At the foot of Mount Sinai, in the shadow of the place where the Old Testament recounts that Moses received the Ten Commandments from God, there rests one of the most enduring monuments of Christian faith: the Monastery of St. Catherine. Nestled amid the rugged peaks of the Sinai Peninsula, this Byzantine church has stood as a light of Christianity in the desert for over fifteen centuries. Known in the West as St. Catherine’s Monastery, the site has borne many names through its extended history. Its origins trace back to the reign of the Roman Emperor Justinian I in the mid-sixth century, who ordered its construction both to safeguard the sacred ground alleged to be the site of Moses’ burning bush and to provide a refuge for the Christian monks who had long sought monastic solitude in the vast Sinai desert. From its founding to the present day, the community of monks has remained in continuous residence, making it not only one of the oldest functioning monasteries in the world but also one of the oldest continuously governing republics. The monks have maintained their self-governance through the centuries, surviving empire, caliphate, crusader, and waves of modern upheaval.
St. Catherine’s owes much of its preservation to its geographical seclusion. Situated far from the main roads of conquest and commerce, the monastery was spared much of the looting and destruction that befell so many Christian centers in the Middle East during the Arab conquest. The monks also developed diplomatic skill, maintaining peaceful relations with surrounding Bedouin tribes and later with Muslim authorities in Cairo. Tradition even holds that, during his lifetime, the Prophet Muhammad himself granted the monastery a charter of protection, a document still preserved within its walls.
Despite this — or perhaps because of this — Egyptian authorities have recently sought to extinguish the ancient lamps that have burned for so long in the Sinai desert. In May 2025, a ruling by the Egyptian courts stated that the lands surrounding St. Catherine’s Monastery did not belong to the monks who have inhabited them for fifteen centuries, nor to their abbot, nor even to the wider Coptic Church in Egypt. Instead, the court declared the monastery’s grounds the legal property of the Arab Republic of Egypt, absorbed into the state’s “public domain.”
For a community that predates Islam itself, such a claim struck at the very heart of its autonomy and political immunity. In a gesture that symbolized both protest and grief, the monks closed their gates to visitors and suspended the sacred ministry of hospitality to pilgrims, an act without precedent in St. Catherine’s long recorded memory. The closure, however, was only the beginning of the turmoil. Long-standing tensions within the monastery erupted into open disputes over its governance, finances, and the role of the abbot. Accusations were leveled against Archbishop Damianos of exceeding his authority, bypassing the council of monks, and making unilateral decisions regarding the security of the monastery. In July 2025, the council took another unprecedented step and voted to depose Damianos from office, citing mismanagement and failure to preserve the monastic community’s fraternal unity. The Archbishop soon departed the monastery for Greece, leaving its leadership in uncertainty and its centuries-old traditions in a fragile balance.
At the current time, the fate of St. Catherine’s Monastery is not just a question of the legal jurisdiction of the site, but also of whether one of the oldest surviving witnesses of Christianity can endure into the future in a growingly hostile region. For fifteen centuries, its votive candles have burned without interruption, testifying to the faith of the desert fathers and the continuity of Christian prayer on hallowed ground. Its present trials remind us that sacred places are rarely immune to the pressures of power politics. Whatever lies ahead for St. Catherine’s, the monastery remains a luminous sign of Christian perseverance, a signpost of continuity in a changing world, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness" (Is. 40:3).
D.P. Curtin is an Irish-American psychologist, theologian, and translator. His work has been featured in the Irish Catholic, Public Orthodoxy, Catholic Exchange, and Where Peter Is. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Scriptorium Project.
