How “the Saints Make History”

The feast of All Saints, this November 1, will mark the beginning of the liturgical year. All Saints’ Day celebrates all the saints who do not appear on the Church’s calendar. Alongside the officially canonized saints, this day therefore honors those prayerful souls known to God alone: priests, monks and nuns, mothers, bank employees, soldiers, doorkeepers, caretakers, librarians, grandparents and young members of the Church… steadfast stones fitted together in the great defensive wall of Lebanon’s holy city.

To support his faith in the face of uncertain times and his belief in the powerful role saints play in history, a historian friend cites two remarkable historical events: the prophet Jeremiah’s purchase of a field even as Jerusalem was about to fall to the Chaldeans (587 BC), and the birth of Jesus in a small, insignificant village in the Roman Empire.

The account of the purchase of a field by the prophet Jeremiah, one of the Bible’s major prophetic figures, is deeply moving (chapter 32). Looking ahead to nearly a century of exile, God commands the prophet to buy a field offered to him by his cousin, even as Jerusalem, surrounded by the armies of the king of Babylon, is about to fall.

The prophet Jeremiah’s plea remains one of the Bible’s most moving appeals: “Ah, Lord my God,” Jeremiah says in chapter 32 of his book (…), “see how the siege ramps have been built up to capture the city! Through sword, famine and plague, the city is being handed over to the Chaldeans who are attacking it. What you said has come to pass, as you yourself can see. Yet you, Lord my God, say to me, even as the city is being handed over to the Chaldeans: ‘Buy this field with silver and call in witnesses!’”

The historian then wonders how a Lebanese person today would react if offered a plot of land to buy just after purchasing a plane ticket.

Yet, he points out, something much like this happened this summer in Rayak, in the Bekaa Valley, when Italian Poor Clare nuns bought a house to establish a monastery, at the very moment when countless Lebanese people, young and old, discouraged by political stagnation and instability, are considering emigrating.

This friend also recalls that, in the very decade in which historians place the Annunciation to Mary, the future seemed to hinge on the rivalry between the Roman and Parthian empires.

Instead, he explains, a new era was dawning in the world with the announcement made by the archangel Gabriel in a tiny, utterly insignificant village in Galilee.

Leo XIV: Saints Make History

In his teachings, and most recently during his visit to France, Pope Leo XIV reminds us that “saints make history” and that “without them, the history of the world would be infinitely poorer and less humane.”

What did he mean? We all know that, with some exceptions—and there are exceptions—saints do not transform the world through political or military conquests, but first and foremost through an inner, spiritual communion with Christ, amid adversity that often demands heroism.

They do so by first changing their own hearts in the light of the Gospel and then offering concrete responses to the calls of their age.

This is clearly evident in Saint Charbel Makhlouf, whose stature has remained untouched by either the great upheavals of his century or the wars and successive crises that have swept through Lebanon and the Middle East over the past 50 years.

But we also all know that his austerities gave him such sway over the heart of God that he was granted the power to “move mountains.”

During his historic visit to Annaya, the pope highlighted how, by choosing radical poverty, silence and constant prayer, Saint Charbel became a spiritual anchor for all Lebanese people, lay and religious alike. Today, the monastery of Annaya reportedly attracts more than 3 million pilgrims a year. In this way, a deeply humble hermit turned a small mountain village into a global crossroads of faith.

A bond that holds communities together

Beyond the gift of healing that had begun to manifest during his lifetime and that he now exercises so generously, Saint Charbel has also become a unifying force for coexistence in Lebanon. He has brought together, across its fault lines, a country whose modern history has been marked by repeated episodes of bloody sectarian strife and seemingly endless political crises.

Yet Christians, Muslims and Druze from all walks of life gather together at his tomb to ask for blessings. By working miracles regardless of religion, Charbel is today writing—or rather, tirelessly rewriting—a story of peace and unity where politics and war have sown, and continue to sow, division.

For all those who have sought and received blessings through his intercession, Saint Charbel is no longer a figure from the 19th century, but a beacon in the storm, an anchor of hope. Faced with institutional instability, inadequate social services or the collapse of the banking system, individuals and families alike find in his legacy a source of moral and spiritual strength that shields them from pain, discouragement and despair.

Finally, although Lebanon is geographically small and was once synonymous with fragmentation and Balkanization, the miracles attributed to Saint Charbel across the globe have brought the country's spiritual and mystical identity to the world. He has transformed cultural perceptions of Lebanon, making it a “land of holiness” and a place of pilgrimage.

In short, while the political leaders of Charbel's time saw their institutions crumble with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, a monk living in obscurity built a legacy that continues to sustain, heal and unite Lebanon more than a century after his death.

That is precisely what the pope means when he says, “Saints make history.”