The parish of Saint Rafqa was established on the 23rd of March 2006 the feast day of its patron in the area of Tilal Ain Saadeh (Ain Saadeh) by the reverend father Antonio Wakim of Beit Mery. For more than twenty years, the great neighborhood of Tilal Ain Saadeh was sadly without a church. However, a small garage below a building in the Amal II compound was converted into a chapel for Our Lady mad
e available to the Maronite Archdiocese of Beirut. In August 2005, His Excellency Archbishop Paul Matar graciously appointed a priest, father Antonio Wakim, to celebrate Sunday masses, and entrusted him to establish a new parish and build a church dedicated to Saint Rafqa. On the 23rd of March 2006, father Wakim celebrated the feast day of Saint Rafqa and announced the good news for the chapel to take the name of Saint Rafqa. In 2008, His Excellency Archbishop Paul Matar offered a plot of 14,743 m2, along with a small contribution of $ 25,000 to encourage parishioners to start drawing the project plans of the anticipated church under the name of its Lebanese patron Saint Rafqa along with a presbytery that includes a rectory and other premises made available to the entire parish activities. The church project reflects the unanimous willpower of almost 2500 families living in "Tilal Ain Saade," an area of the Metn region. The majority of those families come from different Lebanese regions where many of them were forced to leave, and their financial means do not allow them to fully contribute in this project, since most of them have very limited incomes. However, the increasing size of the neighborhood aggravates the situation as we notice a lack of minimal means of leisure and no support from the municipality and government establishments. Taking into account the economic situation in the country, parents are obliged to work till very late hours; thus teenagers wander after school hours. Consequently, these 2500 families rely on the church to meet their needs and provide an infrastructure of extracurricular activities for the youth like sports clubs, cultural or social clubs. For the past few years, the pastor has been working and his work led to the creation of groups for children, teenagers, youths, families and choirs. In addition to the endowment committee that is targeted to collect the donations and supervise the church construction and other facilities. It is thanks to Our Almighty Lord Jesus Christ that we have collected so far an amount of money to accomplish the parish reception hall with around $ 500,000 as contributions. Now, we hope to receive donations to complete the final phase of the project; the church part that we desperately need it today because of the growing number of the faithful.
