The current favourite anti-Russian Orthodox slander of the US-controlled Western media (obviously, this includes the State-run BBC locally) is that the Russian Orthodox Church is the lackey of the Russian government, notably of President Putin. Here they love to misquote the words of Patriarch Kyrill, that President Putin as a leader is a miracle. Clearly, he is a miracle, after ideologues like Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchov, Gorbachov or the shameful drunkard Yeltsin, all peddling their anti-Christian, Western ideologies, after their vicious and barbaric persecution of the Church, the greatest anywhere in human history. However, to conclude from this that President Putin meddles in Church affairs or that members of the Church hierarchy are his lackeys is so absurd that one can only marvel at the sheer brainwashed ignorance (or else lying cunning) of Western politicians and journalists.

Why do they peddle such lies? The short answer is that they are so stupid or else so venal that they believe their own anti-Christian propaganda. But let us look at the problem in more detail.

The Western Powers have always tried to meddle in the affairs of the Church of God. A whole quarter of the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (it was then at most a quarter) was interfered with and taken over by the secularist Western elite who wanted all power for themselves. We have only to think of 1054, 1204, the Crusades, the Teutonic Knights, the Inquisition, the Protestants, the 19^th century games of the British and French ambassadors with venal patriarchs in Istanbul, the British creation of the Greek Orthodox Church, devious British manipulations in Cyprus, the appointment of German puppet-kings in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. Their meddling continued into the 20^th century (for example in the British-orchestrated Russian ‘Revolution’ (in fact a power-grab by decadent Anglophile and apostate Russian aristocrats), the notorious Meletios Metaksakis in Istanbul and the £100,000 he received for his repulsive anti-Church activities in the 1920s. In 1948 these operations were taken over by the CIA from bankrupt Britain.

Today, after the fall of the Western ideology of Communism, we have the extraordinary manipulations by the USA of Istanbul. Here money exchanged hands ($25 million?) in support of US interference in the affairs in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church through the local US-appointed oligarch-gangster puppet Poroshenko. What is the Ukraine to the CIA? Only a banana republic that is not in Latin America, but placed more strategically, there where nuclear missiles can be stationed on the Russian border and aimed at Moscow. However, the USA meddles wherever possible. It not only appoints patriarchs of Constantinople, but also of Bucharest and perhaps elsewhere. It holds ‘conversations’ with the Archbishop of Athens, putting great political pressure on him, it tries to implement a schism in the Patriarchate of Antioch between Damascus and Beirut, tries to reinforce the schisms in Macedonia (just as their friend the Croat Communist Tito did) and in Montenegro, not to mention in puppet-Estonia and Moldova. To suggest that the Russian State meddles in the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church and that its bishops are lackeys of the Russian government is the most extraordinary hypocrisy. Only the most ignorant or brainwashed could possibly believe this lie.

There is a picture of the atheist President Macron standing amid the ruins of Notre Dame. It is a picture that symbolizes contemporary post-Christian Europe. Amid the firs of atheism, Western Europe stands amid the ruins of the vestiges of its Orthodoxy. Sadly, unless the West repents, Notre Dame is only the beginning. God’s punishment awaits. Not just in spiritually, morally and financially bankrupt Western Europe, but in the USA as well. An explosion in Yellowstone? Devastating hurricanes and floods on the Carribean or Atlantic coast? An earthquake or tidal wave along the Pacific? We wish it on no-one. May God spare the United States and Western Europe from any catastrophe. But it will happen – unless there is repentance, because when people turn their backs on God, refusing His help, He can no longer defend them from the activities of the demons and all their satanic glee. Be warned.