Patriarch Kirill

A patriarch stood at the shrine of St Seraphim of Sarov and called the Soviet atomic bomb an act of divine providence. Days later a fellow Orthodox primate — from Helsinki — told him publicly that the Church may not be used to bless weapons of mass destruction. That exchange, rare in a communion whose hierarchs usually quarrel over jurisdiction rather than doctrine, opens this edition.

It is not the only place where something shifted. In Ukraine, pressure on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church acquired a third instrument: not the religious-organisations law, not property litigation, but military commissars, who held a metropolitan for twelve hours and kept his passport. A Serbian metropolitan spent a week with that same Church and said aloud what his synod has not. On Mount Athos, a Macedonian bishop presided at a vigil for the first time since communion was restored — reconciliation arriving not by decree but skete by skete.

Also: three primates on Imbros, a relic flying from Corfu to Chuvashia, a Coptic bishop buried in Minnesota, the first Orthodox Bible in German, and 350 pilgrims walking to Grabarka carrying crosses.