Our Saints

On 29 June 1832, in the village of Hemlaya, Mount Lebanon, Mrad Saber El-Shabq (El Rayes) and his wife Rafqa El-Gemayel were blessed with their only child, a girl they named Pierrette (Boutrosiyye). 

By the age of three, Pierrete had already learned to make the Sign of the Cross, and to recite the Our Father and the Hail Mary. When attending church with her parents, she would imitate her mother by kneeling straight up, beating her chest, kissing the ground and raising her arms in the form of a cross. 

Sadly, her mother died in 1839. Soon after, an Egyptian invasion of the area made her father gather up the family to flee for their lives. When she was ten years old, a family friend took her into his house in Damascus, where she helped with the household chores. In 1847, her father called her back home. There, she discovered that her father had remarried a woman with two daughters of her own.