The Collaborative International Dictionary
Maronite \Mar"o*nite\, n.; pl. Maronites. (Eccl. Hist.) One of a body of nominal Christians, who speak the Arabic language, and reside on Mount Lebanon and in different parts of Syria. They take their name from one Maron of the 6th century.
Wikipedia
The Maronites are a Christian group, who adhere to the Maronite Church and mainly hail from Mount Lebanon (mainly in the area of modern Lebanon) and the surrounding regions in the Levant. They derive their name from the Syriac Christian Saint Maron, whose followers migrated to the area of Mount Lebanon from their previous location of residence around the area of Antioch (an ancient Greek city within present day Hatay Province, Turkey), establishing the nucleus of the Maronite Church. Some Maronites argue that they are of Mardaite ancestry, but most historians reject such claims. Maronites were able to maintain an independent status in Mount Lebanon and its coastline after the Islamic conquest, keeping their Christian religion, and even the distinctive Aramaic language as late as the 19th century.
The Ottoman Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate and later the Republic of Lebanon were created under the auspice of European powers with the Maronites as their main ethnoreligious component. Mass emigration to the Americas at the outset of the 20th century, famine mainly resulting from Turkish blockades and confiscations during World War I that killed an estimated third to half of the population, the Lebanese Civil War between 1975-1990 and the low fertility rate greatly decreased their numbers in the Levant. Maronites today form more than one quarter of the total population in the Republic of Lebanon. With only two exceptions, all Lebanese presidents have been Maronites as part of a tradition persists as part of the Lebanese Confessionalist system, by which the Prime Minister has historically been a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of the National Assembly has historically been a Shia Muslim.
Though concentrated in Lebanon, Maronites also show presence in neighbouring Syria, Palestine, Israel and Cyprus, as well as a significant part in the Lebanese diaspora in South America ( Argentina and Brazil), North America ( USA and Canada), Australia, European Union member states (notably France, UK but also Germany, Benelux, Spain, Italy and Sweden) and in Africa ( Egypt, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa).
The Maronite Church, under its own Patriarch of Antioch, is in full communion with the Holy See, whose papal primate it recognizes, and is therefore an Eastern particular church of the Catholic Church. It has branches in nearly all countries where Maronite Christian communities live, in both the Levant (mainly Lebanon) and Lebanese diaspora.
Usage examples of "maronites".
There were Copts, Maronites, Nestorians, Catholicsincluding an American Catholic offshoot known as Eclectics or "Lesterites," Apostolic Preresurrectionists, Third Millenniumists or "Threesers," New Eastern Rite adherents, and Jumpers.
Consider that the same things have been said by the inhabitants of Chios and Abydos, by the Aeneans, the Maronites, the Thasians, by the natives of Paros and Samos, of Larissa and Messene, and by the people over there in Achaia, and that those upon whom he was able to inflict most injury have made the gravest and most serious charges.
Even if they had killed four—the two Maronites, the pilot, and Baal—they would have gained only one point.
The Maronites had looked startled when they saw her, and that shouldn't have been the case if they had come to meet an Israeli agent.
She didn't know whether real Maronites buckled their seat belts or merely trusted to God to protect the Chosen, but here she had to do it.
That could be the end of her, because the Maronites would just fire into her car until they killed her.
If she got them between her and the pursuit, maybe she could leave the Maronites in the traffic jam and get away.
She turned left again, before the Maronites caught up to the first turn.
The Maronites had set a watch on this road, waiting for her to reappear, and she had blithely done it!
But she could take risks with construct cars and force the Maronites to do the same, lest they lose her.
In the twelfth century, the Maronites, abjuring the Monothelite error were reconciled to the Latin churches of Antioch and Rome, ^137 and the same alliance has been frequently renewed by the ambition of the popes and the distress of the Syrians.