St Rafqa was born on 29 June 1832, the only child of her parents, in Himlaya, a village of Northern Metn in Lebanon. At baptism she was given the name Boutroussieh. Her parents taught her to love God and to pray daily. At the age of seven, she suffered her first great loss with the death of her mother.
In 1843, her father experienced financial difficulties and sent her to work in Damascus as a domestic servant in the house of a Lebanese national. Rafqa grew into a beautiful, pleasant, humorous young woman. In 1847 she returned home and found that her father had remarried.
His new wife wanted Rafqa to marry her brother and, at the same time, her aunt wanted her to marry her son. Rafqa asked God to help her know what he wanted, and she saw that it was God’s will that she devote her life to Jesus Christ and become a nun.
In 1859 Rafqa went to the convent of Our Lady of Deliverance in Bikfaya to join the Mariamette Order, founded by Fr Joseph Gemayel. She was accepted immediately, bringing her great joy. She refused to go back home when her father and his wife came to discourage her from becoming a nun.
After taking temporary vows she was sent to the seminary in Ghazir to take charge of the kitchen services. There, in her free time she studied Arabic, calligraphy and mathematics and helped aspiring girls join the congregation.
In 1863 she was sent to teach in a school of her congregation in Byblos, and a year later she was transferred to the village of Maad, where she helped establish a new school for girls.
When a crisis developed in her congregation, she saw it to be the will of God that she become a Maronite nun, and she went to the Maronite Monastery of St Simon El Qarn, where she was immediately admitted, taking the name Sr Rafqa, after her mother.
She spent 26 years in that monastery and was a model for the other nuns in her observation of the rules, her prayer and silence, and her life of sacrifice and austerity.
In 1885 she began to ask Jesus to allow her to experience some of the sufferings he endured during his Passion. Her prayer was immediately answered and she began to have unbearable pain in her head and eyes.
Her superior sent her for treatment and the doctor ordered surgery on her right eye. She refused anaesthesia, and in the course of the operation the doctor dislodged her eye, which fell on the floor. St Rafqa blessed him and thanked him. Within a short time the disease struck her left eye.
For the next 12 years she had intense pain in her head, remaining always patient and uncomplaining, praying with joy for having received the gift of sharing in Jesus’ suffering. In 1897 St Rafqa was one of six nuns sent to the new monastery of St Joseph in Jrabta.
There in 1899 she lost sight in her left eye and became paralysed, suffering dislocation in her clavicle and in her right hip and leg. She spent the last seven years of her life bed-ridden, lying on her right side. She could not move. She had a large wound on her left shoulder and she would repeat: “For the wound in the shoulder of Jesus”. Her vertebrae were visible through her skin, and her body was like a skeleton covered by skin. Her hands stayed healthy and she used them to knit socks and clothing.
Although she was blind and paralysed, she kept smiling and thanking God for the grace of letting her share in his Passion. Her face reflected peace and tenderness until the end. Rafqa often asked the sisters not to forget the sixth wound of Jesus, the wound on his shoulder from carrying the cross. She died on 23 March 1914 after receiving the Blessed Sacrament and calling upon Jesus, the Virgin Mary and St Joseph. She was 82 and had spent the last 29 years in constant pain.
Pope St John Paul beatified her in 1985 and canonised her in 2001. She is considered the patron saint of the sick, and of those who have lost parents.