[5] Sfair spoke eight languages (Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Arabic, French, Italian & English), and became a professor of Theology, oriental languages (Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic) and Islamic Law at both the University of Rome and Saint John Lateran University in Rome.
He was instrumental during the drafting of the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate to highlight the House of Mary (in Ephesus, Turkey) and Marian devotion as a matter of shared interest between Christians and Muslims.
[11] Archbishop P. Sfair of the Maronite Rite (Rome) considered the reference which the declaration De non christianis made to the Muslims'adoration of the one and remunerating God as insufficient.
He insisted that the declaration should give greater consideration to that which the Muslims believed, to the truths which they proposed for belief, than to their less essential cultural factors.
A great uncle of Sfair was Michel Sfeir (1854–1920), a Maronite priest and scholar who catalogued thousands of ancient Arabic and Syriac manuscripts found in Lebanese monasteries.
[17] Although Sfair died in Rome, where a funeral mass was celebrated for him at the Maronite College Chapel of St. Anthony in the Piazza San Pietro in Vincoli, his remains were shipped to Beirut, where they were received by all the Lebanese bishops and the civil authorities.
At the time of Sfair's death, three siblings remained alive--his brothers Chaia (Sin el Fil, Horsh Tabet) and Isaie (Kleiat), and his sister Marie.
[2] On 11 March 1953 Pope Pius XII appointed Sfair Titular Bishop of Epiphania in Syria (Hama) and Ordinary for the Maronite faithful of Rome.
Sfair's assistant in Rome was a young Maronite Catholic seminarian and deacon Faouzi Elia, who went on to become pastor of St. Sharbel Church in Peoria, Illinois and Chorbishop of the Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon in Los Angeles, California.
In addition to writing about the theology and religious practices of the Maronite Antiochene Rite and the lives of Catholic saints, Sfair occasionally wrote about migrant literature and political satire in Lebanon and Syria.