Daily Archives: January 19, 2016

On the So-Called Council

In a few days time there will be a meeting in a modernist concrete building in Calvinist Geneva (instead of at the historic Russian Orthodox Cathedral) to discuss the possible forthcoming meeting of Orthodox bishops (Where? When?), which the US State Department has pretentiously billed as a ‘Pan-Orthodox Council’. In the Ukraine, from where I have just returned (graffiti like ‘Down with Poroshenko’s Party of Thieves and Murderers’ are now even more common), I found two attitudes to this ‘Council’. One was pure ignorance (‘never heard of it’), the other attitude was fear and rejection (‘whatever they decide, we shall ignore them’). If this meeting, against the background of civil wars in the Ukraine and Syria, happens, it does indeed seem to be a most inopportune time.

Popular attitudes like those in the Ukraine are to be expected when there has been no consultation with monastics, parish clergy and people about this ‘Council’, let alone about its virtually unknown and meaningless agenda (try googling for it), and when all preparatory meetings are conducted behind closed doors and no reports on those meetings are issued. As the much-respected Metr Hierotheos of the Church of Greece has written, this ‘Council’ should be stopped, for its agenda contains not a single theological issue (unlike real Councils). And yet the ailing and elderly Patriarch of Constantinople is desperate to see the ‘Council’ take place before he dies, even reconciling himself with Metr Rostislav of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Going from negative to positive, what are the possible outcomes?

1. The meeting (‘Council’) will not take place. With the difficulty between the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch, between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of Greece, with the political impasse between Russian and Turkey (and the representatives of the Patriarchate of Constantinople are all Turkish citizens), with calls from senior churchmen in the Ukraine and Greece for the meeting not to be held at all, with its secular agenda on which there is no agreement, this outcome seems quite possible. A non-event.

2. The meeting takes place somewhere and some time in 2016, but it will issue some vague and meaningless statement full of secularspeak, ensuring unanimity but also meaning that the meeting is still a non-event.

3. The meeting takes place but begins and ends in disagreement. Faithful monasteries and parish churches declare that they belong to ‘the Church of the Seven Councils’; schismatic and modernist ones declare that they belong to ‘the Church of the Eight Councils’. Although this may seem the most negative outcome of all, perhaps it is time for there to be a cleansing and that the small minority of Halfodox at last leave the Church, taking their heresies with them, in their apostasy becoming Uniats or forming some new ‘Protestant with icons’ sect, whatever they want. Let the dead bury the dead.

4. The meeting takes place and a miracle happens. It obtains an eternal meaning, becoming a Council. Once hesitant Local Churches affirm Orthodoxy and reject spiritual death; the minority of Orthodox who have compromised return to the Orthodox calendar, refusing to die out in the worship of the past as a 1453 nationalistic irrelevance in a global world, rejecting ecumenism and modernism, adopting the global missionary responsibilities of the Church, launching worldwide mission. In this way this Council confirms, seals and extends the Seven Universal Councils of the Church and the Creed and refuses to act as a secular organization like the Vatican or CIA-run Protestant sects, confirming Christ and rejecting Antichrist.

The End of the EU?

Recently the much-respected Metropolitan Athanasius of Limassol said in an interview that the end of the EU is not a matter of if, but when. As an observer, it does indeed seem that the stresses inside the EU are too great for this purely artificial and unnatural structure to survive much longer. Like all the other short-lived feudal ‘Reichs’, the First of Charlemagne, the Second of Bismarck, the Third of Hitler, so too the EU Fourth Reich is also doomed to collapse. A child of the early 1990s, it has now been around for nearly a generation – it cannot continue for much longer.

First of all, there is the stress of Northern and Southern Western Europe, in reality largely the stress between Germanic/Protestant and Latin/Catholic Europe Europe. Protestant, or more precisely Calvinist, Europe lives for petty-minded money and philistine savings; the banking capitals of Europe are in Protestant Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland. On the other hand, Catholic Europe is less interested in Protestant Mammonism. It wants to enjoy life, to live. This fundamental division explains why supposedly unitive EU institutions are sited on the Catholic-Protestant fault-line in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg.

On top of this division, the EU elite then dared to introduce the euro. One size fits all, they said. Of course, it does not. Europe, Greece included, is not Germany and nobody wants a German Europe, which is what the EU is actually about. Some countries even rejected the euro, so hated by the German people. Notably, the UK elite rejected it. Now the patronizing UK Establishment elite is for the first time actually offering its subjects the freedom to leave the EU. It is just possible that by a small majority, the people may indeed seize back their freedom, to the despair of Washington which has always run the EU as its protectorate and is astounded that the UK elite could offer its plebs freedom and democracy.

Finally, there was the hubristic foolishness of the Western EU elite in thinking that the Western EU, already weak and divided, could also absorb Eastern Europe, which had emerged from Communist tyranny after some 45 years. Communism was certainly a tyranny, but it also had advantages. For example under the protection of Communism, everyone had a job (of sorts), a home (however modest), everybody had free education and health care, and crime was virtually non-existent. Even more significantly, Communism also protected Eastern Europe from the Western moral decay of the 1960s, which has led Western Europe to mass Muslim immigration on the one hand and Eurosodom on the other hand.

Today not just Hungary but also Slovakia, the Czech Republic and now the new nationalistic government in Poland are opposing the Western-run EU. The three EU Baltic States have been economically and politically crippled, many of the young people forced to emigrate. Romania and Bulgaria, run by hopelessly corrupt, post-Communist elites, are no-go areas. EU expansion to Montenegro and Moldova, let alone to the Ukraine, where the collapse of the US-installed, neo-Fascist Kiev junta is expected soon, is now unlikely. The peoples of Eastern Europe (and in fact those of Western Europe, but nobody asks them) do not want mass Muslim immigration, nor do they want gay parades and the obligation to recognize the Church of Satan, as the EU immediately imposed on the Ukraine.

Will the EU in its present form survive? We doubt it. As one of the foremost bishops of the Church of Cyprus has said, its collapse is not a question of if, but when. This is because only the Cross can unite the four corners of the Earth, North, South, East and West. And the EU is not the Cross, in fact it is the anti-Cross, Satan’s star. Thus, when some suggest that the EU needs baptizing, we say to them that that is not the solution, for it would refuse even the preparatory prayers of exorcism at the beginning of the baptismal rite. The devil’s own cannot reject and spit upon its master.