Letter #15, 2025, Thursday, January 30: Top Ten 2024 #1

    Person of the Year: Bishop Mounir Khairallah, 72, Maronite Catholic Bishop of Batroun, Lebanon    

    I met Bishop Mounir Khairallah, 72, our choice for #1 Person of the Year 2024, in October in Rome.

    Though he was extremely busy — as days in Rome may be filled with many meetings and encounters, until not a minute remains free — he agreed to have a cappuccino with me for 20 minutes in a little bar/cafeteria across the street from the Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio (link), where the manager, Giovanni, had become a friend of mine.

    I found him a man of exceptional kindness and human warmth.

    And he repeated to me the source of his exceptional message of forgiveness, as follows:

    “I have personally experienced forgiveness.

    “When I was five years old, someone came to our house and brutally murdered my parents.

    “I have an aunt who is a nun in the Lebanese Maronite order.

    “She came to our house to take us four children—the eldest was six years old, the youngest two—and took us to her monastery.

    “In the church, she invited us to kneel and pray—to pray to God for mercy, for love.

    “She told us: ‘Let us not pray so much for your parents; they are martyrs before God.

    “‘Let us instead pray for those who killed them and seek to forgive throughout your lives.

    “‘Thus you will be the children of your Father, who is in Heaven.’”

    I was astonished at the simplicity, profundity, and gentleness of the man.

    I am privileged to have met him, and I feel privileged to be able to introduce him also to you.

    You may see him and listen to him at this video on the Vatican website.

    With prayers for Bishop Mounir, for his family, for Lebanon, for the Middle East, and for our entire world, that we may find a way, through forgiveness, to peace.

    RM

    P.S. To subscribe to Inside the Vatican magazine, click here.

With the aid, and in the hope, of Christ, believers can
overcome any difficulties… 

Here are the testimonies of 10 of His people 

Top Ten 2024

    It was a difficult year. Around the world there were wars and rumors of wars; brutally contentious elections; assassinations and assassination attempts; deadly storms, earthquakes and mudslides. Conflicts within the Church — excommunications, criminal trials, continuing abuse allegations and the tug-of-war between modernism and tradition — were sometimes just as painful.

    Yet the Church is — in a way the world is not — consecrated and filled with grace by her divine Spouse, the Lord Jesus, who ever and always “makes all things new.”

    The grace and peace of Christ is available to all Christians of good will, and in 2024, as in every year, it was the antidote to the sickness of our modern age, and the leavening of our lives otherwise weighed down by the consequences of sin.

    Jesus did indeed, in 2024, somehow renew us and bring us joy and strength, and one way He accomplished this was through the lives and testimonies of His people. We have chosen 10 of them for your reflection here.

    Bishop Mounir Khairallah

    “I carry a message of forgiveness”

    At the tender age of five, Lebanese Maronite Bishop Mounir Khairallah became an orphan when his parents were brutally murdered by a Syrian farmworker.

    His aunt, a nun in a monastery, took him in, along with his three young siblings. It was she who first taught him the great lesson of forgiveness.

    As he recounts: “In the church, she invited us to kneel and pray—to pray to God for mercy, for love. She told us: ‘Let us not pray so much for your parents; they are martyrs before God. Let us instead pray for those who killed them and seek to forgive throughout your lives.’ “

    It is a lesson that Bishop Khairallah passionately desires we all learn, especially those in the grip of hatred and violence in his beloved homeland.

    “I come from a country that has been engulfed in fire and blood for 50 years now,” Bishop Khairallah said in a “testimony” at the October 2024 Synod on Synodality, to which he had been invited by Pope Francis. “In 1975, the war in Lebanon began under the pretext of a religious and confessional war, mainly between Muslims and Christians.

    “Fifty years later, they have failed to understand that it is not entirely a war of confession or religion. It is a war that has been imposed upon us, in Lebanon, a ‘country-message,’ as Saint John Paul II always said; a country-message of conviviality, freedom, democracy, and life in respect of diversity.”

    Bishop Khairallah was ordained in 1977 for the Maronite Catholic Eparchy in Batroun after being educated by the Capuchins and attending minor seminary in Lebanon, then studying philosophy and theology at the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome. He pursued his post-graduate education in France before returning to Lebanon. He became a parish pastor, a university professor and General Secretary of the Maronite Synod. In 2012, Pope Benedict made him the Eparch of Batroun.

    Through all this time, Bishop Khairallah has been an apostle of forgiveness as the path to peace desired by God: “Loving our neighbor and being able to forgive the other person, especially the one who has hurt us, who persecutes us, is a grace and a gift from God.”

    The plea he delivered at the Synod was addressed to both his countrymen and the whole of humanity:

    “But I say to you, young Lebanese, that I have understood why forgiveness is so difficult, but it is not impossible. I understand you, but it is possible to live it if we want to be disciples of Christ, in the land of Christ. On the Cross, Jesus forgave; we are capable of forgiving. And I tell you more: all those who wage war against us, whom we consider enemies—Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, of all nationalities—these are not enemies, why? Because those who foment war have no identity, no confession, no religion; but the others, the peoples, want peace, want to live in peace on the land of the peace of ‘Jesus Christ, King of Peace.’

    “Therefore, even today, despite all that happens—50 years of blind, savage war—despite everything, we as peoples of all cultures of all confessions, want peace; we are capable of building peace.

    “Let us put aside our politicians, ours and those of the world, the great powers: they make their interests at our expense. But we, as a people, do not want all this; we reject it.

    “Yes, I come here to speak about forgiveness and reconciliation, while my country and my people suffer and experience the consequences of wars, conflicts, violence, vengeance, and hatred.

    “We Lebanese always want to condemn hatred, vengeance, and violence. We want to build peace. We are capable of doing so. If Pope Francis has chosen forgiveness, for us and for me, it is a great message to give.

    “Talking about forgiveness, when bombings strike all of Lebanon, would it be impossible? No. In all this, the population of Lebanon rejects, as always, the language of hatred and vengeance.

    “‘If you love those who love you,’ says Jesus, ‘what merit do you have? Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Then you will be disciples of Christ and children of your Father.’”

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