Monthly Archives: November 2023

The Church After The Ukraine

Introduction: In the Ukraine

The Red Star USSR lasted for three generations after the Western-organised Palace coup of 1917. So too the White Star USA, which began its triumph in 1945, is also collapsing after the same three generations. At present we are all waiting for the end of the totally unnecessary American war in the Ukraine. According to official Ukrainian TV, Kiev losses in killed, wounded and captured troops are now 1,126,652. The Americans, who forbade the Ukraine to make peace in spring 2022, want indeed to fight to the last Ukrainian. However, as most Ukrainians are not going to commit suicide for the US elite, that elite will now have to blame someone else for its failure. In this new Greek tragedy, dramatic events are taking place in freezing and snowbound Kiev at this very moment. The main assistant of the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has already been killed by a hand grenade sent to him as a ’present’ from the President’s office and the wife of the head of the dreaded Kiev secret police has been poisoned. Meanwhile, European elites are panicking, as they face the real possibility that a nationalist President Trump will make peace with Russia, at last dissolve NATO and desert a NATO-free Europe.

Talk in Kiev is of a coup, rejecting both President Zelensky and the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Zaluzhny. The situation is even more dramatic on the front line, which is falling apart, as undertrained and underarmed, unarmed and untrained Ukrainian troops give up the unequal fight. In a war of attrition the collapse can come very fast. By Easter, 5 May 2024, the day before the feast of St George the Victorious, it will surely be over. Some say it will happen even as early as January or February, rather than April or early May. The CIA has always instrumentalised the worst elements in each client state to play the roles of heads of their puppet regimes. Thus, they used drug dealers in Latin America, fascist dictators in Spain and Portugal, mafiosi in Italy, colonels in Greece, gangsters in Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Hussein in Iraq, Bin Laden in Afghanistan, hateful extremist nationalists in the Baltic States and in the Ukraine Galician Nazis with an atheist Jewish actor figurehead. Once the US no longer needs its handsomely-paid war criminals, they are exiled, dumped or assassinated, especially if they fail in a US election year.

This will be the fate of Zelensky and will also be that of the US-appointed and now panicking NATO and EU puppets, Stoltenberg, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, Pavel, the bankrupt Russophobic European elite, which is to be ejected by its electorates. With their tiny militaries, they are irrelevant.  Already largely demilitarised, they have to be denazified. The Europe problem will be solved at last. The political results of the Democrat delusions in Kiev and their open lies in the Western media (they declared President Putin ‘dead’ twice last month alone!) are colossal. Kiev is now spelled K-A-B-U-L, only this is Afghanistan multiplied by ten, because it is happening in Europe in full view of the whole world which can now see ten years of the lies of Western politicians and the Western media. The Ukraine is the European graveyard of the US. Former vassals, which like the Ukraine are dependent on US funds for their existence, such as Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Kosovo and Kuwait, will also disappear. Eventually, the bankrupt US will have to abandon its peninsula outpost of Western Europe, NATO will disappear and the US-moulded EU will collapse, to be replaced by a Russian-founded, multipolar concert of the nations.

In the Church

However, what interests us much more are the results of the Ukrainian catastrophe for the Orthodox Church. These are the results for both what once was the most prestigious Local Church, Constantinople, and for today’s largest Local Church, Moscow, as well as for the fourteen other Local Churches.

Founded in the fourth century, this once prestigious Patriarchate in Istanbul was tempted by its glorious history a millennium and more ago as the capital of the Christian Roman Empire. Goaded and bribed by the White House in Washington, it thought it could rule over the Orthodox world through nationalist-imperialist politics. Now it is falling from its height and has to face the embarrassment of its fake Ukrainian Church, which is staffed by perverts, gangsters, thugs and Nazis. Was there ever such a shameful event in all of Church history? The existence of the US-established and US-financed fake Church in the Ukraine discredits this Patriarchate. Imperialist and nationalist politics have their price. The only way out would seem to be the ‘retirement’ of those responsible. Denials by papering over the cracks and sweeping under the carpet is no longer an option.

Founded in Soviet times in 1943, this largest Patriarchate in Moscow was tempted by its size, once nearly three quarters of the whole Church. It thought it could rule over the Orthodox world through nationalist-imperialist politics. Prey to the politics of the FSB and the CIA, it was infiltrated by traitors. Now it is falling from its height and has to face the embarrassment of its infiltration by the representatives of various secret services who betrayed it. It has lost, or is losing, many of its territories: the Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova and most of the Diaspora in the West, ultimately everything that it once controlled outside the Russian Federation. Imperialist and nationalist politics have their price. A Council or Synod in Moscow will have to enact a wave of decentralisation. If independence (autocephaly) is not given to Non-Russians by Moscow, it will be taken by them anyway.

Conclusion: The Triumph of Conciliarity

Once the war of America and its NATO vassal elite, launched against Russia and Europe, now coming to an end in the Ukraine, is over, the persecution of the heroic Church of the Ukraine will also be over. A New Ukraine will be established. And a New Ukrainian Church will also be established. And, regardless of what happens in Moscow, an independent Ukrainian Church under Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev will be supported everywhere that matters, not least by the Romanian Church. Independence for it was thirty years overdue, as for all parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. We await transformations of the centralised structures of the Church, which are now archaic, and await the removal of homosexual mafias of self-interest, corruption and power of the paid Church administrators, exactly those which St John Chrysostom denounced over 1600 years ago.

After the shameful decadence of the minority Orthodox Conference in Crete in 2016, the Church authorities will have to proceed to a real Council to resolve the real problems of the Church. These issues were never even discussed at Crete, where some signatures of the relatively few attendees were even forged. The elites of the two Local Churches which tried to impose their will over all the others over the last thirty years will have to step back, one way or another. That time is over. Now we must proceed to Conciliarity, to reaffirming the Catholicity of the Church, to reaffirming that local nationalisms are always secondary to the Church, which will not be brought down to that level, to reaffirming that in the Church we have Trinitarian unity in diversity, ‘multipolarity’, that we only have one really important passport and identity, our spiritual passport and identity. We shall be victorious, because Christ, the Head of the real Church, is always victorious.

 

What Went Wrong With ROCOR?

In 1974 I asked the then Fr Kallistos (Ware) what the situation in ROCOR was. He told me that he had met the future St John of Shanghai (+ 1966) in the 1950s and had seriously thought about transferring to ROCOR in the 1960s. However, the well-respected priest at the ROCOR Cathedral in London, Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), who had been the confessor of the Tsar’s sister, Xenia Aleksandrovna (+ 20 April 1960), had dissuaded him.

Fr George had told him that the new censoriousness coming from the then CIA-financed ROCOR in the USA was poisoning ROCOR in England and he had better not join it. As an elderly priest, he would stay, for him the old ROCOR was still alive, but it was not a jurisdiction for the young. Consequently, Fr Kallistos remained a priest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, though also remained priest and confessor at the ROCOR Convent in London until 1976, when the poison from the USA reached a new crescendo. In any case, Fr Kallistos’ witness dissuaded me from joining ROCOR in 1974.

Leaving England for Paris in 1979, there I encountered the old ROCOR, still uncontaminated by the US ROCOR, unlike in England. The ROCOR Western European Diocese, living in the spirit of its former Archbishop, St John of Shanghai, had as its ruling hierarch St John’s successor, Archbishop Antony of Geneva. The Dean for France was Archpriest Alexander Trubnikov, who was priest at the parish of the Resurrection in Meudon in the Paris suburbs. He had a great influence on me, an inspiration, and I knew his matushka and children very well.

Fr Alexander had been born in 1908 in Tsarskoe Selo, where the Tsar and his Family and servants lived, into the noble family of a hereditary Russian imperial officer. During World War I, his father was posted as a military attaché to France. After graduating from a French high school, the future Fr. Alexander had to take on various jobs to make ends meet. At the same time he completed military classes organised by White Russian émigrés in France.

The majority of White Russians went indiscriminately to any Russian church. St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, his vicar Bishop Nathaniel of Brussels, Archbishop Anthony of Geneva and all of us considered that both those in the Paris Jurisdiction, then under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and ROCOR were our common flock in France and Benelux and ignored the minority of freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction. Thus, we freely concelebrated with it. Fr Alexander was the rector of the Parish of the Resurrection in Meudon from 1954 until 1984, where he inspired several young men to become priests and rebuilt the Meudon chapel, courageously mortgaging his own home to do so. Besides his role as rector, Fr. Alexander served as chaplain to the Russian scouting organisation, the Vitiazi, which educated children from all jurisdictions.

Fr Alexander was also actively involved in inter-Orthodox and inter-Christian relations for many years, publishing books and a newsletter in French that shared news of the Orthodox world. This publishing activity brought Fr. Alexander to participate in the Second Vatican Council in Rome, where he met the then Pope. He wrote books, published his newsletter and attended the Vatican Council, hoping to represent the point of view of the free Russian Orthodox Church to all who would listen, not least to the Roman Catholics who were, and still are, undergoing a crisis, as they threw out the baby, but kept the bathwater. A priest and a diplomat, Fr Alexander reposed 35 years ago in November 1988. Eternal Memory!

After the repose of Archbishop Antony of Geneva five years later, in 1993, the last barrier fell. Thus, the censoriousness began to appear in the Western European Diocese from the USA, but now via Germany. All the clergy at the funeral were profoundly shocked when we found ourselves forbidden from celebrating. Thus, the new order of categorical phariseeism and judgementalism was already remarked at Archbishop Antony’s funeral. We patiently withstood it to defeat it in 2007, at last bringing ROCOR into canonical communion with Moscow. However, a decade later the censoriousness returned and took revenge; communion with Moscow had for them just been a delaying tactic to give their schismatic spirit outward legitimacy.

The new order of the new pharisees was founded on cupidity, jealousy, narcissistic egoism and the love of power of those who manipulate and use others as instruments for their own benefit, before discarding them. Those of the new order corrupted and destroyed everything they touched. Therefore, we did not allow them to touch, out of respect for St John of Shanghai, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Fr George Sheremetiev, Fr Alexander Trubnikov and all those of the old and traditional ROCOR. You could accept their sectarian and schismatic censoriousness or else resist it. It all depended on whether you were a careerist or someone of principle and integrity. One day it will all be over. Our victory is inevitable because those who occupy the spiritual and moral high ground always win, even though patience will be required in waiting for Moscow to reject the Americanised and schismatic CIA-shaped ROCOR sect.

American ROCOR took over fifty years to spread its tentacles and take over completely. Once the American proxy war in the Ukraine is over, the unprincipled American ROCOR, which has lost so much by sitting on the fence in that conflict, will divide into two camps. On the one hand, there will be the pro-Russian non-schismatics and, on the other hand, the anti-Russian schismatics, the right-wing crazies and persecutors, penetrated by the CIA, heirs to the pro-Hitler Russians of the 1930s and 1940s. This will be the end of ROCOR, as the healthy part will be absorbed into the Moscow Patriarchate or into other Local Churches who obey the canons.

When it is all over, all of us together, from all the Local Churches, will at last be able to build the new Local Church of Western Europe in a US-free Europe, a Sovereign and Confederal Europe, co-operating with all the Local Churches, including a decentralised Moscow, and stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Only then will Europeans be able to recover their lost Motherland of the Church and their lost fatherlands of their own freed countries. At last, with a mother and a father, they will be able to become true brothers and sisters, fleeing the towering pride that created sectarianism and schism, which is what went wrong with ROCOR.

The Difference Between Orthodox Christians and Converts

The Orthodox Christian Man

He may be called Nick, George, Sergei or Jim (= Dimitrios, Dmitry, Dumitrou, Dima) and he works as a builder, carpenter, plumber, electrician or car mechanic (if Serb). He did not go to church very often, apart from to stand outside to smoke cigarettes and talk with his friends, who have the same name as him, until he turned 50, then he started seriously. He once spoke to a convert. The latter told him that his parents were not Orthodox so ‘they will not be saved and will go to hell’. Nick/George/Sergei/Jim said afterwards: ‘He talk crap’ (this sounds more effective when said with a rolled ‘r’ in an Eastern European accent). He added that ‘he look like he need good meal. That make man of him’. He tells everyone that he is the boss (his wife told him so), but he actually knows that his wife is the boss and, secretly, he prefers it that way, but would never admit to it in public.

The Orthodox Christian Woman

Her name ends in ‘a’ (for example Maria), or in ‘na’ (for example, Alina, Arina, Carolina, Ekaterina, Galina, Inna, Irina, Karina, Nina, Marina, Nina, Paulina, Valentina, Christina, Ioanna, Oana, Oksana, Svetlana, Tatiana, Elena) or else in oula (for example, Coula, Foula, Poula, Roula, Soula, Toula). She did not go to church very often until she turned 40, then suddenly she started and now she never misses a service. She is an excellent cook and like her husband is slightly overweight. Her husband says that ‘she comfortable’, which is his word for ‘plump’. She has to be slightly plump for the sake of her many grandchildren, who like sitting on her lap.  She never argues with her husband because she arranges it so he always agrees with her. Her sons, who are builders, fear her and she made sure they all got married before the age of 30. Her daughters, who are beauticians, hairdressers, nurses or teachers, spend as much time as possible with her. She encourages them to have as many babies as possible.

The Male Convert

Although his real name is Bob, Tom or Tony, he calls himself Seraphim, Moses, Vladimir or Silouan. He is single and tends to be frightened of or even despise women (which is why he is single). He has very long hair, tied into a bun at the back, and a very long beard (the parish priest has short hair and a short beard and no-one else in the parish has long hair or a beard). His favourite colour is black and he is very thin. He has a huge number of icons, many ‘Orthodox’ books, several tiny wrist-size rosaries (which for some reason he calls ‘ropes’) and watches podcasts given by gurus who look like him. His favourite word is ‘holy’, and adds it to everything: ‘holy liturgy’, ‘holy canons’, ‘holy icons’, ‘holy tradition’, ‘holy fast’, ‘holy fathers’ etc. He has very right-wing views. He litters his speech with words like ‘prelest’, ‘schema’, ‘stichar’ or ‘omofor’, which he mispronounces and which no-one else in the parish or anywhere else knows anyway. He is not at all practical and gives the impression of being rather autistic. He works part-time and has problems holding down a job. Thank goodness nobody would ever think of making him a bishop. If they did, the power would go to his head and make him crazy.

The Female Convert

Although her real name is Sue or Pam, she calls herself Seraphima or Anastasia. She is single. Although she comes from a well-off family, she usually dresses in long and old skirts. She does not look after her long hair, would never dye it, and never wears any make-up. Her favourite colour is black and she appears to wear tablecloths over her hair, though she calls them headscarves. She is to be found in food shops examining the ingredients of various foods to make sure that they contain no non-fasting foods, the slightest amount of which could cause her to sin mortally. She is vegan and very thin and pale. She does not feel confident with children and may never have any.

 

America, the Ukraine, Russia, the Church: Temptation, Tragedy, Challenge and Opportunity

Foreword

The world is now becoming a post-globalist world. The Globalists (Americans) have been defeated by the Sovereignists. Despite the attempts by the US elite, the power behind the throne, to keep the embarrassingly senile Biden in power until after the next elections, the Ukraine is collapsing (and Gaza genocided by American bombs) and so Biden too will Biden. First in Russia, then in Hungary, then in Slovakia, now in the Netherlands, the Sovereignists are in power. They are increasingly strong in Germany, Italy and France. Union is off the cards. Confederation is the order of the day, as the real New World Order. Sovereignty is beyond the artificial and absurd divisions of left and right, inventions of the Western oligarchies (the mythical ‘democracies’) in order to divide and rule. Sovereignty is what both Russia and China have, though the Globalists falsely call them ‘autocracies’. The Western world has yet to recover its sovereignty. It still can, if it takes the opportunity to return to the Holy Trinity, the model of unity in diversity, what politicians today call multipolarity.

The American Temptation

The American temptation was Empire building, not just in one region, but universally or ‘globally’, as it proclaimed. Let us leave the north to the ice and build ‘from sea to shining sea’, they said. So they stole half a Continent from the natives, whom they slaughtered, bought from a desperate Napoleon, grasped the south from Mexico, began a Civil War with 600,000 dead and invaded small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. This culminated in a four-year war and dropping its atom bombs on the big island of Japan in 1945 in order to dominate the Pacific. At the same time, they conquered and occupied the peninsula of Western Europe in 1944-5, which victory followed its expeditionary experiment of 1917-18. The 1945 double victory meant its victory over half the world. The USA was a Superpower. It still had to conquer the heartland of Eurasia, which it thought it had done in 1991, becoming the only Superpower. This was a delusion and it duly proclaimed it as ‘the end of history’. This proud triumphalism, a Non-Jewish Zionism, was failure, for the fall always follows pride – delusions are always countered by reality.

The American Empire depended on using expendable proxies, puppets whom it flattered and told that they were superior to their neighbours. These puppets were hired do the dirty work for the US. Through them it could divide and rule, sowing chaos and destruction, whether in Latin America, East Asia, West Asia or in ex-Soviet Eastern Europe. However, its agents, from Marcos to Somoza, from Hussein to Bin Laden, from Bolsinaro to Zelensky, would go off script, falling into delusion. The USA has always suffered from a ‘spoilt child syndrome’. The spoilt child always shouts: ‘If I cannot have it, then no-one will have it’. And so they destroy their once much-coveted puppets and toys. This I know from experience with an American. Internationally, it can be seen in Latin America, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Western and Eastern Europe – now isolated from Russia. However, this spoilt-child syndrome only works in a unipolar world of exclusivism, not in a multipolar world. In the latter there is choice and people can escape US despotism, whose policy of containment fails.

The Ukrainian Tragedy

Now desperate the Kiev government wants to mobilise all Ukrainians between the ages of 17 and 70, Berlin-style, and, barbarically, women. The latter are already being killed on the front, where poorly trained and poorly equipped troops without air support, average age 43, are being forced to commit suicide against vastly superior Russian forces. Kiev dead already number between 500,000 and 600,000 and more and more are deserting. The needless death of these troops is a war crime. President Zelensky, like Hitler suicidally forbidding retreat despite military advice, is also isolated and unhinged in his bunker, having banned elections, delusional with his Messiah complex. His PR advisors have told the Western media that Russians have tried to assassinate him five times. Of course, this is nonsense. Zelensky, the brilliant and well-paid actor but utterly incompetent politician, is the greatest asset of the Russians. He may well be assassinated, only by US-backed Ukrainians, which assassination can then be blamed on Russia. The Ukraine has now lost 20%, of its territory, taken back by Russian forces after being ruled by the Ukraine for up to 100 years. But since Kiev refuses to negotiate, it will lose even more.

If the Ukrainians manage to continue losing, they could lose up to 50% of their territory or even more. Russian forces are waiting to fill the vacuum once the Kiev forces collapse and move forward to the River Dnieper and, if necessary, cross it. Whatever happens, Kiev will be forced to surrender unconditionally. There will be no negotiated settlement, as Kiev refused this constantly for eight years. The new, post-Zelensky government in the Ukraine will have to agree to and sign the Russian conditions. It is indeed time to end ‘the magical thinking about Russia’s defeat,’ by which headlines the Wall Street Journal means ending its own delusions and fantasies and those of the whole Collective West and their carefully censored media since 2014. As we have been predicting in over 116 published articles between March 2022 and October 2023, the West is being routed in the Ukraine. Kiev is the second Kabul and even worse in humiliation. As a result, the failed elites in the US and in Europe will fall. NATO and the EU are therefore finished; they were only ever post-1945 relics. Their time is up. Europe’s future is Eurasian and Confederal.

Indeed, the reign of the official Western media like the BBC, used by Western Establishments as propaganda mouthpieces, weapons of mass deception, are over. People are seeing through their lies. The US and the EU made a fatal mistake in forcing Russia into a close alliance with China through their aggression. It was delusional Western hubris that called Russia ‘a gas station with nukes’. Its booming economy has now overtaken the depressed German economy, cut off from cheap energy by US sabotage. As a result of the rout of the Collective West in the Ukraine, worldwide all recognise that there are three Superpowers: China, Russia and USA – and in that order. It is two against one. Queueing up not far behind them are India, the Muslim World, Africa and Latin America, with largely unpopulated Australia left as the natural resource reserve for the great East Asian Superpower – China. Europe discounted itself by allying itself with the US as vassals and client states. Now US failure and humiliation are shared by its lapdogs, Germany, France and especially the UK. France and the UK are to lose their places on the UN Security Council.

The Russian Challenge

Militarily, economically and diplomatically, this is a triumph for the Russian Federation, a Superpower and not ‘a regional power’, as the US President Obama contemptuously called it only a decade ago. Russia is in fact the leader of what used to be called ‘The Global South’, the 90% of the new multipolar world which is Non-Western. Through Russian-founded BRICS +, Russia is the toast of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They too want independence from the neo-colonial West, now that Russia has shown the way through its superiority. It is Russia, backed by China, which with BRICS troops will make peace in West Asia between Palestine and Israel and at last, inevitably, give the Palestinians justice and a homeland. The US is isolated at the UN and has failed because it was one-sided and supported the injustice of Israeli genocide. The US has failed both to divide Europe from Russia and failed to divide and colonise Russia, which was its aim in using Ukrainian soldiers as pawns to attack Russia and die for Washington. However, winning the war in the Ukraine and defeating American Europe is one thing. Russia must also win the peace.

In the Ukraine, this means no occupation of the real Ukraine, where real Ukrainians live, in the north-west and centre-west. It also means that all the Non-Ukrainian parts of the pre-2014 Ukraine, created by brutal Soviet dictators and whose brutality the Collective West has so fervently supported, where Russians, Poles, Romanians and Hungarians live, will at last be able to return to their homelands. They will leave the real Ukraine, about half the Soviet Ukraine. As post-Soviet Russia learned its lesson not to oppress Non-Russian peoples and has never had the slightest intention of occupying the real Ukraine, let alone other Eastern European countries (Zelensky’s Ukraine was in no way defending the West ‘against the Asiatic Muscovite hordes’; that was pure racist propaganda), the peoples of Europe are going to see the real Russia, instead of seeing it through the eyes of their US-selected elite of nonentities, who constantly lied to them. With people’s governments in Europe, a new agreement could be reached, with the abandonment of NATO and mutually beneficial security guarantees.

This means the repeal of the illegal anti-Russian sanctions and respect for the human rights of Russian minorities in all European countries, especially in the Ukraine, where the Orthodox Church has been banned. Tragedy remains. Apart from the unnecessary sacrifice of a whole generation of well over a million Ukrainian men, killed or crippled, Ukraine will need rebuilding – and repopulating. Eight million and more fled Zelensky’s tyranny and his hated SBU secret police and many were needlessly made to fear Russia because of Western propaganda. They emigrated, first to Russia, then to Poland, Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. The death toll for Russia could well reach 40,000 dead. There were also the 14,000 Russian-speaking civilians massacred by the US-installed Kiev regime in the Donbass since 2014. Apart from this, there is the whole question of the once multinational Russian Church. In February 2022 its leadership took a Russian nationalist stance. This meant that Non-Russians and those Russians who did not agree with the Russian Military Operation in the Ukraine left that politicised Church, some with bitterness.

The Orthodox Christian Opportunity

Clergy and people outside Russia, in the Ukraine, in the Baltics, in Moldova, in Western Europe and one day in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, will not return to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Church will have to decentralise and form a family of new and autocephalous (independent) Local Churches for these peoples. This is the challenge and the only way forward. The Russian temptation was to try and dominate the rest of the Orthodox Church because their Church is by far the biggest and so the most powerful, three-quarters of the whole. God has humbled them and they will be reduced to half of the Orthodox world. Russians will have to return to their saints, to Sts Antony and Theodosius of Kiev, St Sergius of Radonezh, St Nil of Sora, St Paisy (Velichkovsky), St Seraphim of Sarov, the Saints of Optina, St John of Kronstadt, the New Martyrs and Confessors, St John of Shanghai. These are the actual spiritual and moral leaders of the Russian Church. Today the Russian Church is at last heading towards becoming a post-post-Soviet Church, that is, to a Church free of centralisation, nationalism, politics, sect and schism.

However, there was also the Greek nationalist temptation, no less historic in its catastrophic proportions. This temptation, which began as long ago as 1917, was to go the way of the world, that is of the USA. Now God has humbled the Greeks too, making them powerless in worldly terms, for they placed their hope ‘in princes and the sons of men’. Their only greatness is in the saints whom they themselves persecuted, St Nectarios, St Paisios and St Porphyrios, to name but a few. The situation reminds us of the following. Some forty years ago St Paisios the Athonite told a then young man, whom I know well, the following. The young man had been scandalised by the conduct of certain bishops. Fr Paisios told him: ‘When you walk along a path on Athos and come across animal excrement, what do you do? You kick it aside into the bushes so that other passers-by will not tread in it and then you wipe your shoes’. This is what we do today. We shall defeat both sectarianism and modernism, for they all end up in the same way, in the bushes, in sect and schism.

JFK (1963-2023): Though the Man be Gone, that the Promise of his Spirit be Fulfilled

A Personal Introduction: Overthrown in 1917 and Born in 1917

As a seven year old child I remember my father telling me to go to my neighbour’s to watch television (we did not have a television), to watch something ‘very important’. It was the funeral of the President of the USA, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I am surely far from being the only person in the world who has met people who as adults knew both Tsar Nicholas II and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Though certainly, I am the only person from the city where I was born to have done so and probably the only Russian Orthodox priest in the world to have done so.

Still, it is a curious fact that JFK was born in 1917, the year that Tsar Nicholas was deposed by Russian traitors, financed mainly from London and New York. Much more significantly, both their deaths have fascinated generations and spawned a mass of conspiracy theories and black and white ideologies. Most notably, many books of suppositional history have been written about them both, about ‘what might have been’ and ‘Suppose if…’. Could what might have been find its fulfilment? That is our question.

Russia and America

There are people who see everything in terms of black and white. For example, in the Russian context, there are those who declare that everything in Russia was perfect before 1917 and everything was bad after it. Of course, a little logic such as: ‘If everything was so perfect, why was there a Revolution?’ would help such people. Alternatively, read a Russian novel from before 1917, or a newspaper from the period, or else, as was still just possible only a generation or two ago, you could have talked to someone who had been adult in Russia before 1917. The fact is that black and white do not exist outside hell and heaven. This world is unremittingly grey – though, admittedly, there is a huge difference between light grey and dark grey.

The same is true in the American context of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. There are those who say that his 1963 murder (let us call it what it was) was a turning-point, that all was white before it and all was black after it, that he was basically a kind of martyr. I suspect that childhood nostalgia plays a part here in the views of now elderly people. Nostalgia is a funny thing, the sun always shone in childhood. It is called selective memory. We will briefly consider some of the issues below. As for the conspiracy theories as to who murdered Kennedy and why, there are hundreds of them. Of course, that does not mean that one of them is not true. God knows the Truth.

It was in Paris in 1996 that I met an American woman from a well-connected family in Massachusetts. She was then in her fifties. She told me that when she was eighteen, she had met JFK. The story she told me confirmed the stories about Kennedy’s weakness for ladies, including Marilyn Monroe. However, he also had great strengths. Let us recall at least a few more significant facts from the life of this man who promised so much, who was so charismatic and such a brilliant speaker, and was so cruelly murdered on 22 November 1963 at the age of 46.

Cuba

Probably the most famous event in Kennedy’s Presidency is the so-called ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ of 1962, which should have been called the Turkish Missile Crisis. For once the U.S. had publicly promised never to invade Cuba again and secretly agreed to remove its Jupiter missiles from near Soviet borders in Turkey, placed there as a provocation by US hawks, the Ukrainian peasant-leader Khrushchov agreed to dismantle Soviet missile sites in Cuba, subject to UN inspections. Thanks in part to Kennedy’s humanity, the US had backed down, though the Soviet side, with no less humanity, had agreed not to make that climbdown public. The US had not lost face publicly and indeed there are still some naïve people who think that the ‘Cuban Crisis’ was an ‘American victory’! In any case, World War III had been averted and Kennedy was in part responsible for that.

Latin America

As regards Latin America, in 1962, Kennedy had also had the wisdom to declare that: ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable’. He sought to contain Communism in Latin America by establishing the ‘Alliance for Progress’, which sent aid to some countries and sought greater human rights standards in the region.

Vietnam

Regarding Vietnam, in April 1963 Kennedy said prophetically: ‘We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point’. Though Kennedy’s Vietnam policies seem inconsistent, nevertheless the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, stated that Kennedy was strongly considering pulling the United States out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. (McNamara also much too late declared that Vietnam had been a mistake and that he had known it all along and should have gotten out in 1963, when fewer than 100 Americans had been killed). Certainly, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263, dated 11 October, which ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 US military personnel by the end of 1964 and the bulk of them by 1965. Indeed, Kennedy had been moving in this peaceful direction since his speech on world peace on 10 June 1963.

Israel

Israeli interests were also countered by Kennedy’s endorsement of the United Nation’s Johnson Plan, which wanted to return a number of expelled Palestinians from the war of 1948 into what was by then Israel. This continuation of the justice plan of the CIA-assassinated UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for Palestinian repatriation disturbed those who had a negative view of Arab resettlement in their own country, let alone full repatriation.

Views of JFK

In general, it seems to us that Kennedy expressed the more collective values of Roman Catholicism over the individualism of Protestantism. This sense of solidarity with the rest of the world and collective responsibility for it, which comes from the Catholicity of the Church, was at his time still present in Roman Catholicism, part of its legacy from Orthodoxy. It is sad that after him the US elite lapsed into an individualistic, not to say a thoroughly sectarian, view of the world. It started in Vietnam and has since gone through Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, and in 2014 reached the Ukraine.

Regardless of the many academic and conspiratorial debates around Kennedy and regardless of whether the great hopes placed in him were realistic, there is no doubt that he was the great hope of a great many in the Western world. It may not be the real Kennedy who is admirable, but rather his spirit and the hope inspired by his spirit. Under Kennedy there could have been Another America and so quite another course of world history over the last sixty years. The fact is that after his murder, the nightmare of the 1960s began, as recalled in the nostalgic Don McLean song ‘American Pie’, and the Western world has not yet woken up from that nightmare.

Conclusion: Hope and Despair

Indeed, though the Western world now proclaims that it is ‘woke’, in reality it is even faster asleep in its delusions. True or false is not the point here. The fact is that it is the youthful and energetic Kennedy, whether his myth or his reality, who represented hope. As John Masefield, the elderly English Poet Laureate of the time, wrote after Kennedy’s murder:

All generous hearts lament the leader killed

The young chief with the smile, the radiant face,

The winning way that turned a wondrous race

Into sublimest pathways, leading on.

Grant to us Life that though the man be gone

The promise of his spirit be fulfilled.

22 November 2023 is the 60th anniversary of JFK’s murder. How fine it would be if we felt that the promise of his spirit might be fulfilled. However, is that realistic?

In Russian:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2023/11/22/kennedi_60_let_so_dnya_gibeli

On Civilisation and Pierre De Gaulle

All civilisations are founded on some spiritual revelation about and belief in a Divinity. This revelation is then formed into and adopted as a religion. So a civilisation begins, whether in China, India, the Orthodox Christian world, the Arab world, Africa, in what is now Latin America, among the aborigines of what is now North America, Australia and Polynesia, or in the Catholic/Protestant world. There are no exceptions, apart from one: secularist post-Catholic/Protestant civilisation, known as ‘the West’.

Uniquely among all civilisations, it has renounced belief in a Divinity and claims that it can rely on humanism, self-belief, the worship of itself. This qualifies it perhaps more for the title of an ‘Anti-Civilisation’. Such delusional hubris reminds us of the story in the old Bible of those who built the Tower of Babel and saw it collapse as a result of their literal overreach, or in pagan Greek mythology of Icarus, who so relied on himself that he thought he could fly near the Sun (God). The Sun melted the wax holding his wings together and he fell to his death.

The latest project of this new Icarus is the Ukraine and it too is now falling from the sky. The State-controlled Western media, which blatantly lied about the inevitable Russian victory for twenty months, are now beginning to tell at least part of the truth about the worse-than-Kabul rout of the West in the Ukraine. Delusional Kiev is indeed haemorrhaging manpower because of the extremely high number of soldiers it has lost (500,000 + dead so far and between 600 and 1,000 more every day) and perhaps a million wounded. It is a mismatched war of attrition, a chronic shortage of arms and munitions, a flood of refugees as people flee the crumbling state and endemic corruption which cripples the efficiency of and trust in the Kiev regime and its military.

This modern Western civilisation proclaims that God is not necessary, He is just a superstition, a vestige from the past, a crutch for the weak-minded, and that sexual depravity and degeneration, even if leading to the suicidal disappearance of Western peoples, is normal. It has retreated so far from the Christian Faith over the last millennium that some of its best representatives are now actually fleeing to Orthodox Christian Russia. This is because those who serve culture cannot work where there is no faith, for no faith means no inspiration.

In Orthodox Russia (though not in post-Soviet Russia) there is freedom for faith and where there is faith there is some sort of morality, belief that we must discern between right and wrong. Years ago, President Putin, who with most of his country had returned at least culturally to Orthodox Christianity, warned the West not to make the mistake that Russia had made in 1917, that of adopting atheism as its ideology. The Western elite did not listen to him and is not listening to him now. The West has now adopted a quite virulent form of atheism as its main ideology, leaving only small, oppressed and despised remnants believing in various forms of Christianity.

Now Western people, fleeing atheist persecution in the spiritually, morally and financially bankrupt West, are leaving for Orthodox Russia and other Orthodox parts of the world. This is exactly as prophesied by St Seraphim of Vyritsa during the darkest days of Stalin’s dictatorship. So far this concerns only a few hundred people, most of whom have adopted Orthodox Christianity. However, with the aggressive bullying against Christian values going on in the West, more are hoping to leave for religious freedom and to protect their children from depravity, inculcated by law in Western schools. Such is the case of Pierre de Gaulle, the grandson of the late President de Gaulle, who, like others from Western Europe, is to become a Russian citizen, as announced on 16 November.

‘It would be an honour for me to acquire Russian citizenship’, said Pierre de Gaulle at the Saint Petersburg Cultural Forum, as reported on 16 November. He added that Russia was ‘fighting for traditional values, the family and spirituality’ and that NATO had lost in the Ukraine. He has clearly inherited his grandfather’s total distrust of the USA. Earlier he had stated that: ‘We French people are paying a high price for a war provoked by the United States to turn Europe into a vassal’. For these words he won praise from Russophile intellectuals and politicians in France, as he represents the Gaullist tradition of resisting aggressive US imperialism, which is now under the leadership of a man with severe mental health problems.

Pierre de Gaulle is only the latest in a number of Western patriots turning to Russia and other Orthodox countries, as they see their countries humiliated by the globalist elites, handpicked by the CIA for their willingness to betray the spirituality, morality and sovereignty of European countries. Like other leading patriotic Western voices, Pierre de Gaulle represents the best in Western society, who also oppose the American war in the Ukraine and want peace, justice and prosperity for all.

He represents that strand of people and thought in Western Europe which for fifty years and more has been calling for the reintegration of Western Europe back into the Orthodox Christian Church and world, which is at its very roots in the first millennium, before it deviated from the Church of God. This world view of the Orthosphere is alive in Jerusalem, on Mt Athos, in the monasteries and the churches of the Carpathians, both Latin-Romanian and Slav, in the forests of Russia, and from Slovakia to the shores of the Pacific, from the White Sea to Syria, and in small oases of Orthodoxy worldwide. We are spiritually alive and waiting for your repentance.

 

The Emperor is Coming And He Will Cleanse the Church of Corruption

‘Wherever Americans come to a region of the planet, they bring chaos’.

Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister speaking on RT, 15 November 2023

The American war against the Russian and Ukrainian peoples in the eastern Ukraine is now coming to an end. However, terror and genocide are breaking out in the Holy Land, which is a convenient get-out, or ‘off-ramp’, from their lost war in the Ukraine for the US elite. For that elite, which fights wars with the blood of others, is threatening even more wars and chaos in many other parts of the world with their same imperial ‘Divide and Rule’ policy. The world knows that we are seeing global transformations in these pre-apocalyptic times.

The post-1945 US-controlled world is over and US-led institutions are collapsing, from the EU to the UK, from NATO to the WTO. This is a parallel to the collapse of Soviet institutions from 1989 on, including the Soviet-created Ukraine which is only now disappearing. A great power shift, prophesied by many, is taking place, with the old Western elites falling everywhere. The time of the prophecies has come. These include the promised return of an Orthodox Emperor or Tsar, of whom we will now speak.

Over a century ago, apostate Orthodox Christian Russians betrayed the Orthodox Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, his Family and his faithful servants.  Since then the vast majority of Russians have not yet woken up from their nightmare. The episcopate of the Orthodox Church has sunk into divisions and corruption, as though a mafia had come to reign there. However, prophetic voices have resounded. Thus, the great Elder Nikolai (+ 2002) of the Pskov Lake, answered pilgrims on three occasions that ‘The Tsar is coming’, when they doubted. On the first occasion, they objected:

‘St Seraphim of Sarov also made such prophecies, but there is no sign that a Tsar is coming. That those in the present government do not see him coming is clear, but the most terrible thing of all is that there are priests who are not waiting for the Tsar’. One metropolitan also objected: ‘What monarchy? That time is over, now we live in a democracy’. Fr Nikolai listened and said: ‘The Tsar is coming’. ‘How come? Who is coming?’ And again he answered: ‘The Tsar is coming’. They argued with him for a third time and once more he repeated: ‘The Tsar is coming’.

‘We left perplexed, but a little later this is what happened. We met a priest from Kiev, who told us how he had been in a car crash. The angels took him away, a bright light shone from above, his soul rejoiced and he thought: ‘Glory to God, I am home’. Suddenly he heard a voice: ‘Not yet, you have to go back’. ‘Why?’ ‘You are a convinced monarchist, you will pray for the Tsar’. ‘Who is the Tsar?’ ‘Only I and the Tsar know this. Even his parents and the Mother of God do not know this’. ‘Why?’ ‘Because as soon as people find out, they will immediately kill him’’.

Thus, there will be no revolutions, elections or councils. When the time comes, the Lord Himself will raise up the chosen Tsar. According to the prophecies, this will happen some time after a war. This is the American war that is now coming to an end in the Ukraine. By the prayers of the last Orthodox Emperor and Martyr and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, the Tsar will be enthroned in the coming years. Then he will cleanse the Church of corruption. As for us, we are simply forerunners, sent to announce this message, though we are unworthy even to untie his shoelaces.

 

The Fascist Flags Are Coming Down

The war in the Ukraine was started by Ukrainian Fascists, not by Russians

Robert Fico, Prime Minister of Slovakia

Introduction: Collapse

The Western world is now faced with the imminent fall of the US-created Kiev government and its near-annihilated NATO-armed and NATO-trained forces. Indeed, so short of cannon fodder is Kiev that it is recruiting women; the first pregnant Ukrainian soldier surrendered on 11 November. (Only Fascists would send pregnant women to fight at the Front).  Kiev can survive for only a few months longer at most. It must be regretting the Russian offers of peace between February 2014 and April 2022, which the US elite forced it time and time again to reject. Events are moving rapidly, as the Ukrainian Armed Forces begin to collapse along the Front and the infighting Zelensky regime is treacherously abandoned by the Western elite, which made so many empty promises. For example, the West has just announced officially what was known, but what it denied all along – that a Ukrainian, Colonel Roman Chervinsky, was behind the blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline to Germany, leading Germany into economic recession.

In reality, he was probably only acting on US orders and with US logistics, but the US will blame the Ukraine for everything. They want to shift the blame. The Western media are now also beginning to admit the Nazi links of the Ukrainians, though they still hide the fact that NATO itself was initially largely run by former Nazi Germans. America’s war in the Ukraine has been lost. Russia first defeated the Pan-European invasions of Napoleon and Hitler and now of NATO, that is, of the whole US-led Collective West. Now the Russian economy is booming – thanks to backfiring Western sanctions. Most in the West are now indifferent to the Kiev regime. The fast-declining and much-indebted West has basic economic problems and has had to turn its back on Kiev. The rats are already leaving the sinking ship.

The Ukraine

The Western elite now admits that NATO can no longer supply the Ukraine with arms; NATO’s weapon stocks are depleted and the deindustrialised West does not have the production capacity to make more. Russia is planning war crimes trials in Moscow and Donetsk of Ukrainian Nazis and NATO war criminals for when the conflict is over. After two years of a generally unpleasant holiday in Western countries, millions of Ukrainian ‘refugees’, the majority of whom never were refugees (most of these fled for safety to Russia), will either stay in Western Europe and start working, or else, if patriots, will return to the much smaller New Ukraine. There they can help rebuild their homeland, which does have a brilliant future as part of BRICS ++.

What is that future? Russia has always been going to win the war, but how can it win the peace? First of all, from the outset, Russia’s aim was not to gain territory or to occupy the Ukraine. Russia has plenty of territory already.  All it wanted was to liberate the Russians in what was Russia until 1922, those to the east and south of what was the Soviet Ukraine, and ensure that the rest of the country is run by a government that is not hostile to Russia. This would have to come about through a coup d’etat from inside the Ukraine, creating a pro-Russian independent Ukraine and not a pro-American dependent Ukraine. What disenchantment there will be when Ukrainians realise that they were never fighting and dying for the Ukraine, but all along were fighting and dying for Washington.

If Kiev wants peace soon, it must recognise that the four provinces, which have already more or less returned to Russia together with the Crimea, will always be Russian and also Kiev must give up on NATO, the EU and therefore militarisation and Nazification. If not, then Russia will take back the next slice of southern and eastern Ukraine, with another four provinces, including Odessa and Kharkov, making nine Russian provinces in all and making the Ukraine landlocked.  As regards the rump Ukraine, Russia may agree to handing back one province (Chernovtsy) to Romania, one (Transcarpathia) to Hungary, and perhaps two, Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk, to Poland. This would leave the New Ukraine with 13 provinces out of the original 26, exactly half.

Churchwise, the almost deserted fake Orthodox Church, set up five years ago by Constantinople and run by the USA, will have to be abandoned. However, Moscow will have to grant the real Church, under Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev, full independence, autocephaly. Just as nobody wants to go to a fake Church, nobody wants to go to a Church under Moscow. Multipolarity, not imperialist centralism, is the order of the day. Centralism is over. Although President Putin knows that, the Russian Church administration has not yet caught on. President Putin is no imperialist, he learned from the Soviet error, which is why he is a Russian nationalist. He has no interest in taking over other people’s countries, only areas where the Russian majority is mistreated. This is why Orthodox in Moldova will also leave the Russian Church – the Russians are a small minority there. The age of the multinational Russian Church is over: it showed itself unable to accept other nationalities. Sadly, it fell into the centralising Greek trap, as practised today by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It is too late now and all Moscow can do now is grant Non-Russians their freedom.

Israel

The Western elite is acutely embarrassed. It is running from Kiev. In its navel-gazing hubris it completely underestimated Russia’s energy, technological, industrial, agricultural, military and diplomatic Superpower status. It also ignored the will for freedom of the seven billion of the post-colonial Non-Western world. Russia, which alone stood up to the bullying West, has become its moral leader. In Washington, Brussels and London, the neocons who ran the show are backing out. First, there was the humiliation in Saigon, then that in Kabul, then in Kiev and now in Israel.

The problem is that the Western elite is also faced with crimes against humanity, over 4,000 dead Palestinian children killed by American bombs from American bombers, being supplied every day, the military stalemate in the giant concentration camp called Gaza, the collapse of the Israeli economy, Palestinian revolt in all occupied Palestine, and its refusal to call for a ceasefire. The terrorism of the West’s Israeli colony still means that Israel is bleeding to death with heavy losses in men and tanks, encountering the realities of urban warfare and trained Palestinian fighters equipped with modern weapons. American bombs and bullets are massacring or maiming Palestinian men, women and children, as vividly shown by social media, which are still for the moment uncensored. And occupying American soldiers are dying in Syria as Muslim militia groups attack them there.

Confronted by the suicidal effects of its anti-Russian sanctions and the chaos in the Middle East, where the Palestinians are supported by the whole world, including very large sections of Western society and millions of brave Non-Zionist Jews, the US-selected and vetted Western ruling elite is at a loss. Although in the UK the neoliberal Starmer’s wife (which is why he got the job) and the Fascistic Braverman’s husband are Jews, President Macron and Prime Minister Sunak are Rothschild bankers and The Economist is a Rothschild magazine, the Western Zionist elite is not a Jewish elite. In the UK the elite is Anglo-Norman, in Continental Europe it is Frankish, in the US it is mixed. But everywhere it is Zionist.

It is Zionist in the sense that it believes that it is a chosen people, an exceptional people beyond the reach of international law, even when it commits war crimes, and to whom the rest of the world must bow down in worship. However, now the elite has now clearly lost, so the Non-Western world will no longer bow down in worship. The elite’s feudal-style bullying no longer works. To replace the old ways, we are seeing the birth of World Order. This is not a New World Order because there was before only Disorder, the ‘rules-based’ Western Disorder. That is now rapidly ending. The global American yoke is falling.

Conclusion: The Turning Point

We are at a millennial turning point in history, a historic shift is taking place now. What used to be called Western Civilisation, at the moment led by the American Empire, is collapsing, together with its puppet regimes in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and indeed all around the world. It is suffering multiple crises and shocks as a result of its previous blunders. Like all narcissists, the US elite has no friends. Everywhere its Empire, in Israel, Eastern Europe, ex-Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taiwan is collapsing, not to mention the collapse of the dollar as an international currency. This is called retribution, or popularly, karma. The boomerang is returning and is going to hits its thrower on his head. Given the collapse of the US boss of Europe, countries there are going to search for their real identities, beneath the polluting plastic and silicon, beyond Coca-Cola, MacDonalds, Google and Netflix.

In the case of former Catholic and Protestant Europe, this means that those nations must re-find themselves, their roots, their national sovereignties, their identities and their patriotism. Here is an opportunity for us Orthodox Christians to preach the real Christ, Who is untainted by the strange but now dying millennial Western deviations of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and untainted by the episcopal corruption which exists in several Local Orthodox Churches. In the case of the Orthodox countries of Europe, they will also be able to re-find their freedom from their Roman governors, called US ambassadors, and re-enter the Global Majority, the Community of Sovereign Nations which is called BRICS. We look forward to the multipolar future, to the revelations of the saints and the prophets, to preparing for the Second Coming of Christ.

 

 

Reflections on the New Offer to Join the Moscow Patriarchate

On Saturday 11 November 2023 we were asked by a bishop of the Moscow Patriarchate if our group of six parishes and 5,000 parishioners would like to transfer from the Patriarchate of Romania to the Moscow Patriarchate. He has told us that this can be arranged, apparently following new instructions from the now besieged Moscow, backtracking from the past. Here is our answer, reprinted and updated from 20 February 2022:

 

Even if I look at the situation as an outsider, just objectively, it will seem absurd, unthinkable and outrageous. There is a very small ROCOR diocese covering a sizeable part of Europe. Its bishop created a schism, causing a lot of damage and pain to many faithful and clergy, including to some widely-known priests. And its American Synod is paralysed due to Metr. Hilarion’s illness (dementia and cancer). And there is the Moscow Patriarchate, the main centre, which can take steps and heal the schism any time, and punish its instigator, any time it wishes. But, instead, it coldly and calmly observes the situation, pretending to ignore it, and in effect taking the perpetrator’s side, without protecting the suffering faithful and clergy. How does it look after that? As if the main centre is afraid of the instigator. Even if you look at this as a pure outsider, its behaviour appears absurd and far from Christian.

From a Correspondent in Moscow, February 2022

 

Many untruths, slander, vilification and much misinformation have been posted about us on the internet over the last thirty months. It is the same vilification as led to the unjust suspension of the great St John of Shanghai in his time, sixty years ago. These postings have clearly been centrally organised. Other lies, or simply misunderstandings, will follow.

This whole affair has been a story of bullying and then betrayal. Throughout the several months of this affair, a certain young, inexperienced and non-seminary trained neophyte bishop, formerly a tutor in a Roman Catholic college in the City of Oxford, has consistently portrayed our departure from the Russian Church as a ‘personal rebellion’. He did this in order to portray himself in a good light and to minimise the gravity of the situation, in which he has lost over half his diocese in the British Isles.

On 23 August 2021 16 clergy left ROCOR in the British Isles in all. True, three of them were Western rite and they are not involved in our group, now that we have been forced into leaving the Russian Church. The annual throughput of our six parishes (excluding the Western rite ones) is about 5,000 Orthodox.

This was never a ‘personal rebellion’, but the collective decision to reject the ROCOR schism from the MP Archdiocese of Western Europe on the issue of rebaptism, which began over a year ago in Cardiff and has now spread throughout both ROCOR dioceses in Western Europe.

ROCOR’s excessive reactions were caused by what really lies behind his attitude: the determination to seize our properties and extract more money from us by bullying over the last four years. We resisted this, but never dreamed of leaving his jurisdiction for reasons of disputes about property ownership, or his bullying, negativity and spectacular rudeness. We consider that you can only canonically leave a jurisdiction in cases of episcopal heresy, episcopal schism or episcopal attempts to force people into acts of gross immorality.

That very young and untrained bishop managed to offend everyone in our multinational group.

He offended our Russian core by writing the most untruthful and unChristian personal attacks against the popular Fr Andrew Phillips on the internet over the last thirty months. As one of our parishioners said: ‘Everyone who knows Fr Andrew and the other 25 members of his family knows all that to be lies. He is a well-known figure internationally, tireless worker for Russian Church unity over the decades, writer, hagiographer, European cultural historian, author of the Services to All the Saints of the Isles (of the North Atlantic) and to All the Saints of the Western\ Lands, and the greatest Russophile you can find in England, who has been faithful to the Russian Church despite continual persecution for nearly fifty years. Unlike his bishop, he speaks and writes fluent Russian and he does not tell Russians to ‘learn English’, so they can speak to him. If the Russian Church rejects him, it will have no friends left in Western Europe. What an appalling way to treat people who have sacrificed their whole lives for the Russian Church’.

The young neophyte bishop then offended the Romanians, telling them to their face that he did not like them and then offended  the Moldovans that he only half-liked them and then forbade them from kneeling on Sundays, something that Orthodox in Moldova have been doing for centuries.

He offended the Greeks by telling them publicly that they must not venerate the icon of St Sophrony, whom Fr Andrew knew well and who was also forced to leave the Moscow Patriarchate because of persecution, and that their Greek Patriarch is ‘possessed’.

He offended the French, with whom he communicates by Google translator, by excommunicating members of their family and friends of 50 years standing who live in France and have always belonged to the Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate. For decades Fr Andrew had battled for this Archdiocese to rejoin the Russian Church and he with others had been successful in this.

He offended the English in an act of swaggering American imperialism and crass cultural insensitivity by insisting that they speak American English, instead of their own native English, which they had been using in the Orthodox context for long before he had been born.

He insisted that we left ROCOR without letters of canonical leave. At any point he could have written those letters in a matter of 15 minutes. Although these letters were politely requested on several occasions by Metr Jean and then by Metr Joseph, he refused to write them. However, in reality no letters of canonical leave were ever necessary, since clergy do not need letters of canonical leave in order to quit a bishop who is in schism (Canon XV of the First and Second Council held under St Photius the Great).

After Metr Jean of the Moscow Patriarchal Archdiocese of Western Europe was forced, stabbed in the back by a certain MP Metropolitan (even younger than nearly all our children), to abandon us on 10 February 2022, with the words ‘I could not care less about them’, We discussed what to do. Tired of the utter divisiveness and sectarianism of the Russian Church, whose bishops are out of communion even with each other, we as a group considered offers from various Local Churches to join them.

We decided for the following reasons to join the Romanian Orthodox Church:

The Romanian Church is in communion with everyone. They are not involved in the Russian-Greek dispute, which began in the Ukraine and has already spread to Africa and elsewhere, isolating the Russian Church.

Over 60% of all Orthodox in England are Moldovans or Romanians. They have an Autonomous Synod of seven Bishops for Western and Southern Europe, nearly 700 parishes, a large number of parishes and two monasteries. No Local Church will ever be formed in the British Isles and Ireland without this majority.

Among our 13 clergy are two Moldovan priests, one Romanian priest, one Moldovan deacon, one Moldovan reader and one Romanian reader. Thus, nearly half our clergy are Romanian-speaking.

The majority of our people are Moldovans or Romanians. As we have so many Moldovans, Ukrainians and Russians, we remain on the old calendar and all our liturgical customs, with the full blessing of Metr Joseph. Nothing changes. Effectively we are a Diaspora part of the Metropolia of Bessarabia, which is under the Patriarchate of Romania.

There are 30,000 Moldovans in Essex and East London who have been pastorally neglected. We have a pastoral duty towards them.

All our six parishes and twelve clergy were received into the Patriarchate of Romania in just four hours on 16 February 2022, with the help of the leading Professor of Canon Law of the Patriarchate of Romania.

We believe that the four very aggressive clerical personalities in the Russian Church who are entirely responsible for the divisions and who have either created or else supported sectarian division inside it will in time be removed.

Then will have to begin the work of re-establishing canonical, and not political, principles of action. The present situation leaves the Russian Church in Western Europe in a state of three jurisdictions, divided and feeling betrayed. It has created great scandal among the people who can only see warring, aggressive and bullying bishops. This is all because of the lack of conciliarity between the three Russian jurisdictions. They ask: ‘Are those bishops even Christians?’

This whole intra-Russian situation reflects the wider and scandalous divisions between the Local Orthodox Churches, which can only be overcome through a return to canonical, and not political, practices, to be re-established by a Council of the whole Orthodox Church.

20 February 2022

This very cruel rejection and betrayal by the Russian Church of its greatest Non-Russian friends in the United Kingdom, ourselves, after nearly fifty years of faithfulness, has led to a spiral of departures from it caused by further astounding acts of Russian nationalism, resulting in November 2023 in its now disastrous situation in the Ukraine, Latvia and Moldova. In the last case, senior priests are now pleading with their Metropolitan to lead the remains of his Church and follow the 30% who have already left it into the Patriarchate of Romania (See the article below, Metropolitan Vladimir….). This is exactly what we did first, over twenty months ago on 16 February 2022, fleeing schism, sectarianism, cultishness, phariseeism, censoriousness, bigotry, greed, sheer lack of love and lack of pastoral care. We fled a very young, inexperienced neophyte bishop who knew very little about the realities of Orthodoxy, only bookish theories, and did not understand even the language of his Russian clergy and people. As by far the senior and most experienced priest in his diocese and financially and morally independent, I had the responsibility and duty of leading the exodus across the Red Sea of his old calendarist schism. What began then has now developed into the heresy (I do not use that word lightly) of the rebaptism of Orthodox who wish to join ROCOR. As the proverb says: ‘Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind’.

City of Colchester

13 November 2023

 

Metropolitan Vladimir convenes a meeting with all the deacons, after receiving the letter from the priests from Botanica

On Thursday, at the Metropolia of Chisinau and All Moldavia, a meeting is to be held with all the archpriests and abbots of monasteries subordinate to Metropolitan Vladimir, at which the proposal of some priests regarding the in corpore accession of this Church structure to the Patriarchate will most likely be discussed in Romanian.

According to the priest Pavel Borsevschi, the Metropolitan convened the meeting, after receiving today the letter from the clerics of the Botanica Deanery of Chisinau, which urges him to switch to the Romanian Orthodox Church.

A single priest from the II Deanery of the Archdiocese of Chisinau spoke out against the accession of the Metropolia of Moldova to the Romanian Patriarchate. The Dean of Botanica, priest Pavel Borșevschi, said this for Jurnal.md. We mention that 30 churches from the Botanica Deanery, but also from the villages of Sângera, Revaca, Băcioi, Străsiteni and Brăila are part of the II Deanery of the Archdiocese of Chisinau.

“The letter is signed by most of the priests in the diocese. We do not propose to join the Metropolia of Bessarabia, but we demand that the entire Metropolia, as a canonical structure, led by Metropolitan Vladimir, renounce the Russian Church and Patriarch Kyrill and come under the jurisdiction of the Romanian Patriarchate. We cannot be in a church where the Patriarch blesses his priests to pray for the victory of the Russian army over Ukraine, which is our suffering sister. We have just had a war in Transnistria, with the blessing of Patriarch Alexiy II. In such cases, when we say “victory”, we are talking about humiliation. It is something that cannot be explained from a Christian point of view.

When he received the letter, the Metropolitan did not tell us either yes or no, but decided to summon all the deacons and abbots of the monasteries on Thursday to discuss this issue. I don’t think he has any reason to disagree with us, based on his letter to Patriarch Kyrill and considering that this opinion is not only ours, the priests’, but also that of the religious community, which we shepherd” . priest Pavel Borševschi reported.

We remind you that, on September 5 Metropolitan Vladimir addressed a letter to Patriarch Kyrill, in which he informs him that he cannot do anything to stop the rise of the Metropolia of Bessarabia in the Republic of Moldova and that the Russian Church is perceived in society as an outpost of the Kremlin and a supporter of the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The letter also states that “the people of Moldova have Latin roots and it is perfectly normal to aspire to remain in this civilizational space, after centuries of artificial division”.

In Memoriam: The Russian Emigration Church

Those of us who became part of the Russian Emigration Church half-way through its life, back in the 1970s, have been betrayed by the direction of the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church. We knew quite well such figures as Metr Antony Bloom (I was tonsured reader by him in January 1981), Archbishop Basil Krivoshein, Archbishop George Tarasov, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Archbishop Seraphim of Brussels. Whatever their ‘jurisdiction’, their spirit was the same – that of piety, that of non-possession, that of pastoral care, that of faithfulness to St Sergius of Radonezh, St Seraphim of Sarov, St John of Kronstadt, to the New Martyrs and Confessors. And their spirit was a missionary spirit, a multinational spirit, not a narrow nationalist spirit. Today all those bishops are spinning in their graves, as they see the spirit of materialist possession, nationalism and narcissism that has taken over the Russian Church administration and even filters down among priests. Of them there are two sorts: those who are hireling priests for career and ‘awards’ and those, like us, who cannot be supressed, because we are priests by destiny.

The Russian Orthodox administration, called the Moscow Patriarchate, will inevitably now lose all its churches outside Russia. We were the first to leave. The strangest thing is that the Patriarchate’s strongest ally outside Russia is ROCOR. What was in its first three generations the most spiritually independent, and could still be so, has now become the most loyal servant of compromise with the world. With its history, it should have been the first to ask the serious questions. It refuses and so the task has been left to us.

How sad that a few years after the Russian Church administration had been freed of atheist persecution, it began to behave towards its faithful children not as a mother, but as a stepmother, and began to persecute us. As a result of its political compromises and nationalism, the Moscow Patriarchate has lost all authority and influence with us in the Emigration and in general outside the Russian Federation. It can no longer be the Patriarchate of Orthodox in the Emigration in Western Europe, in the Ukraine, in the Baltic States, in Central Asia, in Moldova, in Belarus. As a result, it will lose all the once Russian Orthodox Churches, Metropolias and Dioceses outside the Russian Federation. The following article confirms exactly what we began to observe since 2016, forcing us in 2022 to leave the Russian Orthodox Church after nearly fifty years of loyalty to it. It had been disloyal to us and had abandoned us. We were left with no other choice. We thank God that we were well-known to many bishops who were happy to help us and ignore the uncanonical and absurd sanctions later taken against us after we had left.

 

Another 13 parishes leave the Metropolia of Moldova and move to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. Another 50 will follow in the coming weeks

Next week, 13 churches from different districts will officially pass to the Metropolia of Bessarabia, sources close to these parishes told Radio Free Europe. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, more than 60 priests from the Republic of Moldova have moved from the Metropolia of Moldova to that of Bessarabia.

Two weeks ago six priests were excommunicated by the Synod of the Orthodox Church of Moldova (canonically subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate), because they Had joined the Metropolis of Bessarabia (part of the Romanian Patriarchate), in a few days another 13 parishes will leave the Metropolia of Moldova. Next week, these churches are to receive the re-registration documents from the Public Services Agency.

One of the parishes that has already changed its metropolitan in documents is the church of the Holy Archangels Mihail and Gavril from Malcoci village, Ialoveni district. Its parish priest, priest Andrei Oistric, was until recently Dean of the Faculty of Pastoral Theology at the Academy of Orthodox Theology, part of the Metropolia of Moldova.

“I studied in Suceava and Bucharest and I was always closer to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. I have dedicated more than half of my life to theological education: for 13 years I was a teacher, spiritual priest and deputy director at the “Regina Maria” girls’ high school theological seminary and for another 12 years I worked at the Academy of Theology, of which 10 years I was Dean. My feelings for Romanian Orthodoxy were not a secret. All my colleagues and students knew this,” priest Andrei Oistric told Radio Free Europe.

How does the transition from one Metropolia to another take place?

The parish priest from Malcoci says that he wanted to move to the Metropolia of Bessarabia 15 years ago, when he came to the village, but the people in the community were not ready. “Since the war started, I have had more and more requests from the parishioners: “Father, look at how the war is supported, it is not good like that!”. I was also affected by this war, and so was my family. I have relatives on both sides. I showed this desire at the end of February-beginning of March, and in August the parish of Malcoci village officially passed from the Metropolia of Moldova to that of Bessarabia”, explained the priest.

The transition from one Metropolia to another is done through a legal procedure. Parishes are re-registered with the Public Services Agency. “At our place, in the village of Malcoci, a meeting was held with the parishioners and minutes were drawn up. I submitted it to the Metropolia of Bessarabia, the Ministry of Justice and the Public Services Agency. The agency gave us a new tax code, the right to have a stamp, so all the legal rights”, states the parish priest from Malcoci.

“The Russian Church was not like a mother to us, but like a stepmother”

In practical terms, however, nothing changes in the parish, not even the calendar. The priest says that he will still keep all the holidays on the old calendar. Even before officially leaving the Metropolia of Moldova, he left the Academy of Theology. His resignation was approved at the same Synod on October 25 and he was replaced by Hieromonk Macarie Crudu.

“I retired from the academy. I tried to be as fair as possible in everything. Let someone come with new forces, with new ideas. Like it or not, our roots are Latin, we don’t have Slavic roots. The Russian Church was not like a mother to us, but like a stepmother. Nevertheless, it would have been nice to say now: «Return to your natural mother, we allow you». We want to remain on friendly terms with the Russian Church, as it has been throughout the centuries”, adds the parish priest from Malcoci.

This week, the founder and vice-rector of the Academy of Theology, Viacheslav Cazacu, also declared that he had left the Metropolia of Moldova and joined the Metropolia of Bessarabia. More such announcements are expected in the coming weeks.

“The parishes that want to join the Metropolia of Bessarabia are of an impressive number, but let’s see how they take the steps. About 50 have already applied. I cannot give you the names, because that was the deal, so as not to cause confusion. Certain parishes are now in the transition process, at the documentation stage,” said the representative of the Metropolia of Bessarabia, priest Ion Marian, to Radio Free Europe.

Two weeks ago, the Metropolia of Moldova defrocked six priests who had transferred to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. On the other hand, the Metropolia of Bessarabia considers that the decision to defrock the six priests is not valid, because it has no justification “from a theological and canonical perspective”. In a press release, the Metropolia of Bessarabia urged all clerics and monks who “feel constrained by the Russian dioceses to have the courage to get out of this slavery and return to the tradition and communion of the Romanian Orthodox Church”.

In a letter sent to Russian Patriarch Kyrill in September, Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova complained that the Metropolia of Moldova is losing ground to the Republic of Moldova due to the war in the Ukraine and that more and more priests are moving to the Metropolia of Bessarabia.

The two Orthodox churches operating on the territory of the Republic of Moldova – subordinated to the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Romanian Patriarchate, respectively – have disputed their canonical status since 2002, when the Metropolia of Bessarabia was registered, following a decision of the European Court of Human Rights.