Patriarch Hoayek: The Inconvenient Truth (2/2)

02/08/2026

By Dr. Amine Jules Iskandar

We live in a time of glorification of multiculturalism; a concept often wrongly attributed to this holy patriarch. It is therefore necessary to return to his own writings rather than relying on later interpretations of them. It is intellectually questionable to project onto him concepts designed to justify Arabist or wokeist ideologies, or the notion of Lebanon as a laboratory of coexistence.

Elias Pierre Hoayek ascended to the Maronite Patriarchal See in 1899, only eight years after the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum. His entire patriarchate was shaped by the values articulated in this encyclical which was built upon the fundamental concept of the transcendence of the human person and the preservation of that person’s heritage.

The Social Doctrine of the Church 

Rerum novarum emerged as a warning to an industrialized world that risked losing its humanity. This foundational encyclical of the Church’s social doctrine opposes a vision of modernity that tends to reduce the person to nothing more than a consumer.

Radical liberalism rejects the family, the nation, culture, religion, and the social group in favor of the illusion of equality that would dissolve all peoples, sexes, and religions into a single, easily manipulable whole. It seeks to impose on earth and in this life the Christian eschatological vision of the fusion of all nations.

According to Pope Benedict XVI, such a radical liberal claim—which defies the divine order—constitutes a transformation of religion into ideology. What is promised in the heavenly Jerusalem, he argues, cannot be imposed on earth through politics or by ideological currents.

To safeguard the dignity of the human person and the capacity for moral discernment, the Church’s social doctrine emphasizes the central role of the family as the basic unit of society, followed by the importance of the social group and its cultural heritage.

Inspired by the example of the Holy Family, Patriarch Elias Hoayek expressed this centrality of the family through the founding of the Congregation of the Maronite Sisters of the Holy Family in 1895. This work complemented his broader struggle to defend the right of a person to belong to a social group, one defined by its own identity and entrusted with preserving and transmitting its heritage.

Rerum novarum also laid the foundations for what would later become known as the principle of subsidiarity. This principle was explicitly formulated in Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo anno (1931), the same year of Patriarch Hoayek death. His patriarchate is thus symbolically marked by these two dates and by these two landmark texts dedicated to the protection of the human person and of communities.

Through the principle of subsidiarity, the Church recognizes the rights and prerogatives of the social group, the community. It views the community as an extension of the identity and natural rights of the individual person. Consequently, the erasure of a community’s national, communal, cultural, confessional, or linguistic characteristics constitutes an attack on the dignity of the person, who is endowed with freedom and inalienable rights.

Under the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, the Church anticipated attempts to distort both the right to difference and the principle of subsidiarity, which protects the right to difference. In the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), the Church warned against the danger posed by “the denial of subsidiarity, or its limitation in the name of an alleged democratization or equality of all members of society.”

The ideologies of universalism and “coexistence” disregard precisely this warning and run contrary to the recommendations of the Church’s social doctrine. Under the pretext of equality and otherness, these ideologies deny minority social groups the right to flourish and to pass on their heritage within a framework consistent with their way of life. For the Church, however—as the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre expressed it—the universal can be reached only through the particular.

Elias Hoayek enjoyed the esteem of Pope Leo XIII, who entrusted him the supervision of the Maronite College in Rome in 1897. Drawing upon the Christian values and principles reaffirmed in Rerum novarum, Patriarch Elias Hoayek came to believe in the necessity of creating a sanctuary state for his community and for the rest of the Christians of the East.

In his correspondence, he repeatedly affirmed his desire to preserve their traditions, heritage, and culture. He referred to their distinctive cultural and civilizational characteristics that, in his view, had to be protected. He never endorsed their dissolution into supranational entities or even into nations artificially constructed through supra-communal ideologies.

We live in a time of glorification of multiculturalism; a concept often wrongly attributed to this holy patriarch. It is therefore necessary to return to his own writings rather than relying on later interpretations of them. It is intellectually questionable to project onto him concepts designed to justify Arabist or wokeist ideologies, or the notion of Lebanon as a laboratory of coexistence. A study of the archives reveals that modern-day Lebanon represents a betrayal of Patriarch Hoayek’s vision: it embodies everything this patriarch always fought against.

Elias Hoayek repeatedly condemned the concept of a pluralistic and multicultural Lebanon. Instead, he insisted on the necessity of a sanctuary for Christians. He envisioned Lebanon as a nation with a Christian majority and believed it should undergo a demographic adjustment similar to those taking place at the time in Turkey, Greece, and several other nascent states. He also categorically opposed any termination of the French Mandate over Lebanon, believing that such a move would expose the country to Syrian ambitions. On this issue, he was betrayed not only by part of the Maronite political class but also by his own Church. He therefore cannot be held responsible for the failure of his project.

As the founder of the resistance during Kafno, i.e. the Ottoman-orchestrated Great Famine, he never resigned himself to watching his people perish in passivity. He organized clandestine networks responsible for transporting relief supplies from the French military base on the island of Arwad. He tasked Bishop Paul Akl with coordinating this aid alongside the French governor Albert Trabaud. Any contact with the “French enemy” carried the death penalty, yet the Patriarch did not hesitate to take that risk to save his people. The ordeal he endured during this period profoundly formed both his realistic vision of the future and his understanding of his people’s security imperatives.

To attribute to him today’s idealistic ideologies, primarily wokeist notions of “living together” or of Lebanon as a laboratory of coexistence, would amount to an exercise in denial and reflect an unwillingness to confront the reality of our collective failure.

It is equally telling that Islamist movements have eagerly embraced this theory of radical liberalism. It tends, in effect, to eliminate any guarantee necessary for the flourishing and long-term survival of the social groups that it has itself helped turn into minorities.

The beatification of Patriarch Elias Pierre Hoayek by Pope Leo XIV, in continuity with the legacy of Pope Leo XIII, carries profound symbolic significance. It places the work of this great Patriarch within the legacy of the two papal encyclicals that place at the forefront the dignity of the human person, the person’s transcendent nature, and the inalienable right to preserve his or her cultural distinctiveness.

Dr. Amine Jules Iskandar is President of the Syriac Maronite Union – Tur Levnon and Head of External Relations of the Universal Syriac Union Party in Lebanon

You can read part 1 here: Patriarch Hoayek: The Inconvenient Truth (1/2)

This article was originally published in French by Ici Beyrouth on 1 August 2026. The original can be found here.

The views expressed in this op-ed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of SyriacPress.