The fundamental issue of the legal personality of the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine of Sinai is definitively resolved with the omnibus bill of the Ministry of Education, which includes provisions regarding the recognition of the legal status of the Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine of Mount Sinai. This bill, establishing a Non-Profit Legal Entity under Public Law with the name “Greek Orthodox Holy Royal Autonomous Monastery of the Holy and God-Trodden Mount Sinai in Greece,” was voted in the Plenary Session of the Greek Parliament on Friday, August 1, 2025.
The purpose of the law regarding Sinai Monastery is:
a) The representation in Greece of the autonomous religious legal entity, which was founded around the year 549 on Mount Sinai, and is administered by the Holy Sinaitic Brotherhood according to the Divine and Sacred Canons and its Fundamental Regulations.
b) Supporting the work of the monastery
c) Managing the monastery’s assigned property to the Public Law Legal Entity, for the fulfillment of its purposes. Overall, the legislative regulation for Sinai Monastery includes 20 articles.
Sinai Monastery: The draft law that definitively solves the problem of its legal personality
According to the Ministry of Education, with this draft law: “The fundamental problem of the legal personality of the Holy Monastery of Sinai in Greece is definitively resolved. This is a crucial reform for implementing the government’s overall policy for strengthening and supporting Orthodoxy in the East.”
However, the discussion and voting on the bill regulating the monastery’s affairs in Greece came during a period of sudden and unexpected crisis within the Sinaitic Brotherhood. According to exclusive information, for personal reasons, between a monk and the abbot, who showed disobedience, an internal issue was created. Fifteen monks, wanting to support the monk who announced he would leave the monastery, requested from the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophilos, the removal of the abbot.
The Jerusalem Patriarchate is now called to provide the final solution
The Archbishop characterized this act as a “coup” and the monks’ actions as uncanonical, immediately informing the head of the Church of Zion. However, based on the voting numbers of the General Assembly of monks and the procedure followed, no legitimacy of the action emerges. On the contrary, Archbishop Damian’s complaint about a conspiratorial act that endangers the continuation of the monastery’s Golgotha is confirmed, especially after the Ismailia Court of Appeals decision on May 28, 2025. In detail, as our source reports:
“The General Assembly of the brotherhood is convened either by the Archbishop of Sinai or with a written request to the Archbishop by 2/3 of it. The president of the General Assembly is either the Archbishop or his legal deputy, who is the monastery’s Dikaios, both of whom were in Greece regarding the bill. The monks according to the official monasticon are 25, therefore 2/3 is 17. The coup plotters recognize 22 monks as brotherhood members and not 25, therefore 2/3 for them is 15 monks. They have presented 15 signatures, but one of them is invalid and concerns hieromonk Pamphylos, who is not a Sinaite, because he received a discharge from the monastery in 2017 and is a registered monk of the Great Lavra Monastery on Mount Athos. Therefore, they don’t have 2/3 and everything they have done is illegal.” The Jerusalem Patriarchate is now called to provide the final solution to the crisis and division that has occurred in the Sinaitic Brotherhood, within the framework of its canonical jurisdiction.
The Archbishop had spoken to the Educational Affairs Committee of the Greek Parliament in previous days, saying: “Until now we were facing an absurdity. The constitutional article recognizes the inalienable status of the Holy Monastery of Sinai, which however had no legal personality in Greece until today. It was in limbo. This bill, therefore, should not have passed today, but many, many years ago. Be aware that at this moment you are not only protecting the Justinian building of the 5th-century monastery, you are protecting the lives of the monks living inside and the enormous, invaluable, shocking treasures that Sinai Monastery contains and are under the custody of the fathers and brothers… In Cairo we must go to the supreme ecclesiastical court and we will make an effort to be able to recover our rights.” In the aftermath of the bill’s passage, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty is expected in Athens next Wednesday, August 6, 2025, with the weight of the visit falling on resolving the Sinai Monastery issue. Now the monastery issue enters the final stretch after the legislative regulation in Greece.
*Published in Parapolitika newspaper
