Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Battle for European Civilization

Introduction

In history the manipulators who stand behind the official rulers of the world have gone under many different names, but their objective has always been the same: global domination under a single world leader come to power by the manipulated mob. Whether the puppets who officially rule have been evil fanatics (Hitler), captives (Merkel), simply stupid (for example, Bush Junior) or extremely vain and so self-deluded (for example, Blair, Cameron, Obama), the puppeteers (today called neocons) fear only one thing. This is the re-emergence of a Sovereign Ruler who denies them the world domination they so ardently seek for the one who deludes their vanity too. Such denial would come about by that Sovereign’s adherence to spiritual independence, spiritual values, spiritual resistance and popular support for him. This is why they have always sought the overthrow of Christian monarchs – at no time so obviously as since 1914.

Free Russia

Although today the puppeteers fear powerful Non-Western rulers, whether in China, the Muslim world or Latin America, their greatest fear by far is the re-emergence of a new Russian Empire. This is because it is the only possible Christian Empire in the world, ruled by a Christian Emperor, a Tsar. Thus, when President Putin two weeks ago in his regular phone-in programme to the public apologized for what the USSR did under Stalin in 1945, making captive the very Eastern Europe which Soviet forces had just liberated from Fascism, the pro-Fascist neocons were alarmed. This is because they have always tried to make out that President Putin is a new Stalin and that his policy is to recreate a Stalinist Soviet Union. If that fantasy were the case, they could easily discredit him.

They would be equally happy if the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is the spiritual backbone of any re-emergence of the Christian Empire, Tsardom, were limited to a tiny number of zealots or if the Church could be divided or ‘Balkanized’, as in Macedonia or the far western Ukraine. Alternatively, the Church could perhaps be CIA-controlled, as with the Vatican and the Phanar, or intellectualized, as in Paris, or divided into many warring sects like the Protestants (which is why the CIA funds old calendarist sects which feed on their neophyte and immigrant pathologies and self-justifying Russophobia). Then the Russian Orthodox Church could be dismissed as a piece of irrelevant folklore, the domain of a tiny and disincarnate minority, without any constructive, civilizational force. What they really fear is the revival of the Church’s incarnational values which spread to the masses and to the State, so resulting in the restoration of the Orthodox Emperor, the Christian Empire.

Free Europe

What they then fear is the next stage. This is that a Russian Orthodox Emperor, a new Tsar, would be recognized as Emperor by the rest of the Orthodox world. Already the neocons of the EU are turning Greece and Cyprus to Russia. And even though Bulgaria, Romania and increasingly Serbia (with Montenegro and Macedonia) are governed by EU-selected elites, many among the people there are also looking to Russia. Indeed, even in countries with only small Orthodox minorities but which neighbour Russia, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Lands, there are many who also look to Russia. Even in Poland many are now looking to Russia to protect Christians in the Middle East, given their abandonment by the anti-Christian West.

What the neocons fear next is the potential spread of Orthodoxy and the spirit of independence beyond Eastern Europe to Western Europe. One of the favourite accusations of such secularists is that Orthodox Christianity is anti-Civilization, anti-cultural, ‘obscurantist’. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Here are a few cases of Russian Orthodox Western Europeans whom I know or have known personally:

A Russian Orthodox Archbishop, the son of the last Minister of Culture in the Weimar Republic and so dismissed by the anti-culture Hitler.

An aristocratic friend in France who is a descendant of the French King Louis XV.

A Russian Orthodox priest’s wife who is the cousin of the Italian film star Claudia Cardinale.

An acquaintance, received into the Russian Orthodox Church, who was a renowned British composer and knight of the realm.

An Orthodox priest’s wife who was the niece of the Czech artist Alfons Mucha.

A Russian Orthodox Portuguese layman close to the former Portuguese Royal Family.

A Russian Orthodox Swedish priest, formerly a senior member of the Swedish Lutheran Church.

Why are there so many such examples? Because the Christian Faith in its uncompromised form, that is, its Russian Orthodox form, is at the root of the European culture of over 1,000 years ago and spiritually sensitive Western people know it. They have realized that if European culture, now being made atheist by secularization or being crushed by Islamization, is to be saved and rebuilt from the ruins of the great European suicide since 1914, this can only be done through Russian Orthodoxy.

Conclusion

Here is the nightmare of the puppeteer neocons, that all their long-held plans will be dashed, that there will once more be a Tsar in Russia, a restored and united Orthodox Empire and that a Europe of Patriots, of Free Nations, will see through their manipulation and abandon their EU project. Thus, they will throw off the US-cloned EU superstructure, the United States of Europe. Then Europe could spiritually revive with the help of the new Sovereign Ruler and Tsar of the resurgent Orthodox Empire centred in Russia. Thus, the outlying parts of the Orthodox world in the Balkans and elsewhere and through them the former outlying provinces of the Orthodox world in Western Europe will be spiritually united once more and the veneration of the ancient Western saints restored. A millennium of injustice overthrown? This is what is at stake.

Addressing the Seven Billion: On the 2016 Inter-Orthodox Conference

Introduction: The 2016 Conference

Most of humanity’s over 7 billion Non–Orthodox (http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/) have not heard that there is going to be an Inter-Orthodox Conference next year. But then neither have most of the world’s 216 million Orthodox. Information about the proposed 2016 Inter-Orthodox Conference to be attended by a maximum of 24 bishops from each of the 14 Local Churches is, to say the least, sparse. (Will it take place at all? When will it take place? What will be discussed?) Occasional rumours appear on the internet. The vast majority of both Orthodox clergy and people have no idea that such a Conference is even to happen and hardly anyone knows what it going to be discussed. The fact that the conspiracy theorists have been at work regarding it is entirely due to the total lack of transparency and total lack of communications of the highly secretive Conference organizers. It almost seems as though the lack of openness of the obscurantist Conference organizers is deliberately intended to provoke schism. At present, therefore, there appear to be two common scenarios for the outcome of this Conference.

The Apocalyptic Scenario

The first scenario is the apocalyptic one. This is the scenario favoured by the conspiracy theorists, old calendarists, schismatics etc in order to justify themselves. Since all the preparations are going on behind closed doors in Switzerland (of all places!) and hardly anyone even knows what the agenda is and since there has been absolutely no consultation by the bishops with the clergy and people and even many bishops seems to know nothing about this Conference, the internet conspiracy theorists have been having a field day. It seems that we are deliberately being kept in ignorance (shades of the disastrously-organized Nyack Conference in 2003 in ROCOR, of which we were informed after it had happened). Clearly for the conspiracy theorists, the whole agenda of the Conference (for some reason billed as a Council, when a Conference can only be declared a Council if its resolutions are afterwards received by the whole Church) has been dictated by the secularist powers of this world.

According to the conspiracy theorists, the Conference will be a repeat of the 1923 Constantinople meeting, that is a meeting of apostasy which will deny the Seven Universal Councils, close all monasteries, throw out relics, shorten the services, marry the bishops, adopt the secular calendar, abolish fasting, do away with clerical dress etc. In a word, it will simply be a copy of the protestantizing Vatican II and its secularist agenda. Indeed, the apocalyptic scenario even bills this ‘Council’ as ‘The Eighth Universal Council’ – even though in the Greek practice the Eighth Council is that of the ninth century when the Roman Patriarchate repented and for a time returned to the Orthodox fold before its final schism in the eleventh century. I have even been asked what ROCOR will do in such a case. Well, we will simply carry on being a self-governing part of the Russian Orthodox Church, ignoring everything decided by the apostates at such a Conference. As for other Local Churches, including the part of the Russian Church which is inside the Russian Lands, they will be rent by schism. Is this what the secretive Conference organizers want?

The Bureaucratic Scenario

that the apocalyptic scenario is highly unlikely and has been engendered only by the total lack of transparency of those preparing the Conference, what is far more likely? Given the highly detailed preparations going on, it is that the Conference will take place and produce a document of extraordinary blandness, couched in Chancellery-speak and meaningless pseudo-intellectual waffle about ‘being’ and ‘communion’. The result will be that the whole Conference will continue to be totally ignored by the people, the guardians of Orthodoxy, and will pass immediately into the dustbin of history. Of course, there will be total unity – but such is the effect of blandness. Rumours from Switzerland that the Patriarchate of Constantinople is promoting homosexuality, obeying its paymasters in the US State Department (and sadly, certain of its bishops), and that this is being opposed by the other Local Churches, tend to confirm that the result will indeed be a meaningless document written in diplomat-speak.

The latest rumours that Patriarch Bartholomew wants to use the Conference to promote a hopelessly old-fashioned 1960s liberal-type secularist agenda of ‘human rights and racial equality’ are laughable because of their hypocrisy – or is it simply profound ignorance of the real world? Go to almost any Greek parish in Western Europe and ask to join and you will be told to ‘go away (and often much ruder than that) because you are not Greek’. This is commonplace and I could quote several examples with details. Amidst the forest of Greek flags (and the Patriarchate of Constantinople is not the only guilty party – is flag-waving a special parochial Balkan phenomenon?) of the average Greek parish ethnic club, where is the place for Christ? Surely if there is to be a Conference, we could talk about the real problems of the Church in the world, which are not doctrinal, but administrative, and are all due to the utter failure to implement Orthodoxy, that is, to go beyond empty words to deeds.

The Third Scenario: The Holy Spirit

In 2006 I was honoured to be present at the Fourth All-Diaspora Council in San Francisco. There was only one real question on the agenda: whether the Russian Church inside Russia was free and so ROCOR could at last link up with Her, as we had been waiting for over three generations to do. I had definitely made up my mind only on the aeroplane coming from London, when I had learned the news that the local diocese of the Church inside Russia, the Sourozh Diocese, had at last freed itself from modernism and ecumenism, from its hatred for the Russian Church Tradition and its contempt for the New Martyrs and Confessors, and that therefore the last obstacle to unity had gone. However, I seemed to belong to a small group, sure that the time was ripe for unity; equally, there was a small group that was definitely opposed to any sort of unity, declaring that it was premature. The majority at the Council, including most of the bishops, seemed not to have come to a decision. All appeared to be at an impasse.

Those present will remember the third day of that Council, when a miracle happened and suddenly virtually everyone came together and the path to the future opened up before us. What happened? What is the authority of the Church? Who is the most important person at a Council? What is the difference between a Council and a mere Conference? The answer to all these questions is: The Holy Spirit. Suppose such a miracle happens at the 2016 Conference? Suddenly then all those worldly, weary words will vanish ‘as wax melts before the fire…at the presence of God’. All those tired secular agendas will return to the dust from which they are made. Then we could talk about the really important tasks of proclaiming the authentic Christian Tradition to the world, about updating the real situation of the Church to 2016 and forgetting 1453, when for some history stopped. The possibilities are endless – if the bureaucrats heed the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion: Endless Possibilities

A real and free Inter-Orthodox Council could first consult with monastics, parish clergy and people about what all the diocesan bishops of the whole Church (some 800 of them – who knows?) could discuss. It could reaffirm the Orthodox truths before the end to the apostate West and to all those parts of the world which after 2,000 years have still not heard of the Church and Orthodoxy, only of compromised and deformed colonial versions of Christianity, from which Orthodoxy must be distinguished and distanced. Support could be given to the Patriarchate of Alexandria for missionary work in its huge territory of Africa, a potential flock of over one billion Non-Orthodox. Support could be given to the Russian Church for missionary work in its huge territory of Asia, a potential flock of nearly four and a half billion Non-Orthodox. Support could be given for Orthodox unity and missionary work, instead of ethnic rivalry, in Western Europe, North and South America and Oceania (over one and a half billion Non-Orthodox), where new Local Churches have to be set up, given the millennial apostasy of heterodox structures, which are not going to return to Church Christianity. The possibilities are endless because with God in the Holy Spirit all things are possible.

On the Denazification of the West

Two Western ideologies, both engendered by the barbarization after the murderous First World War, marked the first half of the twentieth century. One was Communism, the other Nazism. Communism produced millions of victims in the former Russian Empire, more in the average single day than the number of criminals punished during the previous century of monarchy. Under the dual monsters, Lenin and Stalin, it is said that as many as ten million who disagreed with the ruling Communist ideology were killed, usually in the most brutal of conditions. Nazism was different from Communism in that it was a racist ideology which wanted to wipe many races off the face of the earth. Moreover, it murdered not 10 million, but in a far shorter space of time, some 40 million, the vast majority of whom were Slavs from the former Russian Empire.

However, Nazism, defined as ‘ethnic cleansing for the sake of exploitation by a race that considers itself superior’, stretches back centuries before the invention of the word. Thus, in the eleventh century the racial elite of the ‘Nazi’ Normans massacred their way through Sicily, southern Italy, England and then the whole of the British Isles, imposing feudal slavery on the ‘peasants’ as they went. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries ‘Nazi’ ‘crusaders’ massacred Jews, Orthodox Christians and Muslims from Spain to Germany, from Hungary to the Middle East, from the Baltics to Russia, from Egypt to Cyprus. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ‘Nazi’ tribal chiefs or ‘kings’ created almost continual war in Western Europe: ‘Kill them all, God will know his own’.

In the sixteenth century ‘Nazi’ conquistadors massacred their way through what is now called Latin America in search of gold and created genocide in ‘religious wars’ in Western Europe in search of power. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘Nazi’ slave-traders massacred millions of Africans, casting their corpses into the Atlantic. In the nineteenth century ‘Nazi’ imperialists from Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Germany wreaked genocide for tens of millions among the native peoples of North America, Africa and Asia and cruelly exploited the working masses of Europe for the sake of lucre.

In the twentieth century ‘Nazi’ politicians from several countries created a first World War, massacring the peasant youth of Europe, caused a genocide of the Armenians, a Revolution and massacres in the former Russian Empire, then a second World War, annihilating 27 million Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians and millions of others in concentration camps, looting the gold and art treasures of Europe and dropping millions of bombs, including two Atomic bombs, on civilians. Then ‘Nazis’, now calling themselves ‘liberals’, created the abortion holocaust, burning tens of millions of baby corpses in hospital and clinic gas chambers, and raped the mineral resources of the ‘Third World’, causing worldwide ecological catastrophe.

And yet in November 2014 just three countries out of all the countries in the world, refused to condemn Nazism at the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee. They were of course the neocon-run bastions of ‘liberalism,’ the USA and Canada, and their vassal state and feudal puppet regime in the Ukraine. Little wonder:

In the Ukraine the US-created and Canadian-supported Neo-Nazi junta of pro-Western feudal oligarchs has massacred tens of thousands of Ukrainians, is starving the others, creating millions of refugees and has reduced a once prosperous economy to the level of that of Tajikistan.

In the Yemen (and in the Ukraine) the US is doing what it falsely accuses Russia of doing in the Ukraine – massacring and starving the local people and creating chaos.

Saudi Arabia, the great US ally and dictatorship, responsible for the 9/11 murders, has beheaded more of its own people since January 2014 than the US-created and Saudi and Qatari-financed IS has beheaded in its four years of vicious warfare in Syria. There hundreds of thousands are dead and millions of refugees live in catastrophic conditions.

Since the bombing of Libya and arming of terrorists by the ‘liberal’ allies of the US, the UK and France, hundreds of Libyan refugees, escaping the chaos so created, have drowned every week while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to safety in Italy in flimsy, terrorist-operated boats.

What is the link between Nazism and Liberalism? Nazism and Liberalism are simply the two sides of the same coin, the two wings of rival ideologies, vying for the prize of intolerance. They fought not because they were opposed, as they told the Western peoples, but because they both wanted absolute power and there was room for only one of them. Liberalism asserts:

‘I am against Nazism, but if you disagree with me, I will censor your words through your politically correct media which I control, I will assassinate you if you resist, I will bomb you back to the Stone Age until you agree to accept my rule over you and my right to exploit your natural resources and you will call this freedom and democracy, as I give you the choice between two self-interested puppets who come from the same privileged background and share the same anti-people cultural prejudices’. But this of course is also Nazism. The only difference would appear to be that Nazism murders Jews and ‘Liberalism’ protects Jews.

On Saturday 9 May 2015, there will be a great Victory Parade in Moscow on the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism and the entry of Russian troops into Berlin, liberating it from Nazism. Had the US-led Allied forces almost at the last moment, only eleven months before the end of the Second World War in June 1944, not landed in France, Russian troops would have liberated all of Western Europe as far as the Atlantic.

Today’s ‘Nazi’ liberal Western leaders are boycotting this Victory Parade in Moscow, bullying any European leader who wishes to attend it into staying at home. Perhaps on that day we should hold our own Victory Parade in London – I for one will go wearing my father’s medals which he earned fighting against Nazism. Such a Victory Parade will be a warning that we shall crush Nazism everywhere, including the Nazism that today dresses itself in the neocon clothes of Liberalism.

A Letter from Greece

I have just read your recent posts on the events blog, and I would like to express my gratitude to our Lord who helps you to confess the true Orthodox spirit in such difficult times full of unrest.

In order to give you a glimpse of the “true Orthodox Greece”, that you refer to in one of your quite recent posts (5/12/2014), and not of compromised Greece of bribery, I would like to share with you some recent moments of the life of our Local Church:

1) Tuesday – Wednesday 24-25th of March 2015 | Agia Aikaterini (St. Catherine) parish church, Kastella, Pireus (port of Athens) 20:30 – 01:30: vigil service for the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary (New Calendar), where among the priests serving the holy altar stands hieromonk Gregorios the Athonite, one of the oldest diciples of Saint Paisios the Athonite (since early ’70s or earlier). He is during his annual long visit to his spiritual children in Athens every Lent (he also visits them, as well as other brethren all over Greece and Germany, every May, late July and during the Christmas Fast). Almost all of the latter reunite again, babies, children, adolescents, young adults, adults, elderly people, all faithful spiritual children of Fr. Gregorios for the last four decades are there with their families, sharing the same chalice, the same blessing of the Virgin Mary. It is She whom Fr. Gregorios so vividly honours inside and outside Mt Athos through his exemplary life as a man of constant prayer and through his many books. I was there too with my wife.

2) Saturday 28th of March 2015 | Agios Georgios (St. George) parish church, Dionysos, Attica (at the foot of Penteli Mountain, near Athens) 07:30 – 11:00: Matins and Divine Liturgy for the Saturday of the Akathist in an unusually crowded small church of the early 20th century. Why? Because today is the five-year memorial of the dormition of hieromonk Markos Manolis (16/4/2010). He was one of the most militant adversaries of ecumenism, spiritual leader of “Orthodoxos Typos” newspaper, but above all a true spiritual father and leader of many spiritual brothers and sisters in Christ in villages, towns, hospitals, jails around Athens and in Athens itself. At the end of the Liturgy all in one soul sing “Eternal memory”. A little later a bag is given to everyone as they exit the church containing kolyva and a small book written by Fr. Markos entitled “The Holy Double: humility and love”. Afterwards most of the congregation take part in a common meal organised by the parish in Fr. Markos’ memory in a small house near the church. A couple of priests give short talks about his life and his legacies to our times. There is a strong feeling that Fr. Markos is not dead, but among us! I was there too.

3) Saturday 28th of March 2015 | Holy Monastery of Hosios David of Evia, northern Evia island 07:00 – 11:00: Matins and Divine Liturgy for the Saturday of the Akathist in a unusually crowded monastery up in the mountains. Why? Because today is the three-year memorial of Elder Kyrillos Gerantonis and people from all over Evia, Greece and even abroad gather to commemorate him. Our friend Stratos with his wife Carmen (of Romanian origin) came from Paris just for this day. My wife was there too.

4) Great Wednesday 8th April 2015 | Holy Monastery of Agia Philothei, Ekali, Attica 07:00 – 09:00: Vespers and Divine Liturgy in a quite peaceful central church (katholikon) with a few pilgrims and the heavenly voices of the choir which is comprised of Abbess Agapi (= Love), a couple of nuns and a couple of novices. Only oil lamps and a couple of dim lights behind the iconostasis are seen. A few minutes before the Holy Communion I see a thin stooped figure with a walking stick approaching the icon of the “Nymphios” at the centre of the Church. She is a very old nun with her face hidden moving slowly towards the icon in order to venerate it. Then she takes place next to the choir waiting for Holy Communion. When the time comes she receives the Body and Blood of Christ with great piety right after the Abbess and… steps slowly backwards until she returns to her initial position at the left side of the church. She is always there at every service in spite of her 94 years. As I learned a little later, she is sister Elpida (= Hope).

May you and all your family and parishioners have a blessed Easter full of the light of our Lord.

Dimitrios

Christ is Risen!

From Recent Correspondence (March-April 2015)

On the Destiny of the Church Outside Russia

Q: What was the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) supposed to do in the eighty-five years between its formation in the early 1920s and the reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007?

A: Our first calling was to obey the Gospel by beginning the preaching of Orthodoxy worldwide before the end (Matt 24, 14), which we were providentially enabled to start by virtue of being scattered throughout the world. In other words, it was our calling to bring the serious (and not superficial hobbyists) into the Church, to contact all those who realize that the Church is higher than the spiritual impurity of any national establishment and local culture.

Our preaching was called to be the preaching of Orthodoxy without either of the compromises caused by spiritual impurity, that is, to be real Orthodox Christians free of both provincial and inward-looking Russian nationalism on the one hand, and of the modernist, Protestant-style illusions of disincarnate modernism on the other hand. This preaching was to lay the foundations of the preaching of the Gospel in the Orthodox context so that then, once the Church inside Russia was free and we were strengthened and reinforced from Russia, we could accomplish this great task together.

Our second calling was to canonize the New Martyrs and Confessors. This was the only way of conquering atheism inside Russia and so working for the restoration of the Tsar, the Orthodox Monarchy, the protector of all Orthodox peoples and all who know that beyond the veil of this secular world there is a world to come, the world of spiritual reality, the real world. Atheism inside Russia could not be conquered by military means. Both the White Movement after 1917 and the Vlasov Movement of the Second World War failed precisely because they tried to use military means to conquer atheism. You can only fight evil spirits with spiritual weapons, as the Apostle Paul wrote: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’ (Ephesians 6, 12).

This need for spiritual weapons is why it took until 1981 for the Church Outside Russia to canonize the New Martyrs and Confessors. It should have happened much earlier but, very sadly, political and nationalistic elements in ROCOR resisted. The True White Movement, which is the essence of the whole Russian Orthodox Church, is a spiritual movement, not a political movement and those political elements had to be overcome before their canonization was possible. I personally knew many parishioners in various ROCOR churches, not least in the London parish, who were opposed to the canonization. To the scandal of the faithful, they thought in secular and nationalistic categories and held back our part of the Russian Church from accomplishing her mission and so fulfilling her destiny.

Q: What is the calling of ROCOR today?

A: As soon as Russia was freed, we were called on to ally ourselves with Her as closely as possible, thus strengthening both parts of the Church. The earthly remains of Russian Orthodox heroes like Ivan Ilyin had already been returned to the Centre, we too were to return, although spiritually we had always been there. In order to return, we had to avoid the various nationalistic and political traps that had been set us by the world. It is sad that some political, that is secular-minded, elements fell into them. The destiny of the whole Russian Diaspora and her missions was to return to the liberated Centre, in order to stand together with her in solidarity. The alternative was to fall into a hopeless provincialism and parochialism, which is exactly what befell the marginal fringes who broke away from the Church in the Diaspora for various ghetto-like sects, whether renovationist and modernist on the left (Paris, North America) or old calendarist and nationalist (ROCOR dissidents) on the right.

Q: You say ‘as soon as Russia was freed’. So why did ROCOR not reunite as soon as 1992, after the fall of the atheist government there?

A: There were naïve, patriotic, nostalgic and very emotional individuals in ROCOR, often very elderly, who did reunite or wanted to do so immediately. I do not judge them. But since 1972 I had known the leaders of the old ‘Moscow Patriarchate’, as it was called, from inside and I knew how corrupt it was, especially in the Diaspora. The fall of atheist government was one thing, the spread of a Non-Soviet and fully Orthodox mentality to the top of the Church took time.

For example, there was no possibility of unity with it in England until the self-cleansing of 2006 when at long last Moscow appointed an Orthodox and not a renovationist bishop, the present Archbishop Elisey. It was one thing not to have an atheist government after 75 years, but it was another for the old Soviet-style reflexes to change and see the practical consequences of freedom in the Church hierarchy, with the deaths of the old school of Soviet appointees who did incalculable harm to the Church, rejecting the faithful and self-sacrificing and persecuting the zealous and God-loving.

There were so many appalling scandals from that time. ROCOR could never unite with such spiritual impurity which was working against the Church. Our hearts are still deeply wounded by what we went through at that time and we feel so sorry for those who died without repentance. Indeed, the real Orthodox inside the old Soviet-style Patriarchate, like Archbishop Anatoly in England, actually told us to have nothing to do with the Patriarchate until it was inwardly free. I can remember him saying that in 2003. And inward freedom only came to it in May 2006. It then took us in ROCOR one year to get ourselves ready for the inevitable.

Q: What about those elements in the Church inside Russia who are themselves still today modernist or otherwise sectarian?

A: There are a few rather absurd and very old-fashioned individuals on the fringes of the Church inside Russia, leftist dissident leftovers from the recent Soviet past, like Fr George Kochetkov (whom the modernists wanted to serve at the Patriarchal Cathedral in London), the hippyish and disgraced Deacon Andrei Kuraev or naïve admirers of the heretic Fr Sergiy Bulgakov and modernists and dreamers of the schools of Schmemann, Bloom and other strange émigré cults, or others who are simplistic, rightist Old Ritualist-type sectarians, but they are all irrelevant to the mainstream. In a Church of 164 million, you will inevitably find a few marginal types. In Russia they have no authority or role whatsoever and people generally mock them.

A few eccentric individuals hardly prevent us from our great task of resurrecting Christian Imperial Russia, which we are all engaged in together, inside and outside Russia, in total unity of purpose. Everywhere in Russia you will find icons of the Royal Family – that is key. we work very closely with all who venerate them because they are Churched Orthodox. If Christian Imperial Russia is resurrected, then the whole Orthodox world will be resurrected, and so we can protect all who have values and understand that the ultimate destiny of all humanity is in the life to come and not in primitive Darwinism and pagan Secularism. It is foolish to spend much time dwelling on such marginal individuals; we must not waste our time looking at eccentric, individual and irrelevant trees who are so easy to resist, we must speak with and move forward with the great and irresistible forest, ever onwards to what God is calling us to do. We are people of destiny.

Q: At the 2006 Diaspora Council in San Francisco at least one voice spoke with concern about the present Patriarch who was then a Metropolitan. Was that a reasonable concern?

A: Thee greatest miracle of God is that He changes people. Look at the apostles, Peter lied, the disciples fled from the Cross, Paul persecuted the Church. But they all repented – except for Judas who despaired and hanged himself. Repentance is always possible – only pharisees, like those who criticized Christ’s visit to Zacchaeus, do not understand that. I think that the Soviet-born Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad who twenty years ago opposed reconciliation with the Church Outside Russia was one person, our Patriarch Kyrill is another. And make no mistake, he is OUR Patriarch. He has been transfigured by the grace and international responsibility of becoming Patriarch and is now able to represent all Russian Orthodox all around the world, as no-one else. I have only met him twice, but I am convinced of this. He understands us and has a profound sense of the role of the restoration of Holy Rus, of the global mission of the Russian Orthodox Church and Her Tradition. This is a miracle.

On Non-Orthodox

Q: Can you explain in the simplest of terms and without mentioning the word filioque the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy?

A: Catholicism came into existence some 1,000 years ago, theologically and then immediately structurally. Although it preserved the Revelation of the Old Testament, that there is only One God, and the Revelation of the New Testament, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God become man, it failed to preserve the Revelation of the Church, that Christ is with us and we are with Him by the Holy Spirit. This happened when at the defining moment of its foundation Catholicism replaced the Holy Spirit with the Pope of Rome. In this way Catholicism replaced the authority of the Church, which is holiness, whose source is the Holy Spirit, with a mere man. Here is the difference between Catholicism, which is essentially a Trinitarian heresy, and the Church: The Pope or the Holy Spirit. As St Seraphim of Sarov, whose resurrection we now await, said: ‘The goal of Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit’. It is not to obey a man who lives in Rome.

Q: Do Catholicism and Protestantism have sacraments?

A: There are no sacraments outside the Church, however, there are sacramental forms. These have been preserved as a heritage, as vestiges from the past. In other words, outside the Church there are wine-glasses (however deformed and defective they may be) but they contain no wine. Thus, Catholicism has seven sacramental forms and classical Protestantism (the sort that baptizes by water in the Name of the Holy Trinity) has one – baptism. Thus, in receiving people from what I call ‘Frankish religion’ (Catholicism/Protestantism) into Christianity, the Church does not absolutely need to repeat the sacramental form (though She can if She considers it better to do so in the specific circumstances). What is vital is to communicate the wine, not the wine-glass. For example, Uniats have a wine-glass which is almost identical in form to the Orthodox wine-glass, but it still contains no wine.

Q: Are you saying then that Catholics and Protestants have no grace at all? That seems harsh.

A: No, I am not saying that at all. That is old calendarist ‘light-switch’ black and white ideology – one moment you have grace, the next you do not. The truth is much more subtle.

According to Orthodox Christian theology, the Holy Spirit can come to us in two different ways. Firstly, He comes to us through the Body of Christ, the Church. This only works if we are real Orthodox, that is, practising members of the Church, living limbs (and not withered or nominal branches) of the Body of Christ. If we are outside the Church, we can receive no grace in this way. Secondly, however, the Holy Spirit can come to us directly. This is what happened to the prophets of the Old Testament, who were also outside the Church, and this is also what happens to those outside the Church who receive the calling of God to join the Church, whether they were first-century Jews and Greeks, third-century Latins, sixth-century English, tenth-century Kievans, nineteenth-century Alaskans, Chinese and Japanese, or twenty-first century Western European Catholics and Protestants.

Q: Speaking on the subject of married priests, a French Catholic bishop recently said that the life of Orthodox priests is ‘infernal’ because they have to combine family life and parish life, and therefore he is against married priests. What would you say?

A: The life of an Orthodox priest is certainly difficult. But who said that it would be easy to get into Paradise? I find it amazing that a Catholic bishop would think that it is easy to get into Paradise! This is the same spirit that asks why we Orthodox stand at services, whereas they sit down in comfort. They have no concept of the ascetic. As for Catholic priests – and I know many of them in various European countries – many (usually the best ones) have a mistress and children, many others – and I have met them – are homosexuals and pedophiles. Recently I was speaking to a Polish taxi-driver in Colchester. He comes from Krakow, which is the Polish Canterbury. He told me that he had made his living there ferrying priests, monks and seminarians to brothels. When I was in Portugal 20 years ago, I visited the Portuguese Canterbury, a city called Braga. Local people called it the city of the two Ps – priests and prostitutes. Now that is what I call infernal. What infernal hypocrisy on the part of that Catholic bishop…Has he met the pedophile former Catholic Bishop of Glasgow?

Q: How would you describe the Church of England and the rest of the Anglican Communion?

A: Anglicanism is a Gothic shell, the shell of Catholicism, a kind of Protestant Uniatism, preserving an outward semblance, even a ritual imitation of a sort of Catholicism, but devoid of even Catholic content. The Church of England is State-founded and State-run, founded by a mass murderer and destroyer of monastic life, an English Lenin, who like him also died of syphilis. The Head of the real Church is no such murderous blasphemer, but Christ the Son of God.

Q: Do you think that the Church of England will one day have a female Archbishop of Canterbury?

A: It would be thoroughly logical. Since any secular institution can be headed by a man or a woman, why should the Church of England be any different? As a matter of fact it was a woman, Elizabeth I, who composed the doctrines of the Church of England and it is a woman, Elizabeth II, who heads it at present. Only misogynists can be against female heads of secular organizations.

Q: Do you think the Church of England will eventually introduce homosexual marriage?

A: It is highly likely. It always takes orders from the British Establishment, whether on its doctrines, the EU, fox-hunting or buggery, which is so widespread in that public-school Establishment. The Church of England has always followed the government of the day, ignoring the truism that the American writer Mark Twain expressed: ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it’.

Q: Can those of what you call ‘Frankish religion’ help us in combating secularism, abortion, euthanasia etc?

A: Individually definitely, but sadly the institutions that such virtuous individuals belong to are actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. More and more of them are realizing this. For instance, I was talking to a group of anti-abortion Catholics last year and I saw that they were horrified by their own episcopate, whom they completely distrusted.

Q: Are any of the Orthodox jurisdictions in England close to the Church of England?

A: Virtually all the 300 or so English members of the Antiochian jurisdiction in this country are former clergy and laypeople of the Establishment Church of England. Many seem to be profoundly Anglican, using the Anglican calendar, church-buildings and vestments, so I am not sure why they made the change. They seem to be dedicated to converting other Establishment Anglicans to themselves, ordaining men within days of their reception into the Church in order to do so. This policy of Anglicans only seems very narrow to me, as it repels the vast majority. This is not the way of the Church – our mission is to the people, to the masses, to the whole country, to the 99% of people in England who have never had any real link with the Church of England.

Thus, I know of one ex-Anglican Antiochian priest who has banned the use of any language other than English in his chapel and sends away Romanians telling them that he has no time for them, yet spends hours with prospective Anglican converts, whom he receives very quickly and then very soon lapse. He rejects reality. The clergy are here to serve the people of God, not ourselves, not our personal fantasies. This is just Anglican clericalism. Another wealthy ex-Anglican (in another jurisdiction, it must be said) told me that he liked ‘small churches’ with select groups of English people only and did not want any ‘foreigners’ in his church. This is typical of Establishment racism, regardless of jurisdiction.

Q: But surely the mere existence of the Antiochian jurisdiction in the UK is because of Greek and Russian racism? The Anglicans in question asked to join both the Greek and Russian Churches first and were refused on racial grounds, so the Anglicans got into the Orthodox house ‘by the back window’, that is, through a special arrangement with Antioch.

A: I absolutely agree that the then Soviet-enslaved Moscow Patriarchate and the Church of Constantinople refused them, the latter because of racism and both because they were not politically free to receive them because of their ecumenist compromises. However, the Anglicans in question made one huge mistake on account of their Establishment mentality – they came with their own agenda and list of demands. In this way they refused the Cross, that is, they refused to ask to join ROCOR, the free Russian Church which had and has no ecumenist compromises. We would have received all sincere Anglicans happily, only we would have made sure that they became Orthodox first and would have trained their future clergy how to celebrate etc.

It is no good joining the Orthodox Church without first becoming Orthodox. Otherwise it is just the religion of the Establishment, Anglicanism, or Anglo-Catholicism, with icons. All Churched Orthodox reject that; we know in our guts that it is wrong. What has happened since their refusal to come to ROCOR is that the ex-Anglicans in question have become marginal, finding themselves on an isolated wing of the Church, outside the Orthodox mainstream. So much has been wasted in this way. Similarly Establishment Anglicans who joined the Church of Constantinople have had to undergo Hellenization, having to take on hyper-Greek names like Kallistos, Pankratios, Aristovoulos, Panteleimon etc., whereas the Greek clergy themselves anglicize their names and are called John, Gregory, Peter, Paul etc!

On the Contemporary Western World and the End of the World

Q: What would you say of the present spiritual state of Western Europe in general?

A: Western European countries are increasingly and paradoxically typified by Secularism on the one hand and Islamism on the other hand. For example, the name Mohammed in its various spellings last year became the most common boy’s name in London and there is a wave of mosque-building throughout Western Europe. However, at the same time the secularists who control Western governments and media are completely indifferent to the tens of thousands of Christian victims of Islamist fanaticism throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa and the tens of thousands of Christian victims of the Nazi junta in Kiev. Why? Because those being killed ‘are not Charlie’, in other words, not anti-Christian secularists like themselves. And who will say at the end of time: ‘Je suis Charlie’? It is Antichrist.
So in the West we have the perfect combination of Secularism and Islamism.

Q: Are there not aspects of Islam that we can appreciate?

A: Moderate or Traditional Islam, as opposed to Islamism, condemns violence and keeps certain universal practices like other traditional religions. Thus, Muslim women dress modestly, for instance, wearing a head covering, a universal practice except in the post-1914 secular West.

Q: More and more Western countries allow euthanasia. What do you think of this?

A: In his short story ‘The Veiled Lodger’, written over 100 years ago, a secular writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said: ‘If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest…The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world’. In other words, euthanasia, like any other form of suicide, is the result of an ideology that does not believe in the immortality of the soul and in life after death. All belief rejects euthanasia, but where there is no belief, there is suicide. In this sense euthanasia is symbolic of today’s Western world as a whole – as a suicidal world.

Q: What do you think of the experiment with the Large Hadron Collider on the French and Swiss borders? Some people say that it could lead to a catastrophe.

A: I am not a scientist and am simply not qualified to have an opinion and say whether it will lead to a catastrophe or whether it is perfectly safe. However, since it a vast and vastly expensive experiment concerning the nature of matter, I think we can say that it does represent the Western obsession with the material world as opposed to the spiritual world. In general, I am suspicious of such large experiments and operations. As someone said centuries ago: ‘The chief proof of man’s greatness lies in his perception of his smallness’. And as has been said more recently, ‘Small is Beautiful’. In other words, this is all a question of humility. But I am not able to say any more than that.

Q: How should we vote in the forthcoming elections in the UK?

A: Pray and then vote according to your conscience, voting for whomever you consider to be the lesser evil.

Q: Is there a change you would like to see in Great Britain?

A: I would like to see the concept of ‘Britain’ rejected once and for all. It would mean freedom for all of us from tyrannical ‘Britain’ and its Norman Establishment. As a dream, I would like to see four independent but friendly and co-operating nations, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Their representatives would gather in a round building, a ‘Council of the Isles’, on a high point on the Isle of Man, from where alone the four countries in question are all visible.

Q: Where is the Western world going?

A: The USA controls the Western countries through their elites which have been installed by US PR companies as feudal vassals. All that the Western elites do is in imitation of the USA, its clothes, its food, its television series, its media. Here are four recent statistics about the sex and violence of the USA, which God-fearing Americans know and for which they detest the White House:

85% of the world’s pornography comes from the USA.

Every day 24 former GIs who served in Iraq and Afghanistan commit suicide.

In March 2015 the American police killed twice as many people than the British police have killed since 1900.

In a recent global poll representatives from all the countries of the world, except for the USA, UK and France, declared that Public Enemy No 1 is the USA.

Should not such statistics make us think? It seems to me that either the Western world, especially the USA, is on the point of some great disaster, a hurricane, a tornado, a volcano, an earthquake, a tidal wave, or else it is on the point of repentance, of realizing its foolishness and turning back. It can go either way, but it cannot continue with impunity as now. It is not possible. Our actions always have consequences. It is called responsibility.

Q: Is Antichrist coming soon?

A: Nobody knows if he has even been born, let alone if he is coming to power. However there are clear signs that his coming is being PREPARED. Notably, there are these four signs: worldwide sodomy imposed by Washington and willingly promoted by the Western European elite; the genocide and expulsion of all Christians from of the Middle East; the war between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims, actively encouraged and financed by Zionism; the invasion of the western marches of Rus by the forces of Satan and their occupation of Kiev, the Mother of Russian Cities.

As yet, however, the Temple has not been rebuilt on Zion and, in general, we should not despair and certainly not fall into fatalism. I think that the coming of Antichrist has been delayed many times in history, not least last year, when the Ukrainian people rose up and fought the Satanic forces that the White House has put into power in Kiev. Despite the American threat of nuclear war, Russia did not rise to the bait and sweep away the junta within a fortnight, as it could have. That would have led to the end of the world with nuclear war started by the Nazi neocons in Washington and their paid allies: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Condoleeza Rice, Tony Blair, Carl Bildt and all those other satanists who have spoken directly of destroying the Church of God. As long as we fight and resist Satan, Antichrist cannot come. It all depends on us.

Q: ‘It all depends on us’. But what can we do?

A: At present we are resisting and fighting. There is no time to lose. Together all Orthodox who have an understanding of Orthodoxy have to work together. The visit of the new Greek Prime Minister to President Putin is a great sign of hope. President Putin gave the Greek leader, who says he is an atheist but in fact is just spiritually inexperienced, an icon which had been stolen by the Nazis from Greece. This was highly symbolic. The soul of Greece has indeed been stolen by the West. Now is the time of restoration. This is a personal message to the young Greek leader, but also a message to the whole Greek people. Restore your soul and give up on Nazism, both the old form and the new neocon form of the US/EU.

It is the same in Romania and Bulgaria. Satan is now trying to steal the souls of the Ukraine, Serbia, Moldova, Georgia – everywhere the same processes. Even in Western Europe there are those of us who are also fighting – for the liberation of the Western Lands from the West, for the ‘de-Europeanization of Europe’ and the restoration of Orthodoxy here too. Together, as conscious Orthodox, as the Army of Christ, we can conquer the Satanic spirit of Mammon and its sinister and idolatrous forces.

When asked how Russia could defeat the far superior American armed forces (each year the USA spends eleven times more on arms than Russia), over twenty years ago now the great and newly-revealed St Paisios the Athonite replied: ‘The Russians will win because the angels will help them’. We see such huge solidarity between all the conscious Orthodox peoples, from Damascus to Nicosia, from Belgrade to Kiev, from Bucharest to Sofia, from Athens to Moscow.

The time will come when Constantinople will be freed. And make no mistake Constantinople will not be freed so much from the Turks as from the Americans. But first there will be a Tsar in Russia for all Orthodox and he will call a real and free Council of all the Orthodox, not a diplomatic nicety. And that Council will not waste time talking about the US-imposed secularist agenda of human rights, racial discrimination and gender equality, it will thunder out the truths of the Church, about the Nation and the Family, which the Western world has deliberately forgotten in the cold and dark tomb, where Satan has buried its soul.

And then there will be a new generation of bishops in Constantinople, not appointees of the US State Department, but taken from the monks of Mt Athos, who, never forget it, are in the jurisdiction of Constantinople and who so eagerly support and pray for the Risen Russia. The old decadence will be gone and those pseudo-bishops who parrot the politically correct doctrines taught them by the Zionist CIA, visit synagogues and change the services will be gone. Great difficulties, but also great days, lie ahead for us all. The time will come, as St John of Shanghai prophesied, when you will hear ‘Christ is Risen’ shouted all through the Orthodox world, with an intensity and faith and conviction and unity that you have never heard before.

On Easter Night, after the Gospels at the Liturgy, I heard an insistent voice in my head speaking in Russian. It said: ‘Budet Tsar v Rossii’ – ‘There will be a Tsar in Russia’. Do not ask me how or when or who. That was the voice. I wonder if others heard the same voice?

Christ is Risen!

How Will Russia Rise from the Dead?

Lazarus, come forth!

(Jn. 11, 43)

Unlike several American Presidents who were actually heads of the huge CIA spy and torture agency just outside Washington, President Putin used to be a mere low-ranking KGB official in provincial East Germany. However, when he lived there he witnessed the collapse of the Eastern bloc, which Stalin had constructed in order to protect the Soviet Union from any further Western aggression. And then he witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union itself and realized that the Soviet Union had failed not just Russia but also many countries around the world. Since nobody would ever want to recreate a failure, what could his real, and not imagined, present intentions and future hopes for the Russian Federation be? In order to answer this question, we first have to understand why the Soviet Union collapsed.

The Soviet Union intended to bring ‘a bright future’, Paradise, to the whole earth. In other words, through it the Third International was to replace the Third Rome and bring the Kingdom of God to the whole earth without and against God, to be Christian without and against Christ and His Church. Once we understand this internal contradiction, we understand why the Soviet Union could not help collapsing. Any understanding this may be tempted to think that therefore it is time to restore the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire. However, this too is illogical, for the Russian Empire, the Third Rome, also failed, being unable to prevent the Revolution, and if it is restored, then there will simply be another Revolution. So we come to a second question: Why did pre-Revolutionary Russia collapse? Here is our answer:

Fr George Sheremetiev was a fine and noble ROCOR priest in London who died in 1973. He used to show an album of photos of the estate owned by his aristocratic family, one of the richest in Russia, an estate which has since become Shermetievo Airport. At the Revolution Fr George lost everything and left Russia with a single suitcase and lived in poverty. He used to say that if he lived in poverty, it was his repentance for the fact that the Tsar’s Russia had fallen because of the corruption and treason of the majority of his aristocratic class which had fallen away from the Orthodox Church. In other words, the Third Rome fell because it was not supported by the Faith of the Second Jerusalem. Once we understand this internal contradiction, we understand why pre-Revolutionary Russia could not help collapsing.

As nobody would ever want to recreate two failures, then what could the hopes and intentions of the President of the Russian Federation be? Since his government rules over what is the essential space of both the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union, it must be to create a country which has the weaknesses of neither. On the one hand, it cannot live with a treasonous upper class which has no loyalty to Russian Tradition and because of whose wealth there is social injustice. On the other hand, it cannot attempt to spread Christianity worldwide without Christ, for a Garden of Eden where God does not walk is the place of the fall of Adam and Eve. It is only on this basis that the Russian Federation and the countries and people who voluntarily ally themselves with Her will rise from the dead.