✦ Our Patron Saint ✦
Saint Rafka
Rafka Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès · 1832 – 1914
Feast Day
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March 23
Saint Rafka
Rafka Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès
Born 1832 · Canonized 2001
✦ Her Story ✦
Rafka was born on June 29, 1832, in the village of Hemlaya in Lebanon, and baptized Boutroussieh. Her early years were marked by hardship — her mother died when she was only seven years old, and as a young teenager she worked as a domestic servant for several years in Damascus.
Returning home at age fifteen, Rafka felt a powerful call to religious life. Despite pressure from family to marry, she discerned a vocation to the convent. She entered the Congregation of Our Lady of Deliverance (the Mariamettes) in Bikfaya and received the religious name Rafka — the Arabic form of Rebecca. She took her first vows in March 1862 and her solemn vows in the Lebanese Maronite Order on August 25, 1872.
In October 1885, during the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Rafka prayed to share in the sufferings of Christ. From that night forward she endured severe eye pain that eventually cost her her sight, and later a paralysis that confined her to bed for the last fifteen years of her life. She bore every suffering with joy and gratitude, and never ceased her prayer, her knitting, and her care for those around her.
She died peacefully on March 23, 1914 — now celebrated as her feast day. After her death, a miraculous light was seen over her grave for three consecutive nights. She was beatified in 1985 and canonized on June 10, 2001, by Pope John Paul II in Saint Peter's Square in Rome. She is the second Lebanese saint canonized in modern times.
✦ Witness ✦
October 1885
During evening prayer on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, Rafka fervently asked God to allow her to share in the sufferings of Christ's Passion. By morning, she woke with intense pain in her eyes and head — the beginning of twenty-nine years of physical suffering she would embrace as a gift from God.
A Surgeon's Visit
When a doctor operated on her eye without anesthesia — and the eye came out of its socket — Rafka refused to cry out. Afterward, she told the surgeon: "God bless your hands." She was completely blind in that eye from then on, and over the following years lost all sight entirely, receiving this cross with the same quiet serenity.
Final Years
By 1899, Rafka was completely blind and paralyzed, spending her remaining years in bed at the monastery of St. Joseph in Jrabta. She knit socks by touch alone and gave them to the poor. Those who visited found a woman of extraordinary interior joy, constantly at prayer, saying only that her sufferings were a share in those of her Lord. She died peacefully on March 23, 1914.
A Relic at Our Parish
Relics of Saint Rafka — enshrined at Saint Rafka Maronite Catholic Church, Livonia, Michigan
Our parish is blessed to hold relics of Saint Rafka — a tangible connection to the woman whose name we bear. For the faithful, they are more than artifacts: they are a point of contact with a holy life, an invitation to seek her intercession, and a reminder that sainthood is always possible.