Monthly Archives: November 2018

Istanbul: The Young Turks Take Over

The three-day Synod in Istanbul, the last of the year, ended yesterday.

Firstly, after over three generations of indulging its illusions, it finally dissolved the rebellious Rue Daru group in Paris, reducing its 75 year-old French archbishop to a vicar-bishop. We had long expected this, but did not know when and in what despotic conditions without any consultation. Now in each community of that little group infighting will follow between opposing clans, those who are actually of the Russian Tradition and the anti-Orthodox Russophobes. This mirrors the present and coming battle in the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) group, which as such was founded by Paris intellectuals nearly fifty years ago at the height of the Cold War and is equally divided between Orthodox and Russophobes.

Secondly, the Synod sacked the 90-year old Archbishop Dimitrios in North America, as had been expected earlier this year. This sacking involves a large sum of ‘missing money’.

Thirdly, the Synod did not give the Tomos for Ukrainian autocephaly, just as they said they would not two years ago before their disastrous meeting in Crete, but as they had been paid $25 million for by the US taxpayer to do this year. This leaves President Poroshenko, who demanded this Tomos (he was the only one who wanted it, apart from his US paymasters) with a very red face, outwitted by Greeks who came bearing (apparent) gifts.

Why did all this happen now?

With an ageing (and, according to some, ill) Patriarch and many other elderly and ill bishops, such as the unstable John of Pergamos or the above-mentioned 90 year-old Archbishop Dimitrios or the arch-rebel Archbishop Stylianos in Australia, it seems as though the young generation of ‘Young Turks’ has taken over in Istanbul. These include the ultra-papist Metropolitan of Prussa, Elpidiphoros (Lambriniadis), the Metropolitan of Gaul, Emmanuel Adamakis (said to be the very ambitious successor in Istanbul), or the now notorious Archbishop Job (Getcha).

This new generation lacks pastoral experience and is bound to an extraordinary ideology of Eastern Papism, that comes from a fantasy that ended 565 years ago in 1453. They will eventually come down to earth with a very cruel bump. Meanwhile, the self-imposed spiritual suicide of the New or Second Rome does mean its end, except as a small and schismatic group of ‘new calendarists’. This in turn means that the Russian Orthodox Church is now free to establish canonical Orthodoxy worldwide. A great burden has been lost. Freedom has come. The eyes of the Orthodox world are now looking to the Russian Church to take on the mantle of authority and prove itself worthy by at last setting up the infrastructure in the Diaspora which we have so long been battling for without support. To those who have been given much, much is expected.

 

The Great Opportunity

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men.

With the dissolution of the Rue Daru Exarchate in Paris behind the back of its ruling archbishop, the daydreams of autonomy of the ecumenist Fraternite Orthodoxe have been dashed. Now the way is at last free for the Russian Orthodox Church to establish its Local Metropolia of Western Europe. Called for by ourselves in 1988 and, much more importantly, promised by Patriarch Alexey II in 2003, it is time to move forward. With the Patriarchate of Constantinople having officially removed itself from the equation through the phyletism of ‘the superior Greek race’ which has swallowed the Paris Jurisdiction, all eyes are now looking to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe, one attached to Moscow, the other to New York, joined by any Churchly remnants of the Rue Daru group, together can build the long-awaited multinational Church of Western Europe, which ceased to exist in 1054. Surely 964 years of patience is enough! Unlike the Phanar and others, the Russian Orthodox Church is free from the meddling US State Department. Just as in the Ukraine, it is for our free Church to take responsibility for the future of the flock, putting the Truth of God over the enfeebling diplomacy and petty nationalism of men: it has long been apparent that nobody except the Russian Church will.

The End of an Era

The Rue Daru Exarchate, composed of a few largely Moldovan parishes in Paris and a few dozen tiny communities of converts by and large without their own properties scattered mainly through France, Benelux and England, has today been dissolved by the Phanar. Over ninety years of history since Rue Daru broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia have thus cruelly ended.

Founded largely by aristocratic and intellectual traitors to the Tsar from Saint Petersburg, the surprise is that this anti-Russian and anti-monastic group has survived so long. Nearly four generations on, with its last Russian bishop dying in 1981 and without monasteries, it was clear that it would come to depend on widowers and celibates from Roman Catholicism, such as its present Archbishop from Bordeaux. Rue Daru’s failure to return to the Russian Church, when freedom gradually came in the two decades after the collapse of atheist rule in the former Russian Empire in 1991 was lamentable.

However, as long ago as 1966, the then rector of the St Sergius Institute, Fr Alexey Knyazev, went to the Phanar and asked if the Patriarch was really the ‘Oecumenical’ Patriarch or ‘just a petty Balkan bishop’. Today he has received his answer. Fr Alexey and other real Orthodox, worthies like Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Fr Igor Vernik, had already understood in the 1960s and 1970s that the Rue Daru group could only survive spiritually if it returned to the Russian Mother Church, becoming the basis of a new Local Metropolia in Western Europe.

I understood it thirty years ago in 1988, when Rue Daru’s then ex-Catholic German Archbishop George (Wagner) categorically and suicidally rejected any plan to establish the foundation for a new Local Church of Western Europe faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and even invited the Papal Cardinal of Paris to celebrations of a millennium of Russian Orthodoxy at Rue Daru instead of Russian bishops! This was of course the last straw. As late as 2003, even the naive Archbishop Sergey (Konovalov) understood this, but it was all tragically too late.

Thus, the end had long been inevitable. For Rue Daru and its tiny group that inevitably broke away from the Russian Church in England in 2006 in the notorious Sourozh Schism, going against history and faithfulness, there is now only one choice: Die out under ‘the superior Greek race’ or else return to the Russian Tradition (which the latter has never had, despite its illusions to the contrary) and also return to the Orthodox calendar by returning to obedience to the Russian Orthodox Church. As we said 12 years ago, you cannot be of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, or even know it, even less understand it, when you refuse to be part of the Russian Orthodox Church. This is not theology, this is common sense! To think otherwise is spiritual delusion – prelest.

In Paris all now depends on whom properties belong to. Elsewhere, there is freedom to return to communion with the canonical Orthodox Church from the Phanariot schismatics, their ecumenism and phyletism and liturgical deviations.

The end of Rue Daru is a warning to all its imitators, not only in the USA, but also to those liberals in Moscow who fell to the Paris School of Philosophy (there never was any Theology here). You follow them and this is how you too will die out.

Told you so.

 

The New Vikings

The ninth century chronicles of England constantly refer to the war between the ‘Christians’ and the ‘heathen’, that is, the war between the English and the Vikings. Once the English had themselves been heathen and a bit like the Vikings. However, they had settled 300-400 years before the Viking raids, founding homes and farmsteads (‘hams’ and ‘tons’) and had begun to live as Christians. The Vikings raided (killed, raped, enslaved, looted and pillaged) and traded (exploited and made huge profits). True, many of them then settled like the English, but their spirit lived on and infected other races.

Their spirit lived on in the last Viking invasion – that of the Normans, who were also Vikings. By the eleventh century, having learned French, these barbarian Vikings had become the shock-troops of the new imperial papist ideology in Rome, massacring in southern Italy, England and then much further afield as far as Jerusalem in so-called ‘crusades’. Then their spirit spread to others, especially in northern France between the Loire and the Rhine, and gradually horse-mounted banditry and castle-built exploitation (called ‘feudalism’) became the norm for the whole European upper-class.

Thus, this was the spirit of the Teutonic Knights attacking 13th century Russia, of Spanish conquistadors in 16th century Latin America, of British and French slave-traders, ‘merchants’ and pirates in the 18th century Caribbean and India, of European cowboys in 19th century North America and the spirit of all Westerners and their converts who have looted and pillaged Asia, Oceania and Africa. At one time people spoke of Westernization, in the 1960s Americanization, today it is globalization. It is all the same. It means infecting the world with the Viking spirit of piratry and pillage.

Today the Viking spirit is not conducted by Viking longships, medieval knights, Spanish galleons, British ‘privateers’ (State-sponsored pirates) or Gatling gun-armed troops massacring Africans armed with spears. It is conducted by Western politicians in cartels, ‘businessmen’, international bankers and Stock Exchange or corporate ‘raiders’. They are raiding, asset-stripping, the rest of the world to feed their incredible capitalist-consumerist machine, making all into drugged, enslaved and enzombied consumerists with their Black Friday Alexa apps, ordering them to buy. They are today’s Viking victims.

 

The First Council of New Jerusalem?

The recent Church Council at the New Jerusalem Monastery to the west of Moscow was organized by the Church of New Jerusalem and All Rus – as the Patriarchate of Moscow has now been renamed. The Council was attended by its 400 bishops and substantial official delegations from all the other Twelve Local Churches that are in communion with it and each other.

Momentous international decisions affecting all were taken at the Council. First of all, the Church of Rus was placed first in order of the diptychs, before New Constantinople (see below), Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem; the Archbishop of Athens has been renamed ‘Patriarch of New Constantinople’ and all five Balkan Churches (Romania, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania) have pledged themselves to the closest co-operation and talk seriously of merging into one again; the Churches of Poland and of the Czech Lands and Slovakia are intending to become Autonomous Churches within the Patriarchate of Rus. If this happens, it will reduce the number of Local Churches to seven: Rus, New Constantinople (the Balkans), Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Cyprus and Georgia. Seven is of course the number of Local Churches in the Book of Revelation.

At long last, after over a century lost since the 1917 international-organized, treasonous coup d’etat which overthrew the Russian Empire, the Diaspora and the Non-Orthodox world are receiving attention. Firstly, the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus now has ten Autonomous Churches, not only the five in the Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Japan and China, but also five new ones: in Western Europe from Iceland to Finland and Portugal to Hungary; North America; Latin America; Oceania; South-East Asia. All Orthodox living in these five territories have been invited to take part in inter-diocesan life, while retaining their complete independence, customs, viewpoints and attachment to their homelands. Secondly, the Patriarchate of Antioch has promised to work to evangelize the whole Arab world, with diplomatic and financial support from the Patriarchate of All Rus.

This Council of New Jerusalem has been hailed as a turning-point in Church history. It means that with the internal nationalist bickering of the recent past resolved and administrative divisions overcome, the Church can now turn its attention to the outside world. Today’s world, divided between narrow racist nationalism and greedy scheming globalism, needs Christ as never before.