More on the life of Father Bechara: The following excerpts were taken from: Marie-Louise Lomba, The Servant of God: Fr. Bechara Abou-Mourad, trans. Mortimer, Kenneth (Jounieh, Lebanon: Basilian Salvatorian Fathers, 1988).

Fr. Bechara’s penance and mortification: Those who witnessed the apostolic life of Father Bechara never tire of recounting his rigorous penance and his spirit of continual mortification. However, he made no show of it, quite the contrary! Several saw him hastily remove his shoes when he believed nobody was watching, to continue barefoot across the rocks and thorn-bushes. And his shoes, which he had to keep on his feet to cross the villages and to celebrate the liturgical offices, were so old and patched up that one day the kind Afifeh Khattar, famous for her good heartedness, forced him to accept a pair of new shoes, warning him that she and her whole family would stay away from his Mass if ever he came back with his old shoes which were full of holes!

As for socks, no one ever saw Father Bechara wear them, even during the most extreme cold. He always wore the same black cassock and a coarse woolen rason, summer and winter, “floating around his emaciated body like a shadow,” as one of his parishioners put it. He never put up an umbrella, even during the heaviest cloudbursts and snowstorms. Wearing a kallous green with age, sun and exposure on his head, he went around with a halo of fine white hair which scissors had not touched since his priestly ordination, and a long white beard emphasizing his kind and gentle smile.

Fr. Bechara’s fasting and almsgiving: “During the war,” relates Fr. Malatios Khoury […], “We were…invited to dine with Albert Habib Doumani, a personality of the region. Father Bechara did not touch any of the dishes, as they were prepared with meat and it was a Friday, day of abstinence. When we had left our host, the latter ordered some food to be given him for the journey ahead, as he had not eaten since the morning, and we would not get to the presbytery before evening. But on the way there, Fr. Bechara managed to slip the provisions to a poor fellow and got home that evening still fasting.”

Fr. Bechara helping to save souls: If he had to deal with a hardened sinner, he used his most persuasive weapons, namely prayer and penance. Nagib Selim would tell how there was a drunkard at Deir El-Qammar so sunk in his vice that he ended up by hating God, Church and all the priests in the world! No member of the clergy dared to visit him. One day Father Bechara went to the wretched man's house and, like a beggar asking for alms, invited the man to come and have dinner with him at the presbytery. He was shown the door a dozen times, but finally his smiling, friendly perseverance proved stronger than the man's obstinacy. He then received his guest with the greatest friendliness, and after a meal worthy of all the traditions of eastern hospitality he managed to persuade him to go along to the church. He showed the man around with all the deference and kind attention due to a distinguished visitor. Finally, Father Bechara stood him before a painting showing the Last Judgment, the joys of Paradise and the pains of Hell, with often gruesome detail. A few fitting remarks soon decided the sinner to kneel in the confessional! From then on, he was one of the most faithful penitents of Father Bechara and preferred the joys of prayer to the illusory pleasures of the [national drink], arak. When he had to take the Last Sacraments to an invalid, Father Bechara would have crossed hell-fire to reach the patient's bedside quicker. Nothing stopped him, neither cold, nor rain, nor snow, nor burning sun, nor danger of infection. He ran, he almost flew along the road. He brought to the dying the comfort of his presence and the support of his prayer. He prepared the person with a sort of tender respect to appear before God. He found words of consolation for the grieving family or gave confidence when there was still hope of a cure. During the whole thirty-two years of his rural ministry, not one of his parishioners ever died without receiving the Last Sacraments.

Miracles: [One of Father Bechara’s parishioners related:] “It was during Father Bechara's last months at Wadi Ed-Deir. I usually kept the key of the church of Our Lady of the Annunciation at home in Bainweity. When the Father celebrated the liturgy there or heard confessions, I went to Wadi Ed-Deir at 3:00 [am] to open the church well before the arrival of our dear parish priest. I often found him there before me, walking up and down the veranda and saying his rosary. Such was the case this particular morning. I greeted him by kissing his hand, but when I wished to take the key out of my pocket, I found to my horror that in the haste of my departure I had left it at home. With a slight toss of his head and a smile, Father Bechara tapped me on my shoulder and said gently, ‘God grant you his pardon, my son! How often have I told you that it would be better to leave the key with the neighbors here. But it doesn't matter....’ Very embarrassed, I suggested I should return to Bainweity to find the key, but the Father said no! I was already getting rather lame in the leg and he knew that I would have needed a couple of hours there and back.
I thought that Father Bechara would tell a child to go and get the key in my stead. However, he simply resumed walking up and down, reciting his rosary again. Suddenly he placed his hand a moment on the door of the church, then went on with his walking and praying. A second time he placed his hand on the door and then resumed his walking and his prayer. A third time he stopped in front of the door, and put up his hand, but before it even touched, the thick and massive wooden portal swung slowly open all by itself. I was overcome and felt myself trembling. This is something I am ready to affirm under oath, on the Holy Gospel,” concluded Melhem Abou-Rjeyli. “The door was well and truly shut when we arrived. The lock is a solid iron one. Father Bechara, Merciful God! forbad me to reveal what I had seen, adding, 'It's quite simple, my son. Our Mother the Holy Virgin loves us, and she had pity on us.'”

What does Father Bechara teach us? The highest virtue in the humblest of lives, such is the story of Father Bechara. During this phase of Christianity when there is a mass return to the simplicity of the Gospel,Father Bechara has a message for us, and it is a simple one. At a time when on one hand materialism makes increasing inroads into our lives in every domain, but when on the other hand more and more souls are reacting with confidence and generosity against this tide with a renewed sense of prayer and interior life, Father Bechara comes as an encouragement sent by God. At a time when on one hand some think they are performing a work of enlightenment by pushing Mary almost out of the sanctuary as if she represented a danger to enlightened devotion towards Christ, but when on the other hand in this [last] “century of Mary” she comes herself to visit our earth, at Lourdes, Fatima, Banneux and Beauraing, he who walked the valleys of the Shouf and the streets of Sidon with his rosary ever in his hand reminds us with a gentle smile, “Mary!”

At a time when in the name of certain modern sciences, excellent in themselves but often wrongly interpreted, sacramen-tal confession has been represented as a form of psychotherapy, almost of psycho-analysis, by depriving it of its true meaning of communion in the mystery of redemption, God reminds us through Father Bechara, the apostle and well-nigh martyr of the confessional, of the true worth of this measure, which is a Sacrament just like Baptism, the Eucharist and Holy Orders.
In his life Father Bechara united two values, two orientations which are often misrepresented as opposed: on one hand an intense life of prayer making him a true contemplative, and on the other an intensely active missionary life. If some throw themselves into an unbridled activism where there is no time left for prayer, arguing that work is itself a prayer and therefore replaces it, Father Bechara is there to remind them that the apostolate without prayer is only “a gong booming or a cymbal clashing” (1 Cor. 13:1). On his travels, Father Bechara prayed without ceasing until he sometimes exhausted his companions, whom he urged to answer his interminable Aves.

He had a true ecumenical spirit. In this he was very much ahead of his time, but he was already very much a man of our own time. His zeal and his devotion were not confined to the Christian communities, so many and varied in the Middle East, where all the rites and confessions rub shoulders with each other, but in addition his heart and mind were always open to the Druze and Muslims. To those who reminded him of the massacres of Christians committed in this very region of Deir El-Qammar, in his own huge parish of twenty or more villages, he would answer gently, “The Druze also are our brothers. God has allowed these trials even for the good of the Christians.…”

Last but not least, and in this Father Bechara followed the line traced by Msgr. Aftimos Saifi, the founder of his Order, he had a remarkable social sense in his apostolate, a fact which also makes him very much a man of our own time.

For him, as for us in our own day, the plaint of the prophet Jeremiah was an appeal: “Little children go begging for bread; no ones spares a scrap for them” (Lam. 4:4). His overriding concern for the poor, the weak and the most deprived, made him often appear as a pioneer. So for example, after a service rendered to Naoum Pasha, he obtained from him the authorization to visit the prisoners of Beit Ed-Dine, to take them provisions and comforts, and even—a thing unheard of at that time!—to bring them out of their jail, take them to the nearest Maronite church and hear their confessions and administer them the Sacraments, finally leading them back to prison!

May we be always ready to hear this many-sided message of Father Bechara, this “watchman of God” who all his life “will stand on his watchtower and take up his post on the battlements” (Hab. 2:1).

Sentinel in the depths of the night, herald of the dawn of hope, Father Bechara, help us to proclaim ourselves ready to answer the call and take up our watch on the ramparts of the world, to be in our turn faithful sentinels and heralds of the Good Tidings, the Tidings of Jesus Christ, Son of God, who died and rose again for our salvation.

To him be glory for ages without end, in the unity of the Father and the Holy Spirit!

Return to Top

+ + +