World Council of Churches Voices Concerns With St. Catherine’s Situation

His Eminence Metropolitan Emmanuel of Chalcedon from the Patriarchate of Constantinople opens a confessional meeting of Orthodox churches at the 2025 Central Committee gathering. Photo: Albin Hillert/WCC

JOHANNESBURG — From June 18-24, 2025, the WCC has been holding a central committee meeting in South Africa in which a number of topics have been discussed and communications released.

The most pertinent topic for Orthodox Christians came in the form of a press release on June 24, 2025, in which the WCC expressed concerns over the right and title to St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt.

Acknowledging the monastery’s historical importance and recognition as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2002, the committee stated that, after the court decision last month which recognized the Egyptian state as the owner of sites belonging to the monastery, “the monks are now tenants in their monastery, which has been operating without interruption for 1,500 years.”

This creates a precarious situation for the monks, the release states, as they remain in the monastery using an annual residence permit which the Egyptian government could decide not to renew at any time.

“In view of the forthcoming meetings of the 6th World Conference on Faith and Order in Egypt, the WCC central committee minute asks the WCC general secretary to write a formal letter to the president of Egypt expressing the WCC’s concern about this matter, and to call for a clear and binding agreement recognizing the Holy Monastery’s right and title to the site in perpetuity.”

The committee also called on the WCC general secretary to “engage with UNESCO for its intervention for the protection of the Holy Monastery – and its Christian monastic character – as a World Heritage Site.”

Previously, UOJ reported that an international initiative for the preservation of the UNESCO status quo of the monastery was available for signature.

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