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Monthly Archives: September 2017
The War We Wage for our Christian Empire of Holy Rus
On the centenary of the 1917 Western-organized coup d’etat which overthrew the Christian Empire of the Third Rome and led to the martyrdom of the Imperial Family and millions of others, attempts by our enemies to create divisions in contemporary Russian Church and Society have intensified. These enemies are financed from abroad; they are programmed to destroy both the Russian Federation and its foundation, the Church. The war is being fought openly, militarily and bloodily, in Syria, in the Ukraine and in parts of the Caucasus, but it is also going on ideologically in Russia and throughout the Russian Orthodox Church worldwide, by manipulating those who are on the fringes of the Church.
The aim of these enemies is to destroy all that remains of Holy Rus, the Third Rome. These enemies are Westernized liberals, pseudo-intellectuals (‘intelligenty’) the self-appointed Russian ‘social elite’ (in fact the decadent scrapings from the bottom of the barrel) such as Nemtsov, Radzinsky, Uchitel and their followers like ‘Pussy Riot’. This is a repeat of the situation just before 1917. Tired of attacking the Russian liberation of Syria from Western-backed terrorists and Russian support for freedom in the Ukraine from the violent persecutions of the US-installed Zionist Kiev junta, they are now trying through their media, ‘creative’ (= destructive) art and cinema to sully the image of the Tsar Martyr Nicholas.
They accuse us Orthodox faithful of worshipping the Tsar as God! In reality, no such ‘Tsar-worshippers’ exist. They make use of the marginal half-hearted and Halfodox intellectuals among the clergy, in the Spiritual Academies and seminaries and among the unChurched though baptised masses. These enemies deny the ritual killing of the Imperial Family in 1918, they deny reality. In the same way they also rejoice at the present final destruction of the fragments of the old Orthodoxy in Western Europe, and instead promote atheism, transgenderism, a ‘post-Christian’ Europe, where the masses have lost all faith and former churches have become mosques, shopping centres, casinos and nightclubs.
Our enemies make use of deluded liberals and Russophobes like Fr George Kochetkov, Fr George Mitrofanov and their handful of followers, who are given prominence by the anti-Church media in their foreign-owned, anti-Putin newspapers like Moskovskoe Ekho and Moskovskij Komsomolets, on their notorious Western-financed portal-credo website and their TV and radio stations. These are the heirs of the clerical traitors who welcomed the February 1917 palace revolution and the abduction and imprisonment of the Tsar and his family, the ‘revolutionaries in cassocks’. They accuse the Tsar of all the misfortunes that befell Russia over the last 100 years, denying that such as they are in fact to blame.
However, there are also young (and not so young) hotheads, with ‘zeal not according to knowledge’, filled with absurd conspiracy theories. Like old calendarist sectarians, which in fact they are, they refuse to commemorate Church hierarchs and berate them. They are supported by those who suffer from the nationalist delusion that Tsar Ivan IV, through whom Metropolitan Philip of Moscow was martyred, was a saint or, even more absurdly, that the apostate antichrist Stalin was such. Bitterness and sarcasm, expressing no love or sympathy, and isolationism mark their lives. Many of them are under the influence of Protestant Creationism, which is ironic, given that they are claim to be anti-Protestant.
The main complaint of the zealots is that they do not agree with certain words and actions of a non-dogmatic, i. e. non-essential, nature of Patriarch Kyrill. This is illogical. Firstly, the concept that the Patriarch must agree with them in everything is pure pride. Why this disagreement? Perhaps because they are right, but more probably because they are wrong. This intolerance denies the simple fact that in any case there is no reason why we have to agree with our Patriarch on every detail. There will never be any identity of opinion between any two people. In this obsession with opinions we find once again pure Protestantism. They disagree, so they protest and go and start their own sect, condemning all others.
The Church does not depend on us or on any Patriarch, whoever he may be; we are all here today, gone tomorrow. The Church belongs to God and She was here long before us and will be here long after us. In order to justify themselves, the zealots dogmatize everything. Thus, if you do not believe that God created the Universe in six 24-hour periods (like fundamentalist Protestants), you are a heretic. If a baby is not baptised exactly on the fortieth day of its life, you are a heretic. If you shake hands with a Roman Catholic (again this is Protestantism!), you are a heretic. There is no end to the anti-logic of the zealots. They have hot heads, but cold hearts, what they need is just the opposite.
Outside such marginal extremists, the Orthodox are led by hierarchs like Metr Benjamin of Vladivostok, Metr Agafangel of Odessa, Metr Vincent of Tashkent, Metr George of Nizhny Novgorod, Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), any of whom could become the next Patriarch. Then there is the laywoman, Natalya Poklonskaya, the much admired deputy of the Russian Parliament and heroine of the Crimea. We see that Russia is today the last bastion of the Church of God and so of Christianity in the world. Our war is against those who have destroyed the Church in the West over the last thousand years and are now trying to destroy the Church in the Middle East, in the ‘soft’ Balkans and even in parts of the Ukraine.
The enemies of our Church want schisms, manipulating those on the margins, whether they are naïve and unthinking zealots, or treacherous and Russophobic ecumenist liberals. We must understand that either we are with the Tsar, that is, with all the New Martyrs and Confessors, all the multinational host of saints of the Russian Church, with the holy elders and the Christian Empire of Holy Rus, or else we are, consciously or unconsciously, traitors and helping the enemies of our Church. In accordance with the prophecies, we believe that the war waged by our enemies against the Church of God and Russia will, if there is repentance, end with the rebirth of the multinational Empire of Holy Rus. Amen.
From Recent Correspondence (September 2017)
Q: What is the Russian Orthodox view of patriotism?
A: As President Putin has put it: ‘For Russians […] patriotic sentiment, the sense of national belonging that is now, to their sorrow, being eroded in certain European countries, is very important’. In today’s Europe, the attention of those who seek to preserve their national identity, those who are patriots and nationalists in the best sense of the word, is fixed on Moscow. Conversely, those who yell the loudest about a ‘Russian threat’ and ‘European unity in the face of Russian aggression’ are precisely those who want to destroy European faces and borders and reviving identities, like that of Catalonia, as they are oriented towards the EU headquarters in Brussels and the White House.
Russia is the Motherland of patriotism in Europe and in defiance of the artificial denationalisation imposed by Western-imposed Soviet Communism, it is returning to the old mission of keeping the flame of national identity in Europe alight, preserving it as a Europe of homelands and not a public thoroughfare. Although the State-run media like the BBC try to slander all moderate patriots as ‘Neo-Nazis’ and ‘the far right’, in reality there are very few ‘Neo-Nazis’ and ordinary people, both on the normal right and the normal left, are patriots. 52% of British people voted for Brexit, surely even more would vote for Brexit today, given Juncker’s recent speech on the abolition of Europe (‘Eurofederalism’) in Brussels.
Q: Why is the West so aggressive?
A: The West is far more aggressive than many people even realize. Its wars of aggression are always camouflaged by code-names. For example, the multinational Western invasions and Western wars of aggression against Russia are variously known as ‘The Teutonic Crusades’, ‘The Napoleonic Campaign’, ‘The Crimean War’, ‘World War One’, ‘World War Two’ etc. In the same way, today the USA has a ‘Department of Defense’, and yet no-one has ever tried to invade the USA and that Department is notorious for its Offense.
Britain’s ‘Ministry of Defence’ has similarly always spent its time invading and bombing countries far away, all in the name of ‘national security’. Apparently Britain has invaded some 150 foreign countries in its history! This British Establishment aggressiveness goes back to its founders, in their so-called ‘Battle of Hastings’, which did not take place in Hastings and should actually be called ‘The Norman Invasion and Occupation’ or ‘The Defeat and Rape of England’.
The roots of this Westernwide aggression go back even further than 1066, to the anti-Christian Charlemagne, who revived the dead pagan Roman Empire – the model for all aggressive, asset-stripping and war-based systems – under the code-name of a ‘classical revival’. He told his people that they were superior to Christians (‘Greeks’) and also to anyone else, because the Holy Spirit came from their leader, the Pope of Rome, whom Charlemagne had made infallible with his filioque ideology. Later this mythical superiority was spread downwards to anyone who agreed with the Western Establishment and anyone who was ‘Western’ was thus considered superior. ‘Black, brown, red and yellow peoples’ were inferior and therefore could be enslaved and massacred by ‘White’ Western people. Here is the fruit of the filioque, from the Crusades to Iraq.
Yet another example: On 25 September the BBC programme ‘Beyond Belief’ (Radio 4, 4.30), the programme I spoke on twice after the Pussy Riot blasphemy, the subject was ‘The Persecution of Atheism in Russia’! I could hardly believe what the BBC has come to. It really is Beyond Belief! Not content with supporting the US installation of lesbian politicians and Zionist atheists as leaders in Eastern Europe, from Serbia to the Baltics and the Ukraine, the BBC are now directly plugging Western atheism in Russia, where a few decades ago Western Marxist atheists martyred 600 bishops and 120,000 clergy, under the pretext of ‘freedom of speech’.
Q: What worries you most about the situation of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church? Ecumenism?
A: Definitely not ecumenism. That is a bedtime fairy-tale for old people. It was abandoned as a failure long ago. No, it is something else. Let us try and understand the context in which we live.
We live in the fourth century. We in the Russian Church have come out of persecution and are being recognized, moving forward into the rest of the fourth century. (Unlike the West, where the heterodox have been in the fourth century and are now heading backwards towards the third century and persecution by various atheist emperors). What was the problem in the fourth century? There were no outward enemies, but there were inward enemies, all those who swam with the tide, the ‘fairweather Christians’ who joined the Church for their careers, for worldly advantage. Martyrdom is largely over for us: the ‘easy way’ to salvation has gone: all we had to do was to be killed. For a believing Orthodox that is not a problem. This is why in the fourth century, there was a huge growth in monasticism. Opportunities for martyrdom were mainly over, but the faithful still needed the real thing.
In times of peace we face not outward enemies, but inward enemies, as we in the Church Outside Russia, know only too well. We in our part of the Russian Church did not face martyrdom, what we have faced for nearly 100 years is inward enemies. We faced multiple schisms, by modernists (in the Paris Jurisdiction and in the USA), then by old calendarists (in the USA, France, South America and Great Britain), we faced racism and nationalism (the policy of excluding certain people from the Church because they had ‘the wrong blood’), we faced careerism, false brethren and slanders, backed by certain bishops. This type of persecution is insidious and calls on us to be confessors and not martyrs. That is much more subtle.
We have a great example in St John of Shanghai, who was put on trial in a secular court by so-called ‘ROCOR’ bishops, clergy and people. Shame on them! But who came out of this affair a saint? It is the insignificant and derided little man on the court bench who prayed: the others are, at best, forgotten. Something similar happened to Fr Seraphim (Rose), who faced persecution from inside. Our greatest enemies have always come from inside the Church. Our enemies confess not the Orthodox Faith, they confess ‘religion’, the outward ritualistic system of phariseeism, spiritual dryness and literalism, together with a systemic personality cult and academicism, sometimes homosexual, all of which persecute, mock and despise any authentic, living spiritual experience.
The souls of these go dry at Pentecost, they feel nothing, not the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit, not new green life, but they rattle off the prayers to the Holy Spirit without feeling, looking at their watches. These people have no Love, no Theology, no Knowledge of the Living God (St Alban), no compassion, all they have is their ill psychology, which they use for self-justification and persecution of the righteous.
Today we can see such tendencies inside Russia (and among some of its representatives outside Russia). Careerism, the interest in ‘awards’, rationalism, knowledge only of the outward, Spirit-free academicism, the rush for ‘degrees’, the salt that has lost its savour. It does not matter whether the tendency is new calendarist and modernist or old calendarist and traditionalist, it is the same anti-spiritual tendency.
Q: Was the Russian emigration a good thing?
A: Its causes were of course bad and émigrés suffered. But the spiritual life of the emigration itself was very mixed, both pure and impure. In the 1930s St John of Shanghai reckoned that only 10% of the emigration was Churchly. This corresponds to my own experience. Many Russians were ‘White’ only inasmuch as they were greedy for money and property and had no time, either for the Faith or for the Tsar, whom so many of them had actively betrayed. Many were racist and nationalistic, opposed to multinational Rus, so denying the words and commandments of the apostles to go out into all the world and teach and baptise ‘all men’.
There are still parts of the Russian emigration which have not returned to the Russian Church and, incredibly, are still on the Catholic calendar, which was introduced by the masonic Anglicans into Constantinople for a fee of £100,000 in the early 1920s. Still no repentance for such unspeakable spiritual decadence! In years to come we shall be amazed that any of this was possible, let alone justified by ‘theologians’, ‘the great and good!’
And yet the emigration also produced saints. As ever, I will say to you: Follow the Saints! Yes, the rest existed and exists. Ignore them, let the spiritually dead bury the spiritually dead. There can be no nostalgia for them. Follow the Chains of Love and you will set your soul free. The Russian emigration was caused by evil, but God’s Providence can always make good from evil.
Q: Is it true that ROCOR has never had a scandal?
A: I do not know who told you such a fairy tale. Sadly, very sadly, just think about the Antony Grabbe scandal in Jerusalem, about the consecration of Valentin of Suzdal (I remember how Archbishop Antony of Geneva prayed for a snowstorm so that his plane could not take off and he would not have to take part in his consecration under obedience), about Grabbe’s bishop-father who ended up in a right-wing sect outside the Church and banned anyone from attending his funeral, about the defrocked….
Q: What would you like to see the Orthodox Church do as a whole?
A: Publish statistics and facts! For example, I reckon that there are about 800 Orthodox bishops, 80,000 priests and 217 million Orthodox. However, these are merely informed guesstimates and I do not know the truth. I have no idea how many deacons, monks and nuns there are in the Church and in each Local Church. I would be very grateful to see some central statistical Orthodox authority issuing such information. (If any readers can correct my estimates, please will they contact me).
Q: In the light of what happened in Crete in 2016, what should be done about the state of the Orthodox episcopate, where there are so many who are clearly unprincipled?
A: That is of course a question for the episcopate, not for me. However, my suggestion would be something like deposing all bishops who do not confess that:
1. The Orthodox Church alone is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.
2. The application of the canons which state that if they have been appointed by secular authorities (e. g. the State Department in Washington), they must be deposed.
3. The application of the canons which state that if they practise simony, they must be deposed.
4. The application of the canons which state that if they practise homosexuality, they must be deposed.
5. That if they are freemasons, they must be deposed.
Q: You are educated, how can you believe in heaven and hell?
A: We know from the unique revelation of the New Testament that God is Love. Therefore, it is clear that heaven is the presence of Love and hell is the absence of Love. It is very simple. It is even clear from this that heaven and hell, although in undeveloped forms, already exist on earth. People create their own heaven and hell. Please forget the primitive notions of atheists about heaven and hell that you seem to have. It reminds me of the incredibly primitive peasant Khrushchev who said that Gargarin had proved that God did not exist because he had been in space and had not seen Him! The only thing that this proved was Khrushchev’s own primitive ignorance and spiritual blindness.
Q: Why does the Church have rituals? Surely they are unnecessary?
A: The angels do not have rituals. So why do we? Obviously, because we are not angels, that is, we have bodies, a material nature. All people have rituals. Protestants have rituals (sit down, stand up, prayer, hymn, guilt-making sermon, collection of money to pay for the guilt, which is merely a copy of Catholic indulgences), secularists have rituals, parades, processions, the opening of Parliament, both military and civilian etc. Let us therefore make sure that our Church rituals are beautiful and meaningful.
People will always make rituals to worship something higher and greater than themselves, whether the True God or an invented one – drink, football, the sun on the beach, a human ideology…As we know that we are inferior and need to worship something, so let us worship the True God and not such false gods.
A: What is the situation in the Ukraine now?
A: I have not been there for a year now, but with the persecution of most of the people (‘ethnic minorities, of whom over 50% are Russian’), the continuing civil war, the fleeing of millions abroad (especially to Poland and Russia) and the fact that the government is propped up only by US money and money from US organizations like the IMF, I think the future is grim. It seems probable to me that in a few years from now, the country, which is an artificial conglomerate founded by Lenin and Stalin, will split between Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, leaving a possible Little Russian rump around Kiev.
Q: What are we to make of the recent hurricanes in the Caribbean and the earthquakes in Mexico?
A: There have always been such events. When you hear ‘the most powerful hurricane for 100 years’, it means that there have already been others at least as powerful in recorded history. None of this is the first time, it is just that the media are here to report these events. But the Caribbean and Florida are well known as places of crime, gambling, prostitution, drug-dealing and money-laundering. It is clear that only Faith can avert such catastrophes, not vice. Nearly 70 years ago on Tubabao St John of Shanghai protected that island from a typhoon through his prayers, going around the island with the cross and praying. This is what needs to be done here. But is anyone doing this?
In the USA some fear a great eruption in Yellowstone that could almost wipe out life in North America, or an earthquake in San Francisco. But what do people do in these places? Do they pray, do they repent? Some of course yes, but it seems that most just have more and more hubris. Just like Pompeii of old. Just like the Tower of Siloam. Little wonder that people speak of ‘Eurosodom and Gomorrhica’.
Q: Whose side are you on in the Brexit conflict between the Chancellor Philip Hammond and the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson?
A: That is a political question. All I can say is that I support neither of them. The Anglo-Turkish Old Etonian Boris Johnson is, despite his Russian Christian name, a fanatical Russophobe who supports a new Cold War. As regards the multi-millionaire Philip Hammond, I knew him personally, as he was in the same year in the same college in Oxford and also born in Essex (though at the wrong end). Even then, as a teenager, he was quite a ruthless careerist. True, he has done very well for himself in this respect, but has not yet got the top job, which is what he wants. However, regardless of that, both of these politicians are pro-British, i.e., anti-English, which is because they are pro-UK Establishment. The last pro-English politician I can think of is the long ago-retired Sir Richard Body. I am not sure that there is a single pro-English politician left in Parliament today.
Q: Should we be worried about the conflict between the USA and North Korea?
A: For the moment there is no conflict, just mutual insults. What worries me is that both leaders have terrible inferiority complexes that produce paranoia. One wants to be taken seriously as a President, instead of as a horse-trading businessman of limited intelligence, the other is a shy man who is trying to live up to his father and grandfather in cruelty, bluster and everything else. And his country is surrounded by aggressive US ships and planes (the USA is not surrounded by North Korean ships and planes), which only deepens national paranoia.
They both remind me of Kaiser Wilhelm who also had a terrible inferiority complex, caused by his deformed arm and his profound jealousy of Great Britain, and so started the Great War, with all its appalling consequences. ‘Inferiority complexes’ (= the sins of jealousy, vanity, selfishness and pride) cause many problems in world history. They are dangerous. As for these leaders, you should give children toys to play with, not guns, missiles and nuclear bombs. That is worrying.
Mathilde
He who loves the Tsar and Russia, loves God. If you do not love the Tsar and Russia, you will never sincerely love God.
Elder Nikolai Guryanov (+ 2002)
We all knew that between the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow by Western-backed traitors of the legitimate government of the Russian Empire (February 2017) and the hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imperial Family (July 2018), significant events would occur in Russia. The Satanic power would not rest idle, but would continue to attempt to destroy the present timid restoration of the Church, of Russian Orthodox consciousness and so of the multinational Orthodox Empire. Western-minded atheist liberals – 7% of the population of the Russian Federation – but who control most of the media and many ministries and departments of State – have therefore made an anti-Orthodox film, a piece of sick, atheist porno-propaganda which they promote as ‘art’.
The film concerns the 1892 romance between the then youthful but future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II and a Polish ballet-dancer called Mathilde Kshessinska. Naturally, the Satanic director has, with the help of a German porn-actor as the unmarried future Tsar, fictionalized and sexualized a romance, so creating blasphemy. With the launch of the film naturally scheduled for late October, the hundredth anniversary of the bloody Bolshevik overthrow of the upper-class revolutionaries of February 1917, intentions are clear. Everything that was good about pre-Revolutionary Russia and about today’s Russia must be discredited. Clearly, Western backing is behind thus, just as it was behind the 2012 pornographic ‘Pussy Riot’ blasphemy (the English name of sex and violence shows clearly who was behind that), or for that matter the 1917 ‘Revolution’ itself.
Western liberalism, with its systematic intolerance of all spiritual values, has unchained Satan, giving him the freedom to destroy all spiritual and moral content that remains in the world. This is the mystical meaning of all world events over the last 100 years. This process began in February 1917, when the pro-Zionist British government of the time overthrew the Christian Empire in Russia and opened the way to the Satanic twentieth century with its Great War (which Russia would have ended in 1917, had the Tsar not been betrayed and overthrown) become a World War. There followed artificial famines, massacres and a Second World War with concentration camps, Atomic Bombs and ever since worldwide misery. Since the British began to lose everything after 1917 and gradually transferred power to the American Empire, it has been the latter that strives to dismantle today’s Russian Federation, planting its puppet terrorist-states on its borders.
For the Federation is the heir to the Russian Empire, and it is the apostate rival American Empire that stands behind the pornography of Pussy Riot and Mathilde. In the meantime the Russian Orthodox patriot, heroine of the Crimea and State Deputy, Natasha Poklonskaya, has been trying to have the film banned. A major Russian cinema chain has done so, frightened of violence from the outraged. However, violence has already taken place, though it remains unclear whether this was not in fact violence organized by the Western-backed film-makers and sponsors in order to try and discredit the legitimate, responsible and non-violent Orthodox opposition. The real significance of the film is to show us how far contemporary Russia still has to go in order to free itself from Western liberal delusions.
The mere fact that the film has been made and may be shown proves the power of the Sodomite Western lobby inside the Russian Federation. All this comes at a time when certain elements have infiltrated the fringes of the Russian Orthodox Church and are trying to influence Her. These elements, Western-educated and Western-influenced, usually academics and often young homosexuals, think that they can betray the Church to Western influences, both Vatican and secularist, firstly by watering down the Faith with intellectual platitudes, secondly by old-fashioned ecumenist overtures to the West. These shallow-faithed and marginal victims of Westernization will not survive. There are far too many faithful clergy and people who oppose them inside Russia, as well as in the Church Outside Russia in the Western world.
These upstarts who think they know better, know nothing compared to the village greybeards. Above all, however, they cannot even begin to take on all our saints, among them the New Martyrs and Confessors, more of whom are yet to be canonized. The Western liberals can preach their ideology of death as much as they like: but the Royal Martyrs are far, far stronger than their pathetic moanings. God, not man, is in charge of history. The Cross is triumphant. Let any hothead, who thinks that he is higher than the Church of God and is tempted into schism in opposition to the liberal clique and their pensioner backers, whom he mistakenly associates with the Church of God, think again. As the impious Emperor Julian the Apostate said: Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!
Love, Infatuation, Marriage, Sexual Relations, Contraception and Divorce
These are all topics that are essential, and yet few seem to write about them. These brief notes are presented in the above order because if they were presented in any other order, it would mean that there are problems. This is the logical order.
Love
What is love? What is falling in love? And what is falling out of love?
The human heart can be compared to a radio station. Each radio station works on a certain frequency and is picked up only by a radio that works on the same frequency. With human-beings there are millions of frequencies. Falling in love simply means being on the same frequency. What then is falling out of love? It happens when one or the other of the couple changes frequencies. And that happens when we are first immature and then become mature. Hence the importance of marrying when we are mature. And maturity is often, but not always, a question of age. Some people are mature at 16, others still not mature at 50. Yes, there is such a thing as ‘love at first sight’. But be careful because there is also such a thing as ‘infatuation at first sight’.
Infatuation
Infatuation, ‘having a crush on someone’ in American, is to confuse love with mere feelings, emotions, sentimentalism, what is called ‘puppy love’. Thus, the teenage boy says after five minutes of meeting her: ‘I love her’. But a week later he feels the same about another girl. How do you know the difference? Love lasts and is prepared to make real and long-term sacrifices. At the end of romantic films, they put the words ‘The End’. They should not. They should put the words: ‘The Beginning’.
How do you know the difference between love and infatuation? Two things: Firstly, love is happy to sacrifice. Secondly, love loves even the faults of the other. If you cannot stand the faults of the other, do not marry them. And if you do not know that the other has faults, it is time to get real. As another old proverb says: ‘Love is blind, but marriage is sighted’. Solution: Get sight before you get married.
Marriage
There is another English proverb which says that ‘Marriage is made in heaven’. True, but ‘Marriage is built on earth’. It is amazing how many couples do not discuss essentials before they get married. In any marriage, someone must provide money, buy furniture, do the shopping, cook, clean, spend spare time etc. This must be discussed before you get married. Moreover, in most marriages, there will sooner or later be children. Who is going to pay for them, look after them, feed them, bring them up, take them to school? This must be discussed before ever you get married. This way you will soon find out if you love each other or are merely infatuated with each other.
Marriage is made of compromises. In English this is called ‘give and take’. The French have an even better expression: ‘give and give’. That is how marriage works. Selfish people MUST not get married. They are unfit for marriage and even more unfit to have children. Some people ask who is the boss in a married couple? The answer is in yet another old proverb: ‘The husband is the head, but the wife is the neck’. And that is how it works. Anything else does not work! I can assure you.
Sexual Relations
If you love each other, you will desire each other physically. Now, the sex drive of most men is much higher than in most women (though there are exceptions). Here there is danger. It is one of the oldest stories in the world for a man to lie and say ‘I love you’, when all he wants is sex. Having got her pregnant, he then disappears. Of course, there are also young women who get pregnant, thinking that they have trapped a man. They also end up as single mothers. To be a single mother is no joke. It generally means to be poor. Be warned.
The old way was to catch your man first and then get pregnant. It makes sense because a child (and that is sooner or later the result of sex) needs two parents, male and female, as everybody used to know before common sense was abandoned. Not just for male and female role models, but because money is needed for children and someone must be a provider and someone must be a carer. Whatever the situation, there will be a period, however short, when a mother cannot work and get income because the baby needs intense care.
Some young couples ask: How often can we have sexual relations? The answer is always different. Some new young couples initially have and want relations several times a day. That soon changes into several times a week, then it becomes several times a month and, with age, that can change into several times a year. This is a matter for the couple. But the wife should know that her husband generally needs relations more often than her and it is her duty to provide them. A wife who refuses her husband constantly can lose him. There are always other women out there. But the husband must also know that sometimes his wife cannot have or else does not want relations. He must be reasonable. Biological need should never decide the frequency of relations. It is love that should decide that.
Contraception
The ideal of the Church is that we do not use contraception. The ideal of the Church is that we abstain from marital relations on fast days (Wednesdays, Fridays, during the four fasts and on the eve of communion, for example, on a Saturday evening, if we are taking communion on a Sunday morning). However, in reality, apart from the abstention from relations before communion which is absolute, it does not work like that.
The fact is that 99.9% of Orthodox couples do use some form of non-abortive contraception (abortion is an absolute no) at some point in their marriage. And the Church turns a blind eye to this use of contraception because we know that this is a lesser evil. A lesser evil? Yes, because most couples cannot have and bring up 20 children in modern conditions. And some women will die if they have more than a certain number of children. And some men will abandon their wives and some women will abandon their children, if they have more children than can cope with. We have seen it. It is a reality. Contraception nowadays is a lesser evil. Not the ideal, but real. It is generally not so hard to have children, but to bring them up….
As regards marital abstention during the fasts, this is such a delicate matter that it can even become dangerous. Younger coupled should not try it. In any case, as the Apostle Paul says, it is always a voluntary matter and by mutual consent. We know one case of a woman who imposed it on her husband. The result was that she destroyed her marriage. If in doubt, the couple should speak to their priest.
Divorce
Church divorce, or rather annulment, exists. And it happens. There are men who turn to drink. There are men who are violent and beat their wives or else are abusive. There are men and women who are unfaithful to each other. Every case is different. The fact is that there are cases where it is better for a couple to divorce than to continue in a relationship than brings more bad than good. If only for the children’s sake.
President of European Commission Proclaims the Fourth Reich
In a historic speech on 13 September, the last day of the Church’s Old Year, the President of the European Commission, the Luxemburger Jean-Claude Juncker, declared in Brussels his vision of a future European Superstate, in effect, a Fourth Reich. As one German MEP, Beatrix von Storch, put it: ‘I think his whole speech was a historic one. He was going against all the good guys and he was declaring the United States of Europe. It was frightening what he came out with today’.
Von Storch added: ’The European Union which has been presented to us today is not the one we want to be members of. But I think it will be difficult to set it up that way because imagine the Eastern European States and I think they will be the next to follow the Brits out of the European Union’. ‘You could see him as a person today acting like a dying man with the last vision of something which is about to explode. I think it was to some extent tragic’. Asked how long the EU could survive in its current form, she said: ‘It has to be reformed immediately. They will change the European Union into the United States of Europe without treaty change. Without the change of the treaties. This is incredible what we have heard today’.
Juncker’s ‘vision’ of a European Superstate is considered by most to be a Federalist fantasy and in Britain most people are today greatly relieved to be leaving an EU which could well turn into the tyranny of such a Federalist Dictatorship. Now it remains for England, Scotland, Wales and perhaps Ireland, later perhaps together with countries like Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Lands, Poland and others, to free themselves. Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania have been ravaged by the EU, their young forced to emigrate, Lithuania has lost two-thirds of its population and Latvia is little better off. If England can free itself of Britain, that is, the alien British Establishment and its corrupt bureaucrats, it may yet show the path to freedom for others.
However, for this to happen, all must give up swimming with the tide for selfish advantage for the maintenance of the ruling class, and stand up for principles and the Truth. This means giving up the hypocrisy of double standards on which the British Establishment (just like the Brussels ‘elite’ and the Washington ‘Deep State’) has been built. As for us, we stand for Another England and Another Europe and Another America. We choose Freedom, not Tyranny.
Why the Western Elite Loves Lenin and Trotsky
Before the birth of Antichrist there is to be called an Eighth Universal Council of all the Churches under the One Head, Christ, and the one Protecting Veil of the Mother of God (according to St. Nilus the Myrrh-Giver: ‘A last and Eighth Universal Council to deal with the disputes of heretics and separate the wheat from the chaff’). Its aim will be to unite and reunite all the holy Churches of Christ against increasing anti-Christian ways, under the single Head, Christ the Life-Giver, and the single Protecting Veil of His Most Pure Mother, and to deliver the final anathema against the whole of masonry and all the groups like it (by whatever name they call themselves), the leaders of whom have one common aim: on the pretext of complete egalitarian earthly prosperity, and with the aid of people who have been made fanatical by them, to create anarchy in all states and destroy Christianity throughout the world, and, finally, by the power of gold concentrated in their hands, to subjugate the whole world to anti-Christianity in the person of a single, tyrannical Ruler, who fights against God – one Ruler over the whole world.
Prophecy of St Seraphim of Sarov
One of the mysteries of the Western elite is whereas it hates the Georgian Stalin and Stalinism (that such a murderous monster is hated is not surprising), it adores Lenin and Trotsky. After all, Lenin and Trotsky both lived for years in England, Switzerland and the US under government protection and patronage and the then governments of Germany and Canada respectively made sure that Lenin and Trotsky returned safely to Russia in 1917. Given that both of them in their very short reigns were far more murderous proportionately than Stalin, why this love for them?
First of all, we should understand something vital: neither Lenin nor Trotsky was Russian. The well-off father of Lenin (real name Ulyanov), was an Asian-Russian (as his facial features suggest) and his mother was German-Swedish and Jewish. An intellectual snob, the Bolshevik leader believed that other European countries, especially Germany, were culturally superior to Russia. From his youth he had wanted Russia to become more culturally Western. On the other hand, the family of Trotsky (real name Bronstein), came from a non-practising family of wealthy Jewish farmers in the Ukraine. He had no Russian blood at all and was a Russophobe just like Lenin, whereas the Georgian Stalin declared himself to be ‘Russian of Georgian origin’.
In other words, both Lenin and Stalin were Anti-Russian Zionists. Not Zionists in the Jewish sense, of course (Lenin probably never even knew that he was a quarter Jewish and Trotsky probably never even set foot in a synagogue), but in the modern sense of the word that they were globalists. Now we know why the Western elite loves these criminal monsters who killed millions in just a few short years: unlike Stalin, they were not nationalistic ‘Socialism in one country’ followers, but globalists, the modern code-word for Zionists. What difference between them and the Russophobic Western neocon elite, which like them also creates anarchy and bloodshed wherever it can?
The Betrayal of England
I can remember about fifteen years ago meeting a very posh lady who belonged to the Liberal Democrat Party, as she never tired of telling us, who had ‘come to the Orthodox Church through her practice of Buddhism and her villa on Patmos’. Explaining how important she was and how many important people she knew, she asked me, ‘And what do you do?’ Answering in my best Essex accent (which is not difficult), I replied, ‘I’m a Saxon peasant’. She swiftly turned from me in horror that someone so unEstablishment had been allowed to frequent Her Pompousness.
Meeting such individuals was not unusual then. However, the same lady, like others of her ilk, soon left the Orthodox Church and returned to her Buddhism, whatever that was. (I rather doubt that it resembled at all the real Buddhism of, say, today’s Myanmar. It was rather a patchwork of intellectual exoticism that made her feel virtuous, justifying her very condescending psychology). This hatred of the people, ‘plebs’, is characteristic of the Establishment, of which she was so obviously a part. This patronizing attitude, which underpins for example, the upper middle-class, chattering class ethos of the BBC or MI5, goes back a very long way.
Certainly, it was present among the alien governing class in Romano-British times, renewed by the British-loving Normans and their Francophile mythology. It was renewed in the eighteenth century, when the cruel and racist anthem ‘Rule Britannia’ was written to justify the enslavement of Africans and anyone who got in the way of the rich becoming richer, it was celebrated in the Victorian hypocrisy of the British penny coin with its image of Britannia, while contemporary politicians like Blair and Brown have tried to enforce the selfsame Establishment mythology of ‘Britishness’, even trying to teach it as a brainwashing ideology in State schools.
Essentially, this ‘Britishness’ is the betrayal of England – and also of Wales, Scotland and Ireland and all our peoples. This is because the Establishment, the parasitical elite, which promotes this ideology is alien to us, the peoples of these isles. The antidote to it is to be faithful to ourselves, to our Anglo-Celtic roots. The word ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ are abhorred by the Irish: it should not surprise us, given the history of genocidal massacres there under the ‘British’ Elizabeth I, Cromwell, then the Potato Famine and the 20th century. It is time to drop the words Britain, British and Britishness from our language. But it is even more time to drop the practices that lie behind such words.
The Vatican in Crisis is Desperate for Russian Orthodox Support
Protestantized and liberalized, ever more under its present head, Roman Catholicism is in crisis. The recent visit of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to Russia on 21-24 August ‘to build bridges and increase mutual understanding and dialogue’ illustrates the crisis. Alarmed at the virtual Fascism being preached by Ukrainian Uniats (just as in the 1940s) and, on the other hand, its virtual Protestantization in the Western world, the Vatican is seeking a way out of its self-imposed crisis.
With regard to the visit, the Vatican stated that: ‘It is now a question of walking together in the Gospel footsteps, multiplying opportunities for fraternal encounter, exchange of views and experiences, proclamation of the Gospel, and co-operation in service to human society’. Clearly, this is Diplomatspeak for: ‘We are in a mess, our churches are empty, in Europe we are finished, help us’. Since his appointment as Secretary of State in 2013, Cardinal Parolin has also visited Belarus, the Caucasus, the Baltics and the Ukraine.
The Battle Against Intellectualism
I can still remember the 1970s when I bought icons (without haloes) from Jordanville, portraying St Elizabeth the New Martyr and St John of Shanghai. They hang in the altar of the Church where I serve to this day. Equally I can remember the abuse hurled at the Church Outside Russia at the long-awaited canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in November 1981. Those who hurled the abuse went strangely quiet when what had had to be begun in New York, given the politically enforced paralysis of the Church in Moscow, was confirmed in Moscow in 2000. This merely confirmed the hypocrisy and political prejudice of those who had attacked us.
Thus, I can recall the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva who faced down the proud doubters in the holiness of the Royal Martyrs, including a Roman Catholic baptised in his own blood, among his own ROCOR flock in Brussels and Paris, telling them that they need not venerate the icons of the Royal Martyrs, confident that they would come round in time, as spiritual experience persuaded them that they had been wrong. The same patience was shown in London by Bishop Constantine, a man of holiness himself, towards doubting members of the ROCOR Cathedral there. And in the USA, even the well-known iconographer, Fr Kiprian (Pyzhov) had been opposed to the canonization of the Royal Martyrs, but through prayer, he too came round to the Orthodox view.
Indeed, I can remember one man, now, ironically, a hieromonk ordained by a ROCOR bishop, who on the day of the canonization of the New Martyrs in 1981, vehemently informed me that the Grand Duchess Anastasia had not been martyred because she was identical to a woman known as Anna Anderson, who claimed to be the Grand Duchess. Despite witnesses like the ever-memorable Fr Nicholas Gibbes (The Grand Duchess’ tutor), who had immediately seen that she was a fraud, that man insisted on his opinion. Of course, he came to eat humble pie when DNA tests later proved what the faithful had known all along, that Anna Anderson had indeed been a fraud.
Far more disturbing than the fact that such people attacked us, motivated by secular politics, is the fact that they were attacking the saints. Here great caution is needed. When righteous men and women are venerated among the faithful, when their lives are examined closely and found to contain miracles of healing and prophecies, all of which came true, we should pay attention. Sometimes, their relics are not available because they have been destroyed by infidel liberals like Kerensky or else by Bolsheviks. Such righteous, despite slanders, eventually come to be venerated by many because of the spiritual experience that people have of them in their prayers. Then the hierarchy of the Church investigates and canonizes, always cautiously, always slowly, but the right decision is reached, even though, as in the case of the Royal Martyrs, certain bishops were originally strongly opposed.
The fact that intellectuals do not like the saints is because they do not like holiness, which is what the saints are made of. Why this reaction to the saints? Quite simply because holiness is outside their control, outside the sphere of their purely rationalistic, non-spiritual experience and so they despise it. Such intellectuals study what is called in Russian ‘teologija’ (scientific theology’), not ‘Bogoslovie’ (‘the Word of God’) and come from secular universities and secular-minded institutes, not from monasteries, which are Orthodox universities. It was ever thus. Such was the fate of the Gnostic heretic Origen, so beloved of the Paris-Crestwood School, of the intellectuals Arius, Nestorius and Barlaam, the latter of whom opposed his Western scholasticism to the spiritual experience of St Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica.
This is not to say at all that the use of the intellect (the reason) is bad in itself. Of course not, it is necessary. In the Church we have three great saints who bear the title ‘the Theologian’ – St John, St Gregory and St Symeon. Three – and no more. St Gregory, in particular, was very well educated in the intellect achievements of the day, like indeed, many, many other Church Fathers. Their triumph, however, was not in their use of their intellect, but in the fact of their spiritual experience (holiness), which they expressed with the use of their secularly trained intellect. Intellect is one thing, intellectualism, such as denying the miracle in the life of St John of Damascus and the Three-handed Icon of the Mother of God, is another.
In other words, the Church Fathers did not confuse the means (the intellect, the reason) with the end (holiness), which confusion is called not the use of the intellect, but ‘intellectualism’. Intellectualism is the spiritual disease which makes the reason (rationalism) the be all and the end all. It is not. The Church is not rationalist, which ism is tainted by fallen human pride and arrogance, but neither is She irrationalist. Irrationalism is obscurantist and narrow, the domain of phariseeism and spiritual impurity, just as much as rationalism. The Church is ‘meta-rational’, beyond reason, i.e, She follows the path of Holy Wisdom, ‘Sofia’ in Greek, ‘Premudrost’ in Slavonic.
The Christian goal was very well expressed by St Seraphim of Sarov in the century before last. He defined the aim of our lives, not as the collecting of secular knowledge, idle facts, but as the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. We can see this very clearly in the lives of three saints of the last century, St Silvanus the Athonite, a semi-literate Russian peasant, St Nicholas of Ochrid and St Justin of Chelije, the latter two of whom were very well-educated in Western Universities. The latter two used the intellectual formation which they had received in the West in order to express their spiritual experience, that of St Silvanus. No amount of doctorates, imitations and studies of abstract theories will, however, provide such spiritual experience.
In the Russian Church today, no longer persecuted, we are faced by the challenge of secular-minded intellectuals on the fringes of Church life, often with doctorates and degrees, who call themselves ‘theologians’, but who are not, because they do not have the spiritual experience that comes from suffering. Thus, their writings are superficial and do not provide spiritual food for the Orthodox faithful, but simply act as sleeping pills. The antidote to intellectualism is the living experience of the saints, especially, in the Russian Church, the feats of the New Martyrs and Confessors, who preferred the ‘meta-rational’, Risen Kingdom of God to the rationalist and irrationalist fallen republic of man.