Monthly Archives: September 2016

From Fragments to Wholeness

Introduction

Three experiences and the great wonderment and many questions that they raised, all hinting at the existence of a much greater reality beyond the veil, have shaped and inspired my life. These experiences have all been of fragments and vestiges of the great Imperial Christian Civilization which was rejected over a period of between 1,000 and 100 years ago and has since been largely forgotten and lost. Although wholly rejected, derided and even unknown to most, this Civilization may yet, by Divine Providence and human repentance, be restored. That is our hope in our tiny corner of Eastern England.

My life has been spent in the task of fitting together these three experiences or pieces into a great whole, the big picture, where all these pieces belong. Only together as part of a whole do they have their full meaning. Alone they are just separate facts, tantalizing gleams and hints of some greater reality, keys to the great gates of a Kingdom that remains locked until you have all three of them and the daring to unlock them. With time, patience and prayer, by consulting many and reading the books of those whom I could not consult in life, with great effort, I have been able to put all the pieces together and found the big picture.

The Cottage of the People

The first experience came to me in childhood. In 1963, in a spot that I can take you to today, I sat with two nineteenth-century great-uncles, their caps respectfully removed, in the Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds. A host of silent questions arose in my mind. Why did they, such humble representatives of the people show such respect here? Who was this St Edmund, that this town had been named after 1,000 years before? What was a saint? How did you become a saint? Why were there only ruins here now? And why were there no longer any saints? So many questions, so few answers and none able to answer them.

By the age of twelve St Edmund had led me to discover other local saints in my native Essex and Suffolk, Sts Botolph, Cedd, Albright, Audrey, Osyth and Felix. Places and churches were named after them, but no-one could tell me very much about them. Their names had become an empty ritual of sounds, without any meaning, divorced from spiritual reality. I became aware that further away there were other mysterious saints, but they were all only fragments. Thus, as a child, I was thwarted, unable and unequipped to put any of these little pieces together, into the great, but mysterious and mystifying whole.

The Altar of the Faith

From August 1968 on I began to discover that these saints, however important they had once been locally, belonged to a far greater whole, to a universal background and culture, a whole Civilization, the Civilization of the Saints. I discovered that, once in their context, they would stop being names and stories in dry and dusty books and that they would come alive again and I could speak to them as my companions. This was all part of the greater discovery that what had been presented to me as Christianity was not that at all, but a system of tedious, State-organized ethics devised to control the masses.

Then came the realization that through its inevitable degeneration this false Christianity had been responsible for the opposite of authentic Christianity, Secularism. Whether in its Protestant or its Roman Catholic form, it lay outside the real Christian Church, the Orthodox Church. Finally, in 1972 when I visited the Soviet Union, I realized that the essential and largest part of the Orthodox Church was there, so cruelly persecuted and its integrity damaged, bringing people at worst to superstitious ritualism, Sovietized fragmentization. Outside that, there were other smaller Churches, but even more nationalized and compromised.

The Throne of the Sovereign

Having by my thirty-third year pieced together the saintly Cottage of the People and the holy Altar of the Faith that I served in the so troubled and sadly divided emigration, I began to understand that both Cottage and Altar had to be completed by the sacred Throne, the Throne of the Sacral Christian Empire, which depended on the Cottage and the Altar, but which also protected them both. In the Kingdom of Heaven there was no need for it, but on earth this was the glue that kept everything together. The Throne had been overthrown on earth many decades before. But what was the hope that the Throne could be restored?

At that time there seemed to be virtually none, for the Throne lay in ruins. The Imperial reality had been reduced to fragments, each tiny part claiming to be the Empire! It had been reduced to freemasonry and corruption, to fallen compromises and flag-waving provincialism, to sterile intellectualism and private personality cults. It had been betrayed by disincarnate modernists who could not see the greater picture, as they lived in the bubble of their own egos; they could not see the great forest as a result of looking for too long at their own little saplings. Could it, by the grace of God and human repentance, be restored?

Conclusion

Thus through the saintly Cottage of the People I discovered the Kingdom of the Spirit, through the holy Altar of Faith the Kingdom of the Son, and through the sacred Throne of the Sovereign the Kingdom of the Father. I had discovered in the saints the spiritual essence of the People, in the Faith Orthodoxy and in the Throne Sovereignty. I had discovered Christian Civilization, the opposite of the anti-Civilization that I had been born into, with its world wars, death camps, atomic bombs, cult of mammon and ruthless exploitation and genocide of Non-Europeans. I had seen the big picture, discovering the unique Christian Civilization.

Elitism despised and mocked the Cottage of the People; the Establishment falsified and compromised the Altar of the Faith; Secularism betrayed and scorned the Throne of the Sovereign. But I had seen the big picture, discovering the unique Christian Civilization. It could be called Roma Nova, the Third Rome or Holy Rus, though to some those terms have nationalistic undertones, but it is simply the Sacral Christian Empire. That Empire began in York on 25 July 306 and ended in Ekaterinburg on 17 July 1918. However, has it ended? Or has it merely been interrupted by ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’?

An Appeal: Thirteen Eastern Churches

A Dream of Thirteen Churches in the Eleven Counties of Eastern England

(Only the first two exist so far)

1. Colchester (north Essex and so looking after east Suffolk) – dedicated to our former Archbishop, St John the Wonderworker, who revived Orthodoxy in Western Europe. The secondary patron is St Helen, Equal-to-the-Apostles, who is said to have walked the streets of this town in Roman times. There is also a chapel dedicated to All the Saints who have shone forth in these Isles. The secondary patron here is St Alban the First Martyr, appropriate for this ex-military church.

2. Norwich (east Norfolk) – dedicated to St Alexander Nevsky, the Saint of the North and so of ‘North-wich’, he who resisted both Islamism and Secularism, the present scourges of the world, and so maintained Orthodoxy against all odds. The secondary patron (the icon to the right of the Mother of God) is St Xenia of Saint Petersburg, who intercedes in cases of homelessness, a problem which many of our parishioners here have had to face.

3. Exning (west Suffolk, near Cambridge), a church is now available for £350,000 – dedicated to St Audrey, as Exning was her birthplace and she became a saint in nearby Ely. The secondary patron could be St Edmund, who was venerated in nearby Bury St Edmunds.
This covers the three eastern counties. However, other churches are needed both here and in the six counties of the East of England region:

4. Romford (south Essex), to cover the eastern suburbs of London (two churches already cover those in the western suburbs of London), a perfect church, with hall, a priest’s house and plenty of parking, just over a mile from Romford Station and the future Crossrail, is now available for £1.25 million – dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ. He will help the teeming thousands of Orthodox immigrants who have arrived at the railway station in Stratford nearby and live around it, seeking housing, work and happiness after their homelands have been ravaged and look for hope. The secondary patron could be St John of Kronstadt, who looked after those who lived in poor suburbs like the East End of London.

5. Peterborough (north Cambridgeshire), to cover the fens and south-west Lincolnshire – dedicated to the holy apostles Peter and Paul, as this city was named after the Apostle Peter. The secondary patron could be St Olga, who is already venerated locally.

6. St Albans (Hertfordshire) – dedicated to St Alban the First Martyr, a church which would also cover those in the north of London. The secondary patron could be St Stephen the First Martyr.

7. Bedford (Bedfordshire) – dedicated to the Holy Trinity, in rejection of the heresy of the local Cromwell, who had no understanding of the Incarnation and the Holy Spirit and so became an iconoclast. The secondary patron could be St Fremund of Dunstable, the locally venerated hermit.

8. Kings Lynn (west Norfolk and covering those in south-east Lincolnshire) – dedicated to St Nicholas the Wonderworker, as Kings Lynn was of old an important port trading through the Baltic and with Russia. The secondary patron could be St Guthlac, the English St Antony and Saint of the Fens.

Beyond the above eight churches for the six counties of the East of England region given above, churches are needed in the other five counties of Eastern England:

9. Canterbury (Kent) – dedicated to Christ the Saviour, as in the sixth century. The secondary patron could be St Augustine of Canterbury, who made Canterbury his Church capital.

10. York (Yorkshire) – dedicated to Sts Constantine and Helen, since St Constantine was proclaimed Emperor here over 1,700 years ago. The secondary patron could be St John of Beverley, the wonderworker who is so venerated in Yorkshire and was once Bishop of York.

11. Brighton (Sussex) – dedicated to the Nativity of the Mother of God, in memory of her purity in this city of impurity. The secondary patron could be St Wilfrid, the Apostle of Sussex.

12. Lincoln (Lincolnshire) – dedicated to the twelve Apostles, as this is the twelfth church. The secondary patron could be St Paulinus, the first Bishop of Lincoln.

13. Walton on Thames (Surrey) – dedicated to the Royal Martyrs, since the future Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra stayed here in June 1894. This church would also cater for those in the southern suburbs of London. The secondary patron could be the Grand Duchess St Elizabeth, sister of the Tsarina and who is also venerated in Sussex.

Those who read the above will say ‘fantasy’. But, think, all it would take is one Russian oligarch to donate a quarter of the cost of one player for Chelsea Football Club and this dream would become reality. And a quarter of England would be covered by a network of churches.

The Resurrection of the Christian Empire

http://katehon.com/article/resurrection-christian-empire

Introduction: The Need for the Christian Empire

Since we believe in God the Holy Trinity, our theological, political and social ideal is to strive to bring Heaven down to earth in the form of a Christian Empire, with as much worldwide influence as possible. This is, after all, what we pray for every day in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. Any other attitude promotes the disincarnate heresies of Gnosticism and Origenism, heresies because they deny the Divinizing Incarnation, that God became man that man might become God-like.

The Christian Empire until 1917

This Christian Empire, founded in the fourth century by St Constantine the Great and then continued in the Russian Lands, was the place of special grace, of a culture that was protected from the perverted values of the apostasy of the West and the paganism of the East. This Christian Empire existed as Holy Rus until February 1917, when the Emperor was overthrown and martyred by the international agents of industry and banking outside it and by Western-inspired apostasy and treason, caused by the loss of Orthodoxy, inside it.

Let us recall that the Empire’s spiritual and therefore moral values were profoundly Christian. Indeed, the social, political and economic values of the Christian Empire went around the world, establishing the Hague Court of Justice, promoting anti-militarism and anti-colonialism in East and West alike. This can be seen in the stance of the Christian Empire towards the appalling scramble for Africa of Western European countries and the Boer War, and towards still sovereign countries like Tibet, Ethiopia, Siam (Thailand) and China.

Internally, there was the establishment of free education, welfare measures and social justice, despite the furious opposition of decadent aristocrats and the greedy rising capitalist bourgeoisie. Externally, there was the building of churches for the missionary spread of Orthodox Christianity outside the Empire, notably in Japan, the USA, Western Europe, China and Korea, wherever there was a consciousness of the need to confess Orthodox Christianity before the heretical Western world and the pagan Eastern world.

Stage One of the Restoration of the Christian Empire

Obviously, we would like to see ourselves, our children and our grandchildren living in such a restored Empire once more. However, the Christian Empire can only be restored when the mass of Orthodox Christians repent for apostasy, becoming conscious that our Faith is not some private piece of piety or folklore, an intellectual hobby, without any incarnational social and political consequences. We must be seized by the consciousness of our duty and the importance of restoring the sacral Empire for the continuation of the world.

Over the last generation, since 1991, we have seen the first stage of this restorative process in the main part of the Empire, at present called the Russian Federation. Mass baptism after 1988 and the gradual rebuilding of the Church, however slow, and then in 2000 the recognition by the Jubilee Council of the first of the New Martyrs, including the Imperial Martyrs. Although this was much resisted by disincarnate fantasists and pseudo-Orthodox ecumenists and renovationists, these were vital steps towards reversing the apostasy.

Then came the consciousness of the existence of the ‘Russian world’. However racially limited that is, this was a further step in the continuing restorative process. Now, a generation on from the collapse of militant atheism, there are at last in Russia Orthodox Ministers of Defence and Education (once a bastion of atheism). We can wish now for an Orthodox Minister of Health, since that too has long been a bastion of the vestigial and primitive atheism of backward-looking materialists. And churches are again being built in many places abroad.

The Next Stage

Only now can we begin to understand that the next stage in the process of healing and restoration must be the understanding of the significance of the Imperial Martyrs and all those attached to them. There will be no restored Christian Empire with worldwide influence until there is a Christian Emperor. And there will be no new Emperor until all have repented for overthrowing and martyring the last Emperor, Nicholas II, his Family and all those around them, and rejecting their values, so despised by the aristocrats of Saint Petersburg.

Those around them include the martyred Imperial servants, canonized in 1981 by the Church Outside Russia, all those who remained faithful to the end, whether suffering martyrdom or not, like Fr Nicholas Gibbes in England who was converted by the Imperial example. Necessary here is the repentance for attitudes towards others at the Imperial Court. It is significant that there are both in Russia and in the emigration those who still justify the slaying of the Imperial Family and also denigrate all those who remained faithful to them.

Notably, there is the case of Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova (Taneeva), the confidante of the martyred Tsarina Alexandra. In 1923 she became a nun in exile in Valaam and she is known as Mother Maria of Helsinki. She died on 20 July 1964 and her grave in Helsinki is adorned with flowers, yet she is despised and slandered and falsified memoirs have been published. The aim is not just to discredit her, but also the Imperial Martyrs. If she, their close friend, can be discredited, they argue, so the Martyrs themselves can also be discredited.

The Significance of the Imperial Servants

Mother Maria was slandered because her 1923 ‘Memories of the Russian Court’ (1) told the truth about the Imperial Family and Gregory Rasputin. Notably she spoke of the ‘plot of the Grand Princes’. They did not want the truth about the Lord’s Anointed to be revealed. In this affair the atheist regime of the Soviet Union and aristocratic traitors in the emigration were entirely at one. The truth she told contradicted their self-justifying slanders which concealed the real reason for the downfall of the Christian Empire – treason.

The arguments of all the enemies of the Church were filled with their ideology of disincarnate Gnostic intellectualism and philosophical fantasies. These discredit the Incarnate Christian Empire, reducing the Christian Faith to private, individualistic, Protestant-style pietism without any practical ramifications in everyday life. They reject the God-given arrangement of symphony, or harmony, between Church and State, in favour of a system where the world rules and religion is left as a voluntary affair for personal intellectual life.

Therefore, the enemies of the Church had systematically to discredit all those connected with the Imperial Family. And here we come to one of the problematic areas in this process of repentance, to another Imperial servant. For the Revolution did not start in February 1917, but two months earlier, on 30 December 1916. This was 25 years before the next German invasion of 1941 and 75 years, almost to the day, before the dissolution of the atheist Union on 26 December 1991. What happened on that fatal day, or rather, night in 1916?

1916-2016 and the Resurrection of the Christian Empire

30 December 1916 was the night when Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy was assassinated by British spies with the aid of Russian aristocrats. He was the ‘Friend’ of the Imperial Family, an elder gifted and sent by God, but used as a scapegoat by the aristocracy to discredit the Family because he was a simple Orthodox peasant, not one of them. He was slandered by Soviet atheists, decadent Russian émigrés, and the Western Establishment alike. Why? Because their values are all identical in their hostility to Incarnate Christianity.

Thus, I remember in the 1980s hearing the disgraceful and slanderous opinion of a priest (later a bishop) in the Paris emigration about Bishop Theophan of Poltava and Gregory Rasputin. In reality, only when Gregory’s murder is acknowledged and his role representing the faithful Russian people is recognized will justice be done. His murder was the first in the coup d’etat which led to the murder not only of the Imperial Family, but to the murder of millions, the attempt to murder Civilization, to murder the Christian Empire.

This murder was carried out by the Anglo-Zionist Empire (2), founded in 1916 by the internationalist politician Lord Milner, who wrote the Balfour Declaration, Lloyd-George, and bankers like the Morgans and the Warburgs. This Anglo-Zionist Empire has reigned for 100 years. All this time we have been seeking the resurrection of the Christian Empire. But this can only come with repentance for the treason of 1916 and 1917 and the 100-year nightmare that followed. Only when that repentance has taken place, can restoration begin.

Conclusion: Where Do We Come From – Where Are We Going?

When faced with this question, my answer is always ‘from far away’. For we come from White Russia, from Holy Rus, from the Christian Empire. We are the Tsar’s people. We have not chosen the alternative to this, the Anglo-Zionist Empire, now centred in Washington and spreading its tentacles through the UN, the EU, NATO and a host of vassal states and organizations worldwide. All that is the dying past and we have chosen the future, the Coming Christian Empire. It is what we are single-mindedly marching towards, our only destiny.

Notes:

1. For Anna Vyrubova’s memoirs in English about the Elder Gregory Rasputin and his slanderers, see:
http://www.alexanderpalace.org/russiancourt2006/xi.html

2. This term ‘Anglo-Zionist Empire’ was first used by another, like myself also a spiritual child of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the Russo-Dutch political blogger known as ‘The Saker’. We also use this term because it sums up perfectly the imperialist exclusivism of the British Lloyd-George, Balfour, the ambassador Buchanan and the Anglo-German Lord Milner, anti-English but pro-British, all members of the secretive organization ‘The Round Table’. Milner had been responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in the British concentration camps of the Boer War, a ruthless war all about gold and diamonds. With his bankster and industrialist allies in New York, for example Crane, Morgan, the German-born Kuhn Loeb, Schiff and the Warburgs, the half-German Milner founded the century of supremacy of the transnational Anglosphere, in 1916 transferring its centre from London to New York. This clique had a more or less Hitlerian belief in the racial superiority of the English-speaking world, backed by Jewish finance (hence ‘Anglo-Zionist’), and had no patriotic loyalty, but loyalty only to global finance. Today they would have been called ‘neocons’. Some, for example the German General Ludendorff, have suggested that this clique was responsible for the death of the patriotic Lord Kitchener, the much slandered lover of England and Russia, in June 1916. Certainly Lloyd-George and Milner profited hugely from his death.

From Charlemagne to Obama: The False Empire

The Frankish kinglet Karl the Tall (he measured 1 meter 90), better known in English under his French name Charlemagne, was crowned ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ by Pope Leo III in Rome in the year 800. This was absurd. He was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an emperor, but a semi-literate barbarian, iconoclast and filioquist heretic who had rejected the Seventh Universal Council of the Church in 787. The real Roman Christian Emperors and Empresses, the heirs of the first Christian Emperor, St Constantine the Great, reigned in New Rome, a city deliberately founded by St Constantine away from pagan old Rome, the city of Christian martyrdom, on the very edge of Europe and Asia. The symbol of this Christian world unity was and is the double-headed eagle, combining and balancing both east and west, so avoiding being one-sided and provincial.

The ‘empire’ of Charlemagne, essentially western Germany, France and northern Italy, occupied about 5% of Europe. However, it was to become the basis for a series of nationalistic, pseudo-Christian, revolutionary empires, with Hildebrand, Frederick Barbarossa, the self-crowned ‘Emperor’ Napoleon and Hitler, who both invaded Russia with multinational, ‘globalist’ armies, with the EU and with today’s Obama. All these neo-pagan tyrants have over the last twelve centuries tried to destroy the real Christian Empire, that was founded in New Rome (later called Constantinople) and then, when this had been sacked by barbaric Roman Catholics and finished off by Islamists, was transferred to the New Rome in Moscow. All these tyrants are forerunners of Antichrist, who have inherited and continued the false empire and still proclaim it to be the true Empire of Christ.

Thus, in 1941 the Austrian tyrant Hitler invaded Russia, calling his campaign ‘Operation Barbarossa’ and one of his sadistic SS divisions was called ‘Charlemagne’, whom he celebrated. Thus, under Chancellor Adenauer (1876-1967), Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne called the US-instigated Cold War and its threat of nuclear holocaust ‘the realization of Charlemagne’s ideas’ and every year since 1950 the EU and its predecessors have awarded a ‘Charlemagne prize’ for implementing the tyranny of the US-run Fourth Reich. Little wonder that the Russian poet Tyutchev (1803-1873) wrote long ago that: ‘In Europe there have long been only two real forces – Revolution and Russia…As a result of the struggle that has arisen between them, the greatest of struggles, has depended for many centuries the whole political and religious future of mankind’.

Today the usurpers of the one-sided, westwards-looking, false Empire are still at work in their self-justifying Revolution, emptying the Middle East of worshippers of Christ in conjunction with their Islamist allies and pushing the borders of the heresies and nationalism of Europe ever more eastwards infecting the Balkans and the Ukraine. When will the West stop claiming to be superior to the rest of the world? Only when the West has forgotten the founding myth of the semi-literate barbarian Karl the Tall, renounced his iconoclasm and filioque heresy and at last accepted the Seventh Universal Council of the Church. Only when it accepts the real Christian Emperor, the heir of the first and last Christian Emperors it so despises, thus renouncing the myth of the superiority of ‘the West’, accepting its rightful place as a subject of the real Christian Empire.

Christ the Invincible Power

Answers to Questions from Recent Conversations and Correspondence

Q: When did you first become conscious of the Russian Orthodox Church?

A: My introduction to the Orthodox Church was through the local saints of England in my native north Essex, notably St Edmund, but also St Albright (Ethelbert), St Cedd, St Botolph and St Osyth. However, as regards the Russian Orthodox Church as such, my first encounter was almost fifty years ago, just after my 12th birthday, in August 1968. As a result of that revelation, I began teaching myself Russian in October of that year in Colchester because I already knew that the Russian Orthodox Church is my spiritual home. However, I had to wait nearly another seven years until I could take part in Russian Orthodox life, as in those days (it is not much better now) there were so few Russian churches anywhere. I only managed to visit any Russian churches in 1973.

Q: Which part of the Russian Church did you join?

A: Having been told by two of its members that the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) would not allow me to join it because I was English (I had no idea at that time that my great-grandmother was Russian, I only discovered that distant link much later), I had no alternative but to join the Moscow Patriarchate. They may have been many things in those distant days, but at least they were not racists.

Q: What was your path to the priesthood after that?

A: A very hard one. First of all, since I could not live and work in Russia on account of the Cold War at that time, for my first job I went to live and work in Greece. I thought that was the next best alternative. After a year there and visiting the then Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, I understood that the Balkan Churches were no solution to the need for a Local Orthodox Church in the West. They were all inward-looking, culturally very narrow and hopelessly nationalistic. Later, contacts with Romanians and Georgians told me the same about them and in the Romanian case there is the huge problem of simony. So, with Russia closed off, in 1979 with the blessing of Metr Antony (Bloom) I went to study at the St Sergius Theological Institute in Paris, which I had in my ignorance imagined to be a Russian Orthodox seminary.

Q: What was it in fact?

A: It was the remains of a Russian Orthodox seminary mingled with an institute of philosophy and, frankly, of heresy. It openly preached modernism or Renovationism, which is Protestant-based, and is therefore not even remotely interesting to someone coming from a country like England with a Protestant culture, so alien to me. One English priest, rather harshly, called St Serge a Methodist Sunday School. Very harsh, but there was some truth in it.

Q: Why did you not think of going to Jordanville in the USA?

A: For the same reason as before. I was repeatedly told by members of ROCOR that they only took Russians. Remember in those days there was no internet, no advice, you had to make your own way, you went by what local representatives told you, even if it was incorrect.

Q: What happened next?

A: In 1982 I was offered the priesthood by the Moscow Patriarchate on terms which I can only describe as scandalous. I walked out, never to return, and enquired again at the Church Outside Russia. I got the same answer as in 1974, though I noted that this time there were actually a few ex-Anglicans in a separate branch of ROCOR in England. However, these rather eccentric conservative Anglicans seemed to have no interest in the Russian Orthodox Church, but only in being anti-Anglican and they had a huge interest in fanatical Greek Orthodox sects. Never having been Anglican and having lived in Greece, I had no interest in either. This was all the more frustrating since ROCOR had just canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors and naturally I had their icons and venerated them. Nevertheless, in 1983, I decided to emigrate to France and join my wife’s jurisdiction, the Paris Jurisdiction.

Q: Wasn’t that foolhardy? I mean you already knew about the problem of modernism there?

A: What you have to understand is that in Paris in 1981 they had elected a new Archbishop. Under the very elderly and saintly old one, renovationists had come to the fore, taking advantage of his old age, but the new Archbishop promised us personally that he would sweep them away and return his jurisdiction to Orthodoxy and canonical Russian practice. So this was a time of great promise and even excitement. Patriarch Dimitrios of Constantinople even said at the time that the Paris Jurisdiction would be returned to the Russian Church as soon as it was free. So, with hope in a promising future, in January 1985 I was ordained deacon there.

Q: What happened next?

A: in May 1985 I was offered the priesthood providing that I would become a freemason. I refused, scandalized. Then we became witnesses to the complete takeover of the jurisdiction by renovationists. The new Archbishop ordained them one by one, completely breaking his promise – not because he was a liar, but because he was weak. It was the same problem as Metr Evlogy, the first Paris Jurisdiction ruling bishop; he had never wanted to leave the Russian Church, but he was a weak man surrounded by powerful laymen, mainly freemasons and those who had betrayed the Tsar and organized the February Revolution. It was the end of the possibility that that jurisdiction would ever return to the freed, restored and reunited Russian Church. But I only understood that the meaning of that bitter disappointment afterwards.

Q: Why did you not leave such a masonic group?

A: Not all by far were freemasons and I felt that I had to labour on until God’s will for me should be revealed.

Q: When was that?

A: Without doubt it was in summer 1988 when the Paris Jurisdiction celebrated the millennium of the Baptism of Rus. Instead of inviting the Russian bishops in Western Europe to the Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and returning to the Russian Church in unity, they railed against the Russian Church and invited the Roman Catholic Cardinal of Paris. I was not only scandalized but spiritually distraught. I was an eyewitness to treason and apostasy. It was the last straw. They preferred heresy to Orthodoxy.

Soon after, I met Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, who told me that he would be happy to receive me and that I had no need whatsoever to labour on in such anti-canonical conditions. I jumped at the opportunity. 17 people left with me, including a priest. So we all joined the Church Outside Russia in January 1989. That was a transforming moment because previously I had only known the Church Outside Russia in England. On the other hand, Vladyka Antony, heir to Vladyka John of Shanghai, though traditional, was not racist or fanatical, but missionary-minded. He lived in a different world from the fanatics in England and we freely concelebrated with other Orthodox.

I remember him telling me about the extremists who were trying to take control of ROCOR in New York. He said: ‘But there’s nowhere else to go’. I have not the slightest doubt that he would have returned to Russia, if he had had the chance. I also remember conversations with him about Metr Antony of Kiev (Archbp Antony came from Kiev), whom he had known well in Belgrade and whose name he had taken. He was the real ROCOR. Real Russian Orthodox. At last. It had taken me 20 years to get to that point! 20 years of facing illusions, lies, broken promises and corruption. You would think it would have been easy, but nothing of the sort. All hell was against the Russian Orthodox Church, a sure sign of truth.

Q: What happened next?

A: Well, I was at last living as a proper Russian Orthodox. Nearly three years later, in December 1991 I was ordained priest for the new ROCOR parish in Lisbon in Portugal.

Q: What was your attitude to the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: We were all just impatiently waiting for it to become politically free and free of renovationism. That happened officially with the Jubilee Council in Moscow in 2000.

Q: So why didn’t the Church Outside Russia join up with the Patriarchate straightaway in 2000?

A: It is one thing to proclaim the truth at a Council, but another for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. For example, after that I can still remember how at the London Patriarchal Cathedral they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs and also, incidentally, they refused to sell the books of Fr Seraphim (Rose) or anything traditional. Priests and people coming from Russia were persecuted by the renovationists because they were ‘too’ traditional. We had to wait for the Patriarchate to free itself from such Renovationism.

Also, it must be said, we had to wait until the fanatical elements that had done so much harm to ROCOR since they had started infiltrating the Church in the mid-sixties had left us. When the extremists did finally leave, almost at the same time, there was a huge sigh of relief, because then we could get on with being Orthodox. So it was we had to wait until 2007.

Q: How do you know that people are free of Renovationism?

A: Easy: The yardstick is veneration for the New Martyrs, especially the Imperial Martyrs. The renovationists hate them.

Q: How do you know that people are free of sectarian fanaticism of the sort you describe as having infiltrated ROCOR?

A: Easy: The yardstick is the willingness to concelebrate with other Orthodox Christians.

Q: What is going to happen in the future? At present there are countries like England where there are two parallel jurisdictions of the Russian Church, one dependent on Moscow, the other dependent on the Church Outside Russia?

A: According to the 2007 agreement, where there are two parallel jurisdictions, ROCOR should, in time, absorb the Patriarchal jurisdiction. This will probably take a generation, so that no-one will be under any pressure and everything will take place naturally, organically. However, in reality, already nine years have passed and we can see that in certain areas, like North America and Australasia, ROCOR will indeed clearly take over responsibility for those territories, whereas in other areas the Patriarchate will take over, as in South America, not to mention South-East Asia. The problem comes in the mixed area of Western Europe, including the British Isles and Ireland. In this area, only time will tell, clearly it is the more competent of the two that will take responsibility.

For the moment we shall lead parallel lives. There is in any case so much to do. I could start 12 parishes tomorrow, if I had the money to buy buildings and get candidates for the priesthood ordained. The state of Orthodox infrastructure and the general pastoral situation here are so appalling as to be scandalous; no wonder so many Orthodox lapse or become Roman Catholic or Protestant. All we pastors meet with is indifference. Those in authority should hang their heads in shame. Why is there not a church, our own property in every town over 100,000? This should have been done a generation ago. For example the teeming millions of London only have two small churches!

Colchester is the 50th largest town in England (and incidentally the 500th largest in Western Europe). It has a church that belongs to us. But want about the other 49 larger ones? Only five of them have their own churches: London, Manchester, Nottingham, Norwich, Birkenhead-Liverpool. That is a scandal. There is no missionary vision at all. Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK with a population of two million. And where do the faithful of the Patriarchate have ten liturgies a year on Saturdays (that’s all the priest can manage)? In the Ukrainian Uniat chapel. The next time you hear some naïve Orthodox boasting about his Church, tell him that. Orthodox should be ashamed of themselves.

Q: So is there competition between the two parts of the Russian Church locally?

A: No, not at all. It all depends on who has the priests and the buildings. A concrete example. I was asked to visit a prison in Cambridgeshire. Now, since there is no ROCOR presence in Cambridgeshire (because through incompetence it refused to set anything up there in the 1980s), I gave the prison authorities the references of the Patriarchal priest who lives in Cambridgeshire. On the other hand, when there was question of the Patriarchate setting something up in Norfolk (it had lost what it had had there a few years before, also through incompetence), but knowing that ROCOR had a presence there dating back to 1966, it was referred to me. So here is a territorial division. Now, where there is a double jurisdiction, as in London (the only case), something will have to be sorted out. But, as you can see, that will be as a result of competence. Only time can settle such matters. The more competent part, the more spiritual part of the Russian Church will prevail and form a united jurisdiction.

Q: So there is no rigid territorial division in Western Europe?

A: No, nobody wants to impose such a system. Let everything be done freely, let the people choose. Though, having said that, we can observe a tendency for ROCOR to dominate in the English-speaking world. Canada, the USA and Australasia are clear examples. For example, with Archbishop Mark of ROCOR retiring to Germany and the ROCOR Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland being taken over by Metr Hilarion of New York, we can even talk about a sort of ROCOR Brexit. Metr Hilarion will in fact be Metropolitan of New England and Old England. That is an exceptional event, historically speaking, and may be significant, a turning-point.

So it is possible that in a generation from now ROCOR will only exist in the English-speaking world, but will unite all Russian Orthodox there. ROCOR will become ROCA – the Russian Orthodox Church in the Anglosphere. That is one quite organic and natural possible scenario, a united Russian Orthodox Metropolia for the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world. The Patriarchate will look after everything else in various Metropolias, in Latin America, in Alaska, in Western Europe, in Asia etc.

Q: So Western Europe would completely go to the Patriarchate?

A: That is the way that things are developing at the moment. All the young bishops and all the dynamism in the Russian Church there is Patriarchal. ROCOR only has three ageing bishops and is not opening any new churches.

Q: Is there a difference between ROCOR churches and Patriarchal churches?

A: I think there is a small one, in general. Strangely enough, ROCOR is at one and the same time more Russian, but also more local, more integrated. We have done the translations, we print in English, we speak the local languages and know the local laws, we were born here. At the same time, however, we are utterly faithful to the best of the Tsar’s Russia, never having endured the Soviet period and Renovationism. ‘To quote the saintly Metr Laurus: ‘We are for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. We are Imperial priests and people.

Q: What about your own relations with the Russian Church inside Russia?

A: We are very close to all those who are Churched in Russia and they feel close to us. For example, in Moscow one of the closest friends of ROCOR has always been Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), whom some have even suggested will be the next Patriarch. (Bp Tikhon has been in the news recently, since he outraged the British Establishment by inviting students from Eton College to experience Christianity in Russia; not something the atheist Establishment likes). In general, those who especially venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors at once feel at home in ROCOR. I have this nearly every Sunday. People from different parts of Russia, from the Ukraine, from Moldova and elsewhere say that they feel at home, whatever the language, the atmosphere is like at home. In my native town of Colchester, that is a great thing that we have such an oasis of Orthodoxy.

Q: Who are the unChurched in Russia?

A: You find all sorts of people. There are those on the right hand side who mingle superstition with Orthodoxy, for instance, those ritualists who think that holy water is more important than holy communion, who mix in pharisaic sectarianism, puritanism and judgementalism, or, on the other hand, those on the left hand side, who mix in Soviet nationalism, love of the tyrant Stalin, or modernism. But all that is superficial, the majority make their way to the Church sooner or later. You do not waste time on the convert fringes of the Church – otherwise you might end up thinking that that is the Church! A terrible delusion!

Q: Why have you stayed faithful to the Russian Church despite all the difficulties that you have faced over nearly fifty years?

A: Because the Russian Orthodox Church is the Invincible Power. History since 1917 proves it. The gates of hell have not prevailed – and shall not prevail – despite all the enemies and traitors, both external and internal, we have faced. Judas betrayed, but the other apostles triumphed. So tragedy becomes joy. The stone that was rejected is become the headstone of the corner. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

On Debolshevization and Bolshevization: Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence

Q: Why is the Church Outside Russia in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate? It is a Soviet organization and you are, or at least were, free.

A: A Soviet organization? But there were Patriarchs in Moscow long before the Soviet Union ever existed. I do not understand you. If it is a Soviet organization (even though the Soviet Union ceased to exist 25 years ago), why is the whole Orthodox Church in communion with the Church Inside Russia (or the Moscow Patriarchate as you prefer to call it), including the Church Outside Russia? Simply because it is the now politically-free Church Inside Russia with some 160 million faithful and over 350 bishops, three quarters of the whole Orthodox Church. It has over 800 monasteries and convents, holy elders and no doubt saints. Where are the elders in the tiny but dynamic Church Outside Russia today? The question really is why are you not in communion with the Church Inside Russia? If you are not, then you are outside the Church. So you must belong to some brainwashing, politicized sect, subsidized by the CIA, or else to some esoteric, self-justifying sect or cult which thinks it is above the Church. Only such a sect would call the Russian Church ‘Soviet’.

Q: Yes, but your Patriarch Kyrill actually has a KGB code-name.

A: Well, first of all, the KGB no longer exists, so he had, not has, a KGB code-name would be correct. Secondly, everyone of importance had a KGB code-name, for example, the then Metropolitan Kyrill, but also Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Are you suggesting therefore that Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were KGB agents?! To have a code-name is totally different from working as a spy. You seem very confused between the two. Western spy agencies also give their victims code-names. That does not mean that their victims are spies and murder people, they are victims.

Q: O.K., but you cannot deny that Patriarch Kyrill and Vladimir Putin were once Soviet citizens.

A: And so were hundreds of thousands of saints, New Martyrs and Confessors. You venerate canonized Soviet citizens and you are complaining that they are Soviet citizens!

On a political level, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and a dozen or so Soviet-era defectors were also Soviet citizens. They then went to work for the CIA and MI6 and no doubt were given code-names by those organizations. Some of them, like the late, London-based Litvinenko, worked as an MI6 spy.

As for people who were once Soviet citizens, that was automatic because of the country they were born in. Is it a sin to be born in a country? I cannot understand your logic. The apostles were born in the pagan Roman Empire which persecuted them and the Apostle Paul was actually a Roman citizen. Was that their fault? Was that a sin? Was it their sin that one of the twelve disciples was Judas Iscariot?

Of course, it is true that anyone born and brought up during the Soviet era, and that finished 25 years ago, was marked by that period. Thus, I see a great difference between ex-Soviet citizens under about 50 and those over about 50 and of course both Patriarch Kyrill and Vladimir Putin (the latter of whom is nothing to do with the Church hierarchy, though he is a baptized layman and churchgoer) are over 50. Those under about 25 are hardly marked at all by the Soviet era and on the other hand those over about 75 even tend to be pro-Stalin (and also unbaptized).

Q: What are the temptations of those who like them were born during the Soviet era, but have since been baptized Orthodox?

A: The main temptation is nationalism. There are even a few, mainly elderly Orthodox, now baptized, who admire Stalin for that reason. This is very similar to elderly Anglicans who admire Churchill. Yes, both were victorious war-leaders, but millions died under both, for example, Churchill organized the bloodbath at Gallipoli, gassed the Kurds, made strategic mistakes during World War II and he must also in part bear responsibility for the millions who died in the Bengal famine during that War. Similarly, in the US there are elderly people who admire President Truman, he who massacred 300,000 Japanese civilians, men, women and children, with atomic bombs and also threatened Patriarch Maximos of Constantinople with death. Such admiration is just misplaced and irrational nationalist nostalgia, the result of brainwashing by wartime propaganda.

Here we come to your question about Patriarch Kyrill and President Putin. Both are of course marked or coloured by the Soviet period and are generally admired by nationalists. What critics like yourself fail to understand is that they are simply part of a process – President Putin and the Patriarch are only stages on the way, not the terminus, which is what we are looking at. The next Patriarch, perhaps someone like Metr Benjamin of Vladivostok, will be very different, free of any Soviet colouring at all. In the same way, a possible successor to President Putin has appeared (not Medvedev). The Russian Federation is not long for the world in its present form. All of this is a temporary arrangement to carry us through to where we want to be.

Q: What about renovationism, which still exists in Russia?

A: It is true that the vestiges of renovationism still exist there, for example, with the sect of Fr Kochetkov, who was so warmly invited by the now defrocked Bp Basil Osborne to take over the then Sourozh Diocese before he joined the Rue Daru group. Fr Kochetkov, who was beloved by the late modernist Rue Daru philosophers Olivier Clement and Nikita Struve, who so hated the Russian Church that they refused to belong to Her, has 2,000 followers. His sect is protected by a very elderly Soviet-era bishop, but, frankly, all this is dying out. It has no future. It is a phenomenon of Bolshevization, we are patiently working for Debolshevization. That will need time. Since we do not ask perfection of Western societies, but continue to live here despite their horrific apostasy and baby-killing, why should we demand instant Debolshevization in ex-Soviet societies? We live in the Church, not in society on the fringes of or outside the Church. As Christians the only perfection we are entitled to demand is of ourselves, not of others.

Q: But there are still strong vestiges of the Soviet mentality.

A: Yes, on the fringes, of course. These vestiges are still strong in remoter, provincial areas like Central Asia, the Baltics and, above all, in the Western-supported Ukraine, with its Fascist elements, who simply changed from being pro-Bolshevik to pro-Fascist overnight. The mentality of corrupt dictatorships is the same, whatever name you give them, Communist or Capitalist.

Q: What about nominalism? Most Orthodox in Russia, though baptized, simply do not go to church.

A: Of course, this is true – just as only a maximum of 10% of Russians before the Revolution and in the emigration went to Church. If you do not believe me for lack of living experience with the old emigration before they died out in the 1990s, read the report by St John of Shanghai on the state of the Russian emigration given at the Second All-Diaspora Council in 1938.

Having said that, you must also understand that Orthodox nominalism, however regrettable, is not the same nominalism as in the West. In the Roman Catholic-Protestant world, church-going, made an ‘obligation’ under threat of hellfire by the Roman Catholics and non-church-going made into an experience of guilt by the Protestants, is seen as the only sign of belonging to the Church. For Orthodox, Christianity is all about the way we live, not necessarily about church-going. For example, we do not have ‘Bible study’, a thoroughly Protestant concept, we live the Bible. Anyone who has experienced the friendliness and hospitality of Orthodox countries will know this. In Orthodox countries you have the Christian spirit of mutual support and love of the Truth, whereas Western countries are marked by materialist and calculating self-interest and the cult of self-admiration, the ‘I’ culture of consumerism. Orthodox, including non-Churchgoers, are horrified by Western people who proudly proclaim that they ‘do not believe in God’, just as they are horrified by the Western treatment of people in their slums and in their colonies in the ‘Third World’. To us it is all simply unnatural and inhuman. You cannot treat human-beings like that.

We Orthodox go to church when we need to, when we feel ill, when we need ‘the medicine of immortality’. It is not a guilt trip, as for heterodox. So do not be like the Protestant Pharisees and judge Orthodox by whether we are at church or not, it is our way of life that makes us Orthodox or not. For example last Sunday, we here only had some 200 at church, and yet there are 600 in the parish, and if I count all those Orthodox who come through the doors in any 12-month period, that figure would probably come to 2,000. This is what I mean by 10% maximum attending church, 200 out of 2,000.

Q: You said that some sects are CIA-financed. What proof do you have of that?

A: Well, first of all, these sects openly acknowledge it and are proud of the CIA as ‘patriotic Americans’. Secondly, there is the case inside the Church Outside Russia. It is a fact that as early as the 1960s a senior individual in the Church Outside Russia was given $38,000 by the CIA, as was revealed at the time. The receiver of the money, who died outside the Church in the 1990s and banned anyone from the Church Outside Russia attending his funeral, had a son, who sold off $6 million worth of Church property in Jerusalem. It was a huge scandal. The CIA always makes use of such ‘useful idiots’, those whom it can buy out. Other Western spy agencies did the same, Russian Parisians like Melnikov and Tiesenhausen openly worked for the French spy agency, in London émigré Russians worked for MI5 and MI6 and in Ottawa Russian émigrés worked for the Canadian spy agency. However, the Church goes on despite such politicking on the fringes.

Similarly, there are many Western journalists who receive CIA money to write anti-Russian articles. This is obvious to any reader of the Murdoch-owned ‘The Times’ in England, but this goes on in all Western-owned media in the US and Europe, including Western rags like ‘The Moscow Echo’ in Russia. Such journalists write the propaganda that they are paid to write by Western spy agencies. Some people will do anything for money because they put money above the Truth, as it is written, you cannot serve God and money.

Q: What does Debolshevization mean in concrete terms?

A: To answer this question, we must understand what the Bolshevik regime tried to do. It had a threefold, anti-Trinitarian programme. Firstly, it wanted to destroy all Traditional Religion and above all, but not only, the Orthodox Church. Secondly, it wanted to destroy all National Identity. Thus, in its anti-Christian cosmopolitanism it banned the word ‘Russian’, used ‘Soviet’ and made the Soviet Union out of many different national identities. Thirdly, it wanted to destroy Family Life, virtually banning sacramental marriage, encouraging abortion and divorce, taking away children and putting them into crèches, schools and camps, all the while brainwashing them with Bolshevik ideology. Therefore, Debolshevization means exactly the opposite of all this, that is, a threefold restoration, that of Traditional Religion, National Identity and Family Life.

In all this the Soviet Union failed. However, Bolshevization still exists because it defines exactly what is happening in the neocon and Bolshevik West today. Firstly, today we see the destruction of all Traditional Religion, substituting for it some wishy-washy, spiritually emptied, anti-traditional, New Age humanism and secularism. That is modern Western religion. This spirit of apostasy dominates Protestantism, Roman Catholicism (since the 1960s) and the modernist, new calendarist, Westernized fringes of the Orthodox Church, for instance, among many Greek Americans and some Romanians. Secondly, today we see the destruction of the Sovereign Nation-State under the slogan Globalization (formerly this was called what it is – Americanization, but now the codeword Globalization is used), using mass immigration and social injustices to help it. Thirdly, today we see the destruction of Family Life, killing sacramental marriage with the cohabitation of ‘partners’, encouraging abortion and divorce, taking away children and putting them into crèches, schools and camps, all the while brainwashing them with secularist ideology, sex education, gender ideology and internet pornography from the State-controlled media.

The Bolshevik regime is dead in Russia, but it is very much alive under the politically correct dictatorship of neocon ‘liberalism’ in the Western world, the very liberalism that is so Russophobic. Why is it Russophobic? Because it is in fact Christianophobic. Liberalism is utterly intolerant of real Christianity, that is, of Orthodoxy, it only allows a castrated, secularized substitute which is powerless to save. Just when the Soviet Union died, the European Union was born as part of the whole Western Union. Next door to the EU headquarters in Brussels, what do you find? The headquarters of NATO. It is all part of the same Western Union.

Although forced collectivization failed under the Bolsheviks, voluntary collectivization through the illusion of consumerist individualism seems to have succeeded. Look around you: everywhere you see ‘individuals’ in the same US uniform of jeans, T-shirts, tennis shoes, I-phones, tablets, pokemon fads, tattoos, obesity-making, adulterated food and TV series (bread and circuses). This is the same brainwashing and zombifying secularist poison that makes people unable to think for themselves or to have any sort of spiritual life or values. All who work for Traditional Religion, National Identity and Family Life are mocked, scorned and persecuted in today’s West. The Soviet Union is dead in Russia, but Bolshevization is alive and prospering in the West. The only question is whether it will triumph altogether and completely wipe out the Western world, or whether the Western world will before it is too late take heed of Christian Civilization and values, alive in Russia, and repent.

Do not worry about Debolshevizing old people in Russia, our task is far more ambitious – Debolshevizing the Western world. That is why, for example, some Western people have actually gone to the Donbass to fight for the Ukraine against the Kiev puppet regime – in order to defend the sovereignty of Europe against the anti-Christian, Neo-Bolshevik world.

Memorial Service for King Harold Godwinesson and all his companions – 27 October 2016

We remind all that after the Patriarch’s visit to London on 16 October, on Thursday 27 October a pilgrimage to the village of Whatlington near Battle in Sussex has been organized. This will take place at 11 am to mark the 950th Anniversary of the so-called Battle of Hastings, with its thousands of victims. The venue is the Church of St Mary Magdelene, Whatlington, East Sussex, about three miles north of the battlefield. Whatlington was a Royal Manor and the place where King Harold stopped to pray on his way to the battle itself, and is therefore an eminently suitable place for the service.

Other Details

The present-day village, on Whatlington Road, is just to the west of the main Hastings road (A21) (car park at TN33 0ND). There is a rail connection to Battle and Whatlington can be reached from there by bus, it is a 2-hourly service at an inconvenient time, so if you are reliant on public transport, please let me know and we will try to arrange a lift from the railway station. All are welcome to attend.

Lunch

A lunch will then take place after the service at about midday at The Royal Oak, Whatlington.

Menus

Main course

1) Roast Lamb with Roast Potatoes, Vegetables (carrots, green beans & broccoli), Yorky & Gravy
2) Roast Chicken with Roast potatoes, Vegetables (carrots, green beans & broccoli), Yorky & Gravy
3) Chili con Carne with Rice

Desserts
1) Caramel Apple Pie
2) Sticky Toffee Pudding
3) Ice Cream Sundae (toffee)

All with tea/coffee to follow.
The cost of this will be £15 per head.

If you are attending the service and would like to take advantage of this, please reply to

Eadmund Dunstall, 28 Quested Road, Cheriton, Folkestone, Kent CT19 4BY, E-mail: daysign@dunstall.plus.com,

enclosing the appropriate payment (cheques payable to Malcolm Dunstall please) and being careful to state the number of people in your party and their choice of menu before 30th September 2016.

Talk

A short talk will follow the luncheon at approximately 1 pm in the Function Room of The Royal Oak, on the subject of the battle and its aftermath, and there will be a brief meeting of The Guild of St Eadmund at the end of the talk.

We look forward to meeting you.