On December 24th, 1898, a Lebanese hermit monk died at his hermitage on a mountain north of Beirut. His name was Charbel Makhlouf. He had lived alone in a stone cell for twenty-three years. After his burial, his body did not decompose. For the next sixty-seven years, his sealed grave wept blood.

He had been born Youssef Antoun Makhlouf in the village of Bekaa Kafra in 1828. He had taken the religious name Charbel, after a second-century Antiochian martyr, when he entered the Maronite Monastery of Saint Maron at Annaya. In 1875 his abbot granted him permission to live as a solitary hermit at the small Hermitage of Saints Peter and Paul on the same mountain. He never left it.

Within weeks of his burial, monks at Annaya reported a strange light hovering over Charbel's grave at night. Some of the people who saw it were not Christian. The reports continued for four months. In April 1899, the abbot petitioned the Maronite hierarchy for permission to open the tomb.

They opened the grave on April 15th, 1899. They found Charbel's body floating on a layer of muddy water at the bottom of the tomb. The flesh was intact. The muscles were flexible. Not a single hair had fallen from his head or beard. A reddish liquid was leaking from the pores of his skin. The monks dried him, collected the fluid, and reburied him in a new coffin in a new tomb.

The fluid did not stop. Over the next half century, monks repeatedly opened the tomb to find Charbel's body still incorrupt, still flexible, still bleeding. Two French Medical Institute physicians in Beirut examined him in 1927 and confirmed this in writing. In 1950, pilgrims noticed liquid seeping out of a corner of the new sealed tomb itself onto the floor of the oratory. They opened the grave. The white plasma had separated from the red blood and collected on his garments in a solidified layer.

In 1965, the body began to decompose normally. The fluid stopped. Charbel had been preserved for sixty-seven years. The same year, Pope Paul the Sixth beatified him on the last day of the Second Vatican Council. He canonized him in 1977. The Monastery of Saint Maron at Annaya now keeps a registry of medically verified healings attributed to Charbel's intercession. As of today the registry holds more than thirty-three thousand entries.

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