Monthly Archives: February 2014

The Ukraine: Freedom from NATO tanks and the EU?

The hoodlums who have illegitimately seized power in Kiev now realize that they are bankrupt. They want money. Russia is playing a waiting game to see if they are competent enough to sort things out and can survive till May, that is, till democratic elections which will replace them can happen. Timoshenko, who is on the Interpol wanted list for corruption (she was even worse than Yanukovich) has fled to Germany. So no-one is in control. The Crimeans have taken control of themselves and pushed out the Fascists appointed by the gangsters who have seized power in Kiev. More worryingly, Poland, a NATO country, has sent its tanks to the Ukrainian border. They will not pass.

Two US warships have been off Sochi for the last month, but one got grounded on a sandbank. That is why Russia has sent a warship to Cuba in reply, to show that they cannot be pushed around. There is discontent among the mob in Kiev because the US government, having achieved its aim, wants to stop paying them (apparently $20 million a week over the last three months). The US problem is that it thinks that it can take over a country by appointing a small pro-American dictatorial clique in the capital, as it did in countless Latin American countries and then Afghanistan, Iraq and Georgia (only for a few months in the latter case). But when you try and take over a country, you have to get all the people, not just 15% of them in Eastern Poland, on your side.

Surely the days of the NATO-backed, Fascist junta that has seized power in Kiev are numbered. Bankruptcy stares them in the face. As the people of Kharkov spontaneously tear down the oppressive EU flag and replace it with the Russian flag, as the people of Crimea rise up and take control of their own land and installations, as the people of the Donbass simply ignore instructions from the Neo-Nazis in Kiev, as the people of Transcarpathia search for autonomy from seventy-years of oppression from Kiev, as the people of Pochaev and Kiev protect their monasteries from beardless Catholic aggressors, the Galician Eurocriminals tremble. It has been said that at Easter President Putin will ride into Kiev on a white horse to be greeted as a liberator by the oppressed people. With 68% of Russians supporting him in opinion polls, he has nothing to fear.

The only question is if the disaster that the EU has prepared for itself in the Ukraine will not be repeated elsewhere in Europe. At the European elections in May the UK and France may well reject all pro-EU parties. Similar hostility to EU oppression can be seen in virtually every other country whose corrupt and bribed elites have bound them to the EU Fourth Reich. In London the German Fuehrerin may lecture zombified and spineless, public schoolboy, pro-Munich British Establishment politicians about what they can and cannot do, but she has forgotten the people. We are still free and we can do what we want.

Freedom from the Galician Junta

One of the first acts of the self-appointed Galician Junta currently in power in Kiev was to ban the language used in everyday life by 83% of the citizens of the Ukraine – Russian. The Junta, put in place by US and EU meddlers is upheld by gangs of NATO-trained and dollar-paid Uniat and nationalist bat-wielding thugs (http://ruskline.ru/opp/2014/02/25/ kak_nato_gotovilo_ukrainskih_boevikov dlya_cvetnyh_gosperevorotov obshirnye_ fotomaterialy/). Roaming the streets and intimidating peaceful citizens, they have been seen as far south as Lugansk, offering piles of US dollars to any who support them. So much for Euroterrorism and Eurofascism, the new Western Crusade with its new Teutonic Knights, sent by the US-controlled Berlin and the Berlin-controlled EU.

The only good thing about this Crusade is that it is going to make people think whose side they are on, whether they are in the OCA, the Paris Jurisdiction, the US-funded Patriarchate of Constantinople, or simply stray ecumenists, freemasons and careerists elsewhere. In the Ukraine the filioquist EU project can now be seen by all for what it is. There are no more excuses. As Orthodox people gather in the Orthodox Ukraine to protect the great monasteries in Kiev and Pochaev, just as they gathered before to protect them in Communist times, so now in Capitalist times, and Orthodox troops gather on the borders of the Ukraine, listening to the people of the Ukraine who call on them to liberate them from the Galician Uniat Junta in Kiev, we all get down on our knees to pray.

Metropolitan Onufry: ‘The Church must follow Christ, not Politicians’

The news has come that Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev, the long ill and incapacitated leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, has been replaced by a deputy, Metropolitan Onufry of Chernovitsy and Bukovina. A monk of the great monastery of Pochaev, a great friend of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, a carer for orphans and the leader of the Church in multinational North Bukovina, he has already shown formidable abilities.

The time of the traitor Yanukovich and the former Communist oligarchs is over in the Ukraine. Now the political vacuum can only be filled by the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the vast majority of the many peoples of the Ukraine, part of the multinational Church of Rus. Only it can guarantee the peaceful separation of the present Ukraine, that strange and artificial amalgam of Catholic Eastern Poland with Orthodox Little Russia, Orthodox New Russia, the Orthodox Crimea, Orthodox Carpatho-Russia and Orthodox Northern Bukovina.

This separation should come on the model of Czechia and Slovakia, and not on the model of Yugoslavia, Libya or Syria, which Western countries have through their arrogant and incompetent backing of fanatics done so much to destroy. Both the imperialist USA, with its experience of meddling in banana republics around the world, and the EU must be warned not to be tempted to invade yet another sovereign nation, the Ukraine, with their legions of NATO troops, as they did in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. The American, British and Israeli ‘instructors’ and special forces at work in Kiev over the last three months will have to leave.

Today only the Russian Orthodox Church stands between Christ and the Antichrist of the New World Order. After the coup d’etat in Kiev the latter is represented in Kiev by Protestants, like the new ‘President’ voted in by the laughing stock of the non-representative Galician ‘Parliament’ in Kiev and financed by the Protestant USA, Uniats, promoted by the new and aggressive Vatican of the Jesuit Pope, and the ragtag of provincialist, nationalist followers of the married ‘monk’, Filaret Denisenko. They represent collective apostasy, which Metropolitan Onufry and the rest of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will have no truck with.

To Metropolitan Onufry – Many Years!

Freedom for Orthodox Little Russia and Orthodox Carpatho-Russia?

The Time of Troubles, the anarchy of the mob, is real in Kiev and the Galician far west of the Ukraine. The meddling French, German and Polish Foreign Ministers have had to flee for their lives from the swastikas and EU flags of the Nazi mob. They fled along with the utterly corrupt Yanukovich, though democratically elected and not at all a dictator, still abandoned by President Putin in disgust at his avarice and provincial stupidity. The EU representatives really do not need what they have created – a bloody quagmire with a humanitarian crisis, hundreds of thousands of refugees, terrorist attacks, tanks on the streets and other such joys of the Second EU War (the First EU War was, and still is, in the refugee camps and street demonstrations of Yugoslavia).

Now the EU representatives will have to answer some very difficult questions from television viewers at home. Such as: “Why are the people waving EU flags wearing Nazi emblems?” or “If they are peaceful, then why are they throwing Molotov cocktails at policemen and taking them hostage?” “Do we really want these violent barbarians from Lviv to join the EU?” “What makes you think that the five Ukrainian nuclear power plants will remain safe if the country falls into chaos?” “If Ukraine becomes ungovernable, how are we going to get our Russian natural gas next winter?’’

The Jews are fleeing Kiev in fear of Fascist pogroms unleashed by the separatists and bandits from Galicia, some of whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought in the SS, some of whom were given asylum in the USA and Canada after 1945, some of whose children and grandchildren then became advisors to the US and Canadian governments. Even at the US embassy in Kiev they are now wondering whether the 5 billion US taxpayer dollars they have spent trying to undermine the sovereignty of the democratic Ukraine over the last 20 years has been worth it.

Just as in Libya and Syria, they are beginning to realise that the careerist upstart ‘Opposition’ ‘leaders’, who could smell Western money, whom they have backed, actually have no control over the mob that is now in control. And the mob is hopelessly divided, each speaking a different dialect of ‘Ukrainian’. Financial reserves are down to a few days, federal structures are being dismantled throughout the country, regional governors are fleeing, and a default on some €60 billion of Ukrainian bonds seems likely. The EU should be quaking at the Pandora’s Box it has opened, for Russian gas transits through the Ukraine and no refugee camps have yet been set up in Poland.

However, some are rejoicing. Little Russia in the north and east and New Russia in the south, Russian-speaking and Orthodox, are only too glad to see the back of the troublemakers in Eastern Poland (‘’the Ukraine’’), Ukrainian-speaking and predominantly Catholic. After all, the “Little Russians” outnumber the “Ukrainians” by two to one and they have all the riches and industry. Over two thirds of the eastern, southern and northern ‘Ukraine’ will be only too happy to see the back of the separatist rump of the far western Galician Uniats, as they leave Little Russia to become wage-slaves to labour in Berlin’s EU concentration camp and members of an EU puppet government. Yes, they have chosen ‘European values’ – atheism, bankruptcy and unemployment.

Little Russia, freed from the pro-Nazi Galician thugs, will become a new sovereign country and join the Eurasian Union. In the far south-west Carpatho-Russia (Transcarpathia as the imperialists in Kiev have dubbed it) sees at last an opportunity for freedom from the Fascist Ukrainians in Kiev and it too may join the Eurasian Union. The West has lost again through its own ignorant hubris and inept stupidity. Having created anarchy in Kiev and Galicia, who is the West going to support? The guerilla warrior nationalists? The provincialist Galician Nazis? The terrorists with their anti-semitic slogans? The club-wielding Uniat and schismatic thugs? And what if Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia achieve freedom and join the Russian-led Eurasian Union, which will then grow even stronger?

The End of the Ukraine?

Artificial countries with amalgams of people do not last. We have seen it so often in Africa and the Middle East, with countries designed by colonial tyrants. Designed by the colonial tyrant Stalin, the Ukraine is just another such country.

Today, gangs of Uniat and schismatic thugs, lawless right-wing extremists and radicals have seized power as a result of the US-financed and EU-supported coup d’etat against the democratically-elected government in Kiev. The weak, corrupt and incompetent President Yanukovich has fled, rightly fearing assassination. So Kiev is in chaos, much like Polish-occupied Moscow in 1612 or Western-occupied St Petersburg in 1917. Indeed, the leaders of the so-called ‘Opposition’ from the far western Galicia and meddling EU and US politicians have lost control of the mob, which they urged on and paid, will not even recognise their former leader Timoshenko, let alone the upstart Klichko, so favoured by the US and Germany, where he lives.

Meanwhile, in the Polish borderlands, Uniat Lviv has declared its independence. And so the solidly Orthodox Little Russian north, south and east of the country has therefore declared its independence. Kharkov could become the new capital of this restored Little Russia. And Carpatho-Russia continues to yearn for freedom from Kievan banditry. A landlocked far western Ukrainian rump, centred in Lviv, virtually without industry and dependent on Berlin and Warsaw (as in Nazi 1941) seems to be in formation amid the chaos. The division of the country seems inevitable and only idealists are talking about federalisation; if that were to have been successful, it should have happened 20 years ago. It is almost certainly too late for that now.

We can only hope and pray now that the division of the Ukraine will occur without civil war, without the mutual violence and hatred of recent weeks. May the Saints of Kiev and Pochaev save the faithful Orthodox people from Uniat and schismatic thuggery. The Last Judgement draws near.

Outposts of the Empire: A Brief Catechism of the Christian Resistance Movement

1. Question: It is said by the atheist globalists and secularist indifferentists that there is only One God. How do Orthodox Christians respond to this statement?

1. Answer: There is indeed only One God. And as a result of this fact all members of the Church of God, all Orthodox Christians, are different from others.

2. Question: How are we Christians different from Buddhists?

2. Answer: We are different from Buddhists, for they do not believe in any god, they worship a dead Indian prince, the Buddha.

3. Question: How are we Christians different from Hindus?

3. Answer: We are different from Hindus, for they worship thousands of mythical gods or demons, for they do not know the One God.

4. Question: How are we Christians different from Jews and Muslims?

4. Answer: We are different from Jews and Muslims for they only have their own partial understanding of the Old Testament – an anthropomorphic Old Testament god, the god of vengeance and hatred – not the real Old Testament God, who is made completely known in the New Testament. Rejecting the Revelation of the New Testament, they do not know that God is Love and Forgiveness, as expressed in the unique revelation of the Holy Trinity, Which is the Revelation that God is Love.

5. Question: How are we Christians different from Roman Catholics?

5. Answer: We are different from Roman Catholics, for they secularised the Holy Trinity, blasphemously replacing God with a mere man, an earthly substitute and replacement, a ‘Vicar of God’, who could, for instance, issue infallible decrees to massacre, for Roman Catholicism asserts that the Holy Spirit proceeds from him.

6. Question: How are we Christians different from Protestants?

6. Answer: We are different from Protestants for they replaced the Holy Trinity with themselves, rejecting man made in the image of God and instead making God in the image of each man, each making their own manmade ‘church’ according to their own imagination, this creating today’s secularist culture of egoism, the ‘iChurch’.

7. Question: How are we Christians different from Western secularists?

7. Answer: We are different from Western secularists, for they have replaced God with Gold, Materialism and the worship of the Holy Dollar. This is idolatry.

8. Question: So Who is the One God?

8. Answer: There is indeed only one God and He is the God of the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Christianity.

9. Question: What today is the main enemy of the Church of God, Orthodox Christianity?

9. Answer: Today, and for a thousand years already, the main enemy of the Church, of the Orthosphere, of the Eurasian Christian Empire, is Western secularism. Firstly calling itself Roman Catholicism, its ‘crusaders’ filled Jerusalem with blood, sacked the Eurasian Christian Capital of New Rome and then sank their greedy claws into Russia through more ‘crusading’ knights. Secondly, in part receiving the name of Protestantism, it set about secularising and nationalising the Churches of Christ through political meddling, finally bringing about the Western materialist Revolution of 1917. Thirdly, in its ultimate secularist form of modern Western atheism bent on world hegemony, it is set on destroying the final centre of resistance to its worldwide evil and the reign of Antichrist it wishes to establish by annihilating the reviving force of the Orthosphere, centred in what for the moment is called the Russian Federation.

10. Question: What specific forms of attack on the Church does Western secularism take?

10. Answer: Its attack takes a two-pronged form, the ancient pagan Roman prongs of divide and rule.

11. Question: How does attack by ‘Divide’ work?

11. Answer: Secularism’s first form of attack – ‘Divide’ – works through those who have a conservative, but not Traditional, mentality. ‘Divide’ takes two different approaches. This can take the form of nationalism and nationalistic division. The nationalist attack conditions its victims to believe that the most important thing in Church life is not Christ and so Unity, but their nation, in other words, that being Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serb etc, is the most important thing of all. But the nation is an attachment to the world, a form of worldliness, and to put any nation above the Church is idolatry. This attack can also take the form of ghettoisation, conditioning its believers to divide themselves from others, for some obscure reason, whether of language (converts), calendar (new calendarism or old calendarism), or dogmatisation of personal opinions regarding, for example, the toll houses or the interpretation of the Book of Genesis. Whether nationalists or ghettoists, the victims of ‘Divide’ are all people who cannot see the wood for the trees and divide themselves from the rest of the Church, this weakening her collective witness and also making their tiny sects and subgroups irrelevant.

12. Question: How does attack by ‘Rule’ work?

12. Answer: Secularism’s second form of attack – ‘Rule’ – works through those who have a liberal, but not Traditional, mentality. It involves substituting ‘Halfodoxy’ for Orthodoxy, using liberalism, modernism, renovationism and ecumenism to secularise Orthodoxy. Halfodoxy is used by the American or Western Empire, centred in the USA but with a very powerful tentacle in its puppet EU, to attack continually the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world through the temptation of money. This means bribing those areas of the Orthosphere that are on the fringes of Eurasia Christendom, always its weakest and poorest parts, whether in Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, the Middle East, the Western Diaspora, Romania, Bulgaria, or more recently in Serbia, Georgia, Syria and the Ukraine. By creating Halfodoxy, the only form of the Church beloved of, not feared by but courted by and also mocked by, secularists, secularism can rule. This is because Halfodoxy is spiritually neutered and castrated, a balkanised toy, a petty nationalistic and provincial ethnic plaything of secularism, with no more spiritual force than pathetic Uniatism, the tiniest and most mocked provincial branch of secularist Roman Catholicism.

13. Question: How does Orthodoxy fight back against Secularism and its ‘Divide and Rule’, its dividing into sectarian conservative ghettos and ruling over liberal ‘Halfodoxy’?

13. Answer: We fight back with the fullness of the Tradition, with Patristic Orthodoxy, Spiritual and Incarnational Sovereignty and Orthodox International Identity. We fight back by striving to restore our Orthodox Empire, avoiding nationalistic or ghettoistic dividing and ruling by the secularists through Halfodoxy.

14. Question: Who is the Head of the Orthodox Empire?

14. Answer: Christ.

15. Question: Why do we at present have no earthly head of the Orthodox Empire?

15. Answer: Because Orthodox in Russia fell to the apostasy of Western secularism and murdered the last earthly head of the Orthosphere. Until we have all repented for this, we will be unworthy to have a new earthly head, unworthy of the Final Restoration.

16. Question: What is the role in this process of Final Restoration of our monasteries and parishes in the Diaspora?

16. Answer: We in the Diaspora are outposts of the Eurasian Christian Empire, oases, islands and missions of the Orthosphere, embassies of spiritual resistance to Antichrist, spokespeople for our Christian civilisational values against atheist Western secularism. Our role is to gather together all the spiritually vital forces in these last times, to save and convert whatever we can for Christ and His Holy Orthodox Church from the tide of atheist Western secularism.

Geopolitical War in the Ukraine

The word ‘ukraine’ means borderland. In other words, ‘ukraine’ is not a country, but a region. In fact historically, it is a separatist term for Galicia, which was invented for anti-Russian political reasons by Austria-Hungary only some 120 years ago with strong Vatican approval. In reality, all of what is called the Ukraine today is not part of that borderland, but part of the Rus homeland of Orthodoxy, called Little Russia.

Therefore, what is happening today in Kiev and the far western Ukraine (Galicia) is not so much a civil war, but more part of a continuing divisive and imperialistic geopolitical war. This is a war against Eurasian Christian Civilization, an attempted coup d’etat financed and orchestrated by meddling Western atheist secularism, which already tried to annihilate the Sovereignty of the former in 1917, exporting its atheist materialist ideology there. Long before this Western secularism had, under various camouflaged names, already produced the Europewide massacres of Karl the Tall, the Crusades, the Inquisition and Wars of ‘Religion’, and then the worldwide genocides of slavery, Imperialism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinism, Marxism, Nazism, an utterly corrupt EU whose ‘breathtaking’ corruption costs 100 billion euros a year (according to the February 2014 report of EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem), and exploitative Globalism.

Twenty years ago we saw the first part of this geopolitical war in Yugoslavia, also a borderland area, which the EU, led by the Vatican, wanted to divide and rule, snatching it too away from the cradle of Eurasian Christian Civilization. The US-backed EU has not yet been successful in this and has to supply troops to keep the newly parts of this area even under relative control. These troops, and the threat of bombing and economic blockade of Serbia, have not been able even to begin to prepare this region for European Union control and exploitation by Berlin (except for Slovenia and Croatia). However, today, a similar process is beginning in the Ukraine, where the much-practised Western terrorist techniques of the Arab ‘Spring’, including the use of social networks by the terrorists and snipers, are being tested yet again against the democratically-elected government.

Armouries have been seized in the three former Polish provinces in the west of the Ukraine (Ukraine proper) and semi-professional terrorists, well-trained and orchestrated, have flung themselves against police in Kiev, murdering nine of them in the last 24 hours. These Fascist bandits have left swastikas behind them and one of their leaders, the anti-semite Tyagnibok, has been called a Nazi even by the Calvinistic Angela Merkel in Berlin. However, there are other leaders from the far west, Yatsenyuk, and the favourite German-American puppet Klichko (he speaks English), so beloved of the foul-mouthed US politician Victoria Newland. The present war in Kiev and the far west of the Ukraine is an attempt to yugoslavise the Ukraine.

This attempt is unlikely to succeed, for unlike Serbia, the Ukraine has a border with Russia. As soon as the Olympic Games are over (and the present troubles have clearly been orchestrated by Washington and Berlin to time with them), it is likely that Russia will move to protect its people, the majority of the so-called ‘Ukrainians’. It has no desire to see the Libyanisation and Syrianisation of the Ukraine, or to see it turned into a Polish colomy or German colony, as it was in World War II. Moreover, US dollars and Brussels euros are in short supply nowadays; the US embassy in Kiev has been subsidising the terrorists to the tune of $20 million per week and privding ‘instructors’; the absorption into the US-designed European Union of the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus has all been much too expensive.

Yesterday one of the US warships sent to Sochi two weeks ago to intimidate Russia got stuck on a sandbank in the Black Sea. It may be a symbol of all attempts by Western politicians and media, whether they are Obama or Ashton, to intimidate in the Ukraine. The threat to send NATO troops from Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Romania to occupy the Ukraine in the latest anti-Christian Western Crusade is only a threat. If the ‘Ukraine’ returns to its pre-1939 borders and the former Polish and before that former Austrian Uniat far west breaks away completely and becomes yet another bankrupt Fourth Reich EU colony, the rest of the Ukraine (85%) will only heave a sigh of relief and say ‘good riddance’.

Victory in Presov – but the War Continues

The enthronement in Rusin Presov in Slovakia on 9 February of Archbishop Rostislav (Hont) as the new Metropolitan of the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia marks a victory for Orthodox consciousness against the modernist, US-dictated policies of the present regime of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The failure by the Phanar to subjugate this Local Church with its 300 parishes, founded by the Russian Orthodox Church on 23 November 1951, is another defeat for the ageing episcopate of Constantinople and its unOrthodox, American policies.

The former head of this Local Church, the totally unreliable Metropolitan Christopher (Pulets), who seemed to have no firm bearings in either Church life or his personal life, was rejected in April 2013 for his compromises with Constantinople. Constantinople’s 87-year old candidate, the embittered, half-Serb Archbishop Symeon, was outvoted by the three young members of the Czech episcopate. The cause of Orthodoxy was much helped by Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of the Russian Orthodox Church. On 9 December 2013 he outwitted the two Greek Metropolitans, sent by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to outvote, slander and discredit the three Czech bishops, when interfering Greek bishops have no legitimate vote, and so take over and colonise the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

Of course, this victory has to be set in the context of the wider anti-Orthodox movements of the US/EU-instigated and -subsidised rioting in Kiev, the attempt by Brussels to divide and rule the Serbian Orthodox Church, the US military threats against the Syrian government and the Schadenfreude attempts by the Western media to discredit the success of the Sochi Olympics. Only today the US-loathed but truly Orthodox Metropolitan of Montenegro, Metropolitan Amphilochiy, has called on the so easily bribed and venal politicians of Montenegro to stop ‘worshipping the golden calf of Brussels’. The victory also has to be set against today’s announcement by the aggressively anti-Orthodox new papacy in Rome that it is setting up a Uniat Exarchate in the Russian Crimea.

All these events come against the proposed March meeting in Constantinople – during the first week of Lent! – of the heads of the fourteen Local Orthodox Churches and the increasingly desperate attempts by the ageing Patriarchate of Constantinople to hold a US-dictated ‘Inter-Orthodox Conference’ in 2015. (Two Patriarchs have already said that they will not attend the March meeting and it is rapidly descending into a Pan-Hellenic club meeting). It seems unlikely that the free Orthodox Churches, uncompromised by Turkish politics, Greek philetism and US foreign politics and subsidies, will yield to Phanariot papist threats that their tiny Church is ‘without equals’.

Led by the Russian Orthodox Church. which has already recently had to endure Phanariot-inspired and US and EU-backed schisms in Estonia and England, as well as threats to Church unity in the western Ukraine and even in Russia, increasingly led by the dissident and semi-renovationist Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev, the free Local Churches are unlikely to accept the politically-inspired claims of the Phanar to be an Eastern Papacy.

For long the Russian Orthodox administrative services in Moscow have concentrated on diplomacy and openness to others. With all the above events, it is now realising that its truest and closest friends are precisely those who have long warned them of too open an approach to ecumenism, especially the Russian Orthodox patriots in the worldwide Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. It is typical that the enthronement of Metropolitan Rostislav was attended only by the Patriarchate of Antioch, freed over 100 years ago from Greek colonial tutelage by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Polish Orthodox Church.

It is clear that there is now a bloc of free Local Churches which will resist any US-orchestrated claims by the Phanar to papist hegemony over the Orthosphere. With the coming completion of the international Orthodox centre at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, the time is coming when the Russian Orthodox Church, multinational and multilingual, will return to assume its natural and obvious leadership of the Orthodox world.

Notes on the Restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church

Introduction

At this present time of Church restoration, our Russian Orthodox consciousness and ambitions are clear – our aim is not the restoration of the Church to what it was in 1917. That is not good enough, or else there will be another Revolution. Our aim is more than historical restoration, it is also to make better. What specifically do we need to see?

1. A Patriarchate

Already in 1905 the future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II proposed the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate after a sorrowful 200 year interval. Sadly, those who had grown used to the old uncanonical system refused his offer – they were not yet ready for restoration and preferred the bittersweet captivity of the Protestant system of Oberprocurators and Synodal government. Nevertheless, in 1918 the pro-Patriarchate forces, long led by Metropolitan Antony of Kiev, were triumphant. However, this restoration was reversed by Soviet atheism and even after its second restoration during the Second World War, it made little difference, as the militantly atheist Soviet religious affairs bureaucrats dealt with the Church in even worse ways than the worst masonic oberprocurators of the eighteenth century. After the tragic Soviet period, today it is clear that the restoration of the Patriarchate is permanent.

2. Freedom

The freedom and independence of the contemporary Patriarchate from the Russian Federation State, subject to the whims and fashions of democracy and party politics, and from other successor States, must continue as it is in today’s post-Soviet times. None must fear any State interference. This principle is all the more important inasmuch as the Patriarchate is by nature and title multinational, representing not merely the Russian Federation, but the whole of Rus and its canonical territories, covering most of the former Russian Empire, as well as Japan and China, as well as shared territories of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia – altogether 62 different nationalities. The Divino-human Church must everywhere resist subjection to the whims of westernising or other States and plainly show her freedom to preach the Gospel of Christ and not to become some mere State institution for moralism.

3. Financial Independence

Next comes the thorny question of Church finance. Before the Revolution clergy often lived in poverty and the Church was often subjected to the whims of wealthy merchants, the equivalent of modern businessmen and ‘sponsors’. Here contemporary States have a role to play. Churches have to be rebuilt by the successor States to the Soviet State which destroyed them. Successors to those responsible for destruction have moral obligations and here there is a long way to go even to return to pre-Revolutionary numbers of Church buildings. Once this task has been carried out, there are questions concerning clergy and choir finance. It is not good enough to allow clergy to live in poverty and force them to work in secular jobs and to rely on choir directors who are never free during the week, meaning that all weekday services have to be sung by priests. There must be financial security.

4. Education

The question of clergy education is connected with the previous problem, as we saw both before the Revolution and with certain erroneous ordinations of the post-Soviet 1990s. If the Church cannot pay her clergy a living wage, it will find talent going elsewhere. Thus, many study theology, but do not make use of their knowledge as clergy, for they can find better pay and much better conditions elsewhere. Some may be shocked at this, but it is only realistic; inasmuch as parish clergy are married and have children, you cannot torment them even more by depriving their wives and children of sustenance. As regards the nature of clergy education, it must be of due and moral level. Otherwise Church life may be reduced to ritualism. To reduce the Church to external ritualism may be an easy way out, but it is an error and even a heresy, which turns away the faithful who look for inner content.

5. Church Culture: Music, Iconography, Furnishings, Art and Architecture

For two centuries before the Revolution Church music was dominated either by Italianate concert-type professional singing, inaccessible to the faithful, or else by solo singing for lack of choirs. At the same time iconography was also dominated by Roman Catholic imagery of a realistic and humanistic style which expressed nothing of Orthodox iconography. The quality of vestments, at times over-ornate and excessively heavy, and Church furnishings also suffered. On the other hand, just before the Revolution there was a revival of traditional art and architecture. It is to be hoped that traditional forms will continue to revive and that the bad taste of certain ‘sponsors’, in love with gold, can be overcome, in such a way that available funds can be used not to build a few over-elaborate or luxurious churches, but many more functional churches, albeit simpler and more modest in form.

Conclusion

Restoration does not mean the blind repetition of mistakes. Authentic restoration means a return to the best models of the past. The restoration of the free, independent, educated, worldwide Patriarchate of Rus, multinational and multilingual, the protector of the other Local Churches, and a model of Church culture and practices, is our aim.