Healing Prayer to St. Charbel

The Hermit of Annaya

Charbel Makhlouf was born Youssef Antoun Makhlouf on May 8, 1828, in Beqa-Kafra, the highest mountain village in Lebanon. In 1851, at twenty-three, he entered the Lebanese Maronite Order at the Monastery of Our Lady in Mayfouq, taking the name Charbel after a second-century martyr of Antioch. He was ordained a priest and, years later, received permission to live as a hermit at a hermitage attached to the Monastery of St. Maroun in Annaya, where he spent the rest of his life in silence, prayer, and manual work. He died on Christmas Eve, 1898.

What drew attention after his death was his body: monks who exhumed it found it incorrupt — still soft, as if he had just died — and a second exhumination in 1965 found it still incorrupt, decades after his burial. In the years since, healings attributed to his intercession have been reported by the thousands, many of them medically documented, and he is invoked today by Christians and non-Christians alike across Lebanon and its diaspora. Pope Paul VI beatified him in 1965 and canonized him in 1977.

Prayer for Obtaining a Special Grace

O Lord, infinitely holy and glorified in Your saints, You inspired the holy monk and hermit Saint Charbel to live and die in the way of Jesus Christ, and gave him the strength to detach himself from the world in order to make the monastic virtues triumph in his hermitage.

We implore You to bestow upon us the grace to love You and to serve You by following his example.

Almighty God, who manifested the power of Saint Charbel's intercession by numerous miracles and favors, grant us, through his intercession, this grace:

(State your intention.)

Amen.

Conclude with one Our Father, one Hail Mary, and one Glory Be.

Helper

1. This prayer is often prayed as a nine-day novena — the same words repeated once a day, naming your intention each time — but it is a complete prayer on its own for any single day you need it.
2. Shrines dedicated to St. Charbel distribute blessed oil as a sacramental some pray with alongside this prayer. The oil has no power of its own — like blessed water or a rosary, it is a traditional aid to devotion, not a substitute for the prayer itself.
3. St. Charbel is invoked for healing of every kind: physical illness, infertility, addiction, and emotional or spiritual struggles are all commonly brought to him.