Daily Archives: June 18, 2018

Foreign-Organized Bolsheviks Massacred the Tsar, His Family and His Servants 100 Years Ago: Four Weeks To Go

In four weeks’ time we will mark the hundredth anniversary of the massacre of Imperial Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and his Family. On 17 July 1918 their foreign-organized captors herded the family into a basement of a house in Ekaterinburg, at the meeting point between Europe and Asia. Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra, their daughters Olga (22) Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17) and Alexei (13) fell under a hail of bullets. In a ritual of evil the family’s corpses and those of three loyal servants and the family doctor were then stripped naked, mutilated, disfigured, burned with petrol and acid and secretly buried. So fell Christian Russia, which had for over 900 years resisted both the Mongol-Tartar hordes from the East and the Catholic-Protestant hordes from the West, keeping the balance in the world from these extremists.

Throughout the ‘Heartland’, from Kaliningrad to the Bering Straits, stretching nearly half-way around the northern third of the world to three Continents, and beyond that in oases of Holy Rus outside the Russian Lands, Russian Orthodox Christians this year celebrate. We celebrate the martyrdom of the last Christian Emperor and regret the fall of the Christian Empire after 1600 years. With Church services and conferences, monuments and museums, art galleries and films, it will be hard to forget the tragedy – except in the atheist West. Perhaps the lack of interest is due to being anti-Christian and so being Russophobic, since the essence of Russophobia is hatred for Christianity? After all, atheism is always negative, since it starts with a negation.

The so-called Russian Revolution was a coup similar to most other Western-engineered ‘regime changes’ before and since. Jacob Schiff, (1847-1920), the Wall Street banker who had financed Japan during the Japanese War against Russia (1904-1905), publicly boasted of his success in bringing about the coup, with the help of mainly aristocratic Russian traitors and apostates. Imperial Christian gold reserves weighed 1,311 tonnes: they went to the West and not to the people. In 1911 the St. Louis Dispatch had published a cartoon by Bolshevik insider Robert Minor. His published cartoon portrays Karl Marx with a book entitled Socialism under his arm, standing amid a cheering crowd on Wall Street.

Gathered around and greeting him with enthusiastic handshakes are characters identified as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, John D. Ryan of National City Bank, Morgan partner George W. Perkins and Teddy Roosevelt, leader of the Progressive Party. Western corporations moved in for the kill; Ford, General Electric, International Harvester, Caterpillar etc. Gulag slaves, whom Trotsky-Bronstein dubbed White Negroes, worked harder and cost less than those employed in the West. Over 1,000 Gulag camps were scattered across the bankster colony. The United States and Britain invested heavily in the blood-soaked Soviet regime.

The Romanov Dynasty was primarily made up of Europe’s royal houses. The blood of the martyrs was that of England, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Romania, Serbia and the Habsburgs, as well as that of Russia. The martyred Romanovs could lay claim to being of the essence of Europe’s royal houses, not so much a Russian as a European dynasty. There were 53 Romanovs living in Russia when Tsar Nicholas II was removed from his throne on 15 March 1917. Eighteen of them were slaughtered in heart-wrenching circumstances. 100 years on we now await the coming Tsar, the next Christian Emperor from the Romanov family, who alone can through Christ restore sanity in this world gone mad.

 

Homosexuality and the Problem of the Orthodox Episcopate

The scandal caused by the recent article of Metr Kallistos Ware on homosexuality has been well answered by a US convert in a typically Biblical way (1). Like the previous scandal on Metr Kalllistos’ views concerning the possible ordination of priestesses, it reveals the inherent Anglicanism of His Grace, which is why one of his Phanariot fellow-bishops calls him ‘o anglikanos’. This ingrained Anglicanism was already clearly visible in the very first edition of his book ‘The Orthodox Church’, which expressed the views of a young and idealistic Anglican scholastic looking in on the Church from the outside. Written for those outside the Church in an almost British public school civil service report style, the book was largely ignored by Orthodox on the inside.

It is doubtful if the ivory tower views expressed above really affect anyone in the Church outside the convert fringes and the academic ghetto. I do not think that any of my 600 parishioners have even heard of Metr Kallistos. Everything is simple for Orthodox who live outside the academic world, with its often refined and indeed rather effeminate ways: there is inside the Tradition and there is outside the Tradition. We are inside; what goes on outside is really not our concern. May God guide such people away from bookish secularism and flawed compromises towards the Church and Her inner and mystical understanding and age-old wisdom. This is sent down to the repentant by the Holy Spirit, is so lovingly cherished inside the monasteries and the parishes and is utterly different from mere academic understanding.

However, this issue does raise the problem of the Orthodox episcopate in the Western world and its frequent isolation from the parishes and the monasteries. This isolation, together with the frequent political captivity of the episcopate, are responsible for the lack of leadership it has often displayed over recent decades. True, a few Orthodox bishops come from widowed priests and even from priests whose wives have entered convents. However, the vast majority of bishops have always come and always will come from the monasteries. This is fine, providing that we understand that although bishops should be monks, only a few monks are suitable to become bishops.

The problem, especially in the Diaspora in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia, is that for decades most of the bishops have never been monks, but have simply been unmarried. This is not at all the same thing, for, inevitably, some of these bishops have been homosexuals and in some places and in some jurisdictions this, notoriously, has been and is the prevalent practice. I could draw up a list of several dozen such bishops, whom I have met over the last 45 years. The result has been that these bishops have in turn ordained homosexuals and some married clergy have endured persecution from their bishops and their ordinees, with their homosexual backbiting and narcissism. Thus, the episcopate of one group in North America used to be known as ‘a gay mafia’. And this is not just a problem among new calendarists and others on the liberal fringes. Notorious too are the episcopates of some uncanonical old calendarist groups.

Here we must be honest. If the episcopate has often been tainted, it is surely the fault of all of us. Monks, and therefore monasteries, and therefore bishops, do not grow on trees. They come from devout families and from parishes. The extraordinary decadence of Church life, especially over the last 100 years, is responsible for the weak episcopate. What we do not want is married bishops (the error of the schismatic renovationists in Soviet Russia), what we want is the restoration of monastic life, which is virtually non-existent in some Local Churches, resulting in all these scandals, which are, sadly, so well-known. What we need is genuine monastic bishops, continent heterosexuals, real men with vigour and energy, who are close to the parishes and our spades are spades language, who can understand ordinary Orthodox, without academic theorizing and head in the clouds language. However, the Church is not a welfare State where such bishops magically appear from above. They are created by us: we get the episcopate that we deserve.

 

Note 1:

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2018/06/kallistos-ware-comes-out-for-homosexual-marriage/

Metropolitan Kallistos and The Wheel Fr. Lawrence Farley Metropolitan Kallistos and The Wheel Fr. Lawrence Farley If a respected author writes for a publication whose known purpose is the promotion of a particular agenda, then by that very act he lends credence and credibility to that agenda.

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2018/06/met-kallistos-clearly-implies-that-the-church-should-bless-committed-same-sex-

https://orthodoxlife.org/contemporary-issues/kallistos-ware-homosexuality-humphrey/

On War and Military Saints

At first sight it may seem strange that there are military saints, soldiers who became holy martyrs. But we can think of many examples from many countries: St Sabbas the Commander (+ 272), St George (+ 303), St Dimitry (+ 304), St Alban (+ 305), St Theodore the Recruit (+ 306), St Theodore the Commander (+ 319), St Alfred the Great (+ 899), St Alexander Nevsky (+ 1263) and more recently the admiral, St Thedore (Ushakov) (+ 1817).

True, in paradise there will be no armies, because there will be no war, just as in paradise there will be no police and no prisons because there will be no crime. But we live in the real world as it is and anyone from any background can become a saint. Indeed, in the Gospels, there is no condemnation of the soldiers who appear there and, one of them, the centurion, is praised and another, Longinus, who stood at the foot of the cross and confessed that Christ is indeed the Son of God, became a saint.

And yet in the Book of Exodus the sixth commandment states: ‘Thou shalt not kill’. However, from the same chapter and the following chapters, it is clear that this means that we must not murder out of hatred or for some other evil reason, for instance, because we want to get someone else’s money or property, or out of love of glory. But does this mean that we could kill someone for another reason? For example, if we saw someone in the street trying to kill someone to get their money, does this mean that we should defend that person?

Suppose we were an armed policeman and we saw a terrorist with a gun or bomb and he was threatening to kill lots of people, elderly people, women and children among them, and he could not see us and we had the chance to stop him and that resulted in killing him, would that be forbidden? Of course not, it would be irresponsible of us not to act in defence of others. In such situations where we are able to defend others, not to defend would simply be cowardice on our part.

The fact is that in this world we are often faced by choices and the choice we have to make is what we call ‘the lesser evil’. However, we must be very careful here: such a choice applies only in the case of defending others. So in every country armed forces are controlled by something called ‘The Ministry of Defence’. But do the armed forces really defend? Sadly, they often seem to do the opposite and attack, to offend.

It is the same with us. If we are aggressive and attack others, even killing them, that is wrong. Indeed, priests and monks are forbidden from taking up weapons to defend themselves. But if we are defending those who are weaker than ourselves, that can be justified. Here there is no hatred for an individual, just the responsible desire to protect others. Here there is no selfishness, we are not defending ourselves or our property or money or showing off our strength, we are protecting others, perhaps people we do not even know.

Yes, as Christians we are called on to love our enemies, but that means not to feel no personal hatred for them. Why? Because they are victims of their bad passions, the victims of evil. So to love our enemies does not mean that we should not defend others. War in defence of the weak is a lesser evil than declining war and surrendering to the power of barbaric terrorists. A soldier for us is not some self-satisfied murderer, but a noble hero who sacrifices himself by defending the weak.

 

(First Published in the Youth Magazine of the Colchester Orthodox Parish, Searchlight, Issue 5, June 2018)