St. Stephen of the Abyssinians stands behind St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City and is the national church of Ethiopia. It is dedicated to Stephen the Protomartyr and serves the Ethiopian Catholic Church, which uses the Alexandrian rite. By tradition Pope Leo I built it, though the article does not confirm this. It was started in the fifth or eighth century and finished in the ninth.
Pope Sixtus IV restored it in 1479 and assigned it to Coptic Catholic monks. It was altered under Pope Clement XI and again in 1928, and has a facade in the style of the early eighteenth century. A twelfth-century doorway with the Lamb and the Cross survives.
It is among the few structures to survive the destruction of Old St. Peter's Basilica around 1505. The most important artwork is a fifteenth-century fresco of the Madonna with Child.
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