St. Rafqa

Rafqa, baptized Boutroussieh, was a Lebanese religious whose vocation included teaching before she entered the Lebanese Maronite Order. She helped establish education for girls and lived through a period of violent conflict in Lebanon. In 1871 she entered the monastery of Saint Simon, later moving with other nuns to Saint Joseph’s monastery at Jrabta.

Born in Himlaya in 1832, she lost her mother as a child and worked in domestic service during family financial difficulty. Her early religious life included kitchen duties, study, and teaching. Establishing a girls' school at Maad gave that service a lasting communal form.

Her movement from an active teaching congregation to enclosed Maronite life was a real change of vocation within the same religious commitment. The accounts of visions and extraordinary experiences belong to her devotional record; the schools, communities, and people she served supply essential context.

Her later years brought blindness and severe physical suffering. The Vatican biography describes her continuing to pray and work with her hands despite these limitations. Her spirituality understood suffering in relation to Christ’s Passion. Her life includes both that interior devotion and the earlier, practical work of education and service.

The Vatican biography remembers Rafqa studying Arabic, calligraphy, and mathematics while serving in Ghazir. It also names her fellow nun and the benefactor involved in establishing a girls’ school at Maad. These details recover intellectual work and collaboration that can disappear when her life is told chiefly through suffering.

Her later knitting and clothing-making likewise belong to a life with concrete skills. They should not be used to imply that a sick person must remain productive to have dignity. Rather, they help preserve the particular person behind a devotional image: someone who learned, taught, worked with others, and eventually needed extensive care.