Perhaps the most troubling possibility is that Kirill’s Church, with its canny blend of politics and faith, turns out to be better adapted to survival in our century than mainstream Churches are.

In October 2018, just weeks after his tense meeting with Kirill in Istanbul, Bartholomew dissolved the 1686 edict that had given Moscow religious control over Ukraine.

a young man named Mykola Kosytskyy, a Ukrainian linguistics student and a frequent visitor to Athos. He had brought with him this time a group of 40 Ukrainian pilgrims. Kosytskyy talked about the war—the friends he’d lost, the shattered lives, the role of Russian propaganda. I asked him about the Moscow-linked Church that he’d known all his life, and he said something that surprised me: “The Ukrainian Orthodox Church”—meaning the Church of Kirill and Putin—“is the weapon in this war.”All through his childhood, he explained, he had heard priests speaking of Russia in language that mixed the sacred and the secular—“this concept of saint Russia, the saviors of this world.” He went on: “You hear this every Sunday from your priest—that this nation fights against evil, that it’s the third Rome, yes, the new Rome. They truly believe this.” That is why, Kosytskyy said, many Ukrainians have such difficulty detaching themselves from the message, even when they see Kirill speaking of their own national leaders as the anti-Christ. Kosytskyy told me it had taken years for him to separate the truth from the lies. His entire family joined the new Ukrainian Church right after Bartholomew recognized it, in 2018. So have millions of other Ukrainians.