The Church of the Pater Noster (French: Église du Pater Noster) is a Catholic church located on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. It is part of a Carmelite monastery of cloistered nuns, also known as the Sanctuary of the Eleona. The Church of the Pater Noster stands next to the ruins of the 4th-century Late Roman/Early ByzantineChurch of Eleona. The ruins of the Eleona were rediscovered in the 20th century and its walls were partially rebuilt. Today, France administers the land on which both churches and the entire monastery are standing, following the Ottoman capitulations, as the Eleona Domain (French: Domaine de l’Éléona), part of the French national domain in the Holy Land, which has been formalised by the Fischer-Chauvel Agreement of 1948-49, though the agreement has not been ratified by Israel’s Knesset.
The 2nd-century Acts of John mentions the existence of a cave on the Mount of Olives associated with the teachings of Jesus, but not specifically the Lord’s Prayer.
The walls of the cloister, of the convent church and the partially reconstructed Eleona church are all used to display plaques that bear the Lord’s Prayer in a total of well over 100 different languages and dialects.
In 1851, the remaining stones of the 4th-century church were sold for tombstones in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.
The site was acquired by Aurelia de Bossi, through marriage Princess Aurélie de la Tour d’Auvergne (1809–1889) in the second half of the 19th century, at the advice of Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, a French Jewish convert to Catholicism, and a search for the cave mentioned by early pilgrims began. In 1868, the princess built a cloister and in 1872 she founded a Carmelite convent. The convent church was erected in the 1870s. The princess died in Florence in 1889, and her remains were brought to the church in 1957, according to her last wish.
In 1910, the foundations of the ancient church that once stood over the venerated cave were finally found, partly stretching beneath the modern cloister. The convent was moved nearby and reconstruction of the Byzantine church began in 1915. The reconstruction works, undertaken by the French government, were stopped in 1927 when funds ran out, and the new-old building remains unfinished. The French architect Marcel Favier, who was put in charge of rebuilding the ancient church, arrived in Jerusalem in September 1926.
The 19th-century cloister is modelled on the Camposanto Monumentale in Pisa, Italy. It separates the partly reconstructed Byzantine church, which stands west of it, from the small 19th-century convent church, which stands east of it. Princess Aurelia Bossi’s tomb stands in the western lateral chamber of the narthex, on the right-hand side as one enters the church.
