Maronites

Maronites (Arabic: الموارنة, romanized: Al-Mawārinah; Syriac: ܡܖ̈ܘܢܝܐ, romanized: Mārōnōye) are a Syriac Christian ethnoreligious group native to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant (particularly Lebanon) whose members belong to the Maronite Church. The largest concentration has traditionally resided near Mount Lebanon in modern Lebanon. The Maronite Church is an Eastern Catholic sui iuris particular church in full communion with the pope and the rest of the Catholic Church.

The Maronites derive their name from Saint Maron, (350-410 AD. ), a monk who migrated with his followers from Antioch to the Lebanese Mountains and founded the Maronite church. The spread of Christianity was very slow in the Lebanese region, in the 5th century AD in the highlands they were still pagan. St. Maron sent the apostle Abraham of Cyrrhus known as the "Apostle of Lebanon" with a mandate to convert the pagan inhabitants of Lebanon to Christianity. After their conversion, the inhabitants of the region renamed the Adonis River to the Abrahamic River in honor of the Saint who preached there.

The early Maronites were Hellenized Semites who spoke Greek and Syriac, yet identified with the Greek-speaking populace of Constantinople and Antioch. They were able to maintain an independent status in Mount Lebanon and its coastline after the Muslim conquest of the Levant, keeping their Christian religion, and even their distinct Lebanese Aramaic as late as the 19th century. While Maronites identify primarily as native Lebanese of Maronite origin, many identify as Arab Christians. Others identify as descendants of Phoenicians. Some Maronites argue that they are of Mardaite ancestry, while other historians, such as Clement Joseph David, the Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Damascus, reject this.

Mass emigration to the Americas at the outset of the 20th century, famine during World War I that killed an estimated one third to one half of the population, the 1860 Mount Lebanon conflict and the Lebanese Civil War between 1975 and 1990 greatly decreased their numbers in the Levant; however Maronites today form more than one quarter of the total population of modern-day Lebanon. Though concentrated in Lebanon, Maronites also show presence in the neighboring Levant, as well as a significant part in the Lebanese diaspora in the Americas, Europe, Australia, and Africa.

The Maronite Church, under the patriarch of Antioch, has branches in nearly all countries where Maronite Christian communities live, in both the Levant and the Lebanese diaspora.

The Maronites and the Druze founded modern Lebanon in Ottoman Lebanon in the early 18th century, through the ruling and social system known as the "Maronite-Druze dualism" in the Ottoman Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate. All Lebanese presidents, with the exception of Charles Debbas and Petro Trad, have been Maronites as part of a continued tradition of the National Pact, by which the prime minister has historically been a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the National Assembly has historically been a Shi'ite.