Une Minute avec Marie
Faire connaître et aimer Marie
The Vatican has decided that Lebanon, which has given three major saints and a blessed to the Church, will return to the list of official Catholic pilgrimage sites in 2019. The evolution of the political situation in Lebanon and the stabilization of its institutions seem to have favored this decision.
Lebanon, whose soil was trodden by Jesus, has many Christian monasteries (including the Qadisha, in the “Valley of Saints”) and shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary, including Our Lady of Lebanon in Harissa, above Jounieh, 20 km north of Beirut.
Our Lady of Bechouate (Bechwat), in the Bekaa plain, attracts crowds of believers, Christians and Muslims alike. The Maronite village has become an important site of pilgrimage, since the Virgin appeared to a Sunni Muslim child of Jordanian nationality, Mohammad al Hawadi, in 2004. Now Christians and Muslims come to pray in this little church. Between 2004 and 2006, one million pilgrims visited the site.
Lebanon is dear to the heart of the popes: three of them have visited or passed through the "land of cedars" in the last fifty years. The first was Blessed Paul VI, who made a stop in Beirut on December 2, 1964, on his way to Bombay. Saint John Paul II came twice, in 1979 and 1997; and Benedict XVI visited Lebanon in September 2012 to deliver his Apostolic Exhortation for the Middle East at the special assembly of the Synod of Bishops.