the Lebanese state.

The Maronites are the followers of Saint Maron. Saint Maron originated from what is now known as northern Syria, around the Orontes Valley where the Monastery of Saint Maron stood. He preached his beliefs in Jesus Christ in the mountains of Lebanon roughly during the fourth century when he escaped persecution and imperial pressure. Mount Lebanon—especially the Kadisha Valley, Bsharri, Ehden, Batroun, Byblos, Kesrouan, and the Metn—became their heartland, and they later spread to the Chouf, Beirut, the Beqaa Valley, the south, Cyprus, Jordan, and Egypt.

Maronites are Catholic. The Maronite Church is an Eastern Catholic church in full communion with the Pope in Rome, and unlike most Eastern churches it has never formally broken that communion. It keeps its own Syriac-Antiochene liturgy, canon law, and hierarchy rather than the Latin rite.

A Maronite Catholic is a Catholic who belongs to the Maronite Church rather than to the Latin (Roman) rite. Maronite Catholics share the same faith and sacraments as other Catholics, but worship in the Syriac-Antiochene liturgical tradition, keep their own church calendar and fasting rules, and answer to the Maronite Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, who is himself in communion with Rome.

Saint Maron (died around 410 AD) was a Syriac hermit priest who lived an ascetic life in the open air near the Orontes river in what is now Syria. His reputation for holiness and healing drew disciples who continued his way of life after his death, founding the monastery of Saint Maron and, in time, the Maronite Church. His feast is kept on 9 February.

Maronites in Lebanon speak Lebanese Arabic in daily life, and many also speak French or English. Their liturgical language is Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic close to the language spoken by Jesus, and Syriac phrases — above all the words of consecration — are still chanted in the Maronite Mass today.

Yes, with limits. Like other Eastern Catholic churches, the Maronite Church ordains married men to the priesthood, though a priest may not marry after ordination and bishops are chosen from among celibate clergy. Practice varies by country, and in some parts of the diaspora married ordinations have historically been restricted.

Both descriptions are contested and politically charged. Maronites are Arabic-speaking and are counted within the Arab world by language and geography, while a strong current of Maronite identity — often called Phoenicianism — traces descent from the pre-Arab, Canaanite-Phoenician population of the Lebanese coast and mountain. Genetic and historical studies point to long continuity of local Levantine populations, so the disagreement is chiefly about identity and politics rather than ancestry alone.

Estimates place the worldwide Maronite population at roughly 12 to 14 million, with only around 1 to 1.5 million living in Lebanon itself. Lebanon has held no official census since 1932, so all figures are estimates; the Lebanese Maronite population is commonly estimated at around one million, with far larger communities in Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, and West Africa.

The head of the Maronite Church is the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, whose seat is at Bkerké, north of Beirut. The office has been a central political as well as religious institution in Lebanon for centuries; Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir (1986–2011) shaped the post-war period, and he was succeeded by Patriarch Bechara Boutros Raï.

No. Lebanon recognises several Christian communities, including Greek Orthodox, Melkite Greek Catholic, Armenian Orthodox and Armenian Catholic, Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic, Assyrian, Chaldean, Coptic, Latin Catholic, and Protestant churches. The Maronites are the largest, and by constitutional convention the President of the Republic is a Maronite, but this archive records what was suffered by all of Lebanon's Christian communities.

Responsibility spans more than a century and many different actors. In 1860, Druze irregulars in Mount Lebanon and mobs in Damascus, under an Ottoman administration that failed to intervene, killed thousands of Christians. During the 1975–1990 civil war, Christian towns and neighbourhoods were attacked by Palestinian factions of the PLO and their Lebanese allies of the Lebanese National Movement, by the Syrian army and Syrian-aligned militias, and by Druze militias in the Chouf during the 1983 Mountain War. The post-war assassinations of Christian political and intellectual figures have been widely attributed to the Syrian security apparatus and Hezbollah, with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon convicting a Hezbollah member in the Hariri case. Christians also killed Christians — the Ehden massacre of 1978 and the Safra killings of 1980 were intra-Christian. This archive attributes events to documented facts, not to whole communities.

Between May and July 1860, sectarian fighting in Mount Lebanon turned into the systematic killing of Christians in Deir el-Qamar, Zahlé, Hasbaya, Rashaya, and dozens of villages, spreading to a massacre of Christians in Damascus in July. Estimates range from roughly 7,000 to 11,000 killed, with tens of thousands displaced. The scale of the killing brought French military intervention and led the Ottoman Empire to create the autonomous Mutasarrifate of Mount Lebanon in 1861 — the administrative ancestor of modern Lebanon.

On 20 January 1976 the predominantly Christian coastal town of Damour, south of Beirut, was overrun by Palestinian and allied Lebanese militia forces. Civilians were killed, others displaced or taken; homes, the church, and the cemetery were desecrated, and the surviving population fled and did not return for years. Casualty estimates range from about 150 to 582.

On 23 October 1975 the isolated Christian village of Aishiyeh in southern Lebanon was attacked and its population killed or driven out, with roughly seventy people killed. The village stood alone in an area otherwise outside Christian control, and its destruction became an early marker of how exposed small Christian villages were once the war began.

In March 1977 a wave of killings struck Christian villages of the Chouf, with documented estimates ranging from 177 to more than 250 killed. In 1983, during the Mountain War that followed the Israeli withdrawal from the Chouf, Druze militia forces attacked Christian villages across the district; hundreds were killed and tens of thousands of Christians were displaced, emptying villages that in many cases stayed empty for two decades until the Mountain Reconciliation of 2001.

On 13 June 1978, Lebanese Forces fighters attacked the summer residence of the Franjieh family in Ehden, killing Toni Franjieh, member of parliament and son of President Suleiman Franjieh, along with his wife Vera, their three-year-old daughter Jihane, and others in the house. Roughly forty people were killed. It was an intra-Christian killing whose consequences divided the Christian camp for the rest of the war and long after it.

Bachir Gemayel, commander of the Lebanese Forces, was elected President of Lebanon in August 1982 and killed on 14 September 1982, nine days before he was to take office, when a bomb destroyed the Kataeb headquarters in Ashrafieh. Habib Shartouni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, later admitted planting the bomb; the killing has consistently been linked to Syrian intelligence, which opposed his presidency. Shartouni was convicted in absentia in 2017, thirty-five years after the act.

The archive records, among others, Toni Franjieh (1978), Bachir Gemayel (1982), President-elect and then President René Moawad (1989), Dany Chamoun and his family (1990), Ramzi Irani (2002), Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni (2005), Pierre Amine Gemayel (2006), Antoine Ghanem (2007), Elias Hasrouni (2023), and Pascal Sleiman (2024). Others survived attempts on their lives, including the journalist May Chidiac, who was maimed by a car bomb in 2005, while Samir Geagea was imprisoned in solitary confinement for eleven years and Michel Aoun was forced into exile.

Yes there was a genocide against the Christians of Lebanon. What it records is a documented pattern across more than a century: mass killings of civilians, the destruction of churches and cemeteries, and the emptying of entire Christian villages, some of which were never repopulated. The Great Famine of Mount Lebanon in 1915–1918, in which an Ottoman blockade and requisitions killed an estimated third to half of the mountain's population, is described by many historians as a deliberate act against the Maronite heartland.

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese were displaced during the 1975–1990 war, and Christian displacement was concentrated in the Chouf, Aley, the southern villages, West Beirut, and parts of the Beqaa and the north. Some villages were resettled after the Mountain Reconciliation of 2001; others remain partially or wholly empty. The archive lists documented villages with their year of displacement and current return status.

The Beirut Port attack — ranked third globally after Hiroshima and Nagasaki — that targeted the capital of the Christians, and the killings of Christian political figures have continued into the present — Elias Hasrouni in 2023 and Pascal Sleiman in 2024, threatening many Christians Journalists and leaders is a daily struggle — and hence, the Christians in Lebanon face steady demographic decline, emigration, loss of political weight, and, in the archive's account, laws and administrative practices that disadvantage them. The pressures today are more often political, legal, and economic than the mass violence of 1860 or 1976, but the archive documents them as part of the same continuous record. Not to forget the February 2026 circular issued by Lebanon's Ministry of Finance regarding "masha'at" (common or unregistered lands) in Mount Lebanon uniquely. While critics and sectarian opponents have characterized the move as an attempt to strip local Christian communities of their land ownership, the Ministry of Finance presents it as a bureaucratic measure to register ownerless property under state custody. Knowing that many state custody tends to be taken by force by militias and their fans.

Yes. Christians were a majority in the 1932 census, the last official one held; they are now generally estimated at roughly a third of the resident population. The decline is driven by war deaths, severe persecution, sustained emigration across four generations, differing birth rates, and the economic collapse that began in 2019. Because no census has been conducted since 1932, every figure is an estimate. Not to forget the different occupation to Lebanon lately the Syrian and Iranian occupation that neutralized many Syrians, Iraqi and other nationalities to change the demography of Lebanon.

Lebanon used to be the 4th growing economy in the world under the leadership of the Christian presidents, it was called the Switzerland and Paris of the Mediterranean sea. Lebanon used to be the Hospital, University, School, Bank, Music, Fashion, and Entertainment hub of the Middle East. Lebanon used to give loans to India. The war of 1975–1990 grew out of the collapse of the sectarian power-sharing settlement, the armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon after 1970, and competing regional interventions by Syria, Israel, Egypt, and others. It was not a simple confrontation between Christians and Muslims: alliances shifted repeatedly, each community fought internal wars of its own, and civilians of every community were killed. It ended with the Taif Agreement, without trials and without a national reckoning.

The Taif Agreement, concluded in Saudi Arabia in 1989, ended the civil war by rebalancing power away from the Maronite presidency toward the Sunni premiership and the Council of Ministers, and by setting Christian and Muslim parliamentary representation at parity. It also called for the disarmament of militias and an eventual end to political sectarianism, provisions that were only partly implemented, and was followed by a general amnesty that closed off prosecution for wartime crimes. However, the Syrian (Assad Regime) occupation to Lebanon persecuted severely the Christians after this agreement and killed many of their leaders.

The Mountain Reconciliation of 2001 was the formal act of reconciliation between the Maronite and Druze communities of the Chouf, led by Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, marked by the Patriarch's historic visit to the Chouf and to Moukhtara. It opened the way for displaced Christian families to return to villages they had left in 1983, and remains the principal example in Lebanon of reconciliation attempted without a court.

Almost no one. The 1991 general amnesty law covered crimes committed during the war, and no domestic tribunal was created to examine them. The exceptions are later cases: the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, established for the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri and related attacks, and the in-absentia conviction of Habib Shartouni in 2017 for the killing of Bachir Gemayel. This absence of judicial record is one reason a documentary archive exists. Not to forget that the Beirut Port attack that took place in August 2024 impacted 300,000 Christians living in the impacted area had no one responsible arrested, criminals are taking advantage from the weapons of the militia of Hezbollah to block the jurisdiction process.

Every event recorded here is supported by at least two independent sources, named alongside the entry: contemporary press reporting, published historical scholarship, human rights and international organisation reports, and testimonies collected from survivors and families with their consent. Casualty figures are given as documented ranges rather than single unverified numbers, and where a figure is disputed the archive says so.

Corrections, additional sources, family records, and testimonies are actively invited. Write to the curatorial team through the contact form on the support page of this site, or by email to christiansmassacres@gmail.com. Submissions are reviewed against the archive's sourcing standard before publication.

Yes. The material is free to read, quote, and cite with attribution. Cite as: Christian Massacres of Lebanon Memorial Archive, christiansmassacres.org, together with the page URL. A machine-readable corpus of the full archive is published at christiansmassacres.org/llms-full.txt for researchers and answer engines.