Corruption Inside the Church
Q: Having seen the corruption of the new ROCOR episcopate, do you now think that those who, like Metropolitan Vitaly, warned that ROCOR would be corrupted by contact with the Moscow Patriarchate and so left it between 2001 and 2007, were right.
A: Not at all! You do not leave the Church, whose episcopate had at the time not yet been corrupted, to join a sect!
As for the corruption of ROCOR, that was the choice of those who did it to themselves, it was self-corruption. The episcopate of the Patriarchate in Moscow never imposed any corruption, just as the Russian State never imposed any political compromises on the part of the episcopate of the Russian Church. It is far worse than that – they imposed corruption on themselves by personal choice!
It is a bit like someone who goes to work in a jeweller’s shop, becomes a jewel thief and then blames the owner of the jewellery shop for his corruption. All bishops should know that there is such a thing as personal responsibility and a conscience. Clearly, they did not and I suspect that that is because they had lost their faith and become atheists, ‘princes of the Church’, as they liked to call themselves, Catholic cardinal-style. In any case, they live like atheists. As a result, we have ‘Orthodox’ killing each other in Russia and the Ukraine. This is the Judgement of God.
Q: How do you cope when you see open corruption among bishops?
A: The Church is like a mountain stream that goes down to the lowlands and becomes a fairly slow-moving river. The destiny of the water is to go to the sea, just as our destiny is to go to heaven. However, in the mountains the water gets mixed up with stones and in the lowlands the water inevitably gets mixed up with the mud. We have to live alongside the stones and the mud. It is our job not to get mixed up with either the stones or the mud, but to keep flowing (with the flow of the Holy Spirit) in the top half of the river, where the water is clean, though we do go up and down to some extent. Sadly, there are those who do get mixed up with either the stones or else the mud. Even so, as long as they don’t get caught up in the river weeds or else bogged down in the stagnant mud, they can still rise up away from the mud and get cleaned.
However, we must not fall into the sin of those who, disgusted by any possible contact with the mud, get out of the river altogether and sail down the river in small boats, some of them luxuriously fitted out, for the imaginary ‘pure’, while condemning everyone else in the river, who are in contact with the mud. These people are proud sectarians, pharisees and Donatists. They are disincarnate, that is, not part of the river, not part of the Church, cut off, judging others in their pride. As such they are actually worse than those who are in contact with the mud. At least they still have the chance of going upwards into the flow and of being cleaned by that flow. These people in their boats do not even have the chance of being cleaned by the flow of this river of eternal life, the streams of living water, but remain isolated in their self-pleasing ’comfort’ and pride.
Q: What do you do when you are slandered by a bishop? You have personal experience.
A: I pray for the four slanderers, three of whom have repeated the bishop’s slander, for the one in Colchester, the one in Ipswich, the one in Tiptree and the last in London. All their terrible personal problems to the point of alcoholism come from the fact that they tell lies and slander.
Q: Why have so many Irish-Americans joined the Orthodox Church?
A: What an interesting question. I can remember 50 years ago the then Fr Basil Osborne remark that many who had then joined the Orthodox in the USA had Irish names.
I think it is part of a general situation that those who join the Orthodox Church in Western Europe and Northern America come from oppressed minorities in their countries of origin. For example, in Germany many join from Saxony, in France from Brittany, and in England from those of peasant origin. In other words, those of the elitist Establishment background either do not join, or else, if they do, they do not stay the course, and soon abandon it, like so many Oxbridge professors and those from the London elite in England.
The Non-Orthodox World
Q: Will old calendarists go to hell?
A: This is the second time you have asked an outrageous question. I realise you are new to the Church of God, but where does this desire to condemn all others come from? Where does this hatred come from? If you are really concerned about the salvation of others, pray for them in silence. Last time, it was the same question about Protestants, from where you come. Save your own soul and leave others aside. It is none of your business. Stop meddling and heal yourself.
Q: I recently met an Orthodox woman who does not believe that bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ? Is this typical?
A: It is typical of an Orthodox who has become an atheist. I would not judge a Church of 200 million by one very lapsed example.
Q: I have started going to an Eastern Orthodox church, with the aim, hopefully, of being baptised eventually. I am contacting you because I’ve heard horror stories about people joining, then going through real turmoil in their lives. I understand that no spiritual journey or growth is painless, but I wonder to what extent is joining the Church going to destroy me. I’ve seen commentary like this online, people saying essentially that they’ve been ruined by joining the church. As a man of your station within the church, I just want to ask – is this reasonable? Or is it just hyperbole?
A: The Church ruins no-one’s life! Only sects and cults, which attract the proud, do that.
However, in the Orthodox Church we have long been besieged by psychopaths and sociopaths, misfits in society who think they can fit in to the Church and that they will find their place here. They do not. They seem to pick on the Orthodox Church, as they find us ‘exotic’. Though some of them have been thrown out of the Catholic Church or the Church of England, for obvious reasons.
I have myself received three such individuals in the last 35 years, so am also guilty. Sadly, what I did for them did not help them, as I had hoped it would. However, as they did not repent, it could not help them. They should have seen a psychiatrist first. Sadly, too, there are Orthodox clergy who receive many such people, with disastrous consequences, I mean several people every single year. The worst is, when one of these pathological individuals becomes a member of the clergy and begins to receive others like himself. And the worst is when of these individuals becomes a bishop! You can imagine how much damage that can do!
I hope you find your place in the Church. The main thing is to be sexually normal and be able to hold down a normal job. That makes a huge difference.
Q: Pope Francis has recently published a document stressing Primacy and Synodality. Could this be a positive opening acceptable to the Orthodox Church?
A: On the surface Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism have much in common: the Holy Trinity, Christ God-Man, the Mother of God, the saints, bishops, priests and therefore sacraments. Even the words Catholic and Pope are Greek!
However, the reality is radically different. The Roman Catholic understanding of the Holy Trinity is quite different because of the filioque, the understanding of Christ is full of ‘Jesusism’, that is, suffering human nature which overshadows the victorious God-Man, the Mother of God is called the Virgin, despite the fact that virginity is no guarantee of holiness and may express mere puritanism and forced clerical celibacy, the concept of the clergy is deformed through compulsory clerical celibacy and therefore the concept of the sacraments is deformed also. The same thing with those words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Pope’. The first means having the same faith as always and in all cultures, which is clearly not the case with ‘Roman Catholic’, which means imperialism, spreading the Roman mentality worldwide, and the second does not mean a distant tyrant, but a loving father!
Only if Catholicism first renounces the filioque and the Papal claims, can we sit down and talk. However, the reality is that Roman Catholicism is on the brink of splitting yet again, this time with Archbishop Vigano. This follows all its other splits, the most numerous being those in the sixteenth century, when protestors against its corruption broke away from it in large numbers.
Q: What do you make of the recent statement that the Church of England no longer has churches, but communities?
A: The word ‘church’ comes from the Greek word ‘kyriakon’, which means ‘the House of the Lord’. It can be said that parishes are church communities and monasteries monastic communities, but they are not simply ‘communities’. The renunciation of the word ‘church’ simply indicates that the ‘Church’ of England is now fully secularised and is officially a network of clubs. In fact, that is what many have long suspected, so nothing new here.
Pastoral and Liturgical Matters
Q: Did you bless people to get the covid vaccine?
A: The covid vaccine is not a dogmatic issue, but a question of personal choice. Thus, two people came to me for a blessing at that time, three years ago. This was because they both worked for the NHS and risked losing their jobs if they did not agree to it. Therefore, I blessed them to take the vaccine on condition that they make the sign of the cross over the vaccine as it was injected. They both did so and both have been fine ever since and, above all, kept their jobs.
Q: My name is Clyde and I am a Glaswegian. I want to keep my Scottish roots. If I enter Orthodoxy, what saint’s name could I take?
A: I presume you are called after the River Clyde in Glasgow. Why not take the name of another famous place in Scotland, which is at the source of Scottish Christian national identity: St Andrews? And so take the Christian name Andrew.
Q: What is the point of the liturgical fans? I have heard that they were basically introduced as fly swatters.
A: I think the fly-swatting was purely coincidental! The fans symbolise the wafting of the Holy Spirit over the Gospel and the eucharistic gifts.
Q: How do you explain the disastrous demographic situation in Western and Westernised countries?
A: For over two generations Western and Westernised women have been told that they should live, behave, think, speak and dress exactly like men. The only natural result is the demographic crisis.
Q: Why do so many British people have tattoos nowadays?
A: Because they partake of modern pagan culture. It seems that even the name ‘Britain’ comes from a word meaning ‘the tattooed’. This was recorded by the Greek explorer Pytheas in the fourth century BC. It seems to me that the Western world has rejected Christianity over the last century and more especially, each people has revived its native paganism. Thus, Hitler’s Germany was profoundly pagan, in Scandinavia they have revived Norse pagan mythology, in the Ukraine pagan symbolism is now used everywhere, in France they have returned to full hedonism etc. In Britain this has resulted in the use of tattoos, essentially war paint, which accompanies the aggressiveness of pagan life, both ancient and modern.
Q: When did the Flood occur, according to the Orthodox reckoning?
A: According to the Septuagint (the first parts of which were written down in 272 BC, which means that it is some 1,000 years older than the rabbinical/Protestant version of the Old Testament), the Flood took place in about 3,243 BC, that is about 5,267 years ago. If you follow the dating in the much later Jewish Massoretic text, with its chronology corrupted by later rabbis, the Flood occurred in about 2,348 BC – before the rule of Gilgamesh, who lived in about 2,700-2,600 BC, before the Great Pyramid was built in Egypt in 2,600 BC and before the stone circle was erected at Stonehenge in about 2,500 BC.
Q: I have read on the internet that Fr Andrew Phillips is ‘popular but controversial’. Why do some consider that you are controversial?
A: Because I tell it like it is. The truth is always controversial. There is nothing more hated than the truth. As they say: ‘If you tell the truth 99% of the time, you may survive, but if you tell the truth 100% of the time, they will certainly try and destroy you’. Look what they did to Christ. As He said, ‘The truth will set you free’. Those are the words I will have on my gravestone.
Q: Did you know Fr David (Mark) Meyrick of Walsingham?
A: Yes. I knew him quite well, having first met him in 1976. I have great admiration for him, some of his icons have been inspirational. However, it was a pity that he did not found a permanent church, but just rented a room. This meant that after his death, it all began to fall apart. I also thought it very strange that he did not dedicate his tiny chapel to an Icon of the Mother of God, which would have been appropriate in Walsingham.