Roman Catholicism in Lebanon

The Catholic Church in Lebanon is part of the worldwide Catholic Church under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome.

There are about 1,2 million Catholics in Lebanon in total, the majority of whom are not Latin Catholics but instead follow Eastern Catholic rites as part of the Catholic Church - mostly Maronite, but also Melkite as well as Catholic rites non-native to Lebanon like Armenian, Chaldean, and Syriac.

The Maronite Catholic Church constitutes one of the largest Catholic churches in both Lebanon, and the Middle East. The "Land of the Cedars", as Lebanon is known, is the only one in the region where Catholics play an active role in national politics. Besides the President of the Republic, which by the Constitution of Lebanon must be a Maronite Catholic, in the Lebanese Parliament there are 43 seats reserved to Catholics out of a total of 128 seats. Catholics are also well represented in the government and in the public.

Until the 1960s Catholics were also the major component of the population and represented 43% of all Lebanese. Nowadays they are estimated to about 29% of the total population, being 23% Maronites, 5% Melkites, and 1%Armenian.

Muslim and Christian communities coexist in the country for centuries. Cohabitation was sanctioned by a National Pact in 1943, which created a democracy based on religious communities. The country became a good example of religious and ethnic coexistence. But that lasted only a few decades. The larger communities, Christian and Muslim, were upset by the long civil war that raged between 1975 and 1990. The religious geography of the capital Beirut was redrawn: 65,000 Shiite Muslims abandoned their neighborhoods, and Nabaa chout; from interior regions, in contrast, to the capital flowed 80,000 Maronites and Druzes. As a result of the Civil War, West Beirut was progressively abandoned by Christians. Also, a mass exodus fleeing saw tens of thousands of civilians, including Christians, Druze and Sunni Muslims.

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