Maronite Cathedral of Saint George, Beirut: the bell tower deliberately built lower than the mosque next door

On Nejmeh Square, in the heart of the old centre of Beirut, the Maronite Catholic cathedral of Saint George stands beside the Mohammad al-Amin mosque. A few metres away is the separate Greek Orthodox cathedral of Saint George, an older building (1767-1772) with which it is sometimes confused, although they are two distinct churches of two different Christian denominations. A first Maronite building stood on the same site as early as 1753-1755. The present cathedral was begun in 1884 under Archbishop Youssef Debs and consecrated on Palm Sunday of 1894, to a neoclassical design by the Italian architect Giuseppe Maggiore, inspired by the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, with reused columns taken from the ruins of the Roman temple of Deir el-Qalaa, at Beit Mery. During the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), whose dividing line, the so-called «Green Line», ran right by the old centre, the cathedral was badly damaged, looted and defaced, and lost, according to some sources, a painting of Saint George attributed to Delacroix. The rebuilding was completed in 1997 and the building was reconsecrated on 24 April 2000 by the Maronite patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir. The present bell tower, 72 metres high and crowned by a cross of 7 metres, was inaugurated on 19 November 2016 by the archbishop of Beirut, Paul Matar. Its height was deliberately reduced from an initial design of 75 metres, so as not to rise above the minarets of the neighbouring Mohammad al-Amin mosque: an explicit gesture of interfaith harmony in a city that still carries the scars of the civil war. On 4 August 2020 the explosion at the port of Beirut damaged the cathedral’s stained glass, frescoes, plaster and fittings, restored only a few years before. A recovery project funded by a grant of 184,830 dollars from the international ALIPH foundation, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the French Catholic organisation Œuvre d’Orient, is now reported as finished. The cathedral is the seat of the Maronite archeparchy (archdiocese) of Beirut, a district distinct from the patriarchal see proper, which is at Bkerke, north-east of the city, where the present Patriarch of Antioch of the Maronites, Cardinal Beshara Boutros Rai, has resided since 2011. The Maronite Church is the largest Christian denomination in Lebanon: on the estimates of the United States State Department, based on Statistics Lebanon data, about 16% of the country’s total population and more than half of its Christian component, though Lebanon has held no official census since 1932, precisely because of the political sensitivity of the confessional power-sharing system. By convention, since the National Pact of 1943, later rebalanced by the Ta’if accords of 1989, the presidency of the Lebanese Republic belongs to a Maronite.