The « saint patriarch » raised to the altars: Elias Hoyek, shepherd of Lebanon

In Lebanon, the Maronite Patriarch Elias Peter Hoyek was raised to the honours of the altars on Saturday 25 July, at the patriarchal summer residence of Dimane. Called in his lifetime the « saint patriarch », he led his Church and his people through the war and famine of the last century, father of a nation as much as shepherd of a flock.

The Church has always honoured her saints, and first of all her shepherds: « Let us now praise men of renown and our fathers in their generation. » For the shepherd according to God is not a functionary of the sacred, but a father: « I will give you pastors according to my own heart, and they shall feed you with knowledge and doctrine. » To feed one's people with the truth and to defend them in trial, even to the forgetting of oneself: this is the holiness of a bishop, and the measure by which the Church raises her own upon the altars.

Measured against this rule, the news is both a joy and a reminder. A joy: a shepherd who kept his flock standing under famine and persecution receives at last the honour the world denies to those who serve without selling themselves. A reminder: at an hour when men would have a Church without heroes and a calendar without saints, the Church points to a man and says: imitate him. To honour the saints is no cult of nostalgia; it is to confess that grace still makes fathers, and that holiness remains possible — even on a patriarchal throne, even in a century of blood.

Sources. Ecclesiasticus, XLIV, 1; Book of Jeremias, III, 15; Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the veneration and invocation of the saints.