ANTONIANI MARONITI di SANT'ISAIA. - Gabriele di Blauzà (d. 1705), a monk of very austere life, was consecrated bishop of Aleppo in 1663 and elected patriarch in 1704. As was customary at the time, although bishop of Aleppo, he continued to reside in Lebanon. In 1673 he founded the acephalous monastery of Tāmiš and lived there with some monks. At the beginning of the 1700s he had the foundations laid for the monastery of S. Isaia and, after a few months, sent three monks there, to whom another three were added in 1702. From then on the number of monks steadily increased. In order to give themselves a rule, in 1703 they consulted the founding bishop, who sent them to Patriarch ad-Duwaihi. He ordered them to adopt the rules and constitutions of the Lebanese monks, approved by him in 1700, and they accepted them, «sicuri che erano state raccolte dalle regole del grande anacoreta s. Antonio» (Ba'abdāti, Tā'īh ar-rubhānijjah al-anjūnijjah, 107). In the same year, 1703, the patriarch approved them, as did his three successors before 1740, the year in which Clement XII, on 17 January, having made a few modifications in lexibus rebus, likewise approved them by the brief Misericordiarum Pater. In the meantime, other monasteries were affiliated with S. Isaia, and the Congregation spread throughout Lebanon.
According to the Statistica of the Sacred Oriental Congregation of 1932, it has 130 monks and 25 monasteries; some were suppressed in 1938. In Rome they have a college, not yet opened.