Can Catholics Visit Mount Athos? What a Historic 2026 Pilgrimage Revealed
Yes, With a Permit • What Non-Orthodox Visitors Can & Cannot Do • The September 2026 Pilgrimage
Can Catholics Visit Mount Athos? What a Historic 2026 Pilgrimage Revealed
An Orthodox metropolitan did something reportedly without precedent this September: he personally invited a Catholic bishop to walk the Holy Mountain with him. Here is what that visit involved, and what it takes for any Catholic to make the same journey.
Visiting Mount Athos as a Catholic — At a Glance
- Can Catholics Visit?
- Yes, with a diamonitirion (entry permit)
- Who Issues It
- Mount Athos Pilgrims' Bureau, Thessaloniki
- Non-Orthodox Daily Quota
- A small fixed number, far below the Orthodox quota
- Who May Enter
- Men aged 18+ only; the avaton bars all women
- Communion
- Not available to non-Orthodox visitors
- 2026 Pilgrimage
- September 6–9, Metropolitan Ghattas Hazim & Bishop Aldo Berardi
- Monasteries Visited
- 12 of the 20 ruling monasteries, including Simonopetra & Vatopedi
- Patriarchal Support
- Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I
A Historic First
From September 6 to 9, 2026, Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Ghattas Hazim of Baghdad and Kuwait, of the Patriarchate of Antioch, personally invited Catholic Bishop Aldo Berardi of the Apostolic Vicariate of Northern Arabia, whose territory covers Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, to join him on a pilgrimage to Mount Athos. According to reporting by the Catholic news agency Fides, it is unprecedented for an Orthodox bishop to formally extend that kind of invitation to a Catholic counterpart.
The two bishops were not traveling alone. Bishop Berardi's delegation included Father Sliman Hifawi of the Co-Cathedral of the Holy Family in Kuwait, Father Boutrus Gharib of the Greek Catholic Church in Kuwait, a seminarian, and a layman, while a priest represented the Orthodox side. For Bishop Berardi, who described the trip as historic, the pilgrimage reflected the working relationship the Catholic and Orthodox Churches have built in Kuwait and across the wider Gulf, a region where both communities minister to small, often overlapping congregations far from either Church's traditional heartland.
Part II
Yes, Catholics Can Visit — The Diamonitirion
Mount Athos is not a place a Catholic, or anyone else, can simply arrive at. Every visitor, Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike, must obtain a diamonitirion, the official entry permit issued by the Mount Athos Pilgrims' Bureau in Thessaloniki and collected in person at the Pilgrims' Office in Ouranoupoli, the port town that serves as the gateway to the peninsula. The permit is printed on parchment, signed by the monastic governing authority, and states the visitor's name, nationality, religion, and the dates of the stay it authorizes, which typically runs three nights before renewal is required.
The peninsula limits how many people can enter each day, and the quota for non-Orthodox visitors is deliberately small, a fraction of the roughly one hundred Orthodox pilgrims admitted daily. Only men aged eighteen and older may apply; boys may enter only accompanied by their father and with special permission. Because of the limited non-Orthodox allocation, applications are best submitted months in advance of any planned visit.
Part III
What You Can and Cannot Do There
Non-Orthodox pilgrims, including Catholics, are received with the same hospitality extended to Orthodox visitors: a place to sleep, a place at table, and welcome into the rhythm of monastic life that structures every day on the mountain, built around Orthros, the Divine Liturgy, and Vespers. What is not extended is the Eucharist. Since the Catholic and Orthodox Churches remain outside full sacramental communion, non-Orthodox visitors may not receive Holy Communion at any monastery on Athos, and individual monasteries vary in how openly they allow non-Orthodox guests to attend services at all, largely for practical reasons of space rather than any wish to give offense.
What remains fully open to every visitor, regardless of confession, is private prayer, the veneration of icons and relics, and conversation with the monks themselves, many of whom welcome the chance to discuss questions of faith and practice with visitors from other traditions. It was this openness, extended at an institutional level rather than an individual one, that made the 2026 pilgrimage notable: an Orthodox metropolitan choosing to walk that welcome forward himself, publicly, with a Catholic bishop at his side.
Part IV
The Monasteries at the Center of the Pilgrimage
Metropolitan Hazim and Bishop Berardi's delegation was first received at Simonopetra, the dramatic cliffside monastery perched on a rock outcrop on Athos's southern coast, and then at Vatopedi, one of the peninsula's largest and most historically significant houses. From there the group went on to visit twelve of the twenty ruling monasteries that govern Mount Athos, an unusually extensive itinerary for a pilgrimage of only a few days, made possible by the coordination between the Orthodox metropolitan hosting the visit and the monastic communities themselves.
Part V
The Relic That Connects Athos to Arabia
The pilgrimage carried a deeper significance for Bishop Berardi personally. A highlight of the visit was the veneration of the relics of Saint Arethas, a sixth-century martyr venerated as a patron of the Church on the Arabian Peninsula by Catholics and Orthodox alike. The connection runs further back than this pilgrimage: Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I had previously given Bishop Berardi relics of Saint Arethas, taken from a monastery on Mount Athos, marking what Berardi's own diocese describes as the saint's return to the Arabian Peninsula after roughly fourteen centuries. In the years since, Berardi has gone on to establish a confraternity dedicated to preserving and spreading devotion to Saint Arethas and his companions beyond the Arabian Gulf.
Part VI
The Avaton and Other Rules to Know
One rule at Mount Athos applies with total consistency, regardless of a visitor's religion: the avaton, the centuries-old prohibition barring women, and even female animals, from the entire peninsula. Tradition holds that the Virgin Mary herself is considered the one woman with a claim to the mountain, and the entirety of Athos is regarded, in Orthodox devotion, as her garden. The rule predates any question of Catholic-Orthodox relations and applies equally to everyone; it was never a factor in, and had no bearing on, the 2026 pilgrimage.
Beyond the diamonitirion and the avaton, visitors should expect a schedule set by the monastery rather than the traveler: gates close at sunset, the monastic day begins before sunrise with Orthros, and pilgrims are guests within a rhythm of prayer and work that does not pause to accommodate a tourist's itinerary. That, for both Orthodox and non-Orthodox visitors alike, is generally understood to be the entire point.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
A Mountain That Opens Its Gates Wider Than Most Assume
Mount Athos has a reputation, not entirely undeserved, for guarding its solitude fiercely. But the diamonitirion exists precisely because the mountain does receive outsiders, Catholic pilgrims included, and in September 2026 that welcome was extended by an Orthodox bishop to a Catholic one, publicly and by name. The invitation may have been unprecedented. The door, it turns out, was never entirely closed.
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