Contact with Crusader and later Franciscan missionaries drew the Maronite Church into a formal relationship with the Roman Catholic Church that was progressively clarified between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, culminating in the 1736 Synod of Mount Lebanon, which confirmed the church's union with Rome while preserving its own West Syriac liturgy, its married parish clergy, and its own Patriarch, styled Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, resident in Lebanon rather than in Rome. The Maronite Church is today one of several Eastern Catholic churches in full communion with the Pope while retaining a distinct liturgical and canonical tradition of its own.
Maronites became the demographic and political core of modern Lebanon, and the country's 1943 National Pact, an unwritten power sharing arrangement, reserved the presidency for a Maronite Christian, a role that persists in Lebanon's constitution today even as the country's confessional balance has shifted.
Large scale emigration, driven by nineteenth century economic hardship, twentieth century civil war and continuing regional instability, has built a Maronite diaspora, particularly across the Americas, that now significantly outnumbers the Maronite population remaining in Lebanon itself, extending the church's institutional reach far beyond Mount Lebanon.