Monthly Archives: March 2016

An Old Man Remembers how the Great Apostasy Began in the 1960s

The European Orthodox Times, 16 July 2054

On this Day of Solemn Repentance, the Millennial Anniversary of the Western Folly, which started by replacing God with a small step for one sinful man and finished by replacing God with a giant leap into the abyss for sinful mankind, we publish an interview with one of the few remaining eyewitnesses of the tragic events which began in the 1960s.

Q: I know it is nearly a century ago, but can you tell us your memories of what really happened in the Great Apostasy, from the 1960s on? Many of our younger readers are fascinated by it. They simply cannot understand how so many people could have acted in such a suicidal way and yet still thought it normal. It sounds as though people were possessed by the spirit of folly.

A: Well, although I was only a child when it all began, I can still remember quite vividly what it was like. Possession by folly is indeed a good description of it. I think the process of apostasy suddenly sped up in about 1964. The old world petered out and the new world of the Great Apostasy began, a world of plastic, of false values, was born. Everything suddenly changed, as though an order had gone out from above and most people blindly obeyed it, like sheep to the slaughter.

Q: How had it all come to that? And why did it all happen so suddenly?

A: You have to remember that at that time there had still been no repentance for the two Great Wars of 1914 and 1939 and since then there had been various scandals and depravity among the ruling elite: that explains a lot, it meant the ground was ready for a fall. There was spiritual emptiness all around and the devil always fills a vacuum. So the masses at last began to say, ‘Well, we too have lost our Faith and we too declare that for us God is dead, just like you, the elite, and we will now live in the same folly as you’.

Of course, those words, ‘God is dead’, had first been pronounced almost 100 years before by a German philosopher who later went mad, but only the elite had ever heard of him. Following his words, there had taken place the two mass slaughters in Great Wars, carefully prepared and organized by the selfsame elite. However, it was only in the early 1960s that the folly of the elite finally filtered down and the masses lost their faith too, following the example of the ruling class.

In the 1960s in England, for example, there were corrupt politicians and faithless bishops from the State religious organization who, following the examples of German Protestant philosophers, committed apostasy, writing that they no longer believed in the Son of God become man. Rather they believed that they, the sons of men, fallen and sinful, had become gods. With their loss of faith, they at once lost all sense of the sacred. They began preaching intellectualism or infantilism, but in any case secularism, that is, they decided that merging with the world was the only way.

They wanted to be ‘like everyone else’, to renounce their Christian birthright as ‘a peculiar people’, nobody wanted to confess their faith, people were ashamed of it. One bishop called his loss of faith ‘honesty’. So, naturally, people deserted their churches in their masses. Outside England the same thing was happening, Roman Catholics also renounced their faith and the sense of the sacred in the 1960s. They too began to collapse into the same apostasy of secularism that gradually led to the folly of atheism. Thus, they abandoned fasting and within two generations they faced a crisis of obesity.

A: What happened in the Church Herself? Was Orthodoxy infected too?

Q: Only on the margins. From the 60s, and in some cases even before, the Westernmost fringes of the Orthodox world, in the USA and in Europe, for example in France and Finland, were infected by new calendarism and various other forms of secularism and aped the Western world. Many frauds appeared and the naïve were tricked and then disbelieved those who denounced the frauds. Fortunately, it was only on the fringes, where some, although baptized in Orthodoxy, lost the sense of the sacred. This was because they had stopped living an Orthodox life and began living like others, which they justified.

Of course, there were reactions to this decadence, some so negative that people began breaking away from the Church and founding old calendarist sects by reaction. This was understandable, but, as the old saying goes, although you can find some muddied water in a river, it is always muddied in a puddle. However, most of the Church world was protected from this decadence, ironically in part through the persecutions of atheist Communism. In the countries where that atheism had come to power officially, people retained their understanding of the Church and their sense of the sacred, helped by the witness of the New Martyrs and Confessors.

Q: What happened next in the West?

A: Well, as you know, every civilization, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Pagan Roman, Inca, Aztec, Indian, Chinese or any other, is based on spiritual beliefs and values. So when Western people renounced the underlying, founding beliefs and values of Western civilization, it simply collapsed, just like a tower standing by the seashore that suddenly collapses because its foundations have been gradually washed away by the waves over the centuries.

You see, if you say that God is dead, that is a purely subjective statement. What you are saying in reality is that God is dead for you, that you have lost your faith in God, which means that your soul is empty, it has died, in other words, you are spiritually dead. God looks on and sees that He has been rejected by that individual soul and knows that only the suffering, created by His rejection, can bring that soul to repentance.

That was the case of Western civilization: it was rotten from inside. By rejecting the Church and Her Orthodox Faith, it showed that it had been carrying within it the seeds of its own destruction ever since 1054. When enough people in Western civilization said that ‘God is dead’ at the same time, then they effectively said that their civilization was dead. And spiritual death is always followed by physical death. It is a law of history. It is only a matter of time. For example, by the end of the nineteenth century the European elite had lost its faith and so within the first two generations of the twentieth century, they produced the suicide of two Great European Wars. Loss of faith always and inevitably leads to death for all around.

Q: But wasn’t Western civilization already so weak before the 1960s that its collapse was inevitable?

A: Of course, it had been greatly weakened by the two Great European Wars in the twentieth century, let alone before, but the point is that people could still have realized what the origin of their problems was and returned to the source, to Holy Orthodoxy, which they had had in the beginning. Even in the early 1960s it was still not too late. There were enough vestiges left for people to return to the fullness of the Faith.

God is patient and you can always turn back, even on your death-bed. But no, instead of turning back, even after the blinding light of the atrocities on the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people refused to repent. A whole civilization gone. So sad. Instead of returning, people went even further in their folly of self-destruction in the next generation, that is, precisely in the 1960s. As a popular American song of the 1960s, written in regret for the past, said:

And in the streets, the children screamed,
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed,
But not a word was spoken,
The church bells all were broken.

And the three men I admire most,
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train to the coast,
The day the music died.

These words, ‘the church bells all were broken’ meant that society had renounced the Holy Trinity, they had departed ‘to the coast’, to the outskirts of Western society: the music of God had been silenced among men.

Q: Why did all this happen in the 1960s and not before or later?

A: Because, as I said, it is the next generation, the next 25 years. The first generation had seen the First European War in 1914, the second generation had seen the Second European War in 1939 and the third generation was 25 years later, in 1964. Degeneration, like regeneration, always takes three generations to become widespread throughout society, then it requires further generations for the rot to infect every branch of human life, right down to the level of the family and to the individual.

Q: So what happened in the 1960s, once the masses had been contaminated by the loss of faith, declaring that for them too ‘God is dead’?

A: All kinds of things. First of all, in the 60s there followed a wave of sexual depravity, people began living like cats and dogs. They called it ‘living together’, though old people called it ‘living in sin’. Divorce became the norm, the family began to die out. After a generation of that, husbands and wives ceased to exist and became ‘partners’, as in a business, because everything had become monetized, a question of money and contracts. There were no longer people, only consumers and customers. People were measured economically only, as units of cost and spending.

It no longer mattered who you were, but what you had. What was important was not to be, but to have. People became possessed by what they possessed. People had fewer and fewer children and, within two generations, you saw mainly older people on the streets. Most children were the children of immigrants, often Muslims. The talk was of retirement, pensions, dementia and old people’s diseases, as though that were normal. Society was quite literally dying out.

Q: Why was society ageing? Because of the breakdown of the family?

A: This ageing of society took place above all because hundreds of millions had been killed as a result of the depravity that began in the 1960s, I mean, as a result of abortion. Over the decades tens of millions of little babies were sent off to be turned into ashes in incinerators, just as the Nazis had done with the corpses of their slave camp workers. I think over forty years, it was about six million just in this country.

When you add in all the other Western countries, the figure came to well over one hundred million, far greater than in the two Great Wars. It was the greatest genocide in history, in fact a self-genocide, a suicide. As I said, when for you God is dead, then you are dead too and physical death inevitably follows. God, Who exists, despite the denials of those possessed by folly, looks on and weeps. It was a period of folly, for the greatest delusion, which rejoices Satan, is when people say that there is no God, as the Scriptures say.

Q: Did no-one protest at this wave of legalized mass murder that began in the 1960s?

A: Only small minorities. The masses actually soon began to consider abortion normal and, of course, the media all over the Western world supported this, brainwashing the people; any journalist who wrote otherwise was censored, sacked and would probably have been imprisoned for ‘infringement of human rights’. Abortion became a habit, like taking an aspirin. The profoundly abnormal became normal and the Western world actually condemned and boycotted societies that had normal values, whether their own society in the recent past or else others in the present outside the Western world. You can imagine the billions in profits made by the abortion industry over the decades. The main idea was profit, convenience and comfort, not moral principles, let alone the Truth.

Q: What happened to those who defended the Truth?

A: Defenders of the Truth were systematically accused of lieing….

Q: What happened next in society?

A: Well, having killed God inside themselves, hundreds of millions of people went berserk. All these people, either committing or approving of child murder, began to go mad, so that they needed large quantities of anti-depressants to live. Others poisoned themselves with tobacco, alcohol and other even more lethal drugs, trying to forget and escape. They had no-one to tell their sins to and no-one to receive absolution from and so mental illness reached all-time highs. Others placed images of the demons, reverse icons, around themselves, they bought costumes for their children so that they would look like demons, calling them aliens or witches. And of course the demons are aliens for normal human-beings, but, as I said the abnormal had become normal, exactly as the Apostle had foretold. Paradoxically, as people were unable to face death, people killed themselves. Suicide rates went up and up. There was only one taboo – death, and the dead were usually discreetly incinerated in special centres outside the towns.

At that time, whatever human-beings created tended to be contaminated by the lack of faith and ugliness in souls. Some were condemned to living in ‘blocks’ of concrete and glass and other hideous buildings that were called eyesores. It was a society with the cult of ugliness. They only rarely made anything beautiful or tasteful: music was often just loud noise which actually made some people deaf, and what they called art was often laughable – at best. Films were often obsessed with war, violence, depravity, horror, aliens, zombies and monsters. In a word, the monstrous began to take over life, as the demons came up from hell to the surface and there were demonic manifestations, ‘signs in the heavens’, and so on.

As the decades went by, some even began deforming themselves, destroying the image and likeness of the human in themselves. Some men and women began dressing in rags, as torn and worn clothing became popular. Then some men started dressing like women, some women like men. You could not tell the difference. It was called ‘unisex’. Some people shaved their heads. Others began colouring their hair pink, blue, yellow, green, later sometimes going bald as a result of all the chemicals they used, then inserting pieces of metal into their faces and tattooing themselves, because they were so unhappy with what God had given them. You felt so sorry for those people.

At the same time, in order to escape death, others became obsessed with their bodies, spending billions on special food and in restaurants, ‘sport’, ‘fitness’, gyms and slimming. There was a cult of ‘health and safety’. Others had operations on their bodies and changed their shapes, a few even changed their sex. This movement became quite hysterical and you were not allowed to criticize this, as it had been deemed normal by the State. In fact, you could be arrested for criticisms because by that time free speech was considered ‘intolerance’. Some people tanned their skins, catching skin cancer, others coloured their skin orange or covered their faces with thick layers of chemicals and creams.

Some further deformed their bodies by poisoning their food with chemicals, syrup, hormones and genetic modifications and eating so much of it quickly (called ‘fast food’) that they became obese and developed cancers, diabetes and heart disease. You could no longer recognize some people – they looked physically different, they changed, something had taken them over, as their souls died. So people began dying younger and younger. This was suicide and a great tragedy.

Q: How did people come to their senses?

A: Well, of course, this tragedy brought many tears and all had to come to a crisis. A permanent sense of crisis became apparent in the generations after the 1960s. Only suffering could bring people to their senses. So, in 1989, another generation on, the Western elite in its arrogance started wars of terror all over the world in order to strip other countries of their natural resources and dominate them economically. This was much more ruthless than the old colonialism in the nineteenth century, which had at times at least been patriarchal and even beneficial.

In this way Eastern Europe was impoverished, its factories closed, its young people turned into economic refugees who went westwards, and the whole of the Middle East, as far as the Himalayas and all Northern Africa, from the Ivory Coast and Kenya northwards as far as Pakistan and Afghanistan, was ravaged by Western occupations, bombings and terrorist groups, initially created by the Western elite in order to divide and rule.

All came to a head another generation later in what some called World War III in 2014. With the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government in that year and tens of millions of wretched refugees, mainly from Syria, sent into Western Europe by the Turkish government, the persecution of Christians in the Ukraine and the Middle East and waves of revenge terrorism, there followed a very dark period indeed. It was only after this, through the interventions of the saints, that people gradually came to realize that if they continued, they would destroy the world and it would end very soon.

Many saw no hope. But then, quite miraculously, in the face of death, on the very brink of Armageddon, some began to choose life over death, drawing back from the edge at the very last moment. Little by little people began abandoning the hell that they had created for themselves, they saw through the myths that they had been fed, they came back to ideals, to God and common sense and started living normally again. At last they saw through the consequences of Filioquization and returned to the Church.

Q: What do you mean by Filioquization?

A: The millennial process by which sinless God was replaced by sinful man.

Q: What happened next?

A: As you know, knowledge of the Church began to spread throughout the paganized Western world and several tens of millions repented of secularism and became Orthodox Christians, starting to venerate their own saints again. And then Jerusalem was freed by the Orthodox Empire, as Imperial forces swept down from Russia, liberating Turkey on their way. That was a real miracle because they had been preparing it for Antichrist. That was the beginning of how the Church delayed Antichrist. And that is why we are still alive on this day in 2054, the thousandth anniversary to the day of the Western Folly, that ruthless lust for supremacy which led to the Great Apostasy in the first place.

Orthodox Voices from Europe: Viktor Orban

In this historic speech, the Prime Minister of Hungary cries for Europe to unite and fight the political correctness that is destroying the freedom of Western nations. March 15 – 2016.

The destiny of the Hungarians has become intertwined with that of Europe’s nations and has grown to be so much a part of the union that today not a single people — including the Hungarian people — can be free if Europe is not free.
And today Europe is as fragile, weak and sickly as “a flower being eaten away by a hidden worm.” Today, 168 years after the great Wars of Independence of the European peoples, Europe, our common home is not free!
Ladies and Gentlemen, Europe is not free. Because freedom begins with speaking the truth.
Today in Europe it is forbidden to speak the truth.
Even if it is made of silk, a muzzle is a muzzle.
It is forbidden to say that those arriving are not refugees, but that Europe is threatened by migration.
It is forbidden to say that tens of millions are ready to set out in our direction.
It is forbidden to say that immigration brings crime and terror to our countries.
It is forbidden to point out that the masses arriving from other civilizations endanger our way of life, our culture, our customs and our Christian traditions.
It is forbidden to point out that those who arrived earlier have already built up their own new, separate world for themselves, with its own laws and ideals, which is forcing apart the thousand-year-old structure of Europe.
It is forbidden to point out that this is not an accidental and unintentional chain of consequences, but a preplanned and orchestrated operation; a mass of people directed towards us.
It is forbidden to say that in Brussels they are concocting schemes to transport foreigners here as quickly as possible and to settle them here among us.
It is forbidden to point out that the purpose of settling people here is to reshape the religious and cultural landscape of Europe, and to reengineer its ethnic foundations — thereby eliminating the last barrier to internationalism: the nation-states.
It is forbidden to say that Brussels is now stealthily devouring more and more slices of our national sovereignty, and that in Brussels many are now making a plan for a United States of Europe — for which no one has ever given authorisation.
Ladies and Gentlemen,Today’s enemies of freedom are cut from a different cloth than the royal and imperial rulers of old, or those who ran the Soviet system; they use a different set of tools to force us into submission.
Today they do not imprison us, they do not transport us to concentration camps, and they do not send in tanks to occupy countries loyal to freedom.
Today the international media’s artillery bombardments, denunciations, threats and blackmail are enough — or rather, have been enough so far.
The peoples of Europe are slowly awakening, they are regrouping, and will soon regain ground.
Europe’s beams that rest on the suppression of truth are creaking and cracking.
The peoples of Europe may have finally understood that their future is at stake:
Now not only are their prosperity, cosy lives, jobs at stake, but our very security and the peaceful order of our lives are menaced as well.
At last, the peoples of Europe, who have been slumbering in abundance and prosperity, have understood that the principles of life that Europe has been built on are in mortal danger.
Europe is the community of Christian, free, and independent nations; equality of men and women; fair competition and solidarity; pride and humility; justice and mercy.
This time the danger is not attacking us the way wars and natural disasters do, suddenly pulling the rug from under our feet.
Mass migration is a slow stream of water persistently eroding the shores.
It is masquerading as a humanitarian cause, but its true nature is the occupation of territory.
And what is gaining territory for them is losing territory for us.
Flocks of obsessed human rights defenders feel the overwhelming urge to reprimand us and to make allegations against us.
Allegedly we are hostile xenophobes, but the truth is that the history of our nation is also one of inclusion. and the history of intertwining of cultures.
Those who have sought to come here as new family members, as allies, or as displaced persons fearing for their lives have been let in to make a new home for themselves.
But those who have come here with the intention of changing our country, shaping our nation in their own image, those who have come with violence and against our will — have always been met with resistance.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
At first, they talk about only a few hundred, a thousand or two thousand relocated people.
But not a single responsible European leader would dare to swear under oath that this couple of thousand will not eventually increase to tens or hundreds of thousands.
If we want to halt this mass migration, first we must curb Brussels.
The main danger to Europe’s future does not come from those who want to come here, but from Brussels’ fanatical internationalism.
We should not allow Brussels to place itself above the law.
We shall not allow it to force upon us the bitter fruit of its cosmopolitan immigration policy.
We shall not import to Hungary crime, terrorism, homophobia and synagogue-burning anti-Semitism.
There shall be no urban districts beyond the reach of the law, there shall be no mass disorder.
No immigrant riots here, and there shall be no gangs hunting down our women and daughters.
We shall not allow others to tell us whom we can let into our home and country, whom we will live alongside, and with whom we will share our country.
We know how these things go. First we allow them to tell us whom we must take in, then they force us to serve foreigners in our own country.
In the end we find ourselves being told to pack up and leave our own land.
Therefore we reject the forced resettlement scheme, and we shall tolerate neither blackmail, nor threats.
The time has come to ring the warning bell. The time has come for opposition and resistance.
The time has come to gather allies to us. The time has come to raise the flag of proud nations.
The time has come to prevent the destruction of Europe, and to save the future of Europe.
To this end, regardless of party affiliation, we call on every citizen of Hungary to unite, and we call on every European nation to unite.
The leaders and citizens of Europe must no longer live in two separate worlds. We must restore the unity of Europe. We the peoples of Europe cannot be free individually if we are not free together.
If we unite our forces, we shall succeed; if we pull in different directions, we shall fail.
Together we are strength, disunited we are weakness. Either together, or not at all — today this is the law.
Hungarians, In 1848 it was written in the book of fate that nothing could be done against the Habsburg Empire. If we had then resigned ourselves to that outcome, our fate would have been sealed, and the German sea would have swallowed up the Hungarians.
In 1956 it was written in the book of fate that we were to remain an occupied and sovietised country, until patriotism was extinguished in the very last Hungarian.
If then we had resigned ourselves to that outcome, our fate would have been sealed, and the Soviet sea would have swallowed up the Hungarians.
Today it is written in the book of fate that hidden, faceless world powers will eliminate everything that is unique, autonomous, age-old and national.
They will blend cultures, religions and populations, until our many-faceted and proud Europe will finally become bloodless and docile.
And if we resign ourselves to this outcome, our fate will be sealed, and we will be swallowed up in the enormous belly of the United States of Europe.
The task which awaits the Hungarian people, the nations of Central Europe and the other European nations which have not yet lost all common sense is to defeat, rewrite and transform the fate intended for us.
We Hungarians and Poles know how to do this. We have been taught that one can only look danger in the face if one is brave enough.
We must therefore drag the ancient virtue of courage out from under the silt of oblivion.
First of all we must put steel in our spines, and we must answer clearly, with a voice loud enough to be heard far and wide, the foremost, the single most important question determining our fate:
The question upon which the future of Europe stands or falls is this:
“Shall we be slaves or men set free — That is the question, answer me!”

On the Revival of the Veneration of Local Western Saints in the Orthodox Church

Answers to Questions in Recent Correspondence

Q: Fr Andrew, when did you become interested in the Local Saints?

A: Almost exactly fifty years ago when I was nine years old, at school I read about the saintly Alfred the Great and did a child’s project on him. From here I began enquiring about nearby places that commemorated such saints. Near where I lived there was a little place named after St Albright (Ethelbert + 794) and the town of St Osyth (+ c.700), the town of Bury St Edmunds (St Edmund + 869), the town of Ely (St Audrey + 679) and Felixstowe (St Felix + 647) and a railway station named after St Botolph (+ 680). However, as a child, all I could do was ask questions of adults and wonder who these men and women had been and why they were called saints, who must have been great because 1300 years later people still remembered them in place names.

The year after that, when I was ten years old, there was the 900th anniversary of the so-called Battle of Hastings. I understood that something catastrophic had happened then, which had destroyed and buried a whole, mysterious English Christian Civilization together with all these saints and holiness. And that was kept secret.

It was only in my teens that I began reading and wondering why exactly these saints had been forgotten and hidden and how a whole new layer of unsaintliness and even anti-saintliness had covered them over, obscuring them. The other question that I asked myself was why there were no longer any saints, no new saints, only these ancient ones. The source of holiness had clearly dried up. No-one was interested in holiness any more. We now lived in a different Civilization, with different values, alien to me. Why? That was a question that no-one around me could answer, so I read and understood that it was because the Church, the source of all holiness, had been lost. Without the Church there is no holiness, no saints, because only the Church is Holy.

Q: How did the Church lose the memory of these saints?

A: The memory of major or international Orthodox Saints of the West has never been lost by the Church: for example, many of the Roman martyrs like St Tatiana or St Anastasia and others like St Alexis, St Justin Martyr, St Irinaeus of Lyon, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose of Milan, St John Cassian, St Martin of Tours, St Leo the Great, St Gregory the Dialogist and St Martin of Rome have always been well-known and always been in the Church calendar. But the local Western saints, commemorated only in certain limited regions or even individual villages in Western Europe, were lost, quite simply for geographical reasons. When Orthodox no longer lived locally, then there was simply no-one left to venerate them and their memory was increasingly lost.

Q: Did Catholics not venerate them then?

A: Only to a very small extent; they had largely replaced the saints with new individuals, philosophers and the spiritually deluded, Anselms, Bernards, Dominics, Teresas and what have you. In other words, they replaced the first millennium with the second, that is, they replaced Orthodoxy with Catholicism. For Orthodox these new figures are not saints, since they have a quite alien mentality to that of the Church. Here is the reason why today we know so little about most of the saints – they were forgotten or their real Lives were replaced by false lives, legends and folklore. Even today you can go to Irish villages and instead of the local sixth-century Irish hermit being commemorated, you will find that the local church is dedicated to Bernadette and has a grotto with a statue. A completely alien mentality.

As for the Protestants, they of course completely denied the saints in their general rejection of even the concept of holiness and ascetic life. Nowadays, the ever more protestantized Catholics have stopped venerating the relics of the saints; for instance, in Bari in Italy, it is only Russian Orthodox who venerate St Nicholas, the Catholics have forgotten him. Relics in Catholic churches are kept tucked away in glass boxes in accessible places. And if you go to the Vatican and ask to venerate the relics of St Peter, they will tell you that you have to send a letter asking for permission three weeks in advance! They have lost it.

Q: How did the revival of veneration of these local saints begin among Orthodox?

A: Without doubt this was due to St John of Shanghai, when he became Archbishop of Western Europe in the 1950s. He loved the saints and was no narrow nationalist.

Q: Was it he who influenced you?

A: No, not at all. I had never heard of him then. I came to venerate these saints quite independently, in childhood, as I described. In any case, I only discovered St John in 1978, long after I had done a great deal of research and reading on these saints in Oxford, made pilgrimages to many sites and compiled a calendar in 1975. In Oxford St John had been kept a secret from me. However, the discovery of St John was reassuring because it confirmed my inmost intuitions and he was in fact the only one who spiritually, if invisibly, supported me. Obviously, I don’t compare myself to him, but there were and are parallel paths in the lives of many people who have come to venerate the local Western saints.

Q: So no-one else you knew was interested at that time?

A: One person who had an academic interest was the then Fr Kallistos, who, as he told me in 1976, liked St Cuthbert and St Bede the Venerable, though he never expressed this publicly and there were no icons of local saints in the Oxford parish at that time. Indeed, many parishioners there were very hostile, dismissing these saints as some personal fantasy of my own and as ‘not Orthodox’. My heart had told me differently and I felt sorry for their ignorance and narrow ethnic and political views. However, also in 1976 Fr Benedict Ramsden showed me the draft Canon to the Saints of the Isles that he had written. That was inspiring.

Q: What was the attitude of Metr Antony (Bloom)?

A: I spoke to him about the subject in 1977 and he clearly had no interest in these saints at all at that time, but I think he changed in about 1990, because he realized that he was losing people to the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which was interested. So it was a question of keeping up with the competition.

Q: And the attitude of Fr Sophrony (Sakharov)?

A: He had no interest either, nor did any of his monks. Abbot Kyrill told me in 1977 that since the Cypriots did not venerate the local Western saints, Tolleshunt Knights would not promote them. Of course, such an attitude drove those who did venerate the saints away to jurisdictions that were interested.

Q: Why do you think that Fr Sophrony was not interested?

A: Fr Sophrony, as you know, was a philosopher and an artist and was fascinated by expressing philosophically his experience of meeting a peasant saint, St Silouan. His great interest was in the saint’s words, ‘Keep your mind in hell and do not despair’, even though these are essentially not new words, being the words of the Holy Scriptures, Matt 16, 18 and 2 Cor 4, 8. St Silouan’s revelation was the same as that of all the saints throughout the ages, but Fr Sophrony spent his whole life working on the philosophical implications of those words. Remember he had been the librarian at St Panteleimon’s, where he had met Fr Silouan – he was very erudite. Tolleshunt Knights probably has the best Patristic library in this country, where Orthodoxy ascetics can be studied.

Q: When did you begin writing about the saints?

A: In 1974. In 1977 for the first time I hesitantly showed someone, one of the nuns at Tolleshunt Knights, one of my articles, but she was not interested and simply said that the article was ‘poetic’. She later left the convent there and went back to being Anglican. Publication of my writings did not follow until the very late 1980s and early 90s.

Q: But surely, there were other individuals who were interested in these saints?

A: Yes, some individuals. In parallel to me, though I did not know it at the time, in the early 70s Fr Mark (Meyrick – Fr David when he became a monk) of the ROCOR chapel in Walsingham began including saints’ names in his St Seraphim’s calendar, but he seemed to have a view that only Celtic saints, however obscure, should be included. I first met him in 1976, but I could not understand a certain hostility to the English and other Western saints, especially when he lived in England and he was so English. It was very insular.

Two of his Anglican converts compiled a small book about these Celtic saints, some of them very obscure, but they mainly copied from the 19th century Anglican writer Baring-Gould, though they added troparia that they had written. They seemed to think that only Celts or those who had lived before the seventh century could be saints. But I was still encouraged by this, since I had had no support at all until then and was quite isolated. Moreover, very importantly, Fr Mark was the first to begin painting icons of these saints, notably St Alban (+ c. 304) and St Columba (+ 597), though not St Augustine (+ 604).

In 1981, I think it was, an ex-Anglican, old calendarist mission opened in England under ROCOR and it was given the relics of St Edward the Martyr. They openly venerated all the Western saints. Again that too was refreshing and I went there twice before they left the Church in 2007, although the Anglo-Catholic old calendarism was offputting. In 1984, when I lived in France and worked on the saints of France, I discovered Fr Seraphim Rose and learned that he had had some interest, especially in the saints in Gaul, something he had understood through St John.

Then there was a Greek bishop in London, the late Bp Christopher of Telmissos, who in 1985 wrote a booklet about these saints in Greek. In 1989 I discovered that Fr Peter (Cantacuzene – later Bp Ambrose of Vevey) of ROCOR had composed a service to All the Saints of Switzerland. In 1992 I discovered the veneration for the Portuguese and Spanish saints in Portugal and I learned that similar processes were going on in Sweden and Germany. But all these movements were linked with ROCOR.

Q: Why was it that ROCOR began everything in this field and no other jurisdictions showed any interest at all until later?

A: Simply because the other jurisdictions were inward-looking, either engrossed in their home-countries’ politics and identities or else local personality cults. ROCOR had lost its home-country and could not return to it. As a result, some simply lived in the past, in a cultural nostalgia, a kind of Russian Edwardianism. But others realized that the future was in incarnating ourselves as Orthodox without compromise in our countries of adoption. We were precisely the Church Outside, not inside, Russia. That is why in ROCOR we have had had magazines like Orthodox America, Orthodox Australia and Orthodox England. It is the principle of the Incarnation. Other jurisdictions were either interested only in nationalist politics, Greek, Soviet or Balkan, or else some vague, academic, woolly, disincarnate, philosophical, Oxbridge ‘spirituality’, which feeds only the brain, never the heart. That is self-satisfying consolation for intellectuals only. This is part of modernism.

Q: So when did people outside ROCOR start becoming interested?

A: First of all, in the 1990s, if not earlier, there was the calendar of the Greek Orthodox Fellowship of St John the Baptist, edited by the then Bp Kallistos and other ex-Anglicans, which began including some of these saints, as Fr Mark of ROCOR had been doing for some 20 years already. Then in 1996 a group of 300 Anglicans joined the Patriarchate of Antioch and they started venerating these saints and dedicating their churches to them. That was very refreshing. After this the veneration of Local Saints and pilgrimages to them became fashionable, quite incredibly.

A great step forward was the appointment of the then Bishop Elisei as head of the Sourozh Diocese in 2006. People who had scorned me in the 70s and 80s suddenly became interested! If only Bishop Elisei had been there in the 1970s! What I had written in the 70s and 80s was published and even translated into Russian and parts into other languages. After about 2000 people like Misha Sarni of Sourozh and also the excellent Dmitry Lapa in Moscow became very interested.

Q: When did you compose the first services to the local saints and which ones have you done?

A: I began in 1998 or 1999 with services to St Edmund, St Felix and St Audrey, then to All the Saints of the Isles and later, in 2014, to All the Saints of the Lands of Europe. These efforts are of course dwarfed by the work of Isaac Lambertson, who has composed services to dozens of saints of the Western Lands, all the main saints. Our debt to him is huge for this and for his translations.

Q: What for you was the highlight?

A: I think in 2008 when we opened the first ever chapel to All the Saints of the Isles, in my native town of Colchester. An ambition forty years old had been realized! Then in 2012 we at last had a new icon of All the Saints of the Isles painted for the iconostasis, which corrected the pioneering work of dear Fr Mark.

Q: What of the future?

A: In Moscow they are still thinking of incorporating some of these saints, who were already venerated in the first millennium in the West, into the Russian Church calendar, at least St Alban. They have been considering this for at least eight years. But this would merely mean catching up with the last 60 years of developments here. Sometimes someone starts something in the provinces and only later do others in the Centre catch up. One of the problems for them is the pronunciation of unfamiliar names like Alfred and Ethelbert and the fact that they are Catholic-sounding, though if you translate them into Russian, they come out more or less as Miroslav and Svetoslav.

Q: What advice would you give to those who want to venerate these saints? Do we accept everyone up until 1054?

A: The Schism was not an event, but a process. It is still going on, the process of substituting human sin for Divine revelation, man-worship for the worship of the God-man, the essence of the Schism, continues to this day. But the question for us is when exactly did people begin falling away from the Church?

As we can see from the Greek Archbishop of Canterbury, St Theodore (+ 690) or the Greek Pope of Rome, St Zacharias (+ 752), the process of Schism clearly did not start until the mid-eighth century. However, there was a bad period with the heretical and genocidal King of the Franks, Charlemagne (Blessed Charlemagne for the papists), and his Council of Frankfurt in 794. But Charlemagne died in 814 and his heresies and so-called ‘empire’ collapsed and Orthodoxy revived. In Rome they did not accept his heresy and dismissed him as an ignorant, power-grabbing barbarian.

There was another bad period in the late ninth century, corrected by the anti-filioque Council of Constantinople in 879-80 and Pope John VIII, assassinated for his Orthodoxy and anti-filioquism in 882, but it left the memory of the heretical Pope Nicholas of Rome (St Nicholas for the papists). This occasioned the work of St Photius against the filioque heresy. Then there was a revival of Orthodoxy in Germany with the Greek Empress of the West, Theophano (+ 991). However, we can also see the spiritual decline of the West from the end of the tenth century, when the first signs of feudalism – thoroughly alien to Christianity – appeared. Probably in 1014 the filioque was sung at Rome for the first time. At the same time there were ever fewer pilgrims from the West going to Jerusalem and Constantinople and ever fewer Greek monks and clergy visiting the West. This was symptomatic of a spiritual change, a decline.

In other words, we have to look very carefully at the lives of anyone in the West, especially in what is now Germany and northern France, after the mid-eighth century until the mid-eleventh century, the symbolic date of 1054. However, we also have to look carefully after this in certain regions, because there were Orthodox saints on Western territory even after 1054, probably in England until at least 1066 (though not the half-Norman traitor Edward), perhaps in Celtic areas and Scandinavia even after this, and certainly in Greek Sicily and Calabria, where Orthodoxy survived intact until at least into the twelfth century.

Q: What is the importance of the venation of these saints?

A: The veneration of these saints means the reintegration and reincorporation of Western people into the holiness of the Church. That is spiritually significant, not only personally, but nationally. There can be no salvation for the separated Western world until this happens. Eschatologically, it is part of the gathering in of the Church before the end, the coming together of the Church in heaven, the saints, and the Church on earth, us.

The Patriarch’s Call

Introduction

Over 20 years ago the ever memorable Metropolitan John of Saint Petersburg wrote prophetically: ‘Today there is no longer a Tsar. And the Patriarchal throne is now the only mystical centre which can unite around it the earthly and the heavenly Rus, the suffering and the triumphant. This is now becoming the only bulwark for the coming Resurrection of Rus’. Today, as the restoration and gathering of the Patriarchal Church continues, however hesitantly, these words are even truer. We only have to listen to the new consciousness as recently expressed by Patriarch Kyrill.

The Call to Consciousness

In March, after a liturgy in the newly-consecrated church of St Alexander Nevsky in Moscow, he proclaimed: ‘The most terrible problem in the contemporary world is the persecution of Christians – 100,000 are killed every year…Today Russia is the last power to defend Christians all over the world. In today’s situation the defence of Russia is the defence of the Orthodox Faith…May God preserve our Church, the guardian of the Faith and the spiritual strength of the people!’

And on 20 March, the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, he said: ‘Today the concept of life without God is already spreading all over the planet. We can see how many prosperous countries are making efforts to legislate to allow the right to choose any way of life, including the most sinful that is in complete contradiction with the Word of God. That is why today we speak of the global heresy of man worship, a new form of idolatry, which tears God out of human life. It is precisely at overcoming this main heresy of the contemporary world, which may lead to apocalyptic events, which the Church must today direct the force of its word and thought.

We must defend Orthodoxy, as the Fathers of the Seventh Universal Council defended it, as Patriarch Methodius and the Empress Theodora and a host of bishops defended it, as St Mark of Ephesus and our New Martyrs and Confessors of the Church of Russia defended it’.

‘…my consecration took place on the Feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy…and my enthronement as Patriarch took place on the feast day of St Mark of Ephesus, 1 February 2009. It was he who almost alone saved Orthodoxy from Uniatism…I do not consider that these coincidences in my life were random ones…the path that I chose in life is to proclaim Divine salvation from day to day and to keep the purity of the Orthodox Faith, resisting every heresy and every temptation’.

Conclusion

Let us be clear: the world has for a generation been sliding towards a terrible war. Only Russia can halt that war, but only providing that the spiritual rebirth of Russia can go further and the Russian State can be Churched in time. This means the State repenting of its atheism, which so many of its agents already confessed before the Revolution. This can be seen from the atheism, deceit and betrayal of Holy Rus among a great many in the emigration, which alone was responsible for the pride of émigré Church divisions, as they veered to both Orthodoxophobic and Russophobic modernism or pharisaic sectarianism.

If this repentance happens and the Russian State can recover its sense of Providential, universal mission and its Imperial spiritual duty, then the servants of the coming Antichrist can be stopped, as the Patriarch says. To those who think back to the youthful, ecumenist errors of Patriarch Kyrill decades ago, we recommend his above words. We were all young once and in our naivety we were deceived by older people who were in fact traitors. Above we can see the huge differences between the young Fr Kyrill and the mature Patriarch Kyrill. And as such, he is calling each of us to be preachers of Holy Rus, of the authentic Gospel of Christ.

Democracy Struggles To Recover From Betrayal

Paul Craig Roberts March 20, 2016

I thank you for your commitment. It is what sustains the website and my commitment to all the work it takes to explain reality in contrast to the matrix of lies in which Western peoples live. My columns are re-posted by many websites and are translated into a large number of languages. This large readership is sustained by a relatively small number of donors

It is like Margaret Mead said, “a small number of committed people can change the world.”

With much help from the failures of neoliberal economic policy and neoconservative foreign policy, we are changing the world.

Look at Bernie Sanders’ inroads on the corrupt Clintons’ control of the Democratic Party. Look at how easily Donald Trump defeated the Republican establishment’s candidates. Some Americans are catching on, shedding their unawareness. I am not confident that Sanders or Trump could bring change. In The Deep State (2016), Mike Lofgren concludes that powerful private interest groups, such as the military/security complex and the financial sector, have hijacked democracy. Still, voters’ interest in Sanders and Trump, despite the beating they receive in the media, is a positive sign. Voters are supporting them not so much for their positions on issues as for the fact that neither are part of the Washington establishment. Many voters now understand that the political establishment represents the One Percent, not them.

A New Russia has appeared on the scene and demonstrated to the entire world its power to checkmate the hegemonic ambition of the crazed neoconservatives who have controlled the US government since Bill Clinton. The world now understands that the leadership for peace comes from Russia not from warmonger Washington.

Washington’s vassals in Europe are in disarray, with the Northern European EU members plundering the Southern EU members, with all of Europe overrun with refugees fleeing Washington’s hoax “war against terrorism.” Europeans are beginning to realize that the establishment political parties that they have blindly supported since World War 2 are nothing but agents of Washington, who serve Washington and not Europeans. Merkel, Cameron, Hollande are puppets of Washington, not leaders of the German, British, and French people.

The Chinese government is finally beginning to realize that the neoliberal American economic policies that it has so slavishly been copying have led it into economic difficulties. Perhaps China will now cease to follow America into oblivion.

The Russians have learned that being part of the Western system subjects them to economic sanctions and makes it easy for Washington to interfere in Russian internal affairs. The Russians are beginning to show that their desire for their independence is greater than their desire to be accepted by a corrupt, immoral, decadent, and failing West.

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders speak to Americans’ loss of economic opportunity and financial independence. Today the 99 Percent are slaves to their debt burdens and lack of productive employment, while those who deceived them into these burdens and lowly-paid employment in domestic services are reveling in multi-million dollar annual paychecks.

The US Treasury, Federal Reserve, and financial regulators are corrupted by the private financial interests that control them. The US government serves only the One Percent. Despite this obvious fact, many Democratic Party voters—-traditionally the less well off, union members, and American blacks—-are turning out for Hillary Clinton, a tried and proven representative of the One Percent. The Clintons have been enriched to the amount of $153 million by the ruling One Percent who own the Clintons lock, stock, and barrel. Yet the dispossessed vote for Hillary. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/politics/hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-paid-speeches/

Clearly, many American voters, as Thomas Frank made clear in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, still have no clue as to their own interests and vote to elect their worst enemies.

Many Americans are still trapped in The Matrix and kept there by the propaganda that masquerades in the US as “news.”

Consider the possible implications if Americans were to enable Hillary Clinton to become President. Trump has said that he would work things out with Vladimir Putin, but Hillary has declared the President of Russia to be “the new Hitler.” How can Hillary work anything out with “the new Hitler”? She cannot.

It is a great irony that the American lower class, traditionally served by the Democratic Party, could put in the White House not only a person who only represents the super-rich but also a person who cannot escape confict with Russia, a country with possibly the most capable military force on the planet.

The psychopathic Washington neoconservatives who have controlled US foreign policy since the Clinton regime, misintepret Vladimir Putin’s peaceful diplomacy as a sign of Russian weakness. The neocons say: “See Putin is weak. He is pulling out of Syria.” But what Putin says is different. Putin says: “We have created the conditions for peace in Syria.” If Washington abuses these conditions, “Russia can, in several hours, build up its forces in Syria to a size capable of dealing with an escalating situation and use the entire range of means at its disposal.”

Putin adds: “We hope the parties involved would show common sense.”
From a position of strength, Putin has rolled the dice. Is there common sense in the West? I fail to see any. I see arrogance, hubris, idiocy, immorality, inhumanity, complete and total stupidity. These are the characteristics of Western governments. They amount to a deranged criminal enterprise organized against humanity.

In the awards of medals to those Russians who served against ISIS, Putin stated: “Our uncompromising attitude to terrorism remains unchanged.” If we take this statement broadly, it means not merely Muslim jihadists but the terrorism of the West—-the destruction of seven or more countries by the US and its vassals in the 21st century, the long-term sanctions against Iran, Russia, and a number of other countries whose governments do not comply with Washington’s dictates. Putin has told Washington and Washington’s European puppets, Cameron, Merkel, Hollande, that he has had enough of them. They must reform themselves, become honorable governments committed to the welfare of humanity, and abandon self-serving policies of plunder.

Considering the total failure of the United States to subdue after 15 years a few thousand lightly armed Taliban, the American people need to understand that the US military, corrupted by privatizations to enhance former vice president Dick Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton and by over-cost weapons systems that serve the profits of the armaments industries and not the military competence of the fighting force, has lost its edge in weapons superiority. The latest over-cost American fighter jet, for example, according to the Air Force’s own conclusions cannot match the old figher it is intended to replace, whereas the lastest Russian fighter is said to have the capability to electronically shut down American control systems, track simultaneously 24 enemy fighters and lock on 10 simultanteously for unavoidable destruction. Members of the US military command have expressed concern over the high quality of Russian weapon systems.

Everyone needs to understand that the establishments of the two American political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, are less interested in winning the election than in continuing to control the party. Trump and Sanders are hated by the party establishments, because Trump and Sanders are not members of the establishment. Control over the party by the party establishment is so important that we have many members of the Republican establishment declaring that if Trump wins the Republican nomination, they will vote for the Democrat. This has happened before. It was Republicans who denied the presidency to Republican candidate Barry Goldwater.

The United States is a failing society. Citizens’ hopes are being snuffed out. There are few good jobs or enough jobs of any kind, as the collapse of the labor force participation rate confirms. People are drowning in debts that they have no prospect of ever paying off. Young adults cannot form independent households. The oligarchy that rules and controls the country has committed America to massively expensive wars and privacy invasions for the purpose of establishing a hegemony that enriches elite private interests.

The corrupt and unrepentant financial sector, having survived its mortgage-backed security fiasco without prosecution or correction has repeated its previous folly with a new weapon of potential financial mass destrution. Speculators have bought up distressed properties and rented them. The rental streams are bundled into financial instruments, as were the mortgage payments previously, and sold to investors. Is a renter more committed and better able to pay than a person with a mortgage?

Jobs offshoring and financialization have drained the US economy of the ability to grow. The ladders of upward mobility have been dismantled, and the service of debt curtails consumer demand for goods and services. The wage saving from offshoring jobs raises corporate profits and brings executive bonuses and capital gains to the One Percent. Financialization diverts consumer purchasing power into the service of debt. The result is stagnation and decline.

Foreign policy based on threats and coercion means constant conflict. The US has been in constant conflict since the Clinton regime overthrew the government in Serbia. Constant conflict is expensive, and Americans have had these expensive costs imposed on them simultaneously with the costs of jobs offshoring and financialization.

It was 20 months ago that Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was destroyed over Ukraine. Despite the inability of the investigation to come to a conclusion, from the first moment Western propaganda has blamed the loss of 298 lives on Russia. Three days after the airliner’s destruction, US Secretary of State John Kerry set in stone the blame on Russia with his claim that “we saw the take-off [of the Buk missile]. We saw the trajectory. We saw the hit. We saw this airplane disappear from the radar screens. So there is really no mystery about where it came from and where these weapons have come from.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ever-curiouser-mh-17-case/5514946

If the US has all the evidence, why hasn’t the US government released it? Obviously, there is no such evidence. Why would Washington fail to release evidence that proved Russian responsibility? Kerry’s evidence no more exists than the alleged evidence the US government claims to have from numerous security cameras that a passenger airliner hit the Pentagon on 9/11. If the government had such evidence why has the government refused to release it for almost 15 years? If the government produced this evidence, it would be a death blow to the 9/11 Truth movement. The evidence no more exists than the alleged evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, that Assad used chemical weapons, that Russia invaded Ukraine.

The terms of the last three US presidents have been used to squander trillions of dollars on pointless wars and construction of a domestic police state on the basis of a non-existant “terrorist threat.” This alleged threat has been reinforced with false flag events and a fake history spun from lies repeateded endlessly by government and its presstitutes.

In 1994 Christopher Lasch wrote in The Revolt of the Elites: “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy.” As Lasch said, the greed of the elites for money and power have undermined the constitutional basis of the United States. The elites have used their power to betray democracy. Will the American people succeed in clawing back their democracy?

From Recent Correspondence (Lent 2016)

Q: Why is there so much opposition among the Orthodox faithful to the forthcoming Council in Crete?

A: Because it promises to be merely a politicized meeting of bishops. First of all, how can you say that you are having a Council when you do not know if it is a Council, because you do not know if the Holy Spirit will be present? We must understand that a meeting can only become a Council if the Holy Spirit is present. This is why meetings only become Councils on their reception by the people of God, who recognize the inspiring presence of the Holy Spirit. So far this looks like a meeting of bishops, with the US, the EU and the Vatican in the background, which is not Pan-Orthodox because it does not include all the bishops or, for the moment, even representatives of all the Local Churches. To call a meeting a Council before the event is presumptious and pretentious, even more so when you call it ‘Great and Holy’.

Secondly, how can you have a Council when only a small selected minority of Orthodox bishops have been invited? Thirdly, how can you have a Council when the most important question, the calendar issue, has been removed from the agenda? Fourthly, how can you have a Council when several Local Churches or authoritative voices in Local Churches have been raised in particular against the anti-dogmatic contradictions in the proposed important document on relations with Non-Orthodox? Finally, many have been disturbed by the date of the opening of this meeting: 16/06/16. It contains the triple six of Antichrist. How could the organizers, so blind to any transparency, also be so provocative as to start the meeting on that date, so greatly perturbing the faithful?

Q: You say that the US, the EU and the Vatican are in the background. What exactly do they want?

A: All thisworldly institutions want an aggiornamento of the Church, like that which Roman Catholicism underwent in the 1960s. They want to introduce into the Church secularism, humanism, new calendarism, homosexual marriage, banning fasting and monasticism. In other words, they want to destroy the Church, they want a modernist, spiritually toothless and spineless Church, degutted of ascetic life, spirituality and the sacred, so that they can adapt the Church to their worldly agenda, reducing it to a mere human institution, as they have done elsewhere. And who is their prince, the prince of this world? Satan.

Q: So you are against this meeting?

A: I did not say that. Let us wait and see. This meeting could produce schism, given the arrogant lack of consultation by its organizers with the monasteries, parish clergy and people, with the people of God. For example, why have they not invited a distinguished monastic elder from each Local Church to the meeting to represent the people of God? And, as I said, a meeting, however unpromising, can become a Council. All depends on the Holy Spirit. Man proposes, but God disposes. Sadly, for the moment, all we have seen is bureaucratic men proposing.

Q: You have reported elsewhere the opening of the Russian Cathedral in Paris in the autumn. What are your hopes?

A: Our hopes are that the statement of Patriarch Alexei II thirteen years ago will at last be realized. In other words, we hope that this will be the foundation stone of a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Western Europe and that that will be the foundation of a future Local Church.

Q: So you want to see in Western Europe a kind of European OCA?

A: Before answering, I should perhaps say that what I want is not really relevant, what is important is what God wants. I will answer only because you have asked.

Not at all, we do not want another OCA. The OCA was a failure firstly because its foundation was politicized, being founded during the Cold War, secondly because it was granted autocephaly unilaterally without consultation with the other far more numerous dioceses of other Local Churches on the same territory, and thirdly because it was founded on compromises of ascetic, liturgical and canonical culture, caused by its protestantization, putting American culture above the Church. This meant that a great many English-speaking Orthodox in the USA, the ones whom it was allegedly designed for, simply ignored it. Personally, if I lived in the USA, I would not belong to the OCA. That is no judgement on the many sincere and pious people who do belong to it or the good work that parts of it do, this is merely a personal statement.

Q: So what do you want to see in Western Europe?

A: What we want to see is what we want to see everywhere, including in North America. That is, quite simply, a Local Church that is fully Orthodox, spiritually pure, politically independent and faithful to the Tradition, but which freely celebrates, whenever pastorally necessary, in the local language and venerates the local saints. What could be simpler? And yet human beings with their compromising political cults or narcissistic personality cults make it all so complicated.

Q: To come back to the OCA, what do you make of the concelebration between Patriarch Bartholomew and Metr Tikhon of the OCA?

A: There are modernist, political dissidents in the OCA who want to become a sub-department of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, in some special American Metropolia, just like the Rue Daru group of ex-Russians in Paris, the ex-Sourozhian schismatics in England, or some schismatic Diaspora Ukrainians. It seems to me that a battle is going on between the two factions there, the modernists who want to leave for Constantinople and those with at least some sense of the Tradition who want to stay as a group under the protection of the Russian Church. Personally, I have always thought that a split is inevitable, with all the parishes in Alaska and most in Canada and Pennsylvania around St Tikhon’s, returning to the Russian Church, perhaps within ROCOR, and the others, like those at St Vladimir’s, going over to the Greeks. That would be logical and at last clear up the canonical anomaly once and for all.

Q: The OCA was founded nearly two generations ago. Why has it taken so much longer to begin even thinking about a Local Church in Western Europe?

A: So much longer? We have been thinking about it for thirty years and more! On the other hand, you do not do things prematurely. In my view, the OCA was premature – it should have remained a Metropolia, English-speaking but faithful to Russian Orthodox Tradition, waiting for freedom in Russia, which came 20 years after its independence.

The main problem in Western Europe has been the delay caused by the Paris schism over eighty years ago. The divisive defection of Russophobic aristocrats and modernist intellectuals from the Russian Tradition to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and a self-invented ‘tradition’ meant that the development of an authentically Orthodox Local Church was greatly delayed because the Russian Orthodox presence was so weakened by their disaffection. For instance, although (or because) the Constantinople Parisians are bankrupt, they are still occupying the (smallish) 19th-century Russian Cathedral in Paris, and therefore a new Cathedral and seminary have had to built and equipped at vast expense and with great political complications.

Q: Does the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR, have a role in the construction of this Metropolia in Western Europe?

A: That depends on the leadership of ROCOR, not on mere parish priests like me.

Q: Does that answer mean that in Western Europe at least ROCOR will become dependent on the Church inside Russia?

A: Not necessarily. Everything is still possible. There are parishes in Western Europe dependent on the Church inside Russia and parishes dependent on the Church Outside Russia that are identical in ethos. Some, sadly, are definitely not identical in ethos because of the hangover from the Soviet past despite transfers of controversial clergy out of Europe by Moscow in the last few years. In ROCOR we patiently wait for that vestigial ethos to die out, as it is dying out. Once it has died out altogether, convergence will come.

Q: You mean that ROCOR in Western Europe will merge with the Church inside Russia or that the Church inside Russia in Western Europe will merge with ROCOR?

A: I don’t know. What I do know is that the most active and most missionary, the most spiritually alive, will dominate. Those who are spiritually asleep will be absorbed. If you do not have younger bishops, resident bishops, active bishops, missionary bishops, bishops who are interested in their flocks and local saints, you will die in your self-made ghetto. This is what happened to ROCOR in South America. This is of course true for all Local Churches and their dioceses in the Diaspora. If you do not live, you will die. Surely, that is not too complicated to understand?

For example, today, just in the eastern third of England, we need twelve priests who can speak at least some Russian and some English – if they are bilingual, that would be perfect. I could name the places where they are needed. But where are we going to find them? We have to encourage men to think about this. That requires leadership, time, effort and energy.

Q: How can you describe the ethos of ROCOR, as compared with the ethos of parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia?

A: The emphasis of ROCOR in the last 25 years especially has quite clearly been on the New Martyrs and Confessors, Anti-Sergianism and Anti-Ecumenism. Wherever within the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia there is veneration for the New Martyrs and Confessors (and it is very extensive), wherever there is resistance to the ideas that the Church must swim with the secular tide of the State and resistance to ecumenist compromises (also extensive), there is joy in ROCOR. However, the fact is that some of the foreign parishes in the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia, suffered in the past from modernism, ecumenism and liberalism, unlike parishes inside Russia. When the ethos becomes identical, then there will be a complete merger, though, as I say, it is not clear which part of the Church will dominate it. That will depend on the leadership of bishops.

Q: You mentioned local saints in Western Europe. Who at present venerates those local saints?

A: It mostly seems to be immigrants from Eastern Europe, who have the sense of saints and relics. Sadly, despite all our decades of efforts, there are few native Western European Orthodox.

Q: Why? I thought there were many converts?

A: That is a myth. There have never been ‘many’ converts. At most about 2,000-3,000 in the heyday and many of those soon lapsed because they were received into the Church for the wrong reasons or for ideological reasons, with certain clergy trying to build up artificial empires, which of course soon collapsed. Most of their children also lapsed. I doubt if there were ever more than 1,000 serious converts.

However, in the last ten years, I have witnessed a change. Converts started coming in numbers in the 1960s after the collapse of Anglicanism. In other words, most converts were from an Anglican background, often of a public school or wealthy background and most were at that time 30 or 40 years old. Well, that generation, what I call the ‘Kallistos generation’, is literally dying out. Some are still alive, but are in their late sixties or older. The vast majority of these are either in the Antiochian jurisdiction which at last has a new, young, local bishop, or else under the Constantinople Vicariate, which is dependent on an elderly French bishop in France, whom I knew when he was a young priest.

Together, about 600 in all, they together form a sort of Anglican Orthodoxy. For example, as far as I know, the Antiochian clergy are ex-Anglican vicars who have not received training in Orthodoxy and do not know how to do all the services; then the people do not know how to sing; the Vicariate situation is similar. I know one such Antiochian community, where the priest has banned any language other than English! This is racism, though I suspect partly it is because the priest does not understand any language other than English, let alone the Orthodox ethos.

Q: So converts are dying out?

A: Not exactly, rather their nature is changing. There are some new converts, but they do not usually have an Anglican background; after all very few English people nowadays do – even in the mid-19th century, only 50% of English people were ‘Anglican’, that is, they belonged to the Church of England. Although there are few of these new converts, at least they are converting properly and not creating a semi-Orthodoxy, an Anglican-Orthodox club.

Q: So what does that mean for these convert communities?

A: It means that many Vicariate communities number fewer than ten, usually quite elderly people, and form a kind of ex-Anglican clique, centred on the dead Metr Antony Bloom. Where they are more numerous, most of the people are Eastern Europeans. In a similar way, ageing Antiochian groups are being saved from extinction by Eastern Europeans, especially church-deprived Romanians. Most of these groups do not have their own premises and use Anglican churches.

Q: So what is the justification for using English in services, if there are fewer converts?

A: There are now three justifications. Firstly, there are still English people, converts or children and grandchildren of converts with the English husbands of Orthodox women, secondly, there are the English-speaking children of Eastern Europeans and thirdly, in mixed-nationality parishes, English is simply the common language. The future is with the second group, children of Eastern Europeans, because they are now the majority of English-speaking Orthodox.

Q: How are they to be kept in the Church?

A: That is the key question. In ROCOR, for example, the London Cathedral lost virtually everyone from its second generation, let alone from the third and fourth. And that is a typical story for all jurisdictions everywhere. Why? Because they had no identity, apart from an ethnic one, which they naturally disowned. It is vital for Orthodox children born here or going to school here to have an Orthodox identity, to know and appreciate our civilizational values, to know that we are simply Christians. The old generations generally failed to do this, their identity was purely ethnic, not spiritual.

Thus, the children went to school, lost their parents’ language and said, ‘I’m English, this is nothing to do with me, it’s only for old people’. Assimilation. For example, there are six Anglican Cypriot priests in the Diocese of London. Why? Because they did not understand Greek, so they left the Greek Orthodox Church. Of course, we can only give children this identity if parents bring their children to church regularly. Those children have to be instructed in Sunday schools and they have to have activities, which creates in them a sense of belonging to the Church. If parents do not bring up their children in the church, then they will be completely lost.

Q: Why do Protestants so value the Old Testament?

A: The Reformation was largely financed by Jews (despite Luther’s virulent anti-Jewishness) and most Protestants have always been pro-Jewish. Cromwell depended on them almost entirely. (Even today Israel depends entirely on Protestant countries, especially the USA; Catholics have always been more sceptical). Thus, the Protestants even use the Jewish Old Testament in favour of the Christian one! For Orthodox, by far the most important book of the Old Testament is the Psalter, which is why you rarely find Orthodox reading the Old Testament (other than Genesis and Exodus), but rather just the New Testament and the Psalms.

Q: Why is the USA forcing countries, like the Ukraine and also African countries, into accepting homosexual marriage? Is Obama a homosexual?

A: I have no idea what Obama is – except that he supported thuggery by toppling the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine and replacing it with a murderous Fascist junta, which has little control of the country outside Kiev. Then there are the US drones which can murder anyone anywhere. As regards his other personal inclinations, I would not rely on internet rumours.

Now for your main question, which needs a historical answer.

When, in the 11th century, Satan set about destroying Christendom, his first target was to desacralize, that is, secularize, the Church. Satan cannot stand the presence of the sacred, the sacred must be removed from the world because it prevents him from realizing his plans to take total control of the world. This he did by attacking the Church at its weakest point, that is, in the Western provinces, where all had been weakened by the barbarian invasions. In the 11th century the Western Patriarchate was converted to secularism, with what had been the Church becoming a State, becoming secular, changing the Creed, controlling murderous armies, the courts and sponsoring invasions etc. In history this is called papocaesarism.

In other words, the first step to Satanization, was to remove the Altar. The second step was to remove the Throne, that is, to remove the sacral monarchy. This act came later and was done in the 17th century in England, in the 18th century in France and in the 20th century in Russia, although it is true that the Western monarchies had been deformed before then, either by parliamentarianism, or else by absolutism, neither of which conforms to the Orthodox Christian understanding of monarchy, which is the presence of the Lord’s Anointed among the people.

Thus, having removed the spiritual content of the Faith and the Ruler, having desacralized the Faith and the King, there remained the third and final stage, to desacralize or secularize the Christian People and popular culture. This means destroying Christian cultural values (a process that was very rapid in the 20th century), destroying the family – very rapid from the 1960s on after the fall of the Second Vatican Council, when fasting was abolished and so now today we have an obesity crisis). Then they also started destroying the identity of the human person in the unisex movement that since the 1960s has resulted in only two generations in a transgender, transhuman society.

This enslavement is a form of suicide. It is why Russian Orthodox Tsardom, the Christian Empire, had to be destroyed in 1917. With its slogan of Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People, the Faith, Tsar and Rus, in English, Altar, Throne, Cottage, in French, Foi, Roi, Loi, its existence was the one thing that made upside down Satanism, with its aim of destroying the Church, the Ruler and the People, impossible.

Q: Can this situation of spiritual enslavement be reversed, or is an imminent end inevitable?

A: Nothing is inevitable because for human beings repentance is always possible. In Russia, the Church is slowly being restored and with Her the ideal of a Spiritual Empire, with a Christian Emperor and People. However, nothing is certain and there are reasons for both profound pessimism and profound optimism. May God’s will be done. On 18 December 1917 the Tsarina Alexandra wrote in her diary: (The Revolution in Russia) ‘is a disease, after which Russia will grow stronger. O Lord, be merciful and save Russia!’ May this hopeful prophecy be true.

Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris to Open in the Autumn

Alexander Orlov, the Russian ambassador to France, announced on 14 March that the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris will at long last be opening officially this autumn, hopefully in October. After many years of delays, the news that a Cathedral is opening in the historic centre of the Russian emigration is welcome indeed. The official opening will take place in the presence of the Russian and French Presidents and His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill.

The 4,000 square metre plot of land in prestigious central Paris near the Alma Bridge will house not only the new Cathedral with its five cupolas (the dedication has not yet been announced), but also the Russian seminary, a library, a school for 150 pupils, meeting rooms, diocesan offices and gardens. The Russian ambassador stated that the Cathedral is seen as a pilot and that other similar cathedrals could be built in other Western capitals.

The opening of the new Cathedral is a step towards realizing the vision of the saintly Metr Pitirim of Saint Petersburg (1850-1920). One hundred years ago exactly his desire was to establish in his jurisdiction a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in every Western capital and translate the service books of the Church and Patristic literature into every Western language. Having lost one hundred years, we can only hope that this event will be a step towards that goal.

We pray that the missionary efforts of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe will turn increasingly towards establishing a united Russian Orthodox Metropolia here. This was long the vision and hope of many of us in the twentieth century and it was confirmed by Patriarch Alexey II of Moscow in 2003, who foresaw that such a Metropolia would be the foundation stone of a future Local Church in the spiritual desert of contemporary Western Europe.

A Commentary on a Universal Prayer

O Lord, forgive us for the sins of not knowing and rejecting the Church,

= Forgive us for our ignorance of the Church through the sins of distant ancestors who were forced into following the heresies and errors of the Western rulers of that age and so fell away from the Church, and for rejecting the Church by not seeking Her.

failing to keep the spiritual purity of Holy Orthodoxy and so failing to share in the missionary Cross of Holy Rus, the Christian Empire of the Third Rome,

= Forgive us for the sins of new calendarism (modernism, liberalism, ecumenism), old calendarism (phariseeism, sectarianism), phyletism (nationalism and racism), narcissism (personality cults, false eldership) and the impurity of other deviations and deformations (spiritual delusions).

and betraying the memory of the Anointed of God, not understanding and revering the holiness of the last Christian Emperor and his Family.

= Forgive us for accepting what the rulers of our countries did to betray and undermine the Christian Emperor and Empire in 1917 and for believing the lies about them that have ever since been inherent in Western culture.

On Delaying the Coming of Antichrist: Universal Repentance and a Universal Prayer

In 1914 the leaders of Western Europe set out on a path of madness, dragging down the rest of the world into their folly. Since then that path of folly, invading other countries and repressing other peoples, has continued to be the one which this world treads, as it were winding up the spring of global tension so tight that, it seems, all can end only in a release of unparalleled global violence.

The key event which signified the leaders’ refusal to repent and return was the coup d’etat of February 1917 in Russia, when they and their Westernized Russian minions committed treason and overthrew the God-given ruler of Russia. After that there was no going back and so the folly spread through Europe again a generation later and then went global. For since 1917 there has been no peace, the world has become unbalanced.

After that catastrophe of nearly a hundred years ago, in Russia today many are realizing that only repentance there can bring restoration and so the rebalancing of the world. However, repentance is also necessary in Western countries, especially in Great Britain, the USA, Germany and France, for it was their elites that engineered the treason of the February 1917 coup d’etat and so are indirectly responsible for all that came later. Using their agents, sometimes Non-Russian, sometimes Westernized Russians, they began the disaster.

Moreover, despite the abysmal deeds of the atheists in the former Russian Empire, especially between 1917 and 1941, most books and articles written by Western academics, authors and politicians about the so-called ‘Russian Revolution’ still maintain that this genocidal blood-letting of millions was good. And they have spread that ideology among the peoples of the West, most of whom still actually believe their lies about the Tsar’s Russia and therefore about contemporary post-Soviet Russia.

According to the propaganda myths of these ideologists the old order with its peace and prosperity had to be destroyed, because the Russian Empire was hindering their plans to obtain global secularist control. Thus, the calls to repentance of the Russian Orthodox Church to Russians apply also to all Non-Russians who consider that the overthrow of the Tsar and the Christian Empire were positive. What is needed is repentance not only in the lands of the former Russian Empire, but universally:

The misfortune that has befallen Russia is the direct result of grievous sins and her rebirth is only possible through cleansing from them. However, so far there has been no real repentance, the crimes committed have not been clearly condemned and many who took an active part in the Revolution continue and even now still affirm that at the time there was no other course of action…refusing to express any direct condemnation of the February Revolution and their rebellion against the Lord’s Anointed.

Bishop (now St) John of Shanghai at the Second Council of the Russian Diaspora in 1938.

We call on all to repent….regardless of their political opinions and views of history, regardless of their ethnic origins, religious background, their attitude to the concept of monarchy and the personality of the last Emperor of Russia.

The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, 18 July 1993.

As the end of history approaches with the coming of Antichrist, we can still postpone that apocalyptic event by repenting. That will gain us time for our own much delayed salvation and potentially that of billions of others, those close to us and those far from us, to the ends of the earth. Therefore let Non-Russians also pray:

O Lord, forgive us for the sins of not knowing and rejecting the Church, failing to keep the spiritual purity of Holy Orthodoxy and so failing to share in the missionary Cross of Holy Rus, the Christian Empire of the Third Rome, and betraying the memory of the Anointed of God, not understanding and revering the holiness of the last Christian Emperor and his Family.

On Collapsing Unions

Introduction

Many human structures last only three generations. After the grandparents have passed on their necessarily imperfect achievements to their children and they have passed them on in their turn to their grandchildren, the great-grandchildren reject them and all is dissolved. For the fourth generation stops looking back to the imperfect past and, freeing itself from the weight of history, looks to the future, hoping for better.

The Soviet Union

The Soviet Union was born out of the European suicide of the First World War. International empires centred in Western Europe were not content to limit themselves and continually wanted to expand. Having colonized the world, they were therefore obliged to clash with one another and also destroy the one remaining Empire outside its control, the Russian Empire, using its traitors to create the Soviet Union in its place.

The Soviet Union had a Marxist view of the world. Covering one sixth of the world’s land surface, but with little more than 5% of the world’s then population and responsible for only a small part of world production and trade, the vast Soviet Union was unable to meet the needs of its peoples and so became irrelevant. It had overreached itself out of hubris.

Twenty-five years ago the Soviet Union collapsed. It was effectively founded in 1917, more or less three generations before it collapsed (February 1917 to December 1991). The Soviet Union collapsed because people ceased to believe that its anti-patriotic injustices and straitjacket of tyranny were worth continuing it. They ceased to believe in its atheistic and materialistic ideology, realizing that there was greater.

The European Union

The European Union was born out of the European suicide of the Second World War. International empires centred in Western Europe were not content to limit themselves and continually wanted to expand. Having colonized the world, they were therefore obliged to clash with one another and also destroy the one remaining Empire outside its control, the Soviet Union. Having failed in this in 1945, the European Union was formed.

The European Union had a Eurocentric view of the world. Today, covering a tiny amount of the world’s land surface with little more than 5% of the world’s population and responsible for only a small part of world production and trade, this corner of Western Europe seems unable to meet the needs of its peoples and is so becoming irrelevant. It has overreached itself out of hubris.

Today, the European Union is collapsing. It was effectively founded in 1945, more or less three generations ago (May 1945 to 20??). The European Union is collapsing because people are ceasing to believe that its anti-patriotic injustices and straitjacket of tyranny are worth continuing it. They are ceasing to believe in its atheistic and materialistic ideology, realizing that there is greater.

Conclusion

Apostasy from the Orthodox Faith determined the collapse of the Russian Empire and its dissolution into the atheistic Soviet Union. In turn, the loss of belief in atheism determined the collapse of the Soviet Union and its dissolution into many constituent countries, above all the Russian Federation.

Apostasy from the Christian Faith determined the collapse of the European Nations and their dissolution into the atheistic European Union. In turn, the loss of belief in atheism is determining the collapse of the European Union and its dissolution into many constituent countries, perhaps into a Eurasian Confederation.