George Beseb'ely

George Beseb'ely, also known as Georges Rizqallah Beseb'ely or Jirjis al-Basba'li, was a Maronite Patriarch of Antioch in the seventeenth century. He was born in 1595 in the village of Beseb'el (also spelled Bsebaal or al-Basba'l) in the Koura region of northern Mount Lebanon, then under Ottoman rule. His surname is toponymic and refers to that village. Surviving sources say little about his family or early education. Maronite clergy of his era were typically trained in monastic and parish settings in the Lebanese mountains, especially in and around the Qadisha Valley, where Syriac liturgical tradition remained in use alongside Arabic.

In the mid-seventeenth century the Maronite Church, an Eastern Catholic church in communion with Rome, still located its patriarchal residence at the Monastery of Our Lady of Qannoubine in the Qadisha Valley. That monastic complex had served as the patriarchal seat since the fifteenth century, offering relative security amid Ottoman administration and local feudal conflict. After the death of Patriarch John Bawab of Safra in 1656, the Maronite bishops elected George Beseb'ely as patriarch in 1657. Pope Alexander VII later confirmed the election, a process completed in 1659, and thereby continued the formal communion between the Maronite patriarchate and the Holy See. That relationship had been reinforced since the late sixteenth century by Latin missionary activity and by the training of Maronite students at the Maronite College in Rome.

Beseb'ely governed from 1657 until 1670, during a politically unstable period in Mount Lebanon. The fall and execution of the Druze emir Fakhr al-Din II in 1635 had ended a phase of relative local autonomy and been followed by tighter Ottoman oversight and rivalry among notable families. The patriarch was spiritual head of the Maronite community and also an intermediary with civil authorities. He corresponded with the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith in Rome on clerical discipline, the education of priests, and the maintenance of Catholic communion. Among the clergy formed in this generation was Estephan Douaihy of Ehden, who had studied at the Maronite College in Rome. Toward the end of the 1660s Beseb'ely consecrated Douaihy as bishop for the Maronites of Cyprus; Douaihy later succeeded him.

George Beseb'ely died on 12 April 1670. Estephan Douaihy was then chosen patriarch and became the best-known Maronite leader of the early modern period, as well as the principal historian of the Maronite Church. Beseb'ely himself left no large body of writings and is not the object of a formal cultus or feast in the Maronite calendar. He is remembered as a mid-seventeenth-century holder of the Antiochene Maronite patriarchate who sustained the community's link with Rome during a difficult Ottoman chapter, in the long era when the patriarchs resided in the Qadisha Valley before the later transfer of the see toward Dimane and Bkerke.