Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayes

Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès was born on 29 June 1832 in the village of Himlaya in the Metn district of Mount Lebanon, then under Ottoman rule. She was baptized Boutrosiya (a feminine form of Peter), the daughter of Saber Choboq Ar-Rayès and Rafqa Gemayel. Her mother died when she was about seven years old, after which her father remarried. Economic hardship in the household led the family to send her, while still a child or young adolescent, to work as a domestic servant in Damascus, where she remained for several years before returning to Himlaya. After her return, her stepmother and a maternal aunt pressed rival marriage plans upon her. She refused both, having already formed the intention of consecrating her life to God.

In 1859 she entered the Congregation of the Mariamettes (Daughters of Mary) at the convent of Our Lady of Deliverance in Bikfaya and received the religious name Sister Anissa (Agnes). She taught catechism and served in several localities in Mount Lebanon, among them Deir el Qamar. Contemporary accounts associate her with the protection of a child during the sectarian massacres of 1860. When the Mariamette congregation was later reorganized, she sought a more strictly monastic life and in 1871 entered the Lebanese Maronite Order at the Monastery of Saint Simon in Al-Qarn (Aito). She took the name Sister Rafqa in memory of her mother and made perpetual profession in 1872.

In 1885, according to her later testimony to her superiors, she asked to share in the sufferings of Christ. Severe pain in the head and eyes followed. Medical treatment was unsuccessful and in one intervention a physician accidentally destroyed her right eye; disease then claimed the remaining eye and she became completely blind. Paralysis gradually overtook her body until she was largely immobile. Sisters who lived with her described her as remaining prayerful and without complaint through nearly three decades of illness. In 1897 she was transferred with other nuns to the newly founded Monastery of Saint Joseph in Jrabta, where she spent her last years.

She died at Jrabta on 23 March 1914. Popular devotion developed around her tomb at the Monastery of Saint Joseph, which became a pilgrimage site. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 16 November 1985 and canonized by the same pope on 10 June 2001. The Catholic Church commemorates her on 23 March. Because of the character of her long illness and the early loss of her mother, she is widely invoked by the sick, by those afflicted with bodily ills, and by those who have lost parents.