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.”
This article was originally published by RealClearReligion and made available via RealClearWire.
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