Monthly Archives: September 2015

On ‘The Orthodox Church’ by Timothy Ware

Early editions of this book were excellent at meeting the intellectual needs of its target audience – the Non-Orthodox world, especially of 1960s and 1970s Anglicans. Criticisms launched at it, that it was scholastic, academic, old-fashioned and not aimed at ordinary people, are therefore quite unfair. It was never meant for us, for it was written by an Anglican scholar from Oxford. Similarly invalid are criticisms that it does not cater for Orthodox and that it looks at the Church from the outside – it was after all written from outside in, not inside out. Later editions, expressing the viewpoints of the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople in the 80s and 90s of the last century, cannot be expected either to reflect the mystical understanding of those on the inside of Church life, that is, of those in the arena. They express rather the spirit of ‘middle of the road’ compromise between this world and the Church.

Today the book urgently needs reformatting, a rewriting away from Anglican scholasticism and the worldly concerns which the Patriarchate of Constantinople was bogged down in during the end of the last century. This is necessary in order to take account of the dramatic changes in the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church, since 2000. These changes have moreover had an irresistible effect on the other 25% of the Church, however reluctant secular-minded liberals are to accept the reality of today’s Orthodox Church. It is time for them to abandon the secularist modernism of the last half of the last century, in which they appear to be stuck and nostalgically look back to. They need to look forward to the dramatic spiritual developments and welcome restorations which the 21st century is already bringing us.

A Warning from Minsk

On 28 September, President Lukashenko of Belarus, strangely enough better known for his atheism than his Orthodox Christianity, spoke at the United Nations in New York. Addressing himself to Western leaders, he issued a stark warning in the following words:

‘You the guilty could have said that you had made a mistake and you must stop right there. But no, once again you went even further. You started in Tunisia and ended in Libya. The scenario was the same. You crucified President Khadafy, you destroyed a state. Did things get better in Libya afterwards? No. And does Libya even exist now as a unitary state? No. Gentlemen, was that not enough for you? No. You pounced in Syria. Why? Why are you killing people? Why are you overthrowing the acting President? How did he displease you? Worse still, through the slaughter in that country you are wiping out the last traces of civilization from yourselves. Tell the international community what you want and what your aims are. Now, at the tribune of the UN General Assembly’.

Speaking of the humanitarian disaster the Western world has now created in the Ukraine, he added:

‘Let us take another step towards worldwide conflict and perhaps to a new world war, in the very heart of the advanced, civilized world. Surely, in this new millennium, we have understood just how fragile peace and human civilization are? I am not saying this in order to go over the events are already well-known to us, but in order to bring the powers that be in this world to think. Understood. Today there is no force that can stop you. But all who have religious faith, and many of them publicly, are praying for all those heads of state who are committing blasphemies. The Lord sees everything. And He is just. And what if He is angered and punishes the guilty? You and your peoples who are innocently suffering because of your adventures?’

Who is Speaking in New York?

‘Do not take the path that we took. We tried it and it is the path that leads to destruction’.

Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow and all the Russias,
speaking to the West and referring to atheism

On Thurs 24 September the reputed BBC Newsnight programme called President Putin – ‘the Leader of the Free World’. This was an astonishing turnaround given the usual caricatures, stereotypes and character assassinations vomited forth by the Establishment-run BBC towards the political leader of the Christian world. Somehow these words must have escaped the tight State censorship system that binds the BBC. Having said that, the statement was wrong. Why? In order to answer this question, we must take a look at some history over the last 100 years or so.

First of all, this statement was made by a BBC journalist in the context of the disastrous US policy of deliberately creating chaos in the Middle East. This has notably been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and throughout all the countries where the CIA-orchestrated ‘Arab Spring’ took place. The fact that this divide and rule policy has resulted in two trillion dollars of US debt, hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of mainly Muslim refugees, of whom 10,000 a day (3.65 million per year at that rate) are now entering the EU, is beginning to dawn even on the Western media. The refugees pass as swiftly as possible through the EU-created employment desert and poverty of Greece and Eastern Europe and head for Germany and Scandinavia. With the threat of the collapse of the Western-installed oligarch regime in the bankrupt Ukraine and millions more refugees, the message is getting through even to Western politicians that something must be done by someone who, unlike them, is competent.

Fresh from the Russian diplomatic triumph in Iran, President Putin is now doing in Syria what the West should have done from the start – supporting the lesser evil against the greater evil, supporting President Assad against IS. Having completely lost control of the Middle East through its anarchic and murderous meddling, the West is lost. By backing savage terrorists and fanatics against popular Arab leaders like Assad, Khadafy and Hussein, once all feted by the West itself, it is now left to Russia, backed by Non-Western countries all over the world, to clean up the mess. The West has always backed traitors and murderers, imagining them to be its friends, and so lost its real, if critical, friends. Thus, in the same way it has supported President Poroshenko against President Putin, creating its own nightmares.

This was exactly the case with the Western-organized Russian Revolution. At the beginning of 1917, mainly through the poisonous British ambassador Buchanan, the West launched a coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg through treacherous Russian aristocrats and generals. This coup d’etat, overthrowing the legitimate government, just as the West overthrew the legitimate Yanukovich government in the Ukraine last year, was fanatically and blindly welcomed by Lloyd George and the French and US leaders of the time. By deposing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed in 1917, the West thought that it could prevent the rise of Russia, poised to conquer Vienna and Berlin and so control European destinies, and set up a puppet government there. Instead, the tiny minority of incompetent pro-Western buffoons within seven months lost control, ran away to Paris, and the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, took over.

The same is happening today throughout the Middle East and in the Ukraine, where extremists, whether from IS or from the Right Sector, are poised to take over from feeble Western puppets. The West has created IS, which already controls large parts of Iraq and Syria and is ready to take over derelict Afghanistan, where bankrupt UK governments wasted 450 British lives and £35 billion in trying to support its puppets. In the Ukraine the hope is that the Ukrainian people will rise up against the Poroshenko/Waltzman mafia and its CIA henchmen, freeing themselves from US-armed Right Sector Fascist terrorists. In some areas of the Ukraine they have already found freedom against Western-imposed tyranny; it remains to be seen whether the junta will survive another winter.

The West has understood nothing. The Russians have understood everything. Why? Because Russia went through 75 years of atheism and its ideology of death and saw through its destructive myths, whereas the West has consistently refused to heed the Russian experience and has now imposed atheism. This can be clearly seen in the CIA-organized Pussy Riot obscenity in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Some previously unknown sick young women were paid to blaspheme standing by the holy of holies in a Cathedral rebuilt by the donations of the Russian people. It was rebuilt on the site of the Cathedral which had been built to commemorate the people’s victory over the Western invader and blasphemer Napoleon and had then been blown up by the Bolsheviks, who had come to power through Western meddling in the name of Western, Marxist ideology.

The hysterical young women of Pussy Riot were in Russian eyes simply latter-day, Western-sponsored Bolsheviks, beloved by Western liberals and pro-Fascist Senator McCain alike. Such an anti-Christian provocation, paid for and feted by the West, shows that the modern West is in fact anti-Christian. The spirit of Bolshevik atheism is alive and well in the new Satanic, Western hatred of Christ and of mankind, in the cult of egoism and careerism, in the cult of the ‘human right’ or ‘freedom’ to blaspheme in the Cathedral of Christ or in Charlie Hebdo, in homosexual ‘marriage’, in the persecution of all who disagree with atheism, in suicidal abortion and euthanasia on demand and in the totalitarian, terroristic tyranny of political ‘correctness’. In its atheism the new West has adopted the civilization of death that the Bolsheviks once espoused.

However, today’s Russia is returning to its Christian roots and values, which are the values of St Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor. These values are not nationalistic, for ‘Russia’ is not simply a nation, but it is a spiritual concept, a state of mind, in the same way as the Christian Empire of St Constantine was not some mere nationalistic project, but a multinational reality. Indeed, when the Empire degenerated into a nationalistic project on two occasions, in Germanized Old Rome and in Hellenized Constantinople, it collapsed. After the collapse of the Second Christian Empire in 1453, undermined first by barbarian Western ‘crusaders’, then by Muslim fanatics and then by internal pro-Catholic traitors, the Christian Empire was transferred to Russia for its third and final incarnation. Overthrown in 1917 by ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’, both external and internal, the Empire is now reviving.

Today’s Russia is amazed by the Bolshevikization of political ‘correctness’ of the contemporary West and by the Islamization in its ever-larger ghettoes. This is what happens, they say in Russia, when you lose your roots – as we nearly did under atheist Communism. Has the West learned nothing from our experience of 75 years of Marxist atheism and the Cold War? In 2007 I spoke to a deputy of the Russian State Duma on this very question and he answered me: ‘No, the West has learned nothing because the West is too proud to take lessons from others, so it will have to undergo its own atheist persecutions before it can understand. Just as a child who refuses to obey its parent who tells him not to put his finger in the fire, and learns the hard way, so too will it be with the West’. Russia underwent the culture of death, but has come back to life; now the West is undergoing the culture of death and refusing life, refusing to learn from Russia’s experience.

Today, the USA and its vassal nations in NATO is ringing the Christian Empire with ships, planes, tanks, weapons, including nuclear weapons of mass destruction, troops and military exercises only a few hundred metres from Russian borders. Russia is protecting itself as the last bulwark of Christ and mounting defensive military exercises in return. Icons of the Mother of God are weeping in the Crimea as the Kiev puppet regime tries to starve the free Crimean population into surrendering to its tyranny. However, the flag of the double-headed eagle is flying over the Eastern Ukraine, liberated by its population who have risen against the oppressors. Today, Western-created, sponsored and financed terrorists in Syria have to face Russian arms. The West presents Russia as its enemy. This is hypocrisy. The West has only one enemy: itself.

However, I have still not directly answered the question as to why the BBC journalists are wrong to call President Putin ‘the Leader of the Free World’. They are wrong because he only represents the constant truths of Russian Foreign Policy, Eternal Russia, the Eternal Christian Empire. The reader of any survey of the foreign policy of Tsar Nicholas II (1) will know that what is now being done in today’s Russia is merely continuity with the past. 1917 merely put off the inevitable, the worldwide spread of Christian values by the Christian Empire which the Russian Federation is now becoming once more. True, the Christian Empire was interrupted by the Soviet period, especially under Leninism and Trotskyism and especially until 1941. Then the West, this time in its Nazi Barbarossa format, though much inspired by the Kaiser’s Prussian format, once more invaded Russia, thus ironically ensuring not the destruction of Russia, but its inevitable revival.

In 1917 the anti-Christian West did not stop but only delayed the development of the Christian Empire. The more sensitive, politically free and spiritually awakened in the rest of the Orthodox world, in the Local Churches of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, of Serbia, Georgia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus and on Mt Athos and elsewhere, have also known it for a very long time. In the monasteries and parishes of the Church Outside Russia, renewed in recent years both by a new emigration from the Russian Lands and by Western people who have seen through the lies and joined the Russian Church, we too have known it for a very long time also. We who in the Russian emigration, scattered across the face of the world, prayed and waited for decades for this moment of revival, rejoice. The historic injustice of 1917 and its Western-orchestrated coup d’etat is slowly being righted – even within our lifetimes.

Who is the Leader of the Free World? Who supported the Boers and the Tibetans, the Thais and the Ethiopians, the Mongols and the Moroccans, the Christians of Syria and Palestine? Who would have had peace in the Jerusalem instead of riots of Zionists and Muslims on the Temple Mount? Who was welcomed as the ‘White Tsar’ by Muslims and Buddhists alike? ‘While he was alive, millions of Arabs lived in peace and security. When the news reached the Middle Esat that they had killed the Tsar in Syria, the Lebanon and Palestine, mass suicides began. Arabs even then considered that with the death of Tsar Nicholas human history was at an end and that life on earth had lost all meaning’. (2). Who is the Leader of the Free World who speaks before over 100 world leaders at the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations through his representative Vladimir Putin? It is the peace-loving Tsar Nicholas II, who founded the predecessor of the UN in the Hague in the century before last. Of the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, we, like V.V. Putin, are merely servants and it is he who speaks at the UN through our voices.

Notes:

1. For example:

The Reign of Tsar Nicholas II, by S. S. Oldenburg, several editions. (In English: The Last Tsar: Nicholas II, his reign and his Russia, S. S. Oldenburg, translated by Leonid I. Mihalap and Patrick J. Rollins)

The Last Grand Duchess: Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, by Ian Vorres, 1964. (Translated into Russian in 1996)

The Foreign Policy of Tsar Nicholas II by P. V. Multatuli, Moscow 2012 (in Russian)

2. Vernye (The Faithful, on those who did not Betray the Imperial Martyrs), by O. V. Chernova, Moscow, 2010, p. 30 (in Russian)

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (September 2015)

Q: Are you surprised by the election of the new leader of the Labour Party?

A: Frankly, no. For 35 years neocons have in effect been in power in the UK, ever since the old Tories lost power to Thatcherite monetarists, the ancestors of the neocons, and the Labour Party has essentially been run by neocon Tories. The election of a primitive, old-fashioned socialist as leader of the Labour Party is a reaction to all this. The Labour Party leadership has now returned to its grassroots membership, whom it had betrayed by becoming Washington’s poodles. The Labour Party now has a leader who actually believes in something, other than himself and his own bank account, unlike its previous leaders. The only surprise is that the reaction has taken so long. Extremes breed extremes – the neocons have produced old-fashioned, atheist socialism – that was quite predictable.

This is all part of the process of the election of socialists elsewhere in the EU, for example in Greece and Spain. However, it is difficult to see what will come of it. The new Labour leader seems to have very little understanding of reality and it is difficult to see him lasting very long. Others, nationalists and sovereignists, have also been elected throughout the EU, for example, UKIP in the UK and the National Front in France. All these movements, whether of left or of right, are reactions to the rule over the EU of the neocons in Washington. That is why in the UK the Establishment-run BBC and Press character-assassinate them all. Whether they are the UKIP leader or the new Labour leader, they are both anti-Establishment, driven by sincerely-held beliefs rather than by their own careers and bank accounts. Mammon that rules the modern world dislikes such people because they put their values, whatever we may think of them, right or wrong, above money.

Q: How do you see the consequences of the present chaos caused by mass Muslim immigration into Western Europe?

A: First of all, mass immigration has been rejected by Central and Eastern Europe, not just by Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Lands, but also by the Baltics, Slovenia and Poland, which has had to face mass emigration from Ukrainians fleeing the US and EU-instigated war in the Ukraine. EU-Croatia does not want the refugees either, it is simply allowing them to pass through, not to stay. As for Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, none of the refugees wants to settle in these countries that are poverty-stricken by the EU, let alone in Non-EU Macedonia, which is already being torn apart by the Muslim invasion from Albania, and NATO-bombed Serbia with all its Serbian refugees from Croatia and Kosovo.

All these former Communist-bloc countries are quite right to hand on the refugees – their countries have not been responsible for this new Muslim invasion – Western Europe has been responsible. Who is paying for the billions of dollars of arms with which the war in Syria is being fought? Who is paying for this murderous conflict that is being played out on the borders of Armageddon? Who is making and supplying the arms for these fanatics to murder with? Who bombed Yugoslavia? Who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq? Who bombed Libya? It is not Eastern and Central Europe, it is the Western world that is responsible. At this moment US aircraft and British bombs are slaughtering the people of Yemen. The West always has money for bombs to destroy, but not to feed poor refugees from Western-instigated wars.

Now Germany has to pay the price for its co-destruction of Yugoslavia and the foundation of Muslim states there. If Yugoslavia still existed, the refugees would not be able to pass through its former territory and head for Germany. War in Yugoslavia happened twenty years ago – but the consequences are now. Sooner or later you have to pay for your errors – the chickens always come home to roost. It is called responsibility, responsibility for the injustices that you have committed in the past.

Mass immigration is causing division in the EU – already the Schengen agreement is in tatters. This could be the moment when parts of Eastern Europe, especially Hungary and Slovakia, finally turn their backs on the disastrous EU and join the EEU, the Eurasian Economic Union, together with Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova – if those countries can find the courage to overturn their home-grown traitors who are willing to hand over their countries to NATO tyranny. Thanks to Communism, ironically, these countries had kept their national identity and sovereignty; under EU tyranny they have to lose them. The time for them to choose is coming – to surrender your national identity to so-called ‘multiculturalism’, as have Western European countries, or to keep it by turning to the protection of Sovereign Russia.

The Western part of the EU now has a choice: to accept mass Islamization and so complete the renunciation of its Christian history, as its atheists have already mentally done, or to bring back peace to Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and resettle the Muslim millions back in their homes, which is what they want. But this would be to admit that the West caused the problems in those countries in the first place. This would be a noble act of repentance, but the Western elite is too proud to carry it out. The Western elite is always capable of making war – but quite unable to make peace. This is because of its essentially anti-Christian, aggressive and destructive nature. Only a rising of ordinary Western people, crushed for so long by its elite, and aided from outside, can make a difference now.

Q: After the September Local Synod in Istanbul, Patriarch Bartholomew denounced the co-operation of Church and State in Russia, though without mentioning the word ‘Russia’ by name. What do you make of this?

A: Patriarch Bartholomew is merely a US-installed mouthpiece of the State Department, so he is irrelevant to the real Orthodox world, just as KGB-installed Russian bishops were irrelevant to the real Orthodox world in their time. For example he has just granted the highest award of his Patriarchate to the abortionist Joe Biden. In other words, nobody is listening to him because his words of propaganda are dictated to him by neocon politicians, not by the Holy Spirit.

What is the reality of the situation in Russia, beyond such neocon propaganda? It is that the Russian Church is trying to reChristianize the Russian State. The attempt to Christianize the State is very frightening for the neocons. This is the Incarnational role of the Church, they hate that because for them religion must only be a private matter, which should have no practical consequences and social ramifications. To renounce this role is to renounce Orthodoxy – which is what the anti-Christian US State Department does every single day of its existence. It is interesting for me to see in the words of Patriarch Bartholomew exactly the same editorial policy as that of the BBC, where I took part in two radio programmes a couple of years ago. It was clear then and it is clear now that the powers that be long ago sent out a message to all their vassal Western media – to try and discredit the Russian Orthodox Church by making out that it is a puppet of the Russian State.

In transmitting this message in the UK they are utterly hypocritical – it is the Church of England that is a puppet of the British State – all the C of E bishops are nominated by an agnostic/atheist Prime Minister, most are freemasons. This is quite different from the situation in Russia where the Church is separated from the State and independent of it. Whenever the Russian State agrees with the Church, it is a triumph of reChristianization for the Church, it is not that the State has conquered the Church, but just the opposite. Soviet times are over. The Western elite and its arms merchants want them to return – by creating another Cold War.

Q: If, as you say, Constantinople is a puppet of US neocons, what hope is there for the Orthodox ‘Council’, to be held in the Phanar next year?

A: That Conference, which is what it is at the moment, may well turn out to be a mere meeting with a final statement couched in meaningless ‘Chancellery-speak’. If so, it will be forgotten very quickly, as were many politically-organized ‘councils’ under heretical emperors of Constantinople. However, a destiny much more interesting than the dustbin of history is possible.

If the Phanar is tempted to take the thirty pieces of silver offered it by Washington and the Vatican and so completely discredit itself in the eyes of the Orthodox world and openly fall away from it, the Conference will become a Council, for it will at last be free to speak the Orthodox Truth. Then will follow the official transfer of the Centre of the Orthodox Church to Moscow, where in reality it has already been for centuries. This will be the end of the 562-year old myth of the Phanar (and the other fallen fragments of the Greek Empire) as the centre of Orthodoxy, a myth that US propagandists have assiduously used since 1948 to flatter Constantinople’s inherent ethnophyletist vanity.

Q: But would you not agree that there are still many problems within the Russian Orthodox Church?

A: Yes, of course there are indeed many problems. These are the result of the Soviet-period ‘legacy’. Only when the Church has been purified from this legacy will complete unity and so full strength come. Beware of the word ‘legacy’, when it is used by pseudo-Russian Orthodox, what they mean by it is apostasy.

Q: What in concrete terms do the words ‘Soviet-period legacy’ mean?

A: I mean all the political and spiritual compromises that ‘representatives’ of the Russian Church made through human weakness during the Soviet period, both inside Russia and outside Russia – ritualism, phariseeism, careerism, corruption, lying, renovationism. We were victims of that awful corruption outside Russia, so we know clearly and exactly what we are talking about.

Q: What can be done to destroy that legacy?

A: Re-Churching. And today Russia is being re-Churched. True, the Soviet diseases of alcoholism, abortion and corruption are still rife in the Russian Federation, but they are nonetheless declining because of this re-Churching. It is a privilege to take part in this process of re-Churching, even outside Russia, alongside tens of thousands of others who work in this field, but the process is only just beginning. We have very far to go. The ‘legacy’ must be destroyed, so that it can be replaced by the Tradition, so that human failings can be transfigured by the Holy Spirit, so that multinational Russian Orthodoxy can be rebuilt.

Q: If the ‘Conference’, as you call it, does turn into a Council and the Church is at last cleansed of the spiritually compromised representatives of the Patriarchate of Constantinople who have lapsed from Orthodoxy, where would they go?

A: They could go wherever they want, to whomever would take them. I think, for example, that its lapsed representatives would be welcome in the Vatican or in the post-Protestant US, whose mouthpieces they are; as for all those in the Patriarchate of Constantinople who are faithful Orthodox, the many on Mt Athos and in the parishes, they could join the Church of Greece, whose Archbishop could take the title of Patriarch of Constantinople. At the same time Orthodox-leaning Catholics in today’s Muslim and atheist-dominated Europe, who have been rejected by the present Patriarchate of Constantinople because of its apostasy and ecumenist agreement with the Vatican not to accept them, could freely join the Russian Orthodox Church. Turkey would then become a missionary territory for the Russian Church; there are tens of thousands of Russians living there already. There will be much to do; the Greek prophecies say that a third of Turks will be baptized as Orthodox.

This process of Russian missionary work is already happening outside Europe. Just recently hundreds of Filipinos have chosen to join the Russian Orthodox Church. They chose true Christianity, that is, Russian Orthodoxy, to the alternatives to IS or Maoist terrorism on the one hand and to Western secularist atheism (economic terrorism) on the other hand. This is the same situation as before the Revolution, when Tsar Nicholas II provided the sole alternative to rival secularist and imperialist Western ideologies, the Anglo-French and the Austro-German. He alone provided uncompromised Orthodoxy, the Christian Empire, Christian values. That of course is why the West crucified him and his family, like St Job.

Q: What is the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in this missionary light?

A: Rather than role I would say responsibility. As the heir to the Christian Empire, of St Constantine, the responsibility of what remains of Holy Russia and the Russian Empire is to be the last bastion of Christianity in the world. Today, after the failed imposition of the destructive Western ideology of Communism by the Western Powers against the will of the people through financing the 1905 and 1917 revolutions and through it the slaughter of the last Christian Emperor, Nicholas II (the order for whose martyrdom went out from New York, as the historian Petr V. Multatuli has made clear in recent years), the Christian Empire is beginning to revive and the Russian Church is playing the essential role in this process. Some prophesy the full restoration of the Empire and an Emperor Nicholas III, the final rampart of Christianity against Eurosodom and Gommorhica, which is what the Western elite wants to create against the will of the Western peoples (See what we have said above about the need for the people to rise against this imposition). This is why the West hates Russia – Russia is the only rival to its decadence. Only Russia contradicts it. Only anti-Christians can be against the restoration of the Christian Empire, whatever they may call themselves and however pharisaically they may conduct themselves. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, friends of the pagan Romans, of both yesterday’s and today’s enemies of Christ.

Very sadly, the September communication of Patriarch Bartholomew seems to show that he has accepted the anti-Incarnational secularist ideology of the Vatican and of Washington, the rejection of the role of the Incarnation in the life of the State. Why? Because only the restoration of the Orthodox State, the Christian Empire, can restrain the growth of so-called ‘globalization’, which the US masters of the Phanar are entirely in charge of. Even the remnants of the Third Rome, the Christian Empire, stand as a living witness to the fall, decadence and perjury of both the First Rome and of the Second Rome – that is why their masters deny it, envy it, fear it and fight against it. Their greatest enemy is the Russian Orthodox Church, the last bastion of Christ, which is why they work together against us.

Q: But is there not a danger of Russian nationalism in trying to Christianize the Russian State?

A: Yes, of course there is. In history the word ‘nationalism’ was not used because it is simply a modern word for ‘worldliness’. Nationalism destroyed the first two Romes: Pagan Roman nationalism destroyed the First Rome when it was adopted and made into an ideology by the Germanic peoples; Greek nationalism destroyed New Rome and the Third Rome was for three generations brought down by the nationalism of the anti-Russian aristocracy who wanted power for themselves against the Tsar and against the people.

Thus the first two Romes fell hundreds of years ago on account of worldliness and there is no chance that they will ever be restored. However, this is not the case with the Third and last Rome, Moscow. True, it was brought down in 1917 and suffered immensely for many years, but since the Western invasion of the former Russian Empire in 1941 restoration by the blood and tears of the New Martyrs and Confessors has been under way. This has happened amidst the hatred and envy of the Western world, which is why it is ringing Russia with NATO bases, trying to take over the Ukraine and developing plans for the dismemberment of the Russian Federation and of the Russian Orthodox Church, primarily through US-encouraged schisms in the Ukraine and Moldova.

Q: If the Western world is successful in dismembering the Russian Federation and the Russian Orthodox Church, is that the end?

A: Yes, that is the end – of the world, since salvation will become impossible so the world will no longer have any reason to exist.

Q: Do you think that nationalist temptations can be overcome so that the Christian Empire will be restored in Russia and in the rest of the Orthodox world together with it?

A: Yes, they can, though ‘can’ does not mean ‘will be’. Nevertheless, today there is reason for hope because there is a difference with the past. Before the Russian Revolution nationalism was alive, as was witnessed to by the worldly nationalism in the Russian emigration which stopped Church life from being as missionary as it should have been, persecuted missionaries like St John of Shanghai and rejected its messianic mission to preach Orthodoxy to the world, to make the world part of Holy Russia and so save it. Many emigres, especially among the intellectuals and aristocrats, were selfish and inward-looking, turning away the people whom God sent them. That was to be expected because they had already betrayed the Tsar.

The difference with the past is that Russia is now an international country. Today’s real International Community, led by Russia, includes much of Eastern Europe, Asia (including China and India, the Middle East and Iran), Africa and Latin America. The Western world is a small minority, fewer than a billion people, including only North America (except for Mexico), Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and perhaps South Korea and Taiwan. Six-sevenths of the world stands against Western exploitation. As such the West is isolated.

Look at the great military victory parade in Beijing that took place two weeks ago in front of the Chinese and Russian leaders in celebration of the liberation of China from the Japanese by the Soviet Army. That parade was totally ignored and despised by the Western media, as China and Russia sealed their bonds. A new bloc has been formed. The West did not want to know because it is in denial that it has once again created its own enemies. Today there is a consciousness of Russia’s spiritual importance internationally. Before the Revolution only Tsar Nicholas and a very few in the elite had that consciousness; today many share in it.

Q: What practically does this consciousness mean to you?

A: For instance, every year I travel 17,000 miles around Eastern England visiting Orthodox. As I travel, I am conscious that I am perhaps the first Russian Orthodox priest to be on a given road and in a given place, the first to bless a place with icons, the first to bless a particular house. In doing this, I am therefore in fact travelling around a new province of Holy Russia.

However, I need help. We are together in the Church. The Church is not about individuals. I need at least one Russian-speaking priest here to help. We must encourage young people to take up the priesthood. When I was young, I was strongly discouraged from becoming a priest, not by this world, but by so-called ‘Orthodox’ priests and bishops – those of ‘the legacy’. I was incredibly badly advised and indeed deliberately. This was scandalously sad. Zeal was crushed quite ruthlessly and cruelly by the unworthy then in power. This must not happen to the young generation now, they must not be discouraged as I was.

We are building a new Holy Rus. The Church urgently needs a new generation of priests who are not afraid to use the Word of Christ to fight against aggressive Western secularism (including when so-called Orthodox confess it) on the one hand and Islamic terrorism on the other. We are Christ’s Army. For that we have the example of St Alexander Nevsky who resisted the traitors and the extremes of east and west, soaring above them on the wings of the double-headed Orthodox eagle.

To young people, I say: Do not be afraid! The reviving Christian Empire needs you to restore and rebuild! Join and be active in the Russian Orthodox Church! Belong to Christ, not to Antichrist!

Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 6)

£55,000 Reached in Eight Weeks! Thank you!

The Update

In the East of England there is at present only one multinational and multilingual church faithful to Russian Orthodoxy with its own urban premises. This is St John’s Church in Colchester. God willing and with your support, we have now been able to buy a second one, in Norwich, exactly 60 miles, 100 kilometres, to the north of Colchester.

Why Norwich? For the last four years I have been visiting Norwich and some of the 200 Russian Orthodox there, mainly recent immigrants from the Baltic States, especially from Estonia. I have baptized several in their homes, married couples in Colchester, buried, blessed houses, listened to confessions, visiting every few weeks, sometimes twice a month and am Orthodox chaplain at Norwich prison.

We have thought of dedicating our community to St Alexander Nevsky. We attempted to begin liturgies using the Greek Orthodox church building in Norwich, but were impeded. How are our people and English people and others interested in the witness of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be cared for pastorally? Only from a church building.

Now we have found such a suitable building. At present offices, it is a single-storey building near the town centre, so with free parking, about 13 metres (40 feet) long by 7 metres (22 feet) wide. It has heating, lighting, a kitchen and toilet, all in good condition. Although small, it seems ideal as a basis for starting Russian Orthodox life in Norwich.

And such life is required not only by Russian speakers, but also by Romanian, Bulgarian and English Orthodox. Most of our regular parishioners, only one of whom has a car, live within easy walking distance of this building. With our low offer of £42,500 miraculously accepted, this building, we estimate, would cost a total of £55,000 to buy and convert.

On Wednesday 3 June we launched an internet appeal for £55,000 in order to set up our own church in Norwich. By Wednesday 29 July, eight weeks after the appeal launch, total gifts and pledges had reached £55,000. We are now waiting for legal documents to be exchanged. Once this has happened we can start building work to transform the building into an Orthodox church. At last a permanent home for Russian Orthodoxy in Norwich after over thirty years of struggles. Thank you!

All donations, when required, will be made to our charitable trust: East of England Orthodox Church (Registered Charity No 1081707). May God bless you for having considered the Russian Orthodox Community in Norwich in your almsgiving.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips

15 September 2015

The History

On Friday 8 May, Fr Andrew saw a leasehold property for sale on the rightmove website for £50,000 at 134, Oak Street, Norwich. It measures 88 square metres externally 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 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 local Russian Orthodox.

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 would 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, we were told then, would take at least 6-8 weeks but should result in a positive answer.

On Wednesday 3 June we launched a public internet appeal for the remaining funds, given that £5,250 had already been pledged.

On Wednesday 29 July, eight weeks after the appeal launch, total gifts and pledges had reached £55,000.

Finally, after over three and a half months!, on Tuesday 15 September we received planning permission to convert the building into an Orthodox church.

We are now waiting for legal documents to be exchanged, then we can start building work.

We are still hoping that we may be able to open in time for the feast of St Alexander Nevsky on 6 December.

The Five Stages of Churching

Introduction

We are all baptized into the Church but then we all have to grow into Her, going through the process of conversion so that we become Orthodox. Whatever our nationality or culture (human-beings are the same all over the world), we can identify five stages which we have to go through in this process. What are they?

1. Superstition

This comes first as it is the most basic stage, only one up from non-belief, which is why it is so widespread among the newly-baptized. Superstition is closely connected with magic for, like magic, it presupposes that a spiritual effect is automatic, that no effort of faith is required from us. For example, we have the driver who drives like a maniac but thinks that an icon or cross in his car will protect him, the footballer who makes the sign of the cross before he kicks the ball even though he has been playing dirty all the match, or the prostitute who thinks that by drinking holy water every day, she is forgiven. Their attitudes all show superstition, a belief in a magical effect of what they do, regardless of their lack of repentance and so real change in their way of life.

2. Ritualism

Closely connected to this is ritualism. This is the belief that a ritual which is correctly carried out will save us, even though we do not pray during the ritual and act against its spirit. To put the letter above the spirit is always wrong. This does not mean that rituals are wrong, every religion has rituals for the simple reason that we are not angels and have bodies, and thus express ourselves physically, whether through standing, kneeling or making bows, prostrations and the sign of the cross. We need to follow rituals correctly in order to discipline ourselves, but that does not mean that we have to make rituals into ritualism, ritual-worship. We worship God, not rituals, otherwise they become idols. Let us not confuse the means with the end.

3. Nationalism

Connected with ritualism, there are those who make the Faith into a national ritual, that is idolatry of their nation and State. Such nationalism is profoundly alien to genuine Orthodoxy, for Orthodoxy is catholic or conciliar, that is international, both local and global. In Western nations where the State is paramount, nationalists proclaim ‘England for the English’, ‘France for the French’ etc. Only unChurched Russians say ‘Russia for the Russians’ or ‘Romania for the Romanians’. The Churched say ‘Russia for the Orthodox’, ‘Romania for the Orthodox’, regardless of nationality. The Faith always comes above worldly concerns and so above State religions with their false conservatism and phariseeism. Of course, this does not mean that we should fall into the opposite extreme of denying the Incarnation of our Faith into the lives of different nations.

4. Intellectualism

The fourth stage in Churching, which does not concern everyone, is to overcome intellectualism, the use of the reason, which reduces the Faith into mere booklore. Booklore, abstract knowledge, merely puffs people up and makes them proud and therefore foolish, as the Apostle Paul remarks. This is exactly the opposite of the desired result, which is humility. Abstract knowledge is irrelevant since actions speak louder than words. An intellectual knowledge of the Faith is spiritually irrelevant as it is theoretical and disincarnate and so often associated with liberalism and modernism etc. It comes from an uncleansed, spiritually unenlightened mind. Only the touching of the heart can affect the will and so lead to action. An intellectual or outward knowledge of the Faith is useful in explaining the Faith, but it can go no further. Since it provides no example of living Faith, of action, it is ultimately superficial, a house of cards.

5. Emotionalism

The next stage in Churching is to pass through emotionalism. This means pietism, the pious feelings that we may have in Church, but which are only feelings. These can lead us to act correctly towards others, but they can also become spiritually dangerous, since if the heart is impure feelings create self-satisfaction and self-delusion, the concept that somehow we are ‘already’ saved because we have such strong feelings. Often this emotionalism goes hand in hand with a personality cult, the devotion towards an individual (often a member of the clergy), which approaches superstition and ritualism. In any case, emotionalism is superficial, although less so than intellectualism because at least it involves the organ of the heart, not the organ of the intellect. At least with such emotional pietism, there are some positive results, for feelings are less abstract than thoughts. However, feelings are only feelings, they are still not spiritual since they do not come from the eye of the heart or nous that connects us to God, they come from the uncleansed heart.

Spiritual Life

If we have passed through these five stages, we are Churched. Now we enter the spiritual realm. This is called spiritual life because it is only when the spirit is moved that the will makes sacrifices and so words become actions. It is spiritual life that is the life of the Church. Those who are Churched have entered spiritual life, for their priority has been the Church and not all the other idolatrous traps that we have listed above. This sixth stage of life, Churching, prefigures the struggle towards the seventh stage, which is the entry into heaven.

Europe and the Second Great Immigration Crisis

Europe is once more facing an immigration crisis, the second in little more than a decade. The first one was created when the Western bloc engineered the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union from November 1989 on. Since then tens of millions of Eastern Europeans have suffered from resulting massive deindustrialization and corruption. They have been uprooted from their ancestral homes and forced to live in Western Europe as a result of their corrupt political elite joining the Fourth Reich EU which has closed their factories and workplaces. Families have been tragically split, Eastern European Catholic and Orthodox cultures have been crushed by the Western post-Protestant steamroller of secularism. Parts of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, ex-Yugoslavia, Romania, Moldova (where a Romanian passport costs only $10) and Bulgaria in particular have become dwellings only for the old.

The young and not so young have been forced to leave to work in the factories and workplaces of the West for the glory of wage-slavery, just as their grandparents and great-grandparents were forced by the Nazis to toil as slaves for the glory of the Third Reich. Young men huddle in overcrowded flats and houses, several to a room to save money and send it home to struggling families, often wives and children. Now, as a result of further US/EU (they are the same thing) meddling, millions from the Western-created failed State of the Ukraine will soon have to follow them. Western xenophobes who complain about the mass arrival of hard-working Eastern Europeans in their countries never even ask themselves whether the Eastern Europeans want to be in their countries. Of course they do not – they would much rather be at home; through no fault of their own they have been forced into exile.

However, the West’s ruling elite has not been content with merely causing chaos in Eastern Europe. Since 2001 it has deliberately caused chaos throughout North Africa, as far south as Nigeria, the Sudan and Eritrea, and Western Asia – the Middle East as far as Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Now tens of millions of refugees are on their way to Western Europe (no-one wants to live in EU-stricken Eastern Europe, where a good salary, if you can get it, is 200 euros a month). As Turkey has opened the floodgates and in bombed-out and chaotic Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in particular entrepreneurs have organized their people-smuggling operations, supply meets demand. Hundreds of refugees are dying every week, many drowning, women and children alike. In failed State after failed State, all failed because of Western meddling, people are leaving. Western politicians merely talk. What should be done, concretely, and now?

First of all, all these people must be looked after, or else they will die.

Secondly, ideally, all the countries which caused chaos and destroyed the refugees’ States and their relative prosperity must pay. We would suggest that the USA and its Saudi Arabian and Qatari allies (which have financed IS) pay 90%, though Britain and France have a special responsibility for destroying Libya and other countries to a lesser extent. If you have enough money for trillion dollar wars, you certainly have a billion dollars to look after refugees.

Thirdly, it must be understood that, like the Eastern European economic refugees from the first wave of Western-provoked immigration, none of these political refugees wanted to leave their homes. They were forced into fleeing in order to survive. Therefore, it is the responsibility of warmongering Western countries to restore peace in their countries so that these wretched refugees can then return to their homes to the peace and relative prosperity that they had before the West meddled. The alternative is that the EU creates ‘Euslam’, an Islamic EU.

A few months ago EU secularists united to say ‘Je suis Charlie’. While they slept or said nothing and hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere, will they at least now unite and say: ‘Je suis Aylan Kurdi’?