The Prime Minister of France, Manuel Valls, has asserted that the revolting terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic State amount to a ‘War of Civilizations’. He is of course wrong. A war between fanatical Islamist terrorists who carry out appalling atrocities in the name of Islam and a Sodomite West which is committing suicide in a frenzy of abortion, euthanasia, gun crime, obesity, depression, mental illness, indebtedness, bombing of and genocide in innocent countries (so-called Western values) is not a war of Civilizations. It is a war of Anti-Civilizations. McWorld or Jihad? Neither, thank you. I choose Christ every time.
Monthly Archives: June 2015
Outrage
The end of the (Roman Catholic) Church will come through its corruption from within by the Jewish and pagan avarice that reigns in the very Kingdom of Christ that makes Rome a second Babylon.
Gerhoh von Reichersberg (1093-1169), the prominent Roman Catholic scholastic
The latest appalling Muslim terrorist outrages in three different countries have shocked. However, the fact is that worse happens every single day in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Yemen etc, where it is not uncommon for the fanatics to bomb babies and crucify Christians. And that goes largely unreported in the Sodom and Gomorrah of the hedonistic and immoral West.
Now, when the Nazis occupied Serbia in the Second World War and one of their soldiers was killed by Serbian resistance fighters, they applied a tariff. For every German killed, 100 Serbs were killed. And this appears to be the tariff of the Western media – every Westerner killed is equivalent to 100 Non-Westerners, no matter whether they are Arabs, Burmese, Nigerians or Ukrainians. Of course, if they are Christians, they are even less important. Christians are despised by the propaganda outlets of the Western media and their pagan Western leaders.
Islamic terrorism began when the colony of Israel was set up in Palestine, through the bribery and blackmail of Zionist bankers. Al-Qaida was set up by the neocon CIA, which trained Bin Laden. Islamic State is also a US/Zionist creation: divide the Muslims between pro-Western (Sunni) and anti-Western (Shia) and arming Sunni terrorists (Saudis, Qataris etc). What is the Western (and Zionist) disease that lies behind such slaughter?
It is that of profit, of Mammon, the old Syrian word for riches. It is this obsession with profit that lies behind idolatrous, neo-pagan Western materialism, whether Marxist or Capitalist. It is this obsession with profit that means that tens of millions of poor people from Asia and Africa, refugees from starvation and exploitation, have been forced to immigrate into Western Europe ever since the Second World War to work in its low-paid jobs, undermining the cultural identities of Western, and increasingly Eastern, European countries and leading to their mosque-ization.
In France there is now a debate about whether it is permissible to use abandoned Roman Catholic churches (all Catholic churches there were stolen by the tyrannical French State over 100 years ago and belong to the secular authorities) as mosques. Most French people are against them becoming mosques. But is this because they prefer to see them used as nightclubs? The fact is that Western people are responsible for their own decadence. If they practised Christianity, if they used their churches, none of this would ever have happened.
The contemporary crisis of the Western world is not about the breakdown of traditional Church culture, but about the breakdown of the secular culture which has tried to take its place. The demonic powers which have entered the empty house of secularism cannot be exorcized by the politician and the economist; the Church is the only power that can defeat the powers of destruction. But the various Western denominations, once Christian, are all but dead in Europe.
A Czech journalist, Ladislav Kashuka (1), has just written that Western people will one day have to find refuge in Non-EU Russia, ‘fleeing before the Muslim fanatics on their streets as they burn and destroy the Western cultural heritage’. Only Russia is still free from the Western elite, all the more so since the West declared war on it through the Ukraine. Thus, all intelligent and honest Russians have finally seen through the Western delusion, giving President Putin 89% of popularity. In other words, said the journalist, Western Europe’s nightmare future is already being lived out by Christians in Iraq and Syria today. There today; here tomorrow.
For this journalist the massive movements of migration, as from the chaos and violence in Libya, caused by the French and UK bombing of the country and their permission for its leader, once their feted friend, to be massacred by a mob, are pre-planned; the Western elite ‘wants to cause chaos in order to impose its totalitarian rule’ all the more easily. Only Russia, as we can see with the case of Edward Snowden, is strong enough to protect freedom and also big enough to accept and settle the millions of last Western Christians as refugees, who will be able to receive baptism only in Russia. There we would see established a European Orthodox Church Outside Europe (EOCOE).
None of this is new; it is all in the eighty-year old prophecies of St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1948).
Note:
1. http://fr.sputniknews.com/opinion/20150619/1016617974.html#ixzz3eFdNFKUI
The House of Romanov is Invited to Return to Russia
http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/80203.htm
The Fall of the American Empire
All empires have risen and fallen, whether in Persia, Egypt, India, China, Japan, South and Central America, Africa or Europe. They rise when they have a creative power to give to the world and they fall when they stop giving and become negative and destructive. This explains why some last long, but others fall very quickly. History confirms this; thus the Western Roman Empire, for all its pagan cruelty, lasted for centuries because it had a civilization and a culture, not just great walls and roads, towns and cities, but poetry and art, sculpture and painting. Why did it fall? Because it became decadent (a word that means falling, but in a moral sense), in other words, because it lost its way, lost its civilizing force for good.
European Empires, like the French and the British, lasted, arguably, for some six generations. But they too fell. The British Empire justified itself for a time by bringing the Word of God to a great many peoples; but it fell because its very elite came to reject that selfsame Word of God and instead lived for greed. The Eastern Roman Empire, heir to Old Rome, also fell, though after over a millennium, in 1453. Why? Because it became prey to Greek nationalism and alienated peoples of other languages and cultures around it, limiting the Gospel on which it was based, to a narrow ethnic understanding. So that Empire was transferred to Russia. However, the Russian Empire also fell after some 300 years. Why? Because its elite stopped believing in its underlying principles and betrayed them and also betrayed their Emperor.
Today the world is dominated by the American Empire. Sixty years ago or so many thought very highly of it. It seemed to be philanthropic, a model. Sacks of rice, marked ‘A gift from the USA’ saved thousands of lives. America was the dream because it held to the Good Book, to Biblical and family values, to common human ideals and was enormously generous. Today its flag is spat upon and burned around the world. Opinion polls declare that most of the world’s people see the USA as the greatest threat to world peace. Its President – an African-Asian-European, whose religion is unknown, if he is any at all – has appointed a commissar to impose sodomy on the whole world. Resistance means that the sacks of rice will be stopped; though there are those who have already stopped taking the sacks of rice because they say that they are genetically poisoned.
When did it all go wrong? When did it become pagan? The popular American singer, Don McLean, said that ‘the American pie’ all went wrong ‘the day the music died’, in 1959. Others point to the Kennedy assassination, others point to the Vietnam War; others point to the massive debts that began when President Reagan and his neocon backers decided to win the Cold War by bankrupting his own country; others would go back much further in time. We do not know when it all went wrong, we only know that it has all gone wrong; that, after scarcely three generations since 1945 we are witnessing the fall of the American Empire which is ending in the same unprincipled moral and pagan decadence as Rome. It has lost faith in the underpinning Good Book and chosen Mammon instead of God.
Some empires lasted only for a short time. Thus, that of Alexander the Great ended swiftly because his empire soon became a force for destruction, an end to civilization, a military obsession. Napoleon’s empire lasted scarcely for a generation; his military obsession that killed two million Europeans and saw him stabling his horses in the Cathedrals of Holy Russia also soon came to an end. He had nothing to give except atheism and bloodshed. In other words, empires last only for as long as they are carriers of a great, ennobling and inspiring idea, and the civilization and culture based on that idea. And they always end in atheistic cynicism and black despair (called ‘post-modern irony’) at the loss of that idea and that end is always in spiritual and moral bankruptcy. Let America tremble and be warned. There are many good, ordinary Americans; if they can defeat the Satanic powers that have seized the high places in their country, they can still redeem their land and so help save the world.
Thought-Provoking News
23 June 2015
It has just been announced that the former UK Prime Minister Blair, who was fleeing to North Korea, has been arrested in Rwanda on behalf of the Iraqi government for genocide and war crimes. He faces trial in Baghdad at the International War Crimes Tribunal (IWCT), together with other Western leaders for whom arrest warrants were issued last month by various African, Asian and Eastern European countries. However, there appears to be a dispute between Rwanda and Serbia, which also wishes to extradite Blair and institute proceedings against him for war crimes there. Blair’s Swiss bank account has already been frozen.
Greece says that it is now exasperated with the debt-ridden EU, an organization so corrupt that its accounts have never been audited. Last year alone nearly 150 billion euros ‘disappeared’. The debts of countries like France and the UK are now well over 2 trillion euros, similar to the per capita debt of Greece. The Greek government states that it is ‘fed up’ with sums of money owed to the Greek government being transferred from one German bank account to another. For this reason, said a spokesman, Greece ‘is leaving the EU and joining the EEU’ (Eurasian Economic Union). He called this a move for freedom and added that Greece no longer wished to be ‘a park for illegal Muslim immigrants to the EU and a dumping ground for drunken British yobs’.
The young Greek Prime Minister, smiling broadly, said that this was a great day for Greece as the Greek people had at last put their national sovereignty and patriotic duty above EU bribes and intimidation. ‘Some values are higher than money’ he commented. He added that it would be hard to change but that the humility earned would help the national character. The Greek Orthodox Church has said that now it is at last free from Western diktat, it would return to the Orthodox calendar after nearly 100 years of tyranny. Referring to the change from the EU to the EEU, the Prime Minister said that Greece had ‘not so much gained an ‘E’ as regained its national dignity’. We have had reports from Cyprus that it is to follow Greece and also expel British occupying forces from their base there. Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary are all said to have been examining the situation closely ever since Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro joined the EEU last month, and may also follow Greece.
In Miami the Fascist junta of President Luis Gomez (real name Aaron Goldberg) who was installed there last year by the Cuban government, has said that English would soon be banned in Florida. Anyone who spoke English would be denounced and sent to concentration camps ‘to be reformed’. The multi-billionaire President Gomez, dubbed ‘the candy king’ by the Cuban PR company which got him elected with nearly 25% of the vote last year, actually made his money from selling the arms of the Florida military to Colombian drug-smugglers.
Texas, which was annexed by Florida in 1954, has now returned to the USA after a democratic referendum, in which 97% of Texans voted to rejoin the USA. The Miami junta says that it refuses to recognize the result. All Latin American countries are now enforcing sanctions against the USA as they accuse it of ‘annexing Texas’.
Meanwhile in the Florida panhandle where what Miami calls ‘separatist rebels’ are fighting to rejoin the USA, from which they were separated in 1922 by a Cuban decree, the civil war has calmed. In the last 24 hours a mere 26 violations of the Ottawa accords by the Cuban-armed Miama junta have been recorded by the rebel government. The junta has accused the USA of invading Florida 37 times so far, although not a single US soldier has been spotted there. Israeli intelligence has stated that there are 50,000 dead so far in the civil war and has registered mass torture by the junta as well as their rocket attacks on schools, churches and hospitals.
In Mexico where hysteria whipped up by the government has reached fever pitch, fear of a US invasion has reached a new high. Cuba has threatened to install nuclear missiles along the US-Mexico border and will target Washington and New York. A senior government figure in Havana has said that the US border is ‘far too close to Mexico’ and added that the threat to peace posed by ‘gringo imperialism’ is the greatest since the US ‘stole New Mexico in the 19th century’. He added that that the US President is ‘clearly mentally ill’, as could be seen by photographs of him.
Following the illegal Latin American sanctions against the US, the dollar has halved in value. The boycott of jeans, Coca Cola and all Hollywood productions is causing concern to the US economy. The US has accused Havana of supplying arms to Florida. However, Havana has reiterated that it has only ever supplied ‘non-lethal arms’ and military advisors to the Miami regime. In Havana Senator Meccano has renewed his call for Cuba to ‘give nukes’ to the Miami junta, which is made up of Cuban gangsters. Only thus, said the Senator, ‘can Florida protect itself from US aggression’. Speaking from his retirement home, a friend of Senator Meccano, a retired Cuban general called Gonzalez, has called for the USA ‘to be nuked’.
Yesterday the ninety-year old Archbishop Lucifer, the head of the ‘National Catholic Church of Florida’ (NCCF), who was defrocked by the Roman Catholic Church nearly 25 years ago for having a wife and two children and for conniving to become Pope, visited Havana. He declared that Havana must supply weapons of mass destruction to Florida so that it can ‘kill every Yankee in the world’. He said he would not rest ‘until the Rio Grande ran red with the blood of the gringos’. Swastika-emblazoned thugs of the NCCF have been occupying Roman Catholic churches, beating up priests, ransacking church property and destroying cemeteries. Little wonder that locally in Texas Archbishop Lucifer is called ‘Cardinal Satan’.
English speakers in Florida (80% of the population) are cowed and intimidated and fear denunciations for speaking English. Over a million have already fled to Texas. Last night in Miami another statue of President Kennedy was pulled down by Havana-paid rioters after a junta building had been daubed with the slogan ‘Remember the Alamo’. In Brussels EU gerontocrats say that they ‘are going to monitor the situation and follow all their strict moral principles in full providing that they do not offend Cuba’.
(With apologies to Cuba)
An Athonite Monk in Paris
There are idealists who have not read the works of Orthodox authors (like the writings of Metr Antony Khrapovitsky) or are too young to have talked with those who were adults in pre-Revolutionary Russia and also do not know contemporary Russia. They often think that all was well in the Russian Church before the Revolution. This is wrong. Apart from a huge number of saints, sadly, the negative phenomena of spiritual impurity also came out of the Russian Church after the Revolution.
Firstly, there was the treachery that betrayed the Tsar (the same spirit that had rejected the restoration of the Patriarchate which Tsar Nicholas II had proposed in 1905) and greeted the new, anti-Church government of Kerensky. Secondly, there was the servile Protestant State-Churchism or erastianism that Peter I had imposed 200 years earlier, so that when the new Soviet atheist government put the Church under its control after 1917, it found some in the Church who were weak enough to obey. This servility was given the name sergianism. Thirdly, there was renovationism, a movement of intellectuals who wanted to protestantize the Church, imagining that the stones of their dry rationalism and intellectualism could feed the souls of pious Orthodox, hungry for spiritual bread. This caused a terrible schism inside Russia and a terrible schism outside Russia, where modernizers, freemasons and occultists, mainly from Saint Petersburg, detested the Russian Church so much that they left it for the Western-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople.
None of the above is imagined. These three vices were exactly those which Tsar Nicholas referred to after his overthrow, when he spoke of ‘all around treachery, cowardice and deceit’. For the first group showed treachery, the second group, sergianists, showed cowardice and the third group, renovationists, calling themselves Orthodox when they were inwardly not, showed deceit, indeed, self-deceit. Each of the three groups represented unfaithfulness to each of the three foundation stones of the Orthodox Empire: Orthodoxy, Sovereign Independence and the People. The first were traitors to Orthodoxy, the second were cowards with regard to the Sovereign Independence of Church and State, the third deceived the People. As a result the Orthodox Empire fell, just as the Tsar described.
In history the three groups were represented by three separate groups in the Russian Church. The first group, some actually calling themselves ‘monarchists’, assassinated Rasputin and claimed to be ‘White’, but in fact they had little time for the real Church or the real Tsar or the real People, rather they played right-wing politics, wanted money and power and used the Church, the Tsar and the People as flags to conceal their real motives. Without the noble cause of the Tsar, they lost the war against Bolshevism and had to emigrate. These are exemplified by the nationalist and nominal Orthodox on the fringes of the Church of the Diaspora who later put the great saint of the emigration, St John of Shanghai, on trial and persecuted him.
The second group are those inside Russia who did not have the courage of the New Martyrs and Confessors and were not faithful to the Sovereign Independence (of the Tsar or of the Church), outwardly enslaving the latter to the atheist State. The third group, defeated inside Russia, are those who deceived the simple Orthodox people, turning their backs on the Russian Church entirely, though claiming to be of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, they were protestantizing philosophers and freemasons. Their centre was in Paris where they formed ‘the Paris Jurisdiction’ and from where they tried to colonize New York, where now they have lost many of their positions as reality dawns and fantasy fails.
The first two groups have shed the spiritual impurity of the past and are joined together as one. Now we await the repentance of the third and smallest group in Paris, whose doctrinal and practical eccentricities are immediately apparent to all but themselves and some of whom are still justifying themselves. Unlike his four predecessors, all of them well known to me, an outsider, a new Archpastor of the Paris Jurisdiction, Archbishop Job, also an outsider, has had the opportunity and the courage to confront the renovationists. He wants to restore Orthodoxy there, stopping the renovationist persecution of the faithful of whom so many have been forced to leave his ever smaller jurisdiction, a persecution that began in earnest in the 1980s and has lasted off and on for well over thirty years.
Now the St Sergius Institute has closed, ninety years after its foundation. Ironically, the Institute was the very reason why in 1925 the Paris group first fell into schism and quit the Church Outside Russia, soon after that leaving the Russian Church altogether. Its first dean, Fr Sergius Bulgakov, turned out to be a heresiarch, his fantastic theories condemned by the whole Russian Church. Now 90 years on it has fallen into schism even with its own Archbishop!
It is our impression that Archbishop Job realizes that if his tiny jurisdiction has a destiny, indeed if it has any future at all, then it must return to the canonicity after over thirty years of drifting away from the Russian Orthodox Tradition altogether. The Russian Church is preparing to establish a Metropolia in Western Europe, the foundation of a future new Local Church, far bigger than the small and increasingly irrelevant Paris group and with a large number of bishops, clergy, people and real churches. It is time for the fantasies of the isolated Paris group to cease and time for them to come back to earth. The Paris Jurisdiction is now like a huddle of castaways on a desert island, not sure whether to join the last boat that is leaving or to remain stranded in self-imposed isolation.
Of course, the Archbishop, an Athonite monk attached to a dependency of Simonopetra, is facing slander and intimidation from French nationalism (the oldest trick of the Parisians against outsiders), and the accusation that he is stopping ‘free thought’ and ‘creativity’ in the atheist Republic. In fact, he is supported by a great many who see through all the absurd accusations. Our task now, as before, is to pray for him in his task of restoring the Paris Jurisdiction to the mainstream of canonical Orthodoxy and the authentic Russian Tradition. Otherwise it will simply disappear and be forgotten, like other fringe phenomena of Church history and become a mere archaeological curiosity.
From Recent Correspondence (June 2015)
Q: From the Church point of view, what do you find newsworthy this month?
A: What a difficult question! There has been so much and the month has not ended yet. There has been the declaration by the Pope of Rome that he may consider returning in repentance to the Church Easter (true, his declaration was very vague and there are other, less repentant interpretations), his meeting with President Putin (despite violent US opposition) and the Pope’s approval of the Russian struggle against the anti-Christian European elite. There has also been the tragic EU-manipulated Synod of the Church of Serbia. And then there has been the inevitable closure of the St Sergius Institute in Paris at long last – over 30 years in the making – after its Archbishop asked it to return to Orthodoxy and it refused.
Politically, there has been the G7 meeting in Hitler’s villa outside Munich and the realization that the G7 is now a rather irrelevant US-led Western ghetto, a little huddle with their backs to the wall, unable ever to pay off their own debts, all the more irrelevant since India has now signed a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union. Then there is the Greek debt crisis (Greece’s debt is only about half of US debt per capita) and the possibility that Greece will at last free itself from EU slavery, after so naively and foolishly joining it thirty years ago. Perhaps economic pain is what Greece needs to lead its people to repentance, just as atheist oppression led Russians to repentance.
However, although it is a very minor event internationally, I would like to mention the transfer of the dismissed Metropolitan Jonah of the group known as ‘The Orthodox Church in America’ (OCA) to the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Even ten years ago, let alone thirty years ago, such a move would have been unthinkable, even impossible. The only similar event was in 1976 when Metr Antony (Bloom) requested a transfer to ROCOR. (Ironically, that was at the same time as Metr Antony (Bloom) had himself so wrongly refused to receive the then Fr Kallistos (Ware) into the Russian Church from Constantinople.) Metr Antony’s request was quite rightly refused by Metr Philaret for very good canonical reasons. However, in this very different case Metropolitan Jonah has been accepted by the ROCOR Synod in his retired status.
Q: Could this be the beginning of a movement towards ROCOR?
A: Not necessarily, I think it is a personal choice, but it is still symptomatic of a movement of repentance. The OCA is canonically adrift. Where is it going? What is its identity? What is its future? It is a fragment of the Russian Church adrift for the understandable historical reasons of former Uniatism and for political reasons. It used to be a hotbed of modernism. But today if you look at the most solid parts of the OCA, in Alaska, in Canada and in Pennsylvania around St Tikhon’s, it is clear that it is part of the Russian Church, but, for historical reasons, it is not yet part of the canonical and universally recognized Church Outside Russia. And yet that is clearly what the majority of the OCA is, part of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. I think this event marks the beginning of healing for the OCA.
Q: Surely part of the original problem was ROCOR itself?
A: There was once a problem with politically-minded, nationalistic individuals in ROCOR, but that is in the past. We have moved on and that generation has left or else died out. Today we are in a completely different situation. Indeed, the last two Metropolitans of ROCOR have been Non-Russian, one a Carpatho-Russian Slovak, the present one a Canadian of Ukrainian origin. This means an opening to the whole multinational Russian Orthodox world outside the Russian Lands. ROCOR is moving towards our ultimate aim, to our universal mission, to prepare the path, as St John the Baptist of old.
Q: You ask questions about the identity and future of the OCA, but surely the same questions can be asked of ROCOR?
A: I disagree with you. Our identity is clear, it is in our name. We are that part of the Russian Orthodox Church that is Outside Russia, that is, outside the Russian Lands. On the one hand we have to be absolutely faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and its Tradition, on the other hand, we have to express ourselves in the language of the country where we live and through the culture of that country, as seen through Russian Orthodox eyes. That is our missionary witness. And that is our future.
Q: Is that not what the OCA has done?
A: The best of it yes, but sadly some in it have lost, or never even had, the Tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church. For example, only a quarter of the OCA parishes keep the Church calendar, others in it have misunderstood and imagined that just because they live in another country and culture, they can therefore compromise our Faith. Instead of looking at the world through Russian Orthodox eyes, they tend to see Russian Orthodoxy through the eyes of the world. That is very clearly the path of apostasy.
Q: You mention the Synod of the Serbian Church. What is the problem?
A: The problem is the new persecution of the Serbian Church. It is worse than the Communist persecution. The episcopate of the Serbian Church is being herded like a flock of intimidated sheep into a corner, threatened by the EU wolf, behind which stand the USA and the new threat of NATO bombing, uranium-tipped shells and even nuclear war. And do not judge, until you have faced persecution yourself.
Q: Why do Serbs not stand up to defend their Church?
A: Because there are too many ‘Serbian Orthodox’, but not enough Orthodox Serbs.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: I mean that any country only has value inasmuch as it is Orthodox or has values which are accepting of Orthodoxy. As Dostoyevsky said: ‘A Russian without Orthodoxy is rubbish’. That is the same for every country in the world. When I read of drunken British yobs on a stag night in Prague, do I think that they are English? Of course not. Sadly, the same disease is affecting every country in the world. It is the disease of apostasy. And nominal Orthodoxy is not enough to resist that disease.
Q: What has happened to the St Sergius Institute in Paris?
A: It has closed. A lot of money has disappeared. Archbishop Job is trying to restore Orthodoxy there after thirty years of weak bishops who allowed anarchy by promoting the anarchists. It may never re-open. It is another nail in the coffin of the Paris Exarchate.
Q: What is the situation in the Ukraine?
A: The civil war goes on as the puppet junta in Kiev kills the Ukrainian people. The US State Department is now bribing the Patriarchate of Constantinople to involve itself in schismatic groups in the Ukraine, thus compromising next year’s potential Council. But we have hope that by next year the war will all be over and the Ukraine will be free again. Sadly, however, I do not see any sign of repentance on the part of the US and the EU which, as one British politician rightly said, has blood on its hands in the Ukraine.
Q: And in Syria?
A: There too the war goes on, financed by fanatics in Western-backed Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have created millions of refugees. In Libya Western intervention has also once more proved to be catastrophic and now 65% of Libyans want to flee, looking back on the Khadafi period almost as paradise, rather as many in impoverished and colonized Eastern Europe now regret the Soviet bloc with all its obvious faults. Today, for instance, a decent salary in Romania is 150 euros – per month – if you can get a job at all. This is all the fruit of Western meddling, divide and rule by reducing to poverty. The result of such meddling is mass migration and the break-up of families. The West has caused this. Rule Number One is that you do not destroy something until you have something better to replace it with. But that is exactly what the West did to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as also in Syria, Iraq, Libya etc.
Q: As regards Syria, surely it is the Muslims who are themselves to blame? They are killing each other?
A: When children argue and those children follow a religion which, like Judaism, has no concept of forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, you do not give them expensive arms to kill each other with. But that is precisely what Saudi Arabia and Qatar (and Israel), backed by the USA, have done, whether in Syria, the Lebanon or elsewhere. Remember that Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are CIA inventions to defeat the Soviet Union and divide the Muslim world. The whole Muslim problem began when Britain and then the USA backed Israel as a Western bridgehead in the Arab world. When Western nations turn into terrorist states (that is how Western nations are perceived in the Muslim world) and invade Afghanistan and Iraq, do not be surprised when Muslims turn to terrorism. The radicalization of Muslims was caused by Western governments. Appalling Western terrorism breeds appalling Islamic terrorism.
Q: When did the West set out on this path of apostasy? To what extent was race a factor?
A: I think that there are many misconceptions as regards race and the Western Schism. For example the Neo-Platonist Philip Sherrard presented the Schism as a kind of philosophical dispute between ‘East and West’, between ‘Greek and Latin’ between Plato and Aristotle. True, there was the problem of the Franks, but not for inherent racial reasons, as some modern and rather embittered modern Greek philosophers would have it, but simply because of the mentality which the Franks happened to be the first to adopt. And any race can adopt an anti-Church mentality, as the 20th century showed us. Such racial simplifications completely overlook the multinational nature of the Church. The Church includes Latins like St Hilary of Poitiers and St Ambrose of Milan, Syrians like St Ephraim and St Isaac of Nineveh, Egyptians like St Antony the Great, Georgians like St Nino, not to mention Slavs and so many other nationalities, including Orthodox ‘Franks’ from the period before Charlemagne and from today.
Another point is that although, quite rightly, historians look back to Charlemagne as the real initiator of all the problems, with his massacre of the Saxons and corruption of the Creed, his ramshackle so-called empire was very short-lived. There was a revival of Orthodoxy in the West after him, for example under the Empress Theophano at the end of the tenth century. There was no Schism until the eleventh century and that lasted 100 years; in other words the Schism was not a single event, but a process.
We can do no better than quote the Catholic religious historian, Christopher Dawson: ‘It was not until the eleventh century that the religious bond which united East and West was finally destroyed and Western Christendom emerges as an independent unity, separated alike in culture and religion from the rest of the old Roman world’ (The Making of Europe, P. 47). He relates this to the tenth century and whether ‘feudal barbarism was to capture and absorb the peace-society of the Church or whether the latter could succeed in imposing its ideals and its higher culture on the feudal nobility’ (P. 271). ‘It was not until the eleventh century that the military society (of the barbaric world of northern paganism) was incorporated into the spiritual polity of Western Christendom’ (Pp. 287-288).
In other words the tragedy of the West was that it left the Church and adopted instead the aggressiveness of ‘feudal barbarism’. This, allied with technology, is what lies behind the West’s aggressive imperialism of the second millennium, from 1066 and a couple of decades before that, onwards, and also of the opening years of this already deeply tragic third millennium. We can see this quite clearly in today’s regular gun massacres in the USA. What a culture! Aggression and violence and a society of obesity and mental illness….And you call this civilization?
Q: There is much criticism in the West of President Putin. They have demonized him, making him into a hate-figure. What is the truth?
A: The CIA-fed propaganda is quite shameless, not to say primitive. Of course President Putin, like contemporary Russia, has many faults, but unlike the West, they are both going in the right direction. That is what is important. The name Putin comes from the word ‘put’ which means ‘the path’, ‘the way’. And that is exactly the spiritual meaning of his name, for he is only an instrument. He is not the destination, just part of the way to where we want to go.
Q: What is that destination?
A: Today the atheist West is preaching spiritual death throughout the world. Russia’s spiritual meaning is to preach spiritual life. This is the universal meaning of the coming resurrection of St Seraphim of Sarov for which we must prepare. The West has chosen vulgarity over nobility. We shall not follow. Sadly, we must recognize that when Antichrist comes, he will speak English. It is for us to show him that not all English people will listen to him, that there is a faithful remnant, as in every country throughout the world, that we can speak of nobility, not of vulgarity. It is becoming rapidly apparent, even to those who before resisted – such is repentance – that Orthodox need a Protector, a Guardian, a restored Emperor. A repentant Greece today looks to Russia, a Russia that has thrown off the curse of atheism and apostasy. Many others do the same. We shall not surrender! Christ is victorious!
The Church and Converts
Introduction
To speak of ‘converts’ in a Church context should sound strange. After all, we never speak of the Mother of God or of the Twelve Apostles or of the Apostle Paul as ‘converts’. And yet they certainly were converts in the sense that they became Orthodox, not having been born to Orthodox families and brought up as such. And the same is true of millions of other Orthodox, including other saints and martyrs. They found their way and nobody called them ‘converts’. So why should we speak of ‘converts’ today? The problem is simply one of integration – or rather lack of it. The Apostles and all the others integrated the Church, that is, they not only joined the Church but rapidly BECAME Orthodox, with every fibre of their being. Only as a result of lack of integration are there today ‘converts’, that is, individuals who are unintegrated into the Church’s way of life and thinking. They come in two forms. What are they?
Two Types of Convert
Firstly, there is the convert who is not converted. Harsh though it may sound, he is like the dog who returns to his own (spiritual) vomit, in the Apostle Peter’s words (2 Peter 2, 22). He comes to the Church with his personal baggage, his own agenda, his own theories and even fantasies, he has ‘read all the books’, he ‘knows everything’ already and wants to impose his curious personal views or anti-Orthodox Establishment conformist views on the Church (see 2 Timothy 3, 7). He is so proud that he believes that he does not have to change, but that the Church has to change – in order to fit in with him! Since he is part of the Establishment, he is superior to a bunch of immigrants and peasants from Eastern Europe!
Sadly, there are many such individuals and there are those who, without any discernment and psychological understanding, prematurely receive them into the Church, long before such individuals have the necessary simplicity and humility. Such individuals never even begin to think in an Orthodox way, let alone begin to live in an Orthodox way. Their religion is all theoretical, headborne, bookish. They are indeed ‘converts’, that is, unconverted. The saddest cases are among those who, having been members of the Church for a few days (yes, it happens) or at most a few months, are then ordained. The damage they do is incalculable; many are later defrocked.
Secondly, there is the opposite extreme of unconverted converts, but they too are wholly conditioned by pride. This is the over-zealous. We see such ‘converts’ or neophytes (‘there is nothing worse than a neophyte’) in modern Islam; some of the worst suicide bombers are converts. Fortunately, in the Church we do not have violence, but there is intellectual violence. These ‘converts’ are those who suffer from ‘zeal not according to knowledge’ (Romans 10, 2), and, as is often said, what a pity that cradle Orthodox do not have such zeal, but what a pity that such ‘converts’ do not have the practical knowledge, borne of experience and time, of cradle Orthodox.
In reality both zeal and knowledge together are required. Just as the convert who is not converted and does not repent always sooner or later lapses, so the over-zealous also lapses, nowadays often into old calendarist sects. In ROCOR for years we tried to moderate such converts, but some we failed with and they caused us trouble and eventually lapsed, finding themselves outside the Church. Clearly, their problems were never theological, but psychological, sometimes even pathological.
What is to be done? We suggest three remedies:
1. Avoid Separation
What must be avoided at all costs is setting up convert groups separately from the rest of the local diocese of the Church, for example in separate – and indeed separatist – ‘deaneries’. This often happens when there is no local bishop and the bishop of another nationality decides, sometimes through lack of any interest in the local situation, to ‘delegate’ responsibility. Given that the essence of the problem of ‘converts’ is the fact that they remain precisely ‘converts’, they need to frequent cradle Orthodox, not live separately. Otherwise, how else will they learn and live the Faith?
We have seen the pernicious effects of ‘deaneries’ in various jurisdictions. One such cultish and sectarian ‘deanery’, in France, used to order its members to dress in black and the men all seemed to have to have long hair and shaggy beards, as ordered by their guru! The Russian faithful used to call them ‘the crows’…Of course they soon ended up outside the Church. In another case, nearly all the members of a deanery were normal, integrated Orthodox, but it was the convert dean himself who left his deanery and the Church – again the bishop of another nationality lived in another country and did not know what was happening.
In a third case there was an untrained clergyman in a deanery of untrained clergy who gave communion to Non-Orthodox; the dean did nothing about it; the bishop of another nationality was again an absentee living in another country. Other Orthodox naturally refused to concelebrate with the clergyman – so he was totally isolated. One clergy member of this deanery, ordained a few days after joining the Church!, was then arrested by the police for criminal affairs. The scandals went on…..But they could all have been avoided if there had been no administrative separatism. Administrative separatism leads to convert groups becoming marginal, indeed, becoming withered branches. They are on their way out of the Church.
2. Debrainwash First
The second thing to avoid is prematurely receiving those who have ‘baggage’, generally those who have belonged to a heterodox confession, especially clergy who have been trained, or rather brainwashed, into a heterodox way of thinking. They think they know it all when in fact they know nothing. I well remember visiting a group set up by such an individual who had been ordained prematurely. The group certainly was rabidly anti-ecumenist but not Orthodox, but I was never able to put my finger on what felt so deeply wrong and spiritually unhealthy. Another visitor to the group expressed it for me. An ex-Anglican, he described the group as ‘old-fashioned Anglo-Catholics with icons’, with all the strangeness of such a community. Another sectarian little group was described to me as ‘an upper middle-class Anglican club’ and a third group as ‘a clique for well-off Anglicans only’.
Individuals should never be received into the Church, let alone ordained, until they have got their heterodox past out of their systems; and that can take years and even decades. A heterodox past is, sad to say, a spiritual poison, and must be evacuated before the life-giving spring of Orthodoxy can take the newly vacant place. Care must be taken here with age. Age makes it much more difficult to integrate. Why? Simply because there is so much more baggage from the past, so much more to jettison. We have often found that one who is 20 when he is received into the Church often only begins to be fully integrated when he is 40, in other words, it takes one year inside the Church to overcome every year spent outside the Church. This may sound strict, but we know individuals who have been in the Church for decades and they have never integrated – usually because they have refused to mix with other nationalities – with cradle Orthodox – either because they think they know everything and have nothing to learn, or else because they are simply racist. So much depends on attitude, on being open and showing willingness to learn – or not; the one year for one year need not be binding.
Any Orthodox community must be inclusive; sadly this is far from the case. There are several groups where I have never felt at home because, like the mass of English people, I have never been an Anglican or had any heterodox background. Orthodox from Eastern Europe also simply boycott such groups and prefer to stay at home because they there is no spiritual nourishment to be had in such groupings, just very tiresome and ‘clever’ chit-chat. We know that something feels wrong, that there is no prayerful atmosphere. Such groupings are inwardly sectarian, cut off from the mainstream, even though they may be in a canonical jurisdiction. Even sadder is when such groupings actually try to impose their ideology and calendarism (new or old) on cradle Orthodox. True, such groupings do attract a few Orthodox from Eastern Europe, but they themselves are recent and unintegrated converts, uneducated in the Faith as a way of life, or else long ago lapsed. They like such ‘easy’ groups where there is no confession, you can sit down and fasting is little observed.
3. Ensure that Cradle Orthodox Communities are Receptive
the first two problems are brought by converts, there is a third problem and this is caused by cradle Orthodox. If new Orthodox are to be integrated, it is clear that they must frequent cradle Orthodox who want to integrate them. But how can this be done if the cradle Orthodox are themselves closed, preferring to live in a self-created ghetto? Here local anecdotes are countless. One convert was told by a Greek priest ‘to go away’ (actually he used much ruder language than that, but we shall not repeat it). Another was told that he could not join the Greek Church because ‘you are not dark enough’. A third was told that he ‘cannot become Greek’ as he did not have the ’right blood’.
Little wonder that the Anglican Diocese of London has six priests of Greek origin: having been born in this country and lost their Greek language, they decided that the Greek Church was no place for them, even though they were ‘dark enough’. Sadly, these Greek examples that come to mind are only the tip of the iceberg and all nationalities and all countries are concerned. Clearly the people concerned, clergy included, have never understood the last words of St Matthew’s Gospel about ‘teaching all nations and baptizing them’ (Matt. 28, 19). Nobody wants to join a ghetto and in case there is little to learn from the ghetto because it is a club, just as ‘ethnic’ as convert clubs.
Theological ignorance or simply racism? Whatever it is, such churches clearly have no episcopal leadership and deserve to close down – which is exactly what happens to them, as we have seen countless times both here and abroad. The immigrants die out and so do their uncared for churches. That is their own fault. Those who live in the ghetto die in the ghetto. In the words of the Gospel – and however harsh they may sound, these are the words of our Lord – ‘Let the dead bury their dead’ (Matt. 8, 22).
Conclusion
In real Church life, and not sectarian and cultish Diaspora hothouses of a few inward-looking neophytes, there is no such things as ‘converts’, there is simply the Church. Why? Because where the Church is the Church, people seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all other things are added unto them (Matt. 6, 33). In other words, such new Orthodox, not ‘converts’, have a healthy attitude and bring no personal agendas, no impositions on the Church, no racism, remain open-minded, show willingness to learn and mix with cradle Orthodox (if possible even visiting countries where Orthodox parish and monastic life has existed for centuries), putting the Kingdom of God and humble righteousness first. And this is the key to swift integration, this is the end of ‘converts’.
Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 1)
Half-Way!
On Friday 8 May, Fr Andrew saw on the rightmove website a leasehold property for sale for £50,000 in Norwich at 134, Oak Street. It is 60 square metres and is at present used as offices and rooms for a cultural centre. It has electricity, heating and water and is in very good condition. It is so cheap because it is leasehold, in other words, you have to pay £100 in rent per month for the ground it is built on. This amount is fixed until 2032. The lease itself is even longer – it lasts until 2047.
On Wednesday 13 May we organized a visit to these premises, attended by 9 people.
By Friday 15 May, Orthodox in Norwich had generously promised to donate £5,250.
On Monday 18 May Fr Andrew received Archbishop Mark’s blessing to buy the building if possible, meaning we could start obtaining pledges to donate.
On Thursday 21 May we heard from the surveyor that it would cost £3,000-£5,000 to knock down the internal walls and make good the floor and ceiling, so we could use this building as a church. This was lower than Fr Andrew had estimated.
On Wednesday 27 May we heard that our offer of £42,500 had been accepted. However, since conversion and furnishing costs will come to £12,500, this meant that we should need £55,000 in all.
On Friday 29 May we submitted the planning application for change of use from offices to a place of worship. This will take 6-8 weeks but should result in a positive answer.
On Wednesday 3 June we launched a public internet appeal for the remaining £49,750, given that £5,250 had already been pledged.
By Wednesday 17 June, total gifts and pledges had reached over £31,000. Can you help us reach our target of £55,000?
All donations, when required later this year in July or August, will be made to our charitable trust: East of England Orthodox Church (Registered Charity No 1081707). But please remember that we prefer pledges to actual donations for now. To make a pledge, please inform us at this address: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. May God bless you for considering the Russian Orthodox Community in Norwich in your alms.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
17 June 2015
The Mystery of Iniquity
The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, August 1914
On 15 May 1014 the filioque error was for the first time proclaimed in the seat of the Western Patriarchate in Rome, as it was ever after to be proclaimed. This act of spiritual impurity was due to the loss of the Holy Spirit. Forty years in 1054 this act was to condemn the Western world to spiritual captivity, a future outside the Church of Christ the God-man. This loss of spiritual freedom meant that the Faith had become a mere institutional religion. And, in due course, 900 years later, in 1914, Western Europe set out on its final act of suicide. And in 2014 the ever-aggressive and ever-covetous West yet again invaded the Russian Lands (the fifth time in just over 200 years), once more choosing the route via Kiev as in earlier times.
Indeed, ever since 1914 the world has not known peace, nothing has been the same again. 1914 reminds us of Noah’s Flood, but this time it has not been a Flood of Water, but a Flood of Iniquity. The world has indeed been turned upside down, all has become abnormal in an ever-increasing spiral of violence and death. What was normal and natural is now abnormal and unnatural, what was abnormal and unnatural is now normal and natural. What happened? Why has there been no peace ever since? Why has evil spread without ceasing? Why have the flood waters not receded? Why has the dove that has gone forth from the Ark found no resting-place?
The waters of the Flood have not gone back because in 1918 the last true Christian Emperor, he who restrained iniquity, was finally removed, like a lamb to the slaughter. The Emperor, or Tsar, of by far the world’s largest country was murdered by evil men on the orders of evil men. Already, nearly two centuries ago, one of Russia’s enemies had written that: ‘No revolution in Europe or anywhere in the world can altogether attain its aims as long as the present Russian State exists’ (1). Thus was fulfilled the prophecy: ‘For the mystery of iniquity is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is removed (2 Thess 2, 7).
The Universal Protector, the Orthodox Christian Consciousness, guided by the restraining Holy Spirit, he who canonized the Universal Prophet Seraphim, he who wanted to restore the Patriarchate in Russia but whose offer was rejected by the unready and unvisionary, he who gifted so much to every Orthodox people, he who protected the outraged peoples of the world, the Boers, the Tibetans, the Thais, the Ethiopians, the Armenians, the Carpatho-Russians, he who, mocked, proposed World Peace and disarmament, he who built thousands of churches and monasteries, including seventeen magnificent houses of God in Western Europe and another in New York, was removed by ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’.
Why have the waters not receded? Because there has not been repentance by all, for all betrayed him. The Non-Orthodox who removed him and ordered his slaying, British, French, Germans, Americans together with traitors in Eastern Europe and Russia who refused to fight for the Tsar, have not repented and continue and even justify their deviations and deviance. The Non-Russian Orthodox who have since surrendered to the bribes and blackmail of Western politicians and have taken advantage to plot against the peace and unity of the Church because the Emperor is no longer there to restrain them, intriguing behind his back as it were, have not repented and continue and even justify their deviations and deviance. And those who accepted and accept his removal, without resisting, unfaithful and apostate Russians, have not repented and continue and even justify their deviations and deviance. And the Flood will not recede until repentance.
When will we know that they have repented? When they are ready to accept the new Christian Orthodox Emperor, who will be appointed by Divine Providence, and will wholeheartedly obey him. And most are still far from that, their hearts filled with spiritual impurity and their minds clouded by foolishness, by the education of the beast, not by the education of the heart, not by spiritual intelligence, by deeper understanding, by the incarnate ideals of the Church. Their minds are clouded by petty, narrow, anti-universal nationalism or else by the idolatrous universal consumerism of the Western golden calf. Most today want the unity of Babel, of apostasy, of material things, they want the unity of iniquity; but what we want is unity in Christ, the unity of the Church, diverse in language and custom, but united in spirit and soul and heart, united by the same desires and aims, a universal Christian Orthodox consciousness, the ideals of Holy Rus. And this is what we have struggled for, are struggling for and will always struggle for – until Kingdom come.
Note
1. Friedrich Engels in ‘Karl Marx and the Revolutionary Movement in Russia’, Moscow 1933, p. 15