The long-time abbot of the historic Sinai Monastery officially tendered his resignation on Friday, as widely reported over the recent period, thereby commencing the succession process amid a period when the monastery’s brotherhood is divided into two “camps”.
Archbishop of Sinai, Faran and Raithu Damianos, 91, has served as the hegumen, as the abbot is called in the Orthodox tradition, since 1974. Over the recent years he mostly resided in Athens due to health problems, instead of at the St. Catherine’s of Sinai Monastery. The latter is a pre-eminent Greek Orthodox institution that is the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world.
Damianos’ resignation comes as the venerable institution faces an unprecedented threat to its very existence in the form of an Egyptian appeals court ruling last May that disputes ownership of the very compound and the monastery’s estates and dependencies in the Sinai Peninsula.
In his resignation letter, Damianos expresses a wish that the Sinai brothers “elect the best and most capable successor,” while emphasizing that “it will require unity and support from everyone, free from personal ambitions and obsessions.”
The first step in the succession process is a general assembly of the monastery’s elders and monks, most probably on Sunday, after the morning divine liturgy. An election for a new archbishop-cum-abbot will follow.
While the venerable St. Catherine’s lies in the Sinai Peninsula, which is Egyptian territory, it comes under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Jerusalem Patriarchate and not the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa, which is based in Egypt. At the same time, the monastery belongs to the autonomous, or autocephalous according to some Orthodox theologians, Church of the Sinai, whose hierarch simultaneously holds the titles of archbishop and hegumen of the monastery.
