Monthly Archives: October 2019

Questions and Answers (October 2019)

Q: How should we react to the many stories throughout history, but especially today, of clerical corruption, for example, of priests stealing money, committing crimes and bishops who are morally corrupt or perverts etc?

A: Firstly, many of these stories may well be slanders. How do we know that they are true? Where is the proof? A lot of people (especially atheistic journalists) invent such stories in order to justify their own corruption and laziness, saying: ‘If priests and bishops do it, then I can too’. It is so often just self-justification and it is very easy to slander. Such slanders do great harm. Let us not forget how St Nectarios of Aegina was slandered and how St John was slandered by his fellow-bishops who put him on trial. The righteous need the patience of Job.

But even if all such stories were true, so what? Corruption is the problem of those who are corrupt. Tomorrow they will die and their bodies will rot in their graves and their souls will go down to hell. Let them do their worst – they will suffer terribly for it and their names will go down in history as the monsters they are. They will have to answer for their corruption at the Last Judgement.

God only wants one thing from us, to save our own souls, not to save the world or to save corrupt bishops and priests, but just to save ourselves. Let us do simply that and leave the others in their self-made mess. They will either repent or else will have to face God, Who is not mocked. I tremble for them.

Let us interest ourselves not in scandalous stories, but in real stories, in the Lives of the Saints.

Q: Some people say that all the problems of Orthodox come from others, for example, from Communists, Catholics or Jews. Do you agree?

A: No, this is complete nonsense. The problems of Orthodox come from Orthodox, from ourselves. The grave error of all conspiracy theories is that they blame others for our own failures. They reject the concept and reality of personal sin. This is anti-Christian. Yes, there are many siren voices who urge us to shipwreck. True, they are all enemies of Christ (whom, by the way, we are called on to love, not to hate), but there is no need to listen to such voices. If we do listen to them and obey them, then we become the enemies of Christ, we are entirely to blame, responsible for rejecting Christ, instead of rejecting the siren voices. We do not blame others, we blame ourselves. That is called Christianity. Self-reproach is the beginning of salvation.

Q: Why after 1917 did the White Movement fail and not defeat Communism, the Reds?

A: Simply because there was no such thing as the ‘White Movement’. Most so-called Whites were merely anti-Bolsheviks, not White at all, but February revolutionaries, Kerenskyites. Just because they were against Communism, it does not at all mean they were ‘White’. Many, perhaps most, so-called ‘White’ anti-Communists, were crude nationalists and atheists, so in fact traitors to the real Whites. Many were no better than the Reds and indeed committed the same atrocities. This is an excellent example of ‘the enemies of my enemies are not necessarily my friends’. It has been estimated that only 10% of the so-called Whites were actually White, that is, actually Orthodox, fighting for the restoration of Orthodox government. Yudenich, Kornilov, Kolchak, Denikin and so many well-known generals were not White – after all, the Tsar was brought down by the treason of generals. The only well-known Generals who were White were Diterichs and, to a lesser extent, Wrangel.

Q: Is today’s Russia close to being Orthodox?

A: No, it still has very far to go. For example, there is always the danger both from Western-style ‘liberals’ (militant atheists) as well as from unChurched nationalists. It is because of them all that Lenin’s mummy still lies in its stew in the centre of Moscow. Statues to him still stand in provincial Russian towns. (Just like the statues of the equally evil Cromwell and Napoleon, which defile England and France). You cannot glorify the New Martyrs and the new torturers, God and the devil. Many such unChurched nationalist ‘Orthodox’ also still admire the Georgian bandit and mass-murderer Stalin. Why?

This is simply because he was on the winning side in World War II. In reality, that war was won by the generals and above all the sacrifices of the people, not by the disastrous Communists, who shot brave soldiers in the back and in 1945 sent millions of freed Russians, who had been captured by the Nazis, to Siberia, to perish there. Stalin was a disastrous and incompetent leader who allowed the enemy to get to the gates of Moscow and Saint Petersburg within six months. Thus, nearly 30 million citizens of the USSR were slaughtered in World War II under Stalin, whereas under Tsar Nicholas II in World War I just over one million died and the Germans had only conquered Russian Poland and a small part of Lithuania after three years of huge losses for them. As for the Austro-Hungarians and Turks in World War I, they were defeated by Russia.

And then there are still many place names of those like Lenin, Stalin, Sverdlov and others who committed the obscenities of the USSR. President Putin has been unable to undo all this and that is clearly his greatest failure.

Q: What does the Church say about racism?

A: The Pharisees said that too many ‘foreign’ Greeks had become Christians and this was one of the reasons they refused to become Christians. Thus they lost the Church which passed into the hands of others. All nationalities have committed the same error and so lost the Church, in 1453 and most recently in 1917. There is no place for racism in the Church.

Those who were racist to me in my youth are all dead now. Let that be a warning.

Q: Are some nationalities privileged in the Church?

A: Sadly, often yes. But this always ends up badly, as we can see in ROCOR in Miami today, not to mention several other places.

Q: How do we avoid negativity?

A: By focusing on Christ and the saints. However, this does not mean that we should be dreamers and live in the clouds, like those who do not want to know about the real world. Such people call those who tell them the truth ‘negative’. Such dreamers never achieve anything, however much money they are given by the deluded, as they are disincarnate.

Q: Can ordinary Greeks take communion in our Russian churches?

A: Yes, of course, I give them communion every Sunday. Ordinary members of the Patriarchate of Constantinople are not directly concerned by the actions of their treasonous elite. But I now make a habit of asking Greeks who are unknown to me whether they are actually Orthodox or Eastern Catholics (‘Eastern Papists’) at the confession which is obligatory for adults before communion. As the Ukrainian Archbishop Theodosy of Boyarka has said:

‘Orthodoxy versus ‘Phanarodoxy’ runs as a line not just between Churches, but within the Local Churches themselves; that is, between the ascetics of faith and zealots of the canons of Orthodoxy on the one hand, and ecumenists, religious liberals and Greek ethnophyletists on the other hand. And if, by God’s intervention and admonition, the Phanariots – the new Papists – do not come to understand the Truth and come to repentance, then such a global division between Orthodoxy and ‘Phanarodoxy’ is wholly possible and not far off. But in that case, the Orthodox Church will only be cleansed of a foreign element, of new heresies.

If we are speaking about a schism between individual Local Orthodox Churches within their borders as a consequence of the current inter-Orthodox situation, then theoretically, unfortunately, even this is possible. And by human reasoning, everything is leading to this. But I hope the Lord will not allow this, otherwise, the prophecies of the saints, including of recent times, would have said a lot about it. But they did not. On the contrary, they spoke otherwise, saying a lot that inspires optimism. I believe the Lord will correct the situation with such circumstances so that over time, Orthodox will only remember with a smile the miniscule but proud heresy of Eastern Papism, which will by then have sunk into oblivion’.

Q: What is the most urgent need for Orthodox in Western Europe?

A: I can tell you now that it is NOT writing books about ‘Orthodox’ philosophical theories of ‘spirituality’ and academic theology, where the authors describe what they do not do and cannot provide. Our most urgent need is premises, parish churches. The RCs and C of E have them and they are fully equipped, with Church halls and clergy houses. Why can’t Orthodox do that? Shame on us.

An Interview with a Serbian Church Website

The following interview was published last week on www.pouke.org, a Serbian Church website.

  • Being an Englishman and an Orthodox priest at the same time, how do people in your .neighbourhood perceive you?

With complete indifference. Very few people here are interested in any religion. A priest is generally viewed as perhaps rather eccentric, but harmless. Nobody is interested, people live however they want. It is all the same to them whatever I am.

  • Please tell us, is there an interest in Orthodoxy, at least in the town of Colchester where your Church is? Who are the people from your parish? Where do they come from and what brings them to Orthodoxy?

I was born and went to school in Colchester, which is about 100 km north-east of London. However, interest from most English people living in Colchester, as anywhere else, is very limited. Most English people are atheists and have no interest in any faith at all.

Our parish is mainly made up of Russian immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania, Moldovans, Romanians, Ukrainians and Russians, as well as Bulgarians, Cypriots and Greeks, together with their English-born children. Most have come here over the last 20 years. True, we have small numbers of Orthodox English people and some other nationalities, but these are usually linked in some way to Russia or else are married to Russian women. They live in Colchester or around it, within an 80 km radius.

  • Is there a Church choir in your parish? What are the specifics of your parish in Colchester? 

Yes, of course there is a choir, a good one, between about 10 and 20 people sing every Sunday. All are volunteers, we do not have or like paid choirs. On an average Sunday there are only 150-200 people in church, though we have 600 regular parishioners and, in fact, about 3,000 local Orthodox come to our services during the year, but many are only nominal Orthodox and come only once a year, for baptisms or weddings.

Our church building is the largest Russian Orthodox church building in the British Isles, about the same size as the Serbian Cathedral, St Sava’s, in London. It is white and was built of wood 164 years ago. There are 24 nationalities, most people are under 40, with large numbers of children. On average we have about 100 baptisms, 10 weddings and 1 funeral a year. Our second priest, Fr Ion, is Romanian, but married to a Russian from Latvia. Our services are in three languages, Slavonic, English and Romanian. We have many confessions every Sunday with communion from two chalices, and 100-150 communions.

  • You talked about St Edmund, can you please tell us about this Saint and his significance in your life? 

The name Edmund will sound strange and not Orthodox to most Serbs. But just because some Roman Catholics may have his name, it does not mean that he was Roman Catholic. Firstly, he is a real saint (Roman Catholics do not have real saints) and, secondly, he lived before Roman Catholicism was invented. Many Roman Catholics are called Nicholas; does that mean that St Nicholas was Roman Catholic? Of course not!

St Edmund was King of Eastern England, where I and my ancestors were born and live, and he was martyred by pagan Viking invaders in 869. His memory is still alive here and a whole town locally is named after him. I have known about him and felt his presence here from childhood, since he is the main local saint and the original Patron Saint of England. I think I grew up beneath his protection in some mysterious way. St Edmund is the first saint whose spirit I felt in childhood.

The spirit of the saints is identical, wherever and whenever they lived. Many saints of the West have always been venerated by Serbs in the Serbian Church calendar. For example, St Tatiana, St Sophia and St Alexei of Rome, St Irenei of Lyons, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Vincent of Lerins, or St John Cassian and many Popes of Orthodox Rome, like St Leo the Great, St Gregory the Dialogist or St Martin I. However, saints in Western countries further from Serbia and who lived a little later are not known in Serbia. And yet these saints who lived at this time could travel to Jerusalem and Constantinople and take communion there and feel at home; the Church was One, whatever the difference of language and even rituals, the Faith was the same.

  • Have you ever been to Serbia? If yes, what are your impressions of our country?

Unfortunately, I have never visited Serbia and there are no Church-going Serbs in this part of England.

On the one hand, I have the impression of Orthodox in Serbia who are very faithful to the Tradition. On the other hand, I have the impression that few Serbs are really Orthodox, most are atheists and very nationalistic. I suppose this is the result of fifty years of brainwashing by Communism, mainly under the Croat Tito, and then of a generation of the ‘Soft Power’ brainwashing of Western Consumerism, which has produced the Facebook generation. They dress like Americans, listen to American music, watch American TV programmes and films and so think like Americans. I have read that 30% of the Serbian media is now American-owned. How can people resist?

I also have impressions from Serbian Orthodox I know. For example, I studied with the Serbian Bishop Luka in Paris at the Russian St Sergius Institute in the late 1970s and liked him a lot. The only other Serbian bishop I know is Metr Amfilochije. I much admire him. I greatly venerate St Nikolai of Zhicha (called in Russian St Nicholas the Serb) and have read many of his books, which have been translated into Russian and English. I also venerate St Justin of Chelije, a real Orthodox philosopher, as well as Patriarch Pavle. The latter has not yet been canonized, but this is only a matter of time.

  • Since I know you that you have relations with the SOC (Serbian Orthodox Church) and that you have visited the Saint Sava Church in London, tell us please, how do you feel in the company of our people in England?

Perfectly at home. We have exactly the same Faith and values. We belong to the same Orthodox Civilization and are proud, in the good sense, of this. In today’s Europe, there are only two Civilizations: Anti-Christian, Secularist Western Post-Civilization and Christian, Orthodox Civilization. We are opposites. We should ask ourselves every day: Which Civilization and Empire do we belong to and confess: to the Anti-Christian Globalist Empire or to the Christian Empire, to the Secularist Empire or to the Orthodox Empire?

We have our own Civilization, our own Empire, stretching from Bosnia to the shores of the Pacific, with dependent outposts and oases of Orthodoxy all over the world, as in Colchester. We belong to this, it is our identity, regardless of our nationality and language, because we have the same Faith and Church. We Orthodox do not have the same values as the rest of the world and our Civilization and Empire is the only Alternative to Western Anti-Civilization.

A Serb who is not Orthodox is not a Serb, but either some sort of Titoist or else an American of the MacDonald’s Post-Civilization. In the same way a Russian who is not Orthodox is not Russian, but Soviet. And an Englishman who is not Orthodox or not close to Orthodoxy in some way through faith, is not English, but British. He is, consciously or unconsciously, an imperialist who has little time for truth or love, only for self-interest and imaginary superiority over others whom he can exploit.

  • Please tell us your views upon the latest events regarding the actions of Greek Church recognizing Ukrainian Orthodox Church?

It is all very simple. As you may know, the present US ambassador in Athens, Geoffrey Pyatt, used to be the US ambassador in Kiev. So it is clear that this is all just another American game, started by Obama, using flattery, threats or bribery, as is their technique. However, whatever the great pressure the US elite exerts on weak Greek bishops to recognize these Fascist schismatics in the semi-Uniat western Ukraine, I am ashamed of them. Whether because they are cowards or they have been bribed with dollars, these bishops are wrong. How can these bishops be so racist and weak and trample underfoot the basic canons of the Church, which every first-year seminarian knows? This is shameful. If there is no repentance, a terrible event will visit Greece for the apostasy of some of its bishops. God is not mocked. May the Orthodox bishops of Greece, like my contemporary, Metr Seraphim of Piraeus, triumph.

  • What are your relations with the ROC like? 

Relations with it?!! But I belong to the Russian Orthodox Church!

There is only one Russian Orthodox Church, whatever the administrative differences of its various parts. There are several autonomous parts of the Russian Church, the Churches of Japan and China, the self-governing New-York-based Church Outside Russia which I belong to, the Ukrainian, Moldovan and Latvian Churches, the Belorussian Exarchate etc. But we are all one, we all belong to the same Church and commemorate the same Patriarch.

  • What are your views on Constantinople? 

Until the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople was the plaything of the Turks and the British or French ambassadors in Istanbul. Everybody knew that the nomination to the Patriarchate could be bought for money. The bishops in Istanbul were finally bought by the Anglicans in the 1920s for £100,000 and so their freemason candidate, (he became a mason in a British Lodge on Cyprus in 1909), Patriarch Meletios Metaksakis introduced by force the Papist calendar. After the fall of the British Empire after 1945, its role was taken up by the American Empire, which continued its dirty work.

So the last legitimate Patriarch, Maximos V, was removed by the Americans by force in 1948 on the orders of the war criminal Truman, who had just slaughtered nearly 500,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Patriarch Maximos was too Orthodox for American tastes and was kidnapped and taken in Truman’s personal aeroplane into exile in Switzerland.

I used to know a Greek deacon who was an eyewitness to these events. He later became the Greek bishop in Birmingham in England. In 1948 the Americans behaved like thugs, cowboys, they were very violent. Patriarch Maximos was replaced by the Greek-American Archbishop Athenagoras – and we know how that ended. Since then most of the bishops of Constantinople have just been American puppets, without any spiritual relevance. One of them recently held an LGBT Conference with a ‘transvestite Orthodox theologian’!

  • English history is specific in many ways. Can we say that England was Orthodox until 1066 (12 years longer after 1054)?

The Western Schism was a gradual process, it spread over time and in some ways is not complete even today. It led to the invention of Roman Catholicism in 1054, but began much earlier than 1054, in the late eighth century under the heretic and iconoclast Frank Charlemagne. He was a barbarian who wanted to revive the pagan Roman Empire, with himself, naturally, as its Emperor. So that is what he did, setting up in 800 ‘the First Reich’. (Bismarck invented the Second Reich and Hitler the Third Reich; some say that the Fourth Reich is the EU). They called this revived paganism ‘The Holy Roman Empire’, but in fact it was Unholy and Anti-Roman.

This alien mentality of Schism spread from the Franco-German heartland (where later the EU began) all over Western and Eastern Europe, and eventually to the islands and so England too. It is clear that from about the Year 1000, and even before that, England was falling to these heterodox influences. 1066 marked the end of Orthodox influence in England, but the decadence was there already, especially under the half-Norman King, Edward (1042-1066). (Like Charlemagne, this traitor is called a saint by Roman Catholics!). 1054 (or in England 1066) is the end of the initial process of Schism, the conclusion of its fall from communion with the Church, not its beginning. Therefore we have to look carefully at what went on previously, before we can say whether it was Orthodox or not.

  • Do you think there are things in common between Serbia and England?

Strangely enough, yes.

Serbia is like the front line of the Russian Orthodox Church, the first bastion of Orthodoxy, just a few hundred kilometres from Rome. This is why the West hates Orthodox Serbia and wants to destroy it – because it loves Christ, whereas it loves Antichrist, for whom it works to bring in his reign. On the other hand, England today is like the front line of the USA, the first bastion of Anti-Orthodoxy. Nobody can forget how British airmen dropped bombs on Serbia at Easter 1999, marked ‘Happy Easter’. That was Satanic. So any Orthodox in England survive like soldiers in the trenches; and actually that is the same situation as for Serbs today. You too are soldiers in the trenches under the spiritual bombardment of the anti-Christian barbarians every day. This is what we have in common, we are both on the edges, advanced posts in the struggle for the Church of God.

  • Is there anything you would like to say to Orthodox Serbian people from your perspective?

Yes, just one thing: Stand firm in Orthodoxy! The more you resist the onslaught of the West, the US and its EU, NATO and IMF vassals, the greater the example of spiritual courage you give to Orthodox everywhere and, at the same time, the closer you draw to Christ and so to salvation. The West threw Communism and Nazism at us and we defeated both of them. For all extremes come from the demons, as the Holy Fathers say. We Orthodox shall defeat Liberal Secularism, which hates Christ just as much as Communism and Nazism, as well. Let us Orthodox show our courage, that we fear no man, that we fear only God. Then no-one can defeat us.

 

The Word of the Patriarch

Patriarch Kyrill, the 18th Sunday after Pentecost, 20 October 2019

The existence of Russia is of a great spiritual and cultural value – not only for you and me, but for all humanity. And we are calling for the preservation of the people of Russia, for the birth of our new compatriots, not only and not so much because these people are needed by the country, but also to a great extent because this country is needed by people. Russia must exist and play its irreplaceable role in our destiny with you, in the destiny of our descendants and throughout world history.

The special value of Russia, its special vocation is to be a stronghold of Orthodox Christianity. To oreserve the Orthodox faith, Orthodox tradition and culture, Christian moral principles intact. Maybe that is why the powers that be are so ganged up on the Russian Orthodox Church, wanting to tear away the Greek Orthodox world from the Russian Church, wanting to destroy the unity of the Orthodox Church. We possess reliable information that everything that is happening now in world Orthodoxy is not an accident, not just the whim of a religious figure whose mind has become clouded. This is the implementation of a very specific plan that aims to tear the Greek world away from Russia. According to the perpetrators —I cannot describe these strategists in any other way — the Russian Church appears to be some kind of “soft power”, through which Russia influences the world around it. But why can’t Russia share its spiritual gifts? Is it criminal? This can be criminal only in the view of those who seek to weaken, and if possible to destroy the influence of Russia. In this whole story related to the problem of recognition or non-recognition of Ukrainian schismatics by the Local Orthodox Churches, there is something that is not declared, but which is the main goal of the forces behind the scenes that unleashed this schismatic activity. We in the Russian Church understand this clearly, but today our brothers in Greece and other Orthodox Churches also understand this. We are being asked to resist, not to flinch, to continue the struggle to maintain the spiritual independence of the Russian Orthodox Church from all these centres of world influence, and most importantly – to maintain the unity of Universal Orthodoxy.

 

 

The Saints and the Bad Old Days

My interest in the saints deepened greatly in the 1970s and 1980s, once I had come into contact with the quite extraordinary spiritual and moral decadence of the Orthodox emigration of various nationalities. These immigrants included self-appointed ‘elders’, fraudulent gurus, so-called ‘Orthodox’ bishops who were not even Christians, bishops and priests who were simoniacs, criminals, perverts, bureaucrats, political appointees and who included the usual assortment of clerical narcissists. At least saints could provide positive models to counter the reality.

In those decadent days, and even much after, there were by and large four criteria for ordination to the priesthood if you were English (and indeed Western in general):

Be an adept of a sect or cult grouped around a bishop or priest (a self-appointed ‘starets’) with their various perversions, or else be an adept of some extremist sect based on a political ideology of left or right. Neither of these options had a future. Bishops and priests do not join political parties or tell people who to vote for (either publicly or privately), we only try to influence the course of events positively, in favour of the Church as the Body of Christ.

Be a freemason.

Be an Anglican vicar.

Be fluent in a foreign language e.g. Greek or Russian.

The first two criteria were spiritually and morally repugnant to me, the third not even conceivable, as I have never been an Anglican and have never had any desire to become one; Anglicanism is quite foreign to me as an Englishman, as it is to most Englishmen: there remained only the fourth criterion.

Hopefully, in the future, the criteria for ordination will become spiritual, that there is a group of Orthodox people in a certain place who put forward a man without canonical impediments who is not unwilling, and whose wife is not unwilling for him, to become a candidate for eventual ordination to the priesthood, once he has passed through all the necessary steps. The bad old days, when married men were excluded from consideration simply because they were married, or men were excluded from consideration because they had spiritual interests, as was the case in my youth, will be over. I thank all those who persecuted me; they made me more interested in the Lives of the Saints.

 

How to Deal with Disappointments – or Falling in Love Again Every Day

Marriages can all too easily get tired, especially once children appear. Every married person knows this. In Western cultures, firstly in North America, then the UK and all over Western Europe, and increasingly even in Central and Eastern Europe as those countries too are Americanized, secularist values are being adopted. This alien secularism means ugliness, which says: Why bother to be beautiful when God did not make us and we are going to die like animals anyway?

Thus, adopting secularist values, some Orthodox wives give up looking after themselves, constantly criticize their husbands and men in general, dress badly and eat badly, jeans and T-shirts all the time, too weak to swim against the surrounding tide. As regards some Orthodox husbands, they begin looking at other women, giving up the constant self-sacrifice that real men, real husbands and fathers, make for their beautiful wives and obedient children, and fall into alcoholic and other abuses. Like the secularists, they say: ‘We are free, let it all hang out, who cares anyway?. These secularist values are in fact all about loss of respect for God, for others and for self. These ugly values, loss of respect and self-respect are not the values of our Orthodox Christian Civilization.

Orthodox women should keep themselves beautiful, following Orthodox values. They should look after their bodies and looks, disciplining themselves, careful what and how much they eat, looking after their hair, looks, dress and shoes – but keeping modesty, without falling into vanity and foolish expense on vain luxuries and excessive make-up: such care of self is only for their husbands, not for anyone else. As for Orthodox men, they must keep sacrificing themselves at work and in the home, being good husbands and fathers, sharing all income, disciplining themselves too, not abusing their bodies and minds with alcohol, any other drug or tattoos, spending time with their beloved and unique wives and children. They too should look after their bodies and looks, not in order to attract other women, but only their beautiful wives.

At the Orthodox wedding, we are crowned. These crowns have a double meaning: martyrdom and royalty. Thus, in family life we become martyrs through self-sacrifice for each other and for our children. But in marriage we also become royal, we are kings and queens of our households. There is nothing so beautiful as the little wrinkles that come from love. Our marriages have to be constantly renewed: Orthodox married life is about falling in love again every day.

How to Deal with Disappointments – or Discovering God’s Love for Us

Life is made up of joys and disappointments, sometimes the former predominate, sometimes the latter. As popular wisdom proclaims, ‘after rain comes the sun’ and ‘there is light at the end of the tunnel’. However, disappointments are in reality our appointments with destiny, that is, through disappointments we can finally find out what God’s Will is for us. Thus, disappointments are always a recall, a wake-up call, a reality check, reminding us that our only ultimate Appointment is the inevitable one, when we shall stand before the Face of God and our whole lives will be judged in an instant by His mere presence.

Thus, disappointments in life bring many surprises. These come from Providence, which is God’s Love in human affairs despite us, whether international, national, family or personal. affairs. How acutely disappointed the Royal Martyrs or the Patriarch St Tikhon could have been, when they were rejected, persecuted, betrayed and worse. But they were not, because their disappointment led them to God’s will for them, along the path to holiness. It is almost as if we should thank God for our disappointments. Popular wisdom confirms this too, as we say ‘a blessing in disguise’ and that, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’. Glory to God for all things!

 

The Barbarian West

The millennial Western Empire is surely the cruellest empire of all time. In its barbarism it seems comparable only to the pagan Roman Empire, the killing machine of ancient times. In its ironic propaganda this labelled all Non-Romans as ‘barbarians’ – thus like the ‘Aryan’ Nazis giving itself the right to slaughter all others at will. Despite the Roman Empire’s vain vaunting, in reality, its ‘superiority’ lay only in its military technology, its ability to massacre, terrorize and subjugate by force of arms, in order to asset-strip its vassals and colonies. And so it is today. ‘The West’ has no spiritual or moral superiority – merely a technical one.

For the Western Empire is the only Empire which not only possesses, but which also uses, nuclear weapons of mass destruction – in 1945 in defeated but not yet colonized Japan. It is also the source of all the technology of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. It is by popular consent a menace to the real free world and the real international community of some 180 nations. It has set up its CIA torture chambers from Libya to US-puppets like Romania and Lithuania. Its bombs, marked ‘Happy Easter’ rained down, killing and mutilating in Serbia, where its uranium-tipped shells still deform new-born babies twenty years later. Its bombs also fell on Afghan weddings and hospitals, on the civilians of Iraq and Libya and Syria, as earlier on those of Germany and Japan.

However, this ‘West’ is not geographical; many born and bred in the geographical West do not belong to ‘the West’ and at the same time many who do not live in the geographical West do belong to ‘the West’. ‘The West’ is in fact a construct, a concept which engages only those who accept and welcome the ideological domination of secularism – the power and wealth of the Western elite. When was this ‘West’ (calling itself by various totally inaccurate names like ‘the free world’ or ‘the international community’, much to the bewilderment of the vast majority of the world’s people who are not ‘Western’) first formed?

Was it in 1989? This was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the West’s so-called ‘Cold War’, with which it had justified millions of victims in dozens of proxy hot wars and trillions of dollars of military spending, the need for which was invented by the US military-industrial complex immediately after the Second World War. After all, it was immediately after 1989 that the West began terrorizing and bullying the Muslim world in order to justify that spending and rid itself of some of those weapons. But this terrorization and bullying of the Muslim world had begun over 900 years before, in 1095, with the launch of the First ‘Crusade’.

Was it in 1945? This marked the US invasion of Western Europe and its defeat of Japan in its war to gain strategic control of the Pacific. Victory in 1945 led the USA to invent a host of acronyms for the control and vassalage of others, such as the UN, NATO, SEATO, IMF, GATT, WTO, OECD, EEC, EU etc. But this was not the first US invasion of Western Europe – that was in1917.

Was it in 1917? The great European suicide caused by the rivalry of its nationalist ‘empires’ meant that the US, seeing its moment to become the leader of the world, intervened. But the Western European world had been slaughtering its own peoples and those of the rest of the world long before its creation, the USA, came to prominence.

Was it in the American Civil War which ended in 1865? Despite the self-justifying propaganda claims, this dreadful war was not about freeing slaves. It was about the Unionist imperialism of the industrial North of the USA, which needed to recruit cheap labour in the South whose freedom to move to factories in the North was therefore essential for it. Defeating Confederatism, this Unionist imperialism went on to massacre even more Native Americans and steal their ancestral lands, take over Cuba and the Philippines and so begin the economic colonization (‘banana republicization’) of Latin America (‘our backyard’). But Western imperialism began long before this.

Was it at Waterloo in 1815? Long before US imperialism, its British founders had been practising it. After the victory at Waterloo over its French rival, anything became possible for the British Establishment, including the genocidal depopulation of Ireland through State-created famine in the 1840s (a famine with millions of victims repeated by the Georgian bandit Stalin in Southern Russia eighty years later and again by the British Establishment in Bengal in 1943), the invasion of Russia (’The Crimean War’), the salt hedge in India, ‘the Opium Wars’ (British genocide in China and the rape of Africa (though other Western Europeans were also involved in this). But British, and Western, imperialism began long before this.

Was it in the Reformation which began in 1517? Here began the justification for ‘Wars of Religion’ (sic!), the Judaic idolatry of money called Capitalism, which was later to lead to the dictatorship of the odious and genocidal dictator Cromwell (the English Hitler), who then had his statue erected outside the equally dictatorial British Parliament and became the hero of Thatcher. But Western, and not just Protestant but also Roman Catholic, imperialism began before this, not least in the case of the gold-grasping Italian merchant Columbus.

Was it in the Hundred Years War from 1337 to 1453 between England and France (more exactly between the Roman Catholic French elite of England and the Roman Catholic French elite of France)? But the Roman Catholics had been massacring each other long before this.

Was it in the Roman Catholic Inquisitions with their killings, burnings and tortures which began in France in the 12th century and continued against Cathars, Waldensians and anyone else who disagreed with the totalitarian power of the Papacy for centuries both inside and outside Roman Catholic countries? But Roman Catholicism had been killing and burning people since the Western elite invented it in the 11th century.

No, the construct of ‘the West’ was definitively formed in the mid-11th century as the restored (‘Holy’ – sic!) pagan Roman Empire – first attempted, but fortunately unsuccessfully, by the barbarian Charlemagne in the eighth century, with his massacre of the Saxons and the use by his courtiers of pagan Roman nicknames. Until then, ‘Western’ culture had simply been part of the universal Orthodox Christian culture of all lands, where the apostles had converted local people. It was here that their heirs, martyrs, confessors and Church Fathers, had continued to live according to apostolic tradition until that dried up in the Western lands in the 11th century. From then on ‘the West’ became a secularist ideology, a construct, based on the purely secularist old pagan Roman Empire. Here is where all went wrong.

The Coronation of the Tsar from Paraguay

Moscow, 17 July 2028

All will remember how after the mysterious death of President Putin at the age of 71 in May 2024, the Russian Federation and the countries which had once formed the Soviet Union, as well as all of Eastern, Central Europe and Western Europe, fell into political chaos. Any number of professional Russian politicians vied with each other for power. But all were discredited; some were utterly corrupt, some were simply buffoons. At that time, when the EU had just collapsed in acrimony, the inward-looking and economically feeble USA was bitterly divided after the fall of the oligarch Trump from power and politicians there were urging States to secede from the Union, and China’s corrupt Communist Party had at last been overthrown after 75 years, it seemed as though the whole world was collapsing. Many anxiously wondered: What would the new world order that was being born look like?

Increasingly, in the Russian Federation a very large majority of citizens decided that they needed a strong but not corrupt leader. Naturally, virtually all turned to the hope for the restoration of the monarchy. Various descendants of the Romanov family came forward in reply. However, most of them could not even speak Russian, many had nothing to do with the Church and only very few had any grasp of the political situation in Russia, in neighbouring countries, many of which, like the former US-run Ukraine, had already fallen apart, or else were in chaos, or indeed of the situation anywhere else in the world. A strong man, a man of the moment and a man with understanding and capable of clear-sighted action had to be found. Among the multitude of Romanov candidates, not a single one seemed even vaguely suitable. And then something quite unexpected and even extraordinary happened.

It was in Paraguay in March 2027, in a small and remote town in Alto Paraguay near the Bolivian border, which had been founded by Russian émigrés in 1928, that a previously unknown Romanov descendant was found. He was discovered by a Russian journalist who had been reporting on the earliest Russian emigration in South America. The settlement was so remote and self-sufficient that it was isolated from Spanish speakers. Everyone still spoke pure, pre-Revolutionary Russian, handed down by great-grandparents to the present generation. There, born in 1989, lived a certain Alexei Romanov, a descendant of Tsar Nicholas I. His great-grandparents, born in Saint Petersburg in 1900, had helped establish the settlement in 1928, his grandparents had been born there in 1930 and his parents in 1956. Alexei had been brought up in piety, but had also mastered Spanish, receiving an excellent education.

Interviewed by the journalist, he had shown his fluency in Russian and also a profound understanding of both Russian history and culture and of the modern world. When the interview was broadcast in the Russian Federation, people were ecstatic, seeing in him the Tsar they had long been seeking. Married to Olga, a descendant of the Dolgoruky family, they had three children. All will remember the family’s visit to Moscow in November 2027 and how the crowds were united in their enthusiasm at his words and at the family’s purely Russian Orthodox way of life and values. Now today, amid the rejoicing of tens of millions, Moscow has celebrated his coronation and that of his wife Tsarina Olga. A new focus of unity has been found in this broken world and countries of the former Russian Empire and very many beyond them are looking with hope to the new Tsar.