Monthly Archives: October 2016

The End of the New World Order

The victory of the Trotskyite neocons in the Cold War that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union exactly 25 years ago has turned out to be their self-imposed defeat. This is because the victory, trumpeted as ‘the new world order’ and ‘the end of history’, went to the heads of the neocons, who then, as is the way of all anti-Christian empires, over-reached themselves. In attempting to take over the whole world, the neocons bankrupted themselves, made themselves hated worldwide and so created fanatical terrorist enemies, as was seen on 11 September 2001. As we move into 2017 and 2018, the centenaries of Western-orchestrated events in the Russian Empire which shaped the blood-soaked tragedies of the twentieth century, we are now at a turning-point. We may now be on the eve of a decisive battle.

As the neocon terrorists face defeat in Syria and the Yemen, their arms desperately and bloodily attacking the innocent civilians in the schools and hospitals of Mosul, we see that the attempt to impose their sinister globalist project has failed. The Tower of Babylon, its feet of clay, is falling once more, but those who know that the end is coming for them will not give up their vanity without a struggle. Their pride, expressed in their absurd Russophobic propaganda, will not allow them to admit that they have been hopelessly wrong all along. There are those in Washington who even now threaten nuclear war, taking on Russia and China, despite the chaos and bloodshed they have already created in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. And there are even those in their European vassal states who are so brainwashed that they actually believe them, not least in the UK and among other NATO puppets.

We are not afraid. In 1825 Tsar Alexander I, who vanquished the tyrant Napoleon and liberated Paris, disappeared from public life, and until 1836 lived as a disciple of the future St Seraphim of Sarov. Then, after Fr Seraphim’s repose, he appeared as the much-venerated Elder Fyodor Kuzmich. It is from him that our prophecies clearly say that a last Christian Emperor is to descend and will oppose Antichrist in the last times, uniting all the remaining faithful within the Church centred in Russia. This last Emperor, whose coming is being prepared, will be descended from the Romanovs by his mother (in other words, his surname will not be Romanov). We are now moving towards these times. With the US elections and those in Germany and France, in an EU rejected by the UK, all taking place in the next few months, we await prophetic events.

Hastings 2016

A sermon read before pilgrims in the Church at Whatlington by the site of the so-called ‘Battle of Hastings’ on the occasion of the 950th anniversary of the tragedy, 27 October 2016.

950 years ago, on this very spot, King Harold son of Godwin, the last English King of England, prayed before giving battle to the invader. The latter had a Papal blessing to invade, conquer and forcibly introduce feudal enslavement through castles and knights. This was all in order to bring the Church in England into line with his revolutionary, newly-invented Western European religion, which had already been enforced elsewhere.

The new religion had replaced Christ, making Him unnecessary as Head of the Church, and claimed that the absolute authority of the Holy Spirit now proceeded from its Papal head. For island England was a latecomer to this new religion and the Norman invasion was merely part of a far broader process of subjugation throughout Western Europe that was later to lead to invasion of the Holy Land, called the First Crusade, and determine the pattern of future Western history.

King Harold lost the Battle and died here together with some 7,000 of his men. Massacre and genocide followed the English defeat – 100,000 people, over 5% of the total population, died in the north of England alone, the equivalent of 3.25 million in today’s terms, well over twice the figure of two World Wars combined. The defeat of England and her other regional heroes like Hereward meant that English people became second-class citizens, on the same level as what used to be called Red Indians in North America. As for Wales, Scotland and in the 12th century Ireland, they would also be brought under the same Norman yoke by castle and sword.

Harold’s English people were scattered to the four winds. Some English people fled north to Scotland and Scandinavia, others west to Wales and Ireland. Many of Harold’s surviving military men fled south to New Rome (Constantinople) with the English Navy, at least 235 ships in all. There they settled, as also around the Black Sea coasts, especially around the Sea of Azov near the Crimea, and in Constantinople they founded their own English Church, where a lamp burned before the icon of St Augustine of Canterbury. As for Harold’s daughter, Gytha, she fled east to Kiev, married royally and one of her sons, the grandson of King Harold, founded Moscow.

Today we have gathered to commemorate the some 7,000 men who died in the Battle. They died defending their and our homeland and their and our English Orthodox Christian culture that was in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Christian world. These were real people, they had wives, children and grandchildren, they were flesh and blood, mind and soul, they had names – some of them we know. They died fighting for the culture that had been resurrected in the ninth century by King Alfred from the ruins of the Viking attacks. Let us not forget that Alfred, also called ‘the Lawgiver’ and ‘England’s Darling’, is the only figure in English history to be called ‘the Great’.

Alfredian culture restored Old English Church Civilization, which had been so faithfully recorded by St Bede the Venerable in England’s seventh and eighth century Golden Age. Alfredian culture meant first defeating and then Christianizing pagans, defending towns, rebuilding churches and monasteries, establishing laws, sending alms to the Patriarch of Jerusalem and translating the works of the Church Fathers. King Alfred restored this culture so well that as a result, after his repose, the tenth century became through his descendants the age of the national unity of England and the Silver Age of Church culture, unmatched in its splendour in Western Europe.

However, in the eleventh century the Vikings attacked England again and again and the last Vikings, the Normans, or Northmen, finally destroyed England as it had been, leaving us today with only vestiges of a once great Civilization, as we can see in the remaining books and manuscripts of the School of Winchester, the English capital. These are the rags of a once magnificent and precious raiment of gold and jewels, part of the Old Christian Europe. Today we who are conscious of all this have as our task to tell others these truths which are either hidden from or else indifferent to most.

Today, Orthodox Christian Civilization has its spiritual centres not Canterbury or Winchester, Lindisfarne or Iona, but elsewhere in the east. It is therefore our task to refound spiritual centres here, however modest they may be, for we belong in spirit to this Civilization and keep faith with its values. We live in our spiritual oases here with our heritage of Augustine, Audrey, Cuthbert, Hilda, Theodore, Bede, Edmund, Alfred, Edward, Dunstan, Alphege and all who are present here in their icons. Now we can at the very least pray for the souls who gave up their lives for the Faith, for the King and for England, as well as for the Universal Church, and take inspiration from them.

In the sleep of the blessed grant, O Lord, eternal repose, to the souls of those who fell for the Faith on Senlac Field, King Harold, Princes Leofwyn and Gyrth, Alfwig, Abbot of Winchester, Leofric, Abbot of Peterborough, Deacon Eadric, Aelfric of Huntingdon, Thurkill of Kingston, Godric of Fyfield, Esegar of Middlesex, Hakon, Breme, and all the King’s men, and grant them Eternal Memory!

The Tradition is One

An integral part of the destructive ideology peddled by modernists is to deny the existence of the Tradition. Making out that there is no such thing as the Tradition, they claim that there are therefore only human customs, thus, very typically for them, reducing the Inheritance of the Holy Spirit to relativistic humanism. They are wrong – the Tradition exists and this is precisely the deposit of the Holy Spirit that the Apostle calls us to guard (1 Tim 6, 20).

There is only one Tradition, just as there is only one Church. True, there are local customs, but some of these are bad and come from spiritual decadence. These have come into the Church in recent times through Western influence and can be encountered especially in Greece, Cyprus and in parts of Romania and the Patriarchate of Antioch, which have been exposed for some generations to Western decadence. In their parishes in the USA and elsewhere, some of these groups actually use organs and people sit in pews during Church services! Of course, this is no part of the Tradition and is only justified as a custom because it is what heretics do. Here there are clear cases where the Tradition is being lost. However, modernists justify all this saying that ‘you can have organs or not have organs, you can have pews or not have pews – these are merely differences of custom’. This is a lie.

Such people are simply victims of modernist decadence and have lost the Tradition. Much more seriously, and this is now widespread among those who come from heterodox backgrounds, there is the custom of communion without confession and even persecution of those who do not take communion. This is like saying that communion is medicine which can be administered without a diagnosis. The fact is that if you take the wrong medicine because you do not have a diagnosis, you can die. Though the modernists hate the Scriptures because they are not politically correct, the Apostle Paul wrote about communion for damnation in the first century: ‘For this cause many are weak and sickly among you’ (I Cor 11, 30). Similarly, there is the modernist practice of forcing women to take communion during menstruation, which also goes against the Holy Spirit.

Another widespread modernist practice is to change the services, justifying arbitrary changes contrary to the Tradition. All of this goes hand in hand with the use of the papal calendar instead of the Orthodox calendar. Here too modernists assert that there are two calendars, therefore we can use either. In reality, there is only one Church calendar. The fact that we accept as Orthodox those who use the papal calendar for the fixed services is economy, a dispensation made for the sake of their salvation. Another abuse is celebrating without an iconostasis. This can happen initially in missionary circumstances, but after a few weeks any real Orthodox parish will have an iconostasis. Not to take a blessing on seeing a priest is another abuse – not part of the Tradition. Connected with this is the refusal of women not to cover their heads (I Cor 11, 13) and generally wear improper and immodest dress in church.

It is no good like Anglicans, who do not understand what the Church is, saying that in the Church there are only various human customs and so that we can ignore them or compromise them in amoral ‘pick and mix’ consumerism. In reality, there is right and wrong, good and bad, black and white, and there can be no compromise between right and wrong, just as there can be no concord between Christ and Belial (2 Cor 6, 15). The Tradition is One.

Christian Civilization versus Western Civilization

In his monumental 7,000 pages of historical erudition entitled ‘A Study of History’, Arnold Toynbee, the famous British historian, made an attempt to categorize all the civilizations in the history of the world, both present and past, and followed their rise and fall. He deemed that only five Civilizations are alive today. These are: Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, (Orthodox) Christian and Western, with Western Civilization dominating them all. (Orthodox) Christian Civilization was at the time of his writing, more or less three generations ago, centred in Russia. However, it was in a dying and fragmentary state, since it had been divided and oppressed by imported and imposed Western ideologies such as Fascism (National Socialism), Capitalism and, above all in the centre itself, Communism (State Capitalism).

Today, Orthodox Christian, or simply Christian, Civilization is reviving, with the shackles of both Fascism and Communism long since thrown off. However, what exactly does this term of ‘Christian Civilization’ mean, what are the values of Christian Civilization, what are the differences between them and those of Western Civilization and why does the latter so utterly misunderstand them? It should be said that those who misunderstand them even include Anglican Protestants who, like Uniats, use a form of the Orthodox rite, but still assert that we mainstream Orthodox Christians are not even Christians! This misunderstanding clearly proves that we are not saved by an imitated rite, but by the Orthodox faith which should behind it, for that alone preserves the integrity of the rite, and that they do not share our faith.

This issue has once more come to the fore with last week’s appeal in The Financial Times to Russian oligarchs to overthrow the very popular government of President Putin. Here we see the essence of Western Civilization. It is not based on popular will (‘freedom and democracy’ are a principal Western myth, as we saw with the refusal of EU bureaucrats to allow European peoples to vote on leaving the EU), but on the power of the wealthy few (in Greek ‘oligarchs’). This can be clearly seen in the USA (ruled by a few shadowy billionaires from the military-industrial complex) and in Western Europe (ruled by a few unelected EU bureaucrats). In Western democracy the people are given a choice between two oligarchs or their puppets – and though this is called freedom, it is clearly not.

Clearly, it is the will of the Western elite, and among them are those who run The Financial Times, that (Orthodox) Christian Civilization must be destroyed (just as the Western world destroyed its own original (Orthodox) Christian Civilization during the second millennium of its history). The Western elite intends to do this by turning Christian Civilization into a series of dismembered vassal states or colonies, a process called Balkanization and which it practised in the 19th century. But this became crystal clear already long ago, in the destruction of New Rome by Western barbarians in 1204, in the plundering of the Teutonic Knights in Russia in the 13th century or in the alliance between Western nations and Islam and in the invasions of Western Civilization like those of Napoleon, the Anglo-French-Ottomans, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler.

As a result of this destruction and dismemberment the natural resources of Christian Civilization can be taken over and ruthlessly exploited by the Western world, so that it can parasitically support itself, just as it does on the resources of the rest of the world. Here, essentially, we see that Western Civilization is a Civilization of Mammon, of materialism. No clearer example of this can be seen today than in the Ukraine, a part of Christian Civilization that the West is now trying to control and colonize. Having overthrown the government elected by a majority of its people, the West has now appointed a group of corrupt oligarchs, each with his own feudal fief, to rule it. These oligarchs, their funds controlled by Western and Israeli banks, are the spiritual descendants of warring princes and later corrupt boyars centuries ago.

In the 18th century these were succeeded by Westernized aristocrats who introduced serfdom, enslaving the people after the Western model. In the 19th century these aristocrats, just like the boyars who in the early 17th century had acted to please Polish invaders, tried to seize power under British and French influence in 1801 (the assassination of Tsar Paul I) and in 1825 under the Decembrists. When the aristocrats lost some of their power as serfdom was abolished by the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II in 1861, they became ever more aggressive and they revolted again, in 1905 and, in 1917, this time successfully. What is happening in the Ukraine today is simply a repeat of the old scenario of foreign meddlers operating through local traitors. Simply today the meddlers are not greedy Poles, British or French, but Americans.

So what is the sign of Christian Civilization (called ‘Byzantine’ or ‘Orthodox’ by Western historiographers)? It is simply in the implementation of the two Gospel Commandments given by the Saviour, to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. These Commandments are quite alien to Western Civilization, for they mean that progress is defined not as technological, as materialist and consumerist, but as our repentance and spiritual transfiguration in preparation for the inevitable meeting with God at the Last Judgement. And the state of our progress can be seen in our non-exploitative and non-aggressive relations with others, for we do not invade other people’s countries or arrogantly instruct them on how to live, but cultivate good relations with them as good neighbours.

This does not mean that we are weak or that we do not resist evil, it means that we defend all those who are weaker. Christian Civilization exists not to exploit others, but to fight evil. The prime example of this today is the defence of Syria by the Russian Federation. This is Christian Civilization at work, unlike Western Civilization that meddles, invades, destroys and exploits, as in countless colonies in Latin America, Asia and Africa, or as today in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine, parading its troops, planes, drones and ships off the Russian coasts and along its borders, constantly sabre-rattling and supplying terrorists with training, arms and finance. Russians, however, send their ships through international waters, even though pestered by Western ships which try and impede their route.

The aim of Western Civilization is to strip the world’s natural resources until they are exhausted. This will inevitably lead to the end of the world, the apocalypse. This is done under the excuse of ‘freedom and democracy’ (freedom for the oligarchs to asset-strip and democracy to vote for one Western oligarch or another, but not to vote for an anti-oligarch). On the other hand, Christian Civilization appoints an Emperor (Monarch or Tsar) who is called on to carry out the will of God on earth, in consultation with the people over whom he reigns. This consultation is represented by the words Conciliarity and Catholicity, meaning that the Monarchy is a popular one, neither absolutist – which is the tyranny of a man-God – nor constitutionalist – which is the tyranny of the few behind a puppet monarchy.

Unlike Western Civilization, Christian Civilization is multinational, not nationalistic, chauvinistic and xenophobic. Such abuses do occur, but only in periods of decadence or in backward provincial areas outside the centre. Examples are in today’s schismatic Western Ukraine, Estonia, Montenegro, Macedonia and also in Greek nationalist Constantinople. In all these cases local nationalism rules in contradiction to Christianity. As a result of following the Gospel Commandments, and not the ideology of Western Civilization, Christian Civilization sees no difference between faith and life, for faith is not a mere abstract ideology to justify guilt, but shapes life in harmony with the Incarnation. The aim of such life, patterned by faith, is holiness, the kingdom of heaven on earth, for the spiritual is more important than the material.

Christian Civilization does not encourage individualism, for our common aim is salvation together, as a community. Our political life is determined by a people’s monarch who is called to be a representative of God on earth, defending the Church and our Christian values. It is clear also that the people belonging to such a Civilization show their patriotism for such a Civilization, which is heaven on earth and we defend it against the Western forerunners of Antichrist like the Teutonic Knights, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and those who today admire these tyrants as bearers of ‘Western Civilization’ and are intent on destroying our reviving Christian Civilization. We live in perilous times but, by the grace of God, we shall triumph because we are not afraid of you, however much you try to censor us and intimidate us.

On the Fringes of the Empire

Outside the Lands that were Orthodox Christian, that is, holy, in the second millennium and indeed, sometimes for much of the first millennium also, we in the Isles of the North Atlantic live on the fringes of the Empire. We have our examples of holiness, but they are far in the past. So what happens in the third millennium when the double-headed eagle of the Orthodox Christian Empire once more flies above us, despite a near millennium of apostasy in England?

At first sight it seems that only compromise happens. However, although there may be a need for superficial compromise, for empty platitudes, there are also those who confess the Orthodox Faith despite diplomacy, despite the failure to witness of those who are quoted as witnesses, but who in fact compromised themselves with the Norman Establishment. They may be Jerusalem, but we are Galilee and, without us, they are but stones without living voices.

Who understands us? It is not the personalities who demanded guru-worship, not the philosophers who lived in their intellectual fantasies, not the administrators with piles of gold who have little understanding of pastoral reality. It is the little people in the poor and ignored places who live the Faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, our saints St Elizabeth the New Martyr and St John of Shanghai the New Confessor, who give us food for our souls.

Two Extremes: Calvinism and Modernism

By Calvinism, which has its roots in Augustinianism (which is rather different from the teaching of Blessed Augustine of Hippo), we mean the human tendency to despair. This is the tendency to see all as black, that salvation is impossible, whatever efforts we make – despite the Gospel saying that with God all things are possible – that depression is our life. It is the source of dour Scots, serious Swiss and earnest Dutch. This is the error that says that God has no mercy, only truth.

By Modernism, which has its roots in Pelagianism and Origenism, we mean the human tendency to self-exaltation. This is the tendency to see humanity as already saved, that no confession and repentance are necessary for forgiveness, that the effect of holy communion is magic, automatic, requiring no effort on our part. This is the source of modern humanism and secularism and, in the Church context, renovationism. This is the error that says that God has no truth, only mercy.

As ever, Orthodoxy, the faith in the God-man, transcendent and immanent, neither Monophysite or Nestorian, neither Origenist or Calvinist, has balance, truth and mercy, repentance and forgiveness, the Tradition of the Holy Spirit.

The Errors of the Sectarians

Those who in 2006 were opposed to the unity of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church outside the Russian Lands and inside them, always put forward the same argument: the Church inside the Russian Lands (which they called the Moscow Patriarchate) is corrupt. Thus, on Red Square the mummy of the forerunner of Antichrist, Lenin, is still displayed, and those in control of State and Church, from President Putin to the Patriarch, were all brought up during the Soviet, atheist period and are therefore corrupt. (They who themselves opposed unity are of course not corrupt, but morally superior: the spiritual law is that pride is at the source of all schisms, throughout history).

This argument, conditioned by politics and not faith, has never taken into account the fact that State and Church in Russia are separate (unlike the Church of England, where all the bishops are appointed by the Prime Minister and the bishops follow whatever secular fashion prevails) and in Russia what the State does generally does not necessarily take into account the Church’s view. Neither does this argument take into account the fact that, as regards those brought up during the Soviet, atheist period, there was always the possibility of rejecting atheism at that time (the case of the Patriarch) and, if not, there is the possibility of rejecting that atheism by repentance later (the case of the President). However, the politically-minded never accept the reality of repentance, preferring to remain in the past, for that alone justifies them.

Worse still, the above argument does not take into account the longer-term view that is informed and shaped by Divine Providence. Limited by its short-termism, this argument quite fails to see what is beyond, that what we are about is not the present Russian President or Patriarch, but the restoration of the Christian Emperor and Empire, whose centre is in Moscow. The present bearers of the posts of President and Patriarch are only figures on the way to this restoration. We should not confuse the path, which leads us through ikonomia, but not compromises on issues of principle, with our destination, with where we are heading. And herein is the problem of those who broke away from both sides in 2006, falling away to left and right: they are so obsessed with their path that they have lost from sight the destination, for they are heading nowhere.

Who Killed Christ?

Many different answers are given to the above question. For example, there are those with personal axes to grind who will tell you that it was the Romans or the Jews. Such answers are childish excuses of the sort ‘it wasn’t me, it was him’. More generally it is true to say that fallen humanity killed Christ, or more exactly it was hatred, cruelty, ingratitude and indifference that killed Christ. In three words this general answer can even be summed up as a ‘lack of love’, for this is the greatest killer of all, for it kills individuals, parish churches, monasteries and indeed, as we are witnesses, whole dioceses. However, this lack of love has in human history taken two specific forms.

The first form of a lack of love is the error of putting creation above the Creator, in other words, idolatry. This is the error of paganism that we can see in animism, superstition and throughout paganism. The further away from Jerusalem, the more pagan people were. This we can see in how the Creation story, faithfully recorded only in the Book of Genesis, became ever more distorted in the creation myths of Australia or the Americas, India or Africa, Scandinavia or China. This misidentification was the error of the Romans who made their emperors into gods, putting Caesar above Christ. Through lack of love of God and man, creation, fallen and sinful, is identified as Divine. A fundamental error and distortion.

The second form of a lack of love is the error of putting oneself (and so love of oneself) above the Creator. This self-idolatry was the error of the Jewish elite, but it can be found among the ‘professionals’ of all institutional religion, which is always opposed to faith. This second form is called phariseeism, which makes salvation most difficult for all except its own members, who are the self-appointed elect. This misidentification is the error of humanism, which deifies fallen human nature. Humanism has its origins in papism, which put one man above God, making God absent and so enabling itself to replace him. And humanism is merely papism extended to all Western and Westernized humanity, putting the self above the Creator. Through lack of love of God and man, creation that is fallen and sinful is identified as above the Divine. A fundamental error and distortion.

Who killed Christ? Human lack of love that put itself on the level of the Divine and, even worse, even above the Divine. Although the Romans were guilty of the first form of lack of love, in their indifference ignoring Christ, and although the Jews were guilty of the second form, in their jealous hatred of the Truth (and pharisees hate nothing more than the Truth, for it shows them up as they are, as liars), all fallen humanity is capable of such acts. The fact is that if Christ returned today, He would be killed again. Indeed, this is why when He returns, He will return ‘with power’ (Lk. 21, 27). Who killed Christ? Lack of love, for God is love, but sin is lack of love.

Orthodox Europe

Introduction

We now need a multilingual website for Orthodox Europeans of all races, who have been praying, hoping and working for the establishment of a Russian Orthodox-led, Autonomous Metropolia of Western Europe. Through it, we can look for the long-awaited rebirth of the Local Church of Western Europe after a lapse of 1,000 years, a Church which wholly faithful to the Christian Orthodox Tradition of the Saints and Fathers of the Church. Among them we regard as our particular patrons the holy apostles Peter and Paul, martyred in Rome, and St Martin, born in what is now Hungary, who lived in Italy and became a great monastic founder and Bishop of Tours in western France.

From almost contemporary saints we regard as our patrons the last Christian Emperor, the martyred Tsar Nicholas II. He was half-Danish, spoke four Western languages fluently and had a European vision, founding seventeen churches in Western Europe. And his martyred Tsarina was born in an independent, pre-Prussian Hesse, the grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, thus with English cultural and Germanic racial origins. Our second patron saint is the former Archbishop of Paris and Western Europe, St John the Wonderworker, the hierarch of Shanghai and in fact first global saint, who revived the veneration of the Western saints, in whose footsteps we Orthodox Christians in Western Europe follow.

Territories

This Metropolia, composed initially of one metropolitan and perhaps twelve bishops (at present there are nine Russian Orthodox bishops in these territories), would cover the following seven Western European territories and dioceses, in order of size of population, which totals 400 million:

Germany, Austria, northern and eastern Switzerland and Liechtenstein (91 million and 3 dioceses: Berlin and Eastern Germany; Munich and Western Germany; Vienna, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein).

France, southern Belgium, western Switzerland and Monaco (71 million and 2 dioceses: Paris and the Northern French Lands; Nice and the Southern French Lands).

The British Isles and Ireland (70 million and 2 dioceses: London, England and Wales; Dublin, Ireland and Scotland).

Italy, San Marino and southern Switzerland (60.5 million and 2 dioceses: Rome and Southern Italy; Milan, Northern Italy, San Marino and Ticino).

Spain (with Catalonia and the Basque Country), Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar 56.5 million and 2 dioceses: Madrid, Spain, Catalonia and the Basque Country; Lisbon and all Portugal).

Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland (26.5 million and I diocese: Stockholm and all Scandinavia).

The Netherlands, northern Belgium and Luxembourg (24 million and I diocese: Amsterdam, the Dutch Lands and Luxembourg).

Some will ask why we have not included Hungary in the above list of territories. This is because we believe that Hungary, with its longstanding Orthodox minorities, Carpatho-Russians, Serbs and others, unlike Western European countries for the foreseeable future, will one day have its own Local Church, like the other countries that neighbour the Russian Lands, Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

Unity in Diversity

Some will quite naturally ask why such a Metropolia should be led by Russian Orthodox. The answer has nothing to do with primitive nationalism or ecclesiastical imperialism (phyletism) – we leave that to others. It is simply because the other Local Churches have only narrow, mononational interests and are not interested in founding such a Church, whereas His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II of Moscow clearly stated in April 2003 that the Russian Orthodox Church, with its extensive multinational and missionary experience with dozens of nationalities, is more interested in this and some of us even see it as our historic, pastoral duty.

Such a Metropolia has been made possible because the Russian Orthodox Church is now politically free, which it was not, even two decades ago. Present in many Western European countries for some three centuries and with a new central Cathedral and seminary in Paris, only the Russian Orthodox Church can provide the necessary infrastructure for such an international Church, with our own monasteries, seminary, church buildings, facilities, translations and multinational Church music. All this enables us to be taken seriously and not to be seen as some irrelevant and tiny minority, without even its own proper church buildings.

Clearly, this does not mean that such a Metropolia would be centralized and that local customs observed, say, by the Churches of Romania, Serbia or Greece or in particular European countries with their local saints, would not be allowed. We follow the model of the Holy Trinity, of unity in diversity. There could be dioceses or deaneries of the smaller Local Churches present within such a Metropolia, should they wish to join in this united structure. Provincial parishes could even be temporarily allowed by pastoral condescension the use of the Roman Catholic calendar for the fixed feasts, if they were not yet spiritually strong enough to return to the Orthodox calendar.

The Tradition

Some will ask why we are not hoping and working for the foundation of a series of Local Churches in Western Europe, for example, a French Orthodox Church, a German Orthodox Church, an Italian Orthodox Church, or a Church of the Isles, covering the British Isles and Ireland. Again the answer is simple. We are not interested in building small, nationalistic, hopelessly provincial, insular, inward-looking Orthodox Churches (such signs of nationalistic decadence already exist among a few on the Church fringes in England, France, Finland and elsewhere).

Rather we wish to see the restoration of the historic, multinational Western Patriarchate of the Tradition. An Autonomous Metropolia of 500 or more parishes is not large, but it is big enough to be viable as the basis for a future Local Church. On the other hand, small dioceses of 25-100 parishes are not viable alone and soon fall into provincialism, narrow jurisdictionalism and personality cults, as we have sadly already seen in the past, notably in England and France. We take the broad view of restoration and regeneration of the totality of Orthodox Western Europe. In the longer term, hundreds of years ahead, there could of course be developments in the direction of seven smaller Regional Churches, but to speak of this now is utterly unrealistic, far too premature.

We do not see any future Local Church being built on divisive compromises, for example using the so-called ‘new’ (= Roman Catholic) calendar instead of the Orthodox calendar, patronizingly called ‘old’ by modernists. A new Local Church can be built only on the fullness of Tradition, which has always been kept by genuine monasteries with traditional liturgical and ascetic life and spread through traditional parishes by faithful clergy and laity. Any attempt to build a Church on modernism (such signs of decadence have already been seen in England, France and Finland) will always fail. We build on rock, not on sand.

Two Injustices To Be Righted

We need to launch such a website at this time not only because the new Russian Orthodox Cathedral is about to open in Paris. This year also marks the anniversaries of two enormous historic injustices, which can only be spiritually reversed through the establishment of such a Metropolia. The first anniversary, a local one, also falls in October 2016, ironically coinciding with this year of Brexit, is the 950th anniversary of the genocidal invasion of England by Norman papal shock troops from the Continent, thus founding the treacherous British Establishment. This invasion forced Christians in England into the same schism as most others in Western Europe, already entirely cut off from communion with the Orthodox Church.

The second injustice is the 100th anniversary of the murder by British Establishment (= Norman) spies in December 1916 in Russia, which led directly to the Western-organized and financed coup d’etat of February 1917, commonly called the ‘Russian Revolution’, with universal implications. It was this coup that prevented the realization of the hopes of the pious Metr Pitirim (Oknov) of Saint Petersburg that all Western European capitals would become the sees of Russian Orthodox bishops and that all the Church’s service books would be translated into the various languages of Western Europe. Had the events of winter 1916-17 not taken place, the idea of a Russian Orthodox-led Metropolia of Western Europe might well have been advanced in, say, 1928, seventy-five years before 2003: through the insanity of 1917 we have lost three generations.

Conclusion

Such a website needs to be launched at a time when Western Europe faces two serious threats to its very survival. The first is internal, militant Secularism, and the second is external, militant Islamism. The first has its origins in the last phase of the millennial apostasy of the Western world from the Church of God and has led to the creation of an enslaving atheist Union, destructive of the local identities and sovereignties of all the European peoples, amid a spiritual vacuum. The second has been caused by the fanatical and terrorist reaction to this oppressive apostasy and vacuum by violent Arab Muslim nationalism and the refusal of secularist Western European countries to insist on the baptism of Muslim immigrants before their admission to them.

The origins of our hope for an Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe lie exactly thirty years ago in our 1986 French document, Une Eglise Orthodoxe pour l’Europe Occidentale – Vision ou Reve? (An Orthodox Church for Western Europe – Vision or Dream?). This was immediately dismissed out of hand by the German Archbishop who had asked for it. As the Book of Proverbs (29, 18) says: ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’. In Western Europe the straitjacket of political unity has failed, as also divisive xenophobic nationalism failed before it. The past and future Sovereign Nations of Western Europe now need spiritual unity. In an Orthodox Metropolia, and then a reborn Local Church, lie the hope for the restoration and regeneration of Western Europe from its present low point. As St Alexander Nevsky, who resisted both the tyrannical Eastern and the secularist Western yokes in the 13th century, said: ‘God is not in power, but in truth’.

1916-2016: Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’.

Exalt the Lord our God and worship at His footstool; for He is holy.

Psalm 98, 5 (Septuagint)

Rus is the footstool of the Throne of the Lord.

St John of Kronstadt

Foreword: Personal

However absurd it may seem, including to myself, I have long felt and observed signposts to my destiny in my heritage and the life of Tsar Nicholas II. For example, the future Christian Emperor Tsar Nicholas II was born in the Alexander Palace in the Imperial Capital of Saint Petersburg on the feast-day of St Job the Much-Suffering in 1868. At the same time my great-grandfather Thomas was born in the poorest conditions of the workhouse in a provincial village in Eastern England. However, fifty years later, in 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, whose emblem was the double-headed eagle uniting east and west, the Imperial Family and their faithful servants were murdered in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Urals on the confines of Europe and Asia, uniting east and west. As for my great-grandfather, he died in the same village as he was born in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands. That invasion ended four years later with the liberation of Vienna, where my father went in 1945, and of Berlin by those whose homeland had been so treacherously and bloodily attacked with death, rape, fire and pillage.

I was born on the 19th July, the day in 1918 on which the assassins of the Russian Imperial Family ritually finished destroying their earthly remains. As a child, I collected postage stamps: only one stood out from the 3,000 others – that with the face of Tsar Nicholas II seemingly calling to me to serve his cause. Almost exactly fifty years after the Tsar’s martyrdom, in 1968, 100 years after the birth of the martyred Tsar and 50 years after his sacrificial martyrdom, in a Scottish city almost on the same latitude as Saint Petersburg, I was called to learn Russian and three months later, in a message coming from the east, called to serve the Russian Orthodox Church. Then there was the tutor to the Tsarevich, Fr Nicholas Gibbes, the first English Orthodox priest in almost a millennium, like me a man from the provinces in an Orthodox country as a teacher and becoming a Russian Orthodox priest. Fr Nicholas served in Oxford, where I studied in the same college as Felix Yusupov, the murderer of Tsar Nicholas’ holy elder. And in darkest 1974, when there seemed no hope of it at all, I was called on to write of the coming resurrection of the Russian Church and Empire (1). I never sought any of this, and yet this has been my calling and my destiny.

1916-1981: The Fall of the Christian Empire and of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire

On 30 December 1916, Anglo-Zionist spies in Saint Petersburg, sent by those who by then had in 1916 taken control of the bankrupted British government and aided by decadent, anti-Christian, Russian aristocrats, carried out the assassination of a much-slandered Russian Orthodox holy man and spiritual counsellor to the Imperial Family. Exactly as foretold by its victim, this would begin the process that would lead to the overthrow in 1917 of the Tsar, then on the very point of victory and so of ending the vile and atrocious First World War that was slaughtering the flower of Europe. His overthrow would lead to almost two more years of vile war, millions more of victims, and unspeakable bloodshed throughout the Russian Empire, exactly as the Mother of God forewarned innocent peasant children in distant Portugal in 1917. This meant the collapse of the Christian Empire after 1600 years and its replacement by two false Empires, both founded on Western materialism by those who had engineered that collapse. These Empires were the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the Western Atheist Empire, the first centred in Moscow, the second in New York.

In 1981, 64 years after the 1917 coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg, the only remaining free part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that outside Russia and centred in New York, carried out a heroic act. This was under the leadership of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret (+ 1985), once an exile in China, who had been chosen as Metropolitan by Archbishop John of Shanghai, once also an exile in China (+ 1966). The Metropolitan’s surname was Voznesensky, also the name of the street of the Ipatiev House, where the Imperial Family was martyred in Ekaterinburg. (In 1998 the Metropolitan’s earthly remains were found incorrupt). As for Archbishop John, canonized a generation later (2), he had been slandered, persecuted and even taken to court by false Russian brethren in exile. This heroic 1981 act was when the Church of the emigration at long last canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors. At their head stood Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family and servants, faithful to the end. This act was an act of repentance on behalf of all Russian Orthodox and those Russian émigrés whose ancestors had vilified and betrayed Tsar Nicholas.

This repentance of part of the Russian emigration, living in apparent freedom, had taken a scandalously long 64 years. St John of Shanghai had called for it almost fifty years before. Nevertheless, it represented the long-awaited repentance by descendants of those in the emigration who by treason had abdicated from the Throne and brought about the February 1917 coup d’etat. They had then fled for their lives into an often impoverished and harsh exile, blaming the Tsar for their foolishness, treason and poverty. For that February coup had in turn led to the October 1917 seizure of power by satanic atheists who then ritually murdered the Tsar, his Family and faithful servants. This 1981 canonization led to the rapid deaths of three Soviet leaders from 1982 on, and to the end of stagnation. And in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after its founding act on 30 December 1916, the Bolshevik Atheist Empire, centred in Moscow and which had murdered the Tsar collapsed. Thus, the murders of the Tsar and Imperial Family, ordered from New York in 1918, were literally reversed by an act ordered in New York in 1981. The first part of the curse had been lifted.

In 1988 we wrote that what had begun in New York must be completed in Moscow, that is, by the vast majority of the Russian Orthodox Church, inside Russia. We did not know then that the Bolshevik Atheist Empire would, so painfully for its peoples, finally dissolve in 1991, 75 years almost to the day after the December 1916 assassination by British spies. This is what we wrote then: ‘Our hope is from the living and suffering faithful on Earth and in Heaven, the Martyrs and Confessors of Christ, the One Lord and Saviour. Is then the seventy-year Babylonian captivity of the Russian Church now coming to an end? As yet we cannot know for sure. We shall be certain only when all those many Martyrs and Confessors are venerated without exception, openly, officially and universally in the Russian lands, when the work begun in New York is brought to its fullness in Moscow; this will be the ‘True Pascha’ of which St Seraphim prophetically spoke…The canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors is a gift of God made through the Church for the spiritual enrichment of the whole Orthodox Church, of all the Orthodox Christian peoples…’.

ReChristianization and DeChristianization

When in June 1941 Nazi tanks invaded the Soviet Union, in the western Ukraine (formerly eastern Poland), naïve Ukrainian peasants greeted the Nazis as liberators from Bolshevism, because the peasants saw crosses on the Nazi tanks. They soon learned of the evil of the Nazis who sadistically slaughtered all who stood in their way. Paradoxically, the Nazi invasion brought about a measure of repentance in the Bolshevik Atheist Empire and the reinvigoration of the implicit Christian values of pre-Revolutionary culture that had been preserved, in terms of the provision of social justice (in the Tsar’s Russia you received free health care for the payment of a stamp costing one rouble per year) and also of ‘socially conservative values’, of normal family life. There dawned on some the realization that the liberation from Nazism of Vienna and Berlin in 1945 could have happened in 1917 under Tsar Nicholas II. That would have been far less bloody, far more disciplined, like the Russian liberation of Paris in 1814, with concerts of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin in the main squares of those cities to celebrate Christian culture, as in Palmyra this year.

The story of the slow but gradual reChristianization of the Russian Lands after 1941, increasing especially rapidly fifty years later, after 1991, is the reverse of the Western story. If the red star of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire became ever more cross-like, the white star of the Western Atheist Empire became ever more satan-like. The two became like two trains on parallel tracks, but heading in opposite directions, to heaven and to hell. Unlike the Bolshevik Atheists, who did not reject their inheritance of social justice and socially conservative moral values from the Tsar’s Empire, Western Atheists have rejected Christian culture. True, anti-Christianity had been inherent in Western history from the Crusades to Wars of ‘Religion’, from Colonization to the French Revolution, from the French and British siding with Islam to invade Russia in 1854 or the German siding with Islam against Russia in 1914. But in the 1960s, 50 years after the Western-orchestrated ‘Russian Revolution’ of 1917, the West entered into a frenzy of deChristianization, rejecting all Christian values implicit in its culture, even male and female roles in the family, resulting in today’s gender hysteria.

1981-2016: The Fall of the Western Atheist Empire

So, in August 2000 the far greater part of the Russian Orthodox Church, that inside Russia, was at last freed, completing the work begun in New York 19 years earlier, canonizing the New Martyrs and Confessors, at their head Tsar Nicholas II and the Imperial Family. This has led in turn to the process that is now reversing the second part of the blood-soaked pattern of catastrophic 20th century and early 21st century history. In other words, since 2000 Russia has been rising and the Western Atheist Empire, centred in New York, its myths of ‘freedom and democracy’ spread like tentacles throughout the world, has been falling. Just as New York freed Moscow between 1981 and 2000, so since 2000 Moscow has been freeing New York. This is the fall of the Empire founded on the ruins of the Christian Empire by traitors in 1917, bringing US troops into the Great War, just as demoralized Russian Imperial troops left it. That ensured 100 years of worldwide bloodshed, just as the Mother of God had warned peasant children in Fatima in Portugal in 1917, though those children would be bullied into silence and their revelation utterly deformed by men of the Vatican machine.

Thus, on the feast-day of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, 11 September 2001, we witnessed the attack on the New York Twin Towers, the beheading of the Western Atheist Babylon. Engineered in secret by forces still unknown, though much suspected, this murderous attack with its 3,000 victims foretold the beginning of the collapse of the Western Atheist Empire that stretches throughout North America, Western Europe, Australasia and to vassal states like Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia. It had come to power by financing from New York and organizing the collapse of the Christian Empire eighty-four years before, in 1917. 1917 to 2001: 1984 had indeed come. For the collapse of the Twin Towers did not lead to repentance and the questions, ‘Why is this happening to us?, and, ‘What have we done to deserve this?, as did the collapse of the Tower of Siloam (Lk 13, 1-5), but to illegal, unjustifiable, vengeful, bloody and chaotic invasions of innocent Middle Eastern and Islamic countries. These have in turn bankrupted the indebted US branch of the Western Empire and led to unbearable anarchy and unspeakable misery for the peoples in those lands.

Why did these invasions take place? For oil and gas? For strategic advantage and to set up ever more US military bases? For the usual neo-colonial, Western bullying and asset-stripping of weaker countries, unable to defend themselves against sophisticated arms of ‘shock and awe’? Yes, superficially, all this was the case, but this was only a superficial reason, to keep greedy banksters and military industrialists quiet. In reality, these bloody invasions of Islamic countries, carried out by the neocon elite against the interests of ordinary, hoodwinked and now bankrupted Americans, zombified by their corporate media, took place for another reason. They were designed to weaken the Muslim world, so that the Temple in Jerusalem can be rebuilt by the Zionists in the place of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and there the representative of their chief, the prince of this world (Jn 14, 13), can be enthroned. This is why the possible election of the nationalist and populist Trump next month is feared as a huge setback to their plans by the ‘Anglo-Zionist’ neocons. For whatever he may be, he may at least put US internal affairs above meddling in other countries’ internal affairs.

These invasions are also causing the collapse of the European branch of the Western Empire, called the European Union, a weak group of vassal puppet-states controlled by the American Union and heir to the Soviet Union in terms of its tyranny. This absurd, overstretched and bankrupted Union, never wanted by its peoples but only by its moneyed elite, and used to extend a Fourth Reich of German political and economic hegemony over all Europe, is now being overwhelmed by the invasion of Islamic refugees, resulting in divisions everywhere. This leaves only a weakened Western German core, set up to lead Europe under US control at the end of the Second World War, when it was occupied and colonized by US troops. However, if the countries that make up the present EU can regain their freedom and sovereignty, Europe could be saved by returning to its cultural roots. It could return not to recent human and political manipulations and cheap surrogates like Protestantism and Catholicism, but to its real Christian first millennium roots, so long lost, forgotten, scorned and despised, to Orthodoxy Christianity, to the Church of God.

Afterword: The Christian Empire May Rise Again

Today the Russian Federation, once the centre of the Bolshevik Atheist Empire which was dissolved 25 years ago in great pain for its peoples, collapsed through treason and cynical lack of belief in anything except self-interest, so-called Communists becoming Capitalists overnight, is starting to save itself. The Soviet Union had to die if it were to turn its back, however hesitantly, on the Bolshevik heritage of alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce. Thus, the restoration by patriots of the Christian Empire after the 100-year long nightmare that began at the end of 1916 now actually looks possible. In this way the Russian Federation can start to save the ever more fragile European nations of the Western Atheist Empire, bringing them back to their senses, back to true freedom (not the ‘freedom’ to murder millions of children in the abortion holocaust or the freedom for sexual perversion), to true culture (not the Coca-Cola culture of feeble imitations of imported cowboy culture) and to their own national sovereignty (not national degradation). A spectre haunts Europe – the spectre of freedom, sovereignty and national restoration, which are spelled Brexit.

But why is this process of salvation, which is now beginning, nowhere yet complete? Because nowhere is repentance yet complete. St Seraphim of Sarov said: ‘I will glorify the Tsar who glorifies me’. Today Tsar Nicholas II says: ‘I will glorify those who glorify me’. But for the Tsar to be glorified, we must first be brought together into Rus by full repentance, by understanding the sin of regicide and all that followed and by accepting the Christian values which he and his family incarnated. This will mean those in the dead Bolshevik Atheist Empire, and at least some in the Western Atheist Empire, which is also to die, overcoming their treason, lies and prejudices about the Christian Empire of the last Tsar. Only when this has been done can the Lord raise up the still unrevealed and unknown man who is to become the next Christian Emperor, the next and perhaps the last Tsar. He alone will resist him who is to be enthroned by our enemies in Jerusalem, as St John of Kronstadt prophesied. But the next and coming Christian Emperor will not appear until the masses are first ready to accept and glorify the last Christian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II. Yea, come, Lord!

Notes:

1. ‘Beloved Land, soon to be made fragrant and all-holy, shone through and warmed by the love of so many martyrs’ blood, there is an unknown redolence and radiant light in thy still brightening churches; we neither ask why nor question how, but we know and feel and have Faith’. (From ‘Premonition’, Chapter I of ‘Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition’, English Orthodox Trust, 1995, 1997 and 2014).

2. St John was the first saint of the Church Outside Russia. Two others have since followed: Bishop Jonah of Hankou (Hangchow – also in China) (+ 1925) canonized in 1996, and Archbishop Seraphim of Sofia (+ 1950), canonized in 2016. Will Metropolitan Philaret be the fourth? His possible canonical canonization under discussion.

“This article also appeared on Katehon.com http://katehon.com/article/1916-2016-today-tsar-nicholas-ii-says-i-will-glorify-those-who-glorify-me”.