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.

Bartholomew’s most distinctive effort to “update” the Church is his commitment to environmentalism. In the press, he is sometimes called the Green Patriarch. When, in 1997, he declared that abusing the natural environment was a sin against God, he became the first major religious leader to articulate such a position.

But Bartholomew’s power is more limited than the pope’s. There are eight other Orthodox patriarchs, each of whom presides over a national or regional Church, and Bartholomew’s role is that of “first among equals.”