Monthly Archives: November 2024

How St John of Shanghai the Orphan-Lover Adopted Us

When we moved back to England in 1997, we did not know to which saint or saints to dedicate our then small family community. So for a time we commemorated the names of the two local saints, St Edmund and St Felix. It was only in 2004 that it was revealed to us who to dedicate our church to in our situation. By that time, with Russians, Romanians, English and other parishioners present, we would need a multinational saint. But who?

Then one Saturday evening before the vigil service we saw a monk entering the church. He was very short, quite stocky and wearing his monastic veil which was moving as if in a breeze. Before we could speak to him, the monk had disappeared. We realised from photos that this monk was St John of Shanghai and he was going to take charge of us, after seven years of being ignored, despised and indeed persecuted by bishops and others.

Since then, in 2008, we bought – miraculously and through him – our own church, without help from any bishop. We now worship in the largest church in the world dedicated to St John. He has protected us from a rapacious man who wanted to take possession of our church and, on failing, then wanted to close it. St John has worked miracles and showed us myrrh and fragrance from our icons. He has comforted us constantly to this day.

We should not forget that St John’s title was ‘of Shanghai and Western Europe’. He spent thirteen years here, in Geneva, Paris, Brussels, London and elsewhere, whereas he spent less than four years in San Francisco, which was where they crucified him. And indeed he reposed not in San Francisco, but in Seattle. It was in Western Europe that we saw his missionary identity, preaching to all nationalities and understanding different needs.

All who are interested in the life of St John of Shanghai will have seen the infamous photo of 9 July 1963. This photo shows him sitting as a defendant in a court room in San Francisco. Sitting beside him were the only three bishops who supported him, one a Serb, Bishop Sava. St John had been put on trial with the approval of other ROCOR bishops from the Synod, who had to their shame also suspended him from his see. He awaited his crucifixion.

Today we recall that St John was born in what is now the Ukraine, the country that ten years ago the US made into its sacrificial lamb. Here too St John shows us the way forward as our inspiration. In February 2022, all our parishioners left their passports at the door. Russians and Ukrainians, Romanians and Moldovans and our 21 other nationalities forget their passports and stand together in solidarity. We have only one passport: Christ, Who unites us.

This is also the passport of St John, who alone can bring unity to the whole tragically divided Diaspora. The universal saint, he lived in exile in Serbia, Macedonia, China, the Philippines, Western Europe, North Africa and North America. His parents lived in exile in Venezuela. Many of his spiritual children took refuge in Australia. He served in Slavonic, Greek, Mandarin, French, Dutch and English and venerated the saints of the Old West. And so do we.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebaptism and Pathology

Fifty Years of Recent History

Nearly fifty years ago, in 1976, a scandal took place in the Orthodox Church in Guildford, England. A very young, poorly educated and inexperienced Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) priest, married off to the first woman come so he could be ordained at the uncanonical age of 22, rebaptised a group of recent converts. The converts had previously been received from the Church of England into the Moscow Patriarchate in the usual Orthodox way by chrismation. Here they had been receiving the sacraments for some time until they had been told by a rather fanatical priest that they needed to be rebaptised! The local Moscow Patriarchate bishop, supported by all other canonical Orthodox, complained.

His petition went to the then still Orthodox ROCOR Synod in New York. Its leader, Metropolitan Philaret, whom no-one would ever suspect of liberalism, commented that this rebaptism was a form of Neo-Donatism. The priest was rebuked – later he divorced the woman that he had been ordered to marry and left the priesthood and the Church. Sadly, the bishop who had had him ordained and had preached the ‘theology of rebaptism’ to him was not rebuked. However, some years later that bishop also ended up outside the Church and then died. An extreme right-winger, he had first created several more scandals, including consecrating as bishop a pedophile in Russia, outside his canonical territory.

Two years later, in 1978, there took place the rebaptism of the late French Catholic monk Fr Placide (Deseille) in the sea at the foot of the Athonite Monastery of Simonopetra. Fr Placide was very well-known in Roman Catholic France and had great respect as a scholar. Later I met him. However, he had already transferred to the so-called ‘Byzantine rite’, as the Roman Catholic rite had been deformed after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Fr (now St) Sophrony the Athonite, whom I knew very well, was very upset. For him this rebaptism was not only quite unnecessary, but also a provocation. He expressed the Orthodox theology of the sacraments, as practised by our 1,000 bishops.

This is that there are no sacraments outside the (Orthodox) Church, but there are sacramental forms or rites. The grace that is missing from them is made up for, completed, by contact with the Church and Her life. Thus, a rite of baptism with water (triple immersion is not compulsory – for Orthodox emergency baptisms are conducted without this) in the Name of the Holy Trinity outside the Church is acceptable as a valid sacramental form. The grace that is clearly missing from it to make it into a sacrament is communicated by reception into the Church. To repeat the sacramental baptismal rite is a type of fundamentalism, formalist literalism, which is actually typical of Protestantism.

Pathology

Today we are seeing again this same Protestant ‘Will I be saved?’ neurosis among some converts from Protestantism to the Orthodox Church. In this there is always the sectarian desire to condemn others, which is why Protestantism consists of a myriad of warring sects. This ‘OneTrueChurchism’ is a typically Protestant reflex. It is pathological because, like all pathologies, it is based not on Christian love, but on hatred for others, not on theology, but on pathology.

There are those who want to prey on the insecurity of neophytes in order to make such new converts doubt in their own Orthodoxy, using jurisdictions just as Protestants use denominations. But why do they want to prey on their insecurity? Simply because they want neophytes to become dependent on them. Creation of dependency is again typical of sectarianism, which is always associated with cults, that is, on guruism, personality cults, lust for power.

There is also a need among these cult leaders or gurus to recruit others. With very small flocks and so lacking money – given their anti-pastoral fanaticism, that is understandable – they are desperate to fill their near-empty churches. Without ethnic groups to attend their ‘temples’ (as they call churches), their only audience is naïve, young people, including the lonely, incels, closet homosexuals and others with problems. They make easy prey for the spiritual vultures.

Thus, one young Englishman I know is on his third rebaptism now. He lasted three years in a parish of 200 in the canonical Church, then went off to a tiny ROCOR community (nowadays they are always tiny) for about one year. However, that group of ten individuals was not good enough for him, so he went off to another tiny old calendarist group, which rebaptised him. He stayed with them for only about one year but they were not exclusive enough for him!

Six months ago he was rebaptised in a group, numbering six worldwide! The latest news is that he is dissastisfied with them, for they too are not strict enough for him. Here is the map of his way out of the Church, because that is how it will end – and it always does end in that way, outside the Church. This ‘anabaptism’ (Greek for rebaptism) is typical of Protestantism, whose underlying mentality and reflex is clear from the outset. It is not Orthodox, for it is not Love.

 

Peace for the Ukraine – and for the Orthodox Church?

US Disengagement?

Even before Trump had been elected, the US elite had realised that it had to disengage from its Ukraine project. Russia had not been weakened, regime-changed, dismembered and destroyed, as had been the US plan all along. Instead its economy was booming, becoming the fourth biggest in the world, President Putin was more popular than ever and BRICS had taken off. As for the illegal Western sanctions, they were ignored by 90% of the world and damaged only the West. The US puppet, Zelensky, in his bunker in Kiev is clearly delusional, taking, they say, cocaine and desperately threatening invasions of Russia, without troops, arms and munitions, and even nuclear war, without nuclear weapons.

The claim by President-elect Trump during his campaign that he would achieve peace in the Ukraine within 24 hours, even before he entered the Oval Office was all presupposition and hubris. How could he end a war which the US had already lost. and Russian victory is ending anyway? Peace does not depend on him, even if the tragedy began as a US proxy war. Peace depends on the actions of the Russian military and President Putin. Indeed, peace may come through Russian military victory and Ukrainian military collapse even before Trump assumes office. That would probably be very welcome to Trump, enabling him to begin as President unburdened of the curse of the Ukraine, which has ruined everything.

The fact is that the President-elect does not want to solve the conflict in the Ukraine, what he wants is to disengage from it, so that the US can save money and at last ‘pivot to Asia’. The Ukraine is now a distraction from US strategic interests. Trump wants to run away from Kiev, just as the US ran away from its failed wars in Saigon and Kabul. Trump can do this very easily, if Kiev collapses before Trump’s inauguration. He can simply blame Biden for everything. This will be his ’exit strategy’. The puppet-master has changed and so the puppets must change too. After all, Trump has from the outset stated that the war would never have begun, if he had been President at the time. And that may well be true.

Peace Talks?

But who can Russia talk too? The Russians cannot talk to the Ukrainians, as their President is illegitimate and talks with Russia were literally outlawed by Kiev in 2022. The Russians cannot talk to Europeans, as they have shown themselves to be delusional liars and treaty-breaking traitors ever since 2014. This can be seen from their refusal to implement the so-called Minsk Accords, which they openly confessed were simply delaying tactics. In any case, the narcissistic and so delusional European ruling class is discredited and hated by the peoples of Europe and represents only the past and its own selfish interests. That ruling class is unable to talk to Russia because it is incapable of dealing with reality – its defeat.

In any case, Russia will certainly not sit down and talk now, when it is on the brink of victory. Would the Allies have stopped in January 1945 to talk to Hitler? Russia will not stop now, victory is in sight. Anyway, as we said, Kiev has literally outlawed talks with Russia and its President is illegal, as his term of service ended earlier this year, like that of his Parliament. The war has continued for so long only because of Biden’s support and EU and UK backing. And bankrupt Europe cannot replace the US, as Europe has run out of money and arms and cannot let its own troops die there. And it is troops that the Ukraine needs, for it has lost nearly a million soldiers, 517,000 of them in the unfinished year of 2024 alone.

As a result, with no-one to talk to, the Russians are taking back more and more territory from the Ukraine, 100 years after it was illegally handed over to the Ukraine by the anti-Russian Bolsheviks. There will be no ‘frozen conflict’ or ‘stalemate’ here, just Russian victory. ‘Frozen conflict’ was possible two years ago. The only people the Russians could talk to now are the Americans – but under Trump. Trump is a businessman and wants to disengage from a loss-making business and must sack Zelensky. As the Americans no longer have any diplomats, the hope is that Trump will appoint the only European politician left – Victor Orban – to talk not only to the Russian President, but also to the Russian Patriarch.

The Russian President

The Russian President could express the following terms to Trump’s representative, perhaps Orban: Firstly, drop all 16,000 illegal anti-Russian sanctions and absurd criminal charges. Then, recognise as Russian the four Russian provinces which have already joined Russia, and, if they have been taken by Russia by then, the next four once Russian provinces of the south and east, including Nikolaev and Odessa on the Black Sea coast, and the three more once Russian provinces to the north-east (Chernigov, Sumy, Poltava). The Russian President would leave the rest to become again the real Ukraine, perhaps to be called ‘Kievan Rus’ (Kiyivska Rus’), more or less mirroring Belarus to the north.

Such a nationally homogenous, Ukrainian-speaking Kievan Rus would consist of 14 administrative areas, just over half of the original 27 (including the two that were in the Russian Crimea), its new easternmost provinces being Kiev, Cherkasy and Kirovohrad. This would represent an area of about 260,000 square kilometres and a pre-war population of about 16 million. This would draw Ukrainian refugees back from Europe. Kievan Rus would be a neutral, sovereign and independent nation, that is, demilitarised (free of NATO) and denazified (free of the EU) which are racist, anti-sovereignty organisations. Agreement could then be reached and Russia would by treaty guarantee the territorial integrity of all European nations.

Of course, they would have to make a condition that Moldova should carry out referenda for any groups among its border population, such as those in Transdniestria and Gagauzia, who may wish to join Russia. Similarly, referenda must be held for Romanian and Hungarian minorities on the borders of Kievan Rus who may wish to ‘go home’. If the three tiny Baltic statelets were at last obliged to grant human rights to their Russian minorities, there would be no threat from Russia to them. With such an agreement, the Western half of Europe would be secure and could slash its military spending. Then Trump would see his dream come true and abandon NATO, which could be dissolved, just like the EU.

The Russian Patriarch

The Russian Orthodox Patriarch also has to be involved in these talks. Leader of by far the largest Local Orthodox Church, the whole Orthodox Church of 200 million has been in chaos ever since the British-orchestrated palace revolt or ‘Russian Revolution’ of February 1917. Without the Russian Church, several key Local Orthodox Churches were taken over through political interference by Great Britain and, after the Second World War, specifically in 1948 with the forced removal by the CIA of Patriarch Maximos V of Constantinople, by the USA. Freedom for the Orthodox Church, the end of Western interference in its internal affairs, is essential for peace in the Ukraine and for justice in Church affairs.

There would have to be an agreement with the Russian Church, which has also suffered as a result of American policy in the Ukraine and elsewhere. This is principally because of the Zionist neocon ideology, implemented by Nuland, Pompeo, Blinken, Biden etc. This established a fake Church in the Ukraine, permitted the open persecution of the real Church there and also sanctioned the Russian Patriarch personally. What could the terms of the Patriarch be and what concessions could he grant in return? Here there has to be mutuality, as there have been excesses on both sides. Here are Russian Orthodox terms to be imposed on the Greek Churches by the USA, with compensation from the USA:

  1. Closure of the fake Church in the Ukraine, the OCU, with Constantinople withdrawing its absurd Tomos, which justified it. All stolen property is to be returned to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (see Concessions 1, 2 and 3 below).
  2. Release of all Orthodox in Finland, Estonia and Lithuania from the uncanonical jurisdiction of Constantinople, introduced from the 1920s on, on condition that all Orthodox there be granted a new Autocephalous Baltic Orthodox Church (see Concession 5 below).
  3. No more interference by Constantinople in the affairs of the Polish Orthodox Church and, especially, in those of the Church of the Czechia and Slovakia.
  4. Granting to the Russian Church of jurisdiction over all Africa, except for Egypt, which has its own historic Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, based in Alexandria (thus returning to the pre-1920s situation). This is on condition that Moscow establishes an Autocephalous African Orthodox Church there by 2050.

Russian Concessions:

  1. Immediate resumption by Moscow of communion and concelebration with the Churches of Constantinople, Alexandria and other Greek Orthodox Churches.
  2. Immediate rescinding of all ‘suspensions’ and ‘defrockings’ of clergy in Russia, the Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Western Europe and elsewhere, which were carried out for political reasons because of clergy disagreements with political, nationalist or uncanonical sectarian ideologies, imposed by certain Russian bishops.
  3. Autocephaly for the Kievan Rus Orthodox Church within twelve months.
  4. Autocephaly for the Moldovan Orthodox Church on the remaining national territory of Moldova within twelve months, in concert with the Romanian Orthodox Church, in order to reunite all Moldovan Orthodox in one Church. The Moldovan Diaspora in Western countries would come under the care of the Romanian Orthodox Church.
  5. Autocephaly for all Orthodox (about 500,000 in number) in the three Baltic States and Finland, forming an autocephalous Baltic Orthodox Church within twelve months.
  6. All Russian Orthodox in the Diasporas in Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania are to be instructed, under threat of excommunication, to merge by negotiation into new Local Churches, to be founded on those territories by 2050. This would be conditional on all other Local Churches which have Diaspora jurisdictions issuing the same instructions to their Diasporas.

 

On Former Archbishop Welby

The resignation of the ultra-woke Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Church of England, for covering up the crimes of a sadistic pervert is not a surprise. Anglican bishops and certain Anglican clergy have for generations been suspected of being perverts, as was finally portrayed in the 1968 film ‘If’. Surely, the Archbishop’s resignation will be only the first of many more. And there will surely be trials and imprisonments. Justice demands it.

However, their perversions are only some among the many of the whole British Establishment, for example, the pedophiles so far disclosed in the BBC – for the three so far are only the tip of the iceberg. The reason for the Establishment promotion of wokeness is the self-interested impunity of perverts. Now, slowly, the perversions and identities of various ‘queer’ members of the government are being disclosed.

Apparently, there are still as many as 25 million baptised (‘christened’) members of the Church of England, though they are rapidly dying out. However, only some 500,000 of them attend church on Sundays. This means that the proportion of practising is about 2%. This is very similar to the rates of practice in Roman Catholicism and in the Orthodox Church in England, as well as in most of the Western world.

Some Roman Catholics appear to believe that the way out of this scandal is for scandalised members of the Church of England to join Roman Catholicism. This is absurd. The Church of England is profoundly Protestant, anti-Roman Catholic and was founded on enmity towards it. And what about the profound and scandalous pedophilia among Roman Catholic clergy? What would attract Anglicans to perhaps even worse?

In any case, every bishop of the Church of England is a political appointee, not a parish priest with pastoral experience, but an Old Etonian who worked in the oil industry – like Archbishop Welby. No surprise then that Church of England bishops appear to have no spirituality whatsoever. Therefore, surely, there is even less excuse for Roman Catholic bishops, who are not appointed by atheist/Hindu/Jewish Prime Ministers of the UK?

There is even less excuse for Orthodox bishops in the UK, who are not appointed by the UK Prime Minister either. And yet some neophytes to the Orthodox Church appear to think the same as Roman Catholics, that members of the C of E should join the Orthodox Church. This is equally absurd. It is doubtful if even one in a thousand of the practising members of the Church of England (that is, 500 in all) are interested in Orthodox Christianity.

For them Orthodoxy is unProtestant, and ‘full of foreigners’, as one of them told me. (It seems that he did not know that Christ is also ‘a foreigner’ – a brown-skinned Asiatic from the Middle East. He thought that Christ is a middle-class Englishman and Rotarian – like himself). And then there are all the perverts among the bishops of the Orthodox Church. Take the one decades ago who used to ordain his boyfriends.

Then take the one who decades ago was sacked from teaching in Edinburgh for his perversion and was forced to teach in Glasgow. Or the one in Europe who was exiled to Siberia (though his priest-boyfriend went unpunished). We will not go into detail about the two who were deposed in Russia and sent to monasteries. Nor will we say anything further of the recent scandals in Paris and Budapest on the part of bishops of two different Local Churches.

The real problem here is the gay mafias of Orthodox bishops, not just in Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe and the USA. As gays, they will punish any whistle-blower, who discovers that his bishop has the ‘Grindr’ app (like one of those in Russia too) and spends Saturday evenings drinking in bars with his boyfriend. When the whistleblower discreetly asks for the Grinder addict to be removed, the mafia punishes the whistleblower. It was ever thus.

Their hatred for you comes from the fact that you are more popular than they are, because you have compassion for the people, you are a pastor, a shepherd. Their jealousy comes from the fact you have a normal family life, whereas they are perverts and so do not and cannot have a normal family life. We have had enough of wolves in shepherd’s clothing. Archbishop Welby is only the tip of the iceberg. Orthodox – sort out your own house first before you criticise others.

 

 

Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth in the Ukraine

Mr Trump is not yet President of the United States. However, his election just over a week ago and his nomination of several members of his administration is changing the world, not least in Europe. Here members of the political elite like Scholz, Macron and Starmer are trembling. However, none more so than Mr Zelensky in Kiev. We do not know if Mr Trump likes Mr Zelensky or President Putin. Probably nether of them. They are not very relevant to him. What we do know is that he likes himself. Indeed, as a narcissist, what he now wants is personal vengeance for all that was done to him for eight years.

As a result, many are now trembling. Others, like Mr Pompeo, excluded from his administration, are angry. Among the trembling are some in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, like Archbishop Elpidiforos (who had his photo taken with President Biden, whom he recommended to his flock) or Metropolitan Emmanuel and the other modernists there, unlike those there who hold traditional values. Not least the pseudo-clerics of their fake Church which the above bishops set up in the Ukraine. The pseudo-clerics include Sergei Dumenko and the gangsters and perverts of the ‘OCU’ – ‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’ under his authority. Read on:

https://spzh.live./en/zashhita-very/82999-without-pompeo-the-beginning-of-ending-world-support-for-ocu-project

 

The New Age of Sovereignty

You always knew who the goody was and who the baddy was in the cowboy films of the mid-twentieth century. The goody always wore a white hat, the baddy a black hat. Simple. This reflected the Cold War mentality of the time. The Capitalists were good, the Communists were bad. It was all an oversimplified world of good versus evil, right versus wrong, ‘with us or against us’, as per Bush. It was a simple, bipolar, dualist, Manichean world of black and white. It was not of course reality, which is usually lighter or darker grey.

In reality, although nobody liked the tyranny of Communism, especially those who lived in Communist countries, the paradoxical tragedy was that after the fall of Communism, the world became unipolar. In other words, the US and its Western vassals could brook no rivals. It was the ‘spoiled brat syndrome’ – ‘I am the only one’. ‘Hegemony’, that is, supremacy and domination over all, became the order of the day. But hegemony and bossy control freakery do not work – ask any Californian bishop who has tried to impose it.

However, as the whole world, except for the Western, now knows, neither a bipolar world (Capitalist versus Communist), nor a unipolar world (Western), work. Rule by one or two always leads to despotism. The solution is a multipolar world, which breaks the tyranny of the monopoly of one and the warring opposition of two. This is the realm of the Holy Trinity. Sadly, the West wants either unipolar or else bipolar, the ‘democratic’ (West) versus the ‘autocratic’ (East). This is the heretical nonsense of Manichaeism.

The fact is that the Western Establishment oligarchies are certainly autocratic, they ignore and despise their ‘deplorable’ peoples. ‘plebs’, as in France, the UK and Germany, all governed by minority governments. For the people are the greatest threat, as we saw from the very unexpected (for the elites) results of the referendum on Brexit and the recent US election. They were not unexpected for the people. As for the pro-Western CIA-sponsored dictatorships in the Arabian Peninsula, Latin America and Asia, are they not autocratic?

But the most autocratic of them all is the Kiev regime, which has banned other political parties, critical media, sent all opposition to the firing squads, prisons and torture chambers of the dreaded Secret Police, and is now even banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. On the other side, India is the world’s largest democracy. And President Putin can easily win any election, in the same way as the very popular political leaders of China and Iran. Some people like such ‘autocratic’ governments – the more the better, they say.

As long as the Western elites and their venal media criminalise or ‘hitlerise’ a dialogue with ‘cancelled’ Russia (though they talked to the USSR and China during the Cold War), the only end to NATO’s anti-Russian war in the Ukraine is Russian victory and their total defeat. And that will not be long now. The Western elite never cared about Ukrainians, or any other Non-Western people, it just used them as proxies, so their own troops did not have to die. However, this does not mean that the Russians are not guilty of mistakes.

For one thing, as President Putin has openly admitted, there was the continual Russian naivety with regard to Western politicians from 1989 on. The Russians actually thought they were dealing with honest people, viz the Minsk Accords. And then there has been the problem of the hangover of the old Soviet centralisation. After 1991, the Russian Federation failed to give the real Ukraine (the north-western half, not the Russian southern and eastern half), autonomy and to respect its culture and language, authentically Ukrainian.

It was the usual condescending Great Russian chauvinism and imperialism, dating back to the pre-Soviet times of the Imperialist Establishment, which says that if you are not Russian, you are a third-class citizen. This is the same attitude as in the Russian emigration, pre-Soviet and post-Soviet, towards all Non-Russians. This imperialist attitude of both many Russians (and many Americans – they have that in common) meant that the US conquered very venal Kiev in 2014 for a paltry $5 billion. But look at the miserable results.

The scale of the events in the Ukraine is that of a Shakespearian tragedy. The main role was performed by the CIA-hired and very overpaid actor and comedian Zelensky, who  firsthad to improve his English, learn Ukrainian and be reclothed in khaki sweatshirts for the role. Like Caesar, expect Zelensky to be betrayed and stabbed by Brutus. The Ides of March are near. President Putin is waiting for free Ukrainians to take power, perhaps with Trump’s backing. Then banned peace talks can start and the European elite can resign.

There needs to be a New Ukraine, sovereign, independent, free of NATO and the EU – which are not going to survive anyway. And as a Sovereign Nation  it must have its own autocephalous or independent Church. Ordinary Ukrainians, unlike their greedy oligarchic elites – usually Non-Ukrainians – have been the sacrificial lambs of both American and Soviet Imperialism. Hopefully, President Putin can persuade the Church in Moscow to abandon centralism and give autocephaly to all Russian Orthodox in territories outside the Russian Federation.

This may mean that before Trump’s inauguration in seventy days’ time the Russians will advance towards the Dnieper, taking from four to seven more Ukrainian provinces, including the Black Sea Coast, so joining up with Transdniestria. The territories outside the Russian Federation, where Russian Orthodox live, would need autocephaly, meaning a Church of the New Ukraine and a Church of the Baltics. All the other Diasporas, as well as Moldova, would have to come to an agreement with the other canonical Orthodox there.

Imperialism has always been a problem. It bankrupted the seventeenth-century empires of Spain and Portugal, of eighteenth-century France and of nineteenth-century Britain, each time the bankruptcy taking place in the century after greatness. Imperialism caused two ‘World’ (European) Wars. Now in the twenty-first century, Imperialism has bankrupted the USA. We believe that the Russian Federation has learned from the bankruptcy of the equally Imperialist USSR. The administration of the Russian Orthodox Church must learn that too.

We have entered the new Age of Sovereignty. Sovereignty is what multipolarity means, where one nation is balanced out by the others and no-one can become too powerful. All defend their own and each other’s interests, as the UN should have done. Away with the old Imperialism of unipolarity, World Dictatorship, and the bipolar Imperialisms of two rival blocs, everyone else crushed between them. We have entered the world of Sovereign Nations. Imperialism caused two World Wars and has nearly caused a Third. Enough is enough.

The Fall of the Pygmies: The Elite and the People

Will the US Republican Party one day be renamed ‘The Constitutional Party’? After all, the US Constitution opens with the words: ‘We, the People…’. Sadly, in European countries it is unlikely that the people will ever be commemorated constitutionally, at least under the present millennial ruling class. For now, Europe, that is, the feudal EU and its vassals like the UK, are run by the unelected grand-daughter of a Nazi officer and all her inherently racist and unelected commissars and minions who condemn the rest of the world as a jungle, whereas they themselves alone live in a civilised ‘garden’: yes, the garden where the twin seeds of Communism and Fascism were sown and grew up and where nearly two million babies are burned in incinerators every year.

In France the Sun-King President ignores the results of the recent elections, where his Party came third, but continues as a dictator in his Elysian Palace just as before, ignoring the people. In the UK a Party, for which only one fifth of the electorate voted, also rules as a dictatorship, imprisoning the free, still delusionally imagining that their British Establishment controls an Empire – on which in fact the sun set for ever in Suez in 1956. The Nordic countries whose elites have bound themselves hand and foot to the now redundant NATO are isolated. Italy is ‘governed’ by Meloni, captive to the equally redundant and perverted EU elite. Alone in Europe, in courageous Hungary and Slovakia, whose leader the elite tried to assassinate, are the people represented.

Of course, the US Establishment has already tried to assassinate Trump twice (and to imprison him on 34 charges) and so far he has done nothing. They know that as a narcissist he will want revenge. They tremble. They may try assassination again, as they did to President Kennedy, as they try to do to any President who may end lucrative arms contracts. As the President-elect smiles with another Kennedy, son and nephew of the assassinated, the repercussions of his victory are already visible – and so far he has only given rhetoric. In the US the Democrats who hate each other have begun their blame game. The foolishness of choosing figureheads who have dementia or are plainly stupid, in order better to pull their strings, is now clear. Abroad the situation is far worse.

As a result of Biden’s defeat, it only took a day to see the collapse of the German puppet government of Scholz, its thirst for revenge for German defeats in Russia since 1914 ever strong. It is doubtful if the desire for elections among the sad and impoverished German people can be delayed until next September. The collapse is due of course to the state of the German economy, disastrously cut off from cheap Russian energy, and therefore bankrupt like all the other Western European economies, and due to the wasteful sending of even more money to Kiev, which has lost the US war against Russia. The invasion of Russia through the NATO Kursk plan is ending in NATO scrap metal, just as predicted. Why support a regime, created by the CIA, which the CIA has now abandoned?

On 7 May 2024 the dictator – he is no longer a legal President, as he cancelled elections and sent the opposition to the prisons of his dreaded SBU secret police – Zelensky was nearly assassinated. This was by his Ukrainian bodyguards, which is why his new bodyguards are all American or else, according to some, British. The man is living on borrowed time, as he and his General Syrsky are so hated. Unwilling Ukrainian troops surrender and other Ukrainians give abundant details of military targets to Russians. These are the partisans, who would long ago have negotiated with the Russians and come to an agreement, saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men, and so creating a grave demographic crisis for the Ukraine for generations to come.

The European elite is in panic, as Biden’s misconceived war is over, like the regime-changed Biden himself. He and his racist European war criminal vassals have killed a million Ukrainian men. As the cowardly and parasitic European elite has been abandoned, it has lost the reason for its existence. Their hubristic attempt to destroy and dismember Russia, effecting regime-change in Moscow, failed totally, making President Putin even more popular, and also forcing Moscow to ally for ever with China, speeding the BRICS process and making the multipolar world real. Trump will waste no more on the Ukraine. He does not need an excuse, he can walk away, blaming the Biden regime, which, as far as he is concerned, in any case stole his election in 2020 through electoral fraud.

In response to abandonment by the US, the European elite will now call for ‘more Europe’, in other words, more of the same disastrous recipe for the destruction of national sovereignty, which has baked their poisoned cake. Any attempt, especially by the sexually perverted elites in France and Germany who have pulled the EU strings from the outset, will be dismissed in Eastern Europe. ‘More Europe’ is the way to lose them entirely. It will be dismissed in EU Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Czechia, Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and elsewhere, countries whose puppet rulers once agreed to Brussels, let alone in Non-EU countries like Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia and even Albania. The future is ex-EU, if the EU survives anywhere.

After Biden’s defeat, the European ruling class scurried to meet at NATO and EU meetings. They know that Trump knows that they opposed him, none more so than the discredited UK Starmer, whose Foreign Minister Lammy openly insulted Trump, calling him a Neo-Nazi. Trump knows his enemies, even though now they hurry like a pack of dogs to lick up to him because he can feed them with titbits – or not. In Kiev the loser Zelensky still insults all his allies who do not give him even more hundreds of billions and arms, while he continues to persecute the Church. In Israel the Defence Minister, Gallant, was sacked immediately after Biden’s defeat – he was too much of a pragmatist who knows that Israel has lost. However, Biden, Starmer and the others are all complicit in Israeli genocide.

Even worse, they are all war criminals, responsible with the oligarchs in Kiev for the genocide of the people of the Ukraine. The Western Establishment has failed to weaken Russia. As for Western (Trumpian or other) fantasies about peace in the Ukraine, these are delusional. All peace plans, or rather fantasies, of the West are dialogues with itself, not with Russia. Russia does not need to dialogue – it is victorious. The West cannot give Kiev any more arms – it has none – and there are ever fewer Ukrainians willing to die for the US. There will be no ‘stalemates’ or ‘frozen conflicts’ in the Ukraine. President Putin is clear. The Russian part of the Ukraine will become Russia again while the rest becomes a sovereign, independent New Ukraine, free of the NATO and EU puppeteers.

The racist Western elite speaks of the existential defeat of the West and the defeat of Europe, after its defeat in the Ukraine by the victorious ‘Asiatic’ and ‘Mongol’ hordes as per Kiev’s Nazi propaganda. This is nonsense. This is only the defeat of a certain idea, THEIR IDEA of the West and THEIR IDEA of Europe, and of course the defeat and end of their power, overpaid jobs and millennial delusions. Those ideas certainly have been defeated and they have lost power. Time is up for the reckless Western elites who bet all their money at the casino table on ‘victory’ in the Ukraine. The time has come for the peoples of Europe to start governing themselves, tasting freedom, sending their parasitic elites into exile or to prison, as many of these war criminals so richly deserve.

This is what explains the ever-increasing authoritarianism of the ‘Fascist Liberalism’ of the modern West, the imposition of the Woke by bullying. Authoritarianism is always the death-rattle before the end. Thus, the Soviet Union became more and more authoritarian in the 70s and 80s because it knew that it was over. Thus, the European Union and NATO are doing the same. They too are over. And, as puppets, the European media, just like the media in the Soviet Union, applauds this authoritarianism. Sadly, this authoritarianism is echoed in Church affairs. All that happens then is that people turn their backs on the Church administration. Church bureaucrats suspend, punish or ‘defrock’ pastors and they become more popular and the bureaucrats less popular.

On a Church level, it may also mean that the faithful will begin to take over from the corrupt politicians. We remember the old Greek and Russian (all three of the Russian ones) jurisdictions, built on snobbery and which so despised ordinary, simple, but pious people, ‘the Soviet mob’, as one of their bishop-snobs called them. Of course, there were tragedies because the sociopathic elites would persecute, suspend and put on trial the good pastors who opposed them. This they did with St John of Shanghai in 1964 and then they disposed of the empathetic Ukrainian Metr Hilarion (Kapral). However, the Church will never be built on snobbery, but on the people. The upper-class ‘bishops’, monocles in their eyes, like Papist cardinals or slave-owning Anglican lords, will lose.

They have lost Western Europe to the ‘peasant’ immigrant masses of Romania, Moldova, Greece, Cyprus, to the sacrificial lamb of Ukrainians and those of the Russian Lands. This is why aristocratic Russian emigres were unable to found anything in Western Europe – they would not let the faithful participate – ‘they are not intellectuals like us’. In North America, a new Church did come into being, as it was the Church of poor Carpatho-Russian immigrants. All Churches are built on the people, on the masses, not on the imitation of elitist Roman Catholicism, a religious institution founded on the desire to replace Christ with an Emperor, or on Anglicanism, a religious institution founded on the personal lust and greed of a murderous renegade-King and his rapacious cronies.

The icons in our churches weep myrrh and exude Carpathian fragrance; the victory belongs to the simple people and to the people’s pastors and archpastors. The shepherds follow Christ, not the protocols of spiritual pygmies, elitist ideologues, racist and class spite, the intellectual fantasies of narcissistic and effeminate parasites, who seek only wealth and power, despising and mocking pastors and people. Their days, like the days of the clique in Kiev, are numbered. Their days, like those of von der Leyen, Starmer, Macron and Scholz and all the others, are numbered. They all dug ever deeper holes for themselves to commit suicide in. Now are the pygmies, who lorded it for so long, fallen, as Christ promised: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth’.

 

 

 

 

The Wind Is Turning

The old left and right divisions in politics are long since over. The division has long been between Globalism and Patriotism, the elitists and the people. And for the elitists the people are ‘deplorables’, ‘garbage’ and in the UK ‘plebs’. This is clear from the US election results. Here the only question is if President-elect Trump will be able to keep any of his promises.

Trump certainly did not do so in his first term, when he further indebted his country, surrounded himself with warmongering neocons, endowed the Ukraine with lethal weapons and a fake Church. And he also encouraged Israeli aggression, abandoned missile treaties and illegally sanctioned other countries.

Clearly, next year he could in a deBidenised White House begin to resolve the huge problems within the dysfunctional USA, repairing its economy and crumbling infrastructure, controlling illegal immigration, stopping any further indebtedness by drastically reducing military expenditure and cutting waste, renewing failing US democracy, eliminating electoral fraud and ending the oppression of Wokeism.

Abroad Trump could broker peace in the Middle East, refusing Israel arms, establishing a Palestinian State, withdrawing US occupation forces in Syria, doing deals with China, North Korea, Iran and Cuba, and stopping interference in other countries through CIA fronts, so-called NGOs, as in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Georgia, Armenia, Serbia, Central Asia etc, through colour revolutions.

In Europe he could broker a peace deal, not in the Ukraine, which has already lost its needless war with Russia, but in Europe, because that is what is needed for peace in the Ukraine. For instance, Trump could take a trip to Moscow next January, ending the illegal sanctions against the Russian Federation and the absurd Western warrant for the arrest of President Putin. Then he could accept the new leader of deBidenised Kiev.

Trump could agree to the de facto establishment of a New Ukraine as a Russian Protectorate, abandoning its Greek-sponsored fake Church, as it deserves. Here he could offer to guarantee self-determination referenda in the far west of the Ukraine to find out which country the peoples there actually wish to belong to. Such self-determination may be necessary elsewhere, in the Baltics and Moldova, for example, or at least Trump could insist on establishing democracy and human rights in those countries for their long-oppressed Russian minorities.

Once the peoples have decided, then a Peace and Security Treaty can be drawn up among all the peoples of Europe who wish to belong to the Russian world (basically the Russian Federation, Belarus and the New Ukraine) and those who do not. Demilitarisation and the abolition of the old Cold War NATO can then follow, as no-one would any longer need to fear anything from one anyone else. Trump could take part credit for all this, blaming everything else on Biden.

In Europe, politicians like Orban, Fico, Meloni, Wilders, Farage, Le Pen and those of the AfD in Germany will ascend in Trump’s wake. The old unelected EU bureaucrats and globalists like von der Leyen and the wildly unpopular Macron, Scholz and Starmer will have to disappear. Will the peoples of Europe finally be allowed the leaders they want? Will the Nations of Europe come together in sovereignty and freedom, in peace and co-operation, leaving the EU to die its natural death?

Indeed, in reality will Trump do any of these things? Will he be free to or even allowed to do any of them, without getting assassinated? Or will he instead, as just another figurehead of the bankrupt USA, send more arms to the Ukraine and Israel and declare war on Iran and China? Will the US Congress continue to be Zionist-occupied territory? Will the madmen and madwomen of the EU and the UK declare war on Russia? These are the stuff of nightmares. However, they are also possible. The wind may be turning, but is it turning in the right direction? Or will it all just be more of the same?

 

 

The Fall of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Rise of the Russian Orthodox Church

‘God so loved the world that He did not send a Committee’.

Foreword: The Hundred Years War Is Ending

The Hundred Years War (1914-2024) is at last ending, not in Sarajevo where the first part began in 1914, not in Warsaw, where the second part began in 1939, but in Kiev, where the third part began in 2014. The second and third parts were made inevitable by the key, first part, caused by rival Imperialisms. All three parts have pulled into Europe the USA, which had profited from them until the last part. But the seeds of US success contained the seeds of its own destruction. In order to maintain its supremacy, the US yoked itself to a delusional madman in Kiev, who has the most developed sense of entitlement of any of his people. When he does not get the means of destruction that he wants, and that is always more and more lethal, he throws a tantrum, like any spoilt actor or diva who wants adulation.

As with any spoilt child, all you have to do is call his bluff, that is, ignore him and walk away. However, he is still by far the most dangerous dictator of the many recruited and employed by the US, in any banana republic whether in Latin America, Western Europe, the Middle East or the Far East, with the possible exception of the equally genocidal maniac, Netanyahu. For Kiev wants nuclear weapons. It was inevitable. All that the US – and hysterical Western Europe – have to do is to pull the carpet from under the Kiev dictator’s feet. However, war victory in the Ukraine, or even the potential peace victory, do nothing to solve the spiritual and structural crisis in the Russian Church, whose jurisdiction used to extend to all the territories of the former USSR and beyond them to the Western world.

The Fall of the Moscow Patriarchate

The Russian Orthodox Church administration in Moscow, founded, named and centralised in Soviet times as ‘the Moscow Patriarchate’, is in great difficulty. It has once again tried to impose impossible political demands on the consciences of clergy and faithful everywhere, just as it did in the late 1920s, of which the ‘Sergianist’ mentality is currently much admired within the Patriarchate. These political demands stretch to outside the Russian Federation and Belarus – though even inside these countries it has great difficulties. There it has even ‘defrocked’ clergy for having political views on the tragic conflict in the Ukraine which are different from those of the Patriarchal authorities.

Wanting to pray not for ‘victory’, but for peace, that is, for the Victory of Christ, persecuted independent clergy have often had to flee abroad. Moscow also finds its churches boycotted by many faithful all over Russia. Surely an Orthodox is defined by his agreement with the Creed, the Symbol of Faith, not by his political views? Why this dogmatisation of political opinions and the canons, as also happened during the Soviet period? Surely the dogmatisation of non-dogmatic political views is, by definition, uncanonical? Outside those two Russian territories, where Patriarchal authority is backed up by the State, the situation of the Moscow Patriarchate is not just difficult, but catastrophic.

Inside the Former USSR

Inside the former USSR, the worst situation is in the Ukraine. Here over 12,000 churches and their clergy no longer commemorate the Russian Patriarch, since he is seen as an enemy leader. This is a pastoral disaster. How does a pastor come to be seen as the enemy of his people? He may reply that their perspective is wrong, but the fact is that that is how they perceive him. And it is too late to do anything about it. In Latvia, Russian Orthodox also no longer commemorate him, as the four besieged bishops there have had to declare independence from Moscow, despite their divided flock, who are often boycotting the Church. The situation is chaotic.

Meanwhile, in Lithuania and Estonia, the Russian Church is faced by schisms due to its disputed authority. Indeed, the Patriarch is not even allowed entry into Lithuania (nor into the UK and Canada). In Central Asia, there is dissidence and some are leaving for abroad, others declare that they are retiring. In Moldova, the only country in the former Soviet Union (apart from Georgia) where there is a canonical alternative to the Moscow jurisdiction, over a hundred more clergy have this year alone left with their parishes for the Orthodox Patriarchate of Romania, tired of Russian nationalism, racism and their mistreatment as third-class citizens.

Outside the Former USSR

Outside the territories of the former USSR, the Moscow Patriarchate finds itself in schism with the imperialistic Greek Orthodox world as a result of mutual disputes regarding ‘canonical territory’. This is not because either is intent on doing missionary work among Non-Orthodox, but rather each is intent on trying to steal each other’s flocks. In North America, Metropolitan Nicholas, the leading bishop of the Anabaptist ROCOR sect, an out-of-control American Protestant-style and anti-Russian (!) schismatic group under the Moscow Patriarchate, finds that people walk out on him when he prays for the Russian Patriarch and people refuse to donate.

In Western Europe many Russian Orthodox priests refuse to commemorate the Russian Patriarch or have left him. As for the Ukrainians, they have set up 100 parishes, separate from Moscow in Western Europe. And Moldovans are doing the same. In Australia and especially in Latin America, many will have nothing to do with the Moscow Patriarchate. In general, outside the former USSR, the parishes of the Moscow Patriarchate resemble ever smaller, ever more inward-looking, ever more nationalistic groups, often numbering only a dozen or two. As for native Orthodox people, everywhere they are tired of being treated as third-class citizens by Moscow and are leaving.

Babylon Versus Jerusalem

Let us be frank. The mentality that now pervades the apparently often ‘effeminate’ upper reaches of the Moscow Patriarchate is careerist, not saintly, political, not pastoral, bureaucratic, not spiritual, nationalistic, not multinational, Statist, not canonical. For that reason, they are losing their authority and people are, as the phrase goes, voting with their feet and leaving them. However, this fall of the ‘cardinals’ (be they overt or covert) of the Moscow Patriarchate and its associated Soviet-period administrative groups, like ROCOR, is leading to the rise of the Russian Orthodox Church, for the fall of Babylon always leads to the rise of Jerusalem, paradoxically the dead hand of the State brings opposition and so life.

The Rise of the Russian Orthodox Church

The fall of top-heavy, militaristic, Soviet-period superstructures like the Moscow Patriarchate or ROCOR is because the grassroots faithful want to return to the authentic Church. The great mainstream tradition of the monastics, pastors and people of the Russian Church is very much alive. Who were Sts Antony and Theodosius of the Kiev Caves? They were real Churchmen, not careerist administrators with their ‘protocols’, they were enlighteners of the peoples of Rus, who brought forth a host of saints, whose holy relics lie in the Kiev Caves today and give out myrrh, calling to God.

Who was the great Russian Orthodox St Sergius of Radonezh? Why is he called the Builder of Russia? He was the heir to that multinational network of monks and saints who spread again the prayer of the heart from St Gregory Palamas and Mt Athos through the Balkans north to the Russian Lands. He and his disciples, like St Nil of Sora, set up dozens and dozens of monasteries to spread the Word of God into still pagan central Russia and this movement spread ultimately to Siberia, the Pacific Coast and even beyond, through St Herman of Alaska and his companions, who spread the Light of Christ to California.

More Recent Saints

Who was St Job of Pochaev? He was the monastic founder who turned the Western Ukraine into an advanced post of Orthodoxy, a bastion against those whose filioquism was a political instrument for the Polish oppression of Orthodox in order to gain more power and wealth. Who was St Paisy (Velichkovsky)? He was the heir to the monastic renewal, forced by persecuting German Tsarinas to take refuge from what is now the Ukraine in what is now Romania, and from there to re-enlighten the Russian Lands, liberating them from the schismatic curses caused by the purely external observances of ritualism and State nationalism.

Who was St Seraphim of Sarov? He was the old, bent-over monk digging in his vegetable-patch in Sarov, whom the rich and ignoble noble regarded as a dirty peasant, because he looked at the saint’s rags and not his praying heart of gold, and who was canonised at the insistence of the pious Tsar against the opinion of bishop-bureaucrats. Who was St John of Kronstadt? He was the righteous and fragrant pastor who prophesied all, exactly as it happened, because the idle rich parasites, who persecuted him and were jealous of him, refused to repent for their persecution of the real Church and the Tsar and enraged the oppressed who then revolted.

The Saints After 1917

Who were the New Martyrs and Confessors, from Tsar Nicholas to St Tikhon, Apostle of America, Bishop of San Francisco and American citizen, who had the services translated into English, and then became the Patriarch of Moscow, from the Martyrs of Solovki to the 20,000 Martyrs of Butovo, from the Martyrs of Kazakhstan to the Martyrs of Kolyma, from St Matrona of Moscow to St Seraphim of Vyritsa, from St Laurence of Chernigov to St Luke of Crimea? Who was the universal missionary St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, persecuted and suspended by ROCOR bishops for being a good pastor and not a right-wing ideologist, and the wise fool Mother Alypia of Kiev, who saw through sinners to their hearts?

These all were those who thought nothing of nationality and politics, but knew that if they sought the Kingdom of Heaven first, then all would be added unto them, and for this reason they became saints. And, despite the persecution of bishop-bureaucrats, effeminates in love with luxury, they were and are followed by a countless host of saints, fools-for-Christ, prophets, faithful women and children, priests and nuns, who are victorious, as they were and are not the practitioners of politicians, but, as practitioners of Christ, the victims of politicians. We know that we are on their side and are undefeatable, for we follow Christ, Who overthrew the devil and defeated our enemy, Death, restoring all to Life.

Jerusalem Conquers Babylon

Faithfulness to the thousands of years of the Saints of the Universal Church, from the Patriarchs and Prophets of the Old Bible, from the Mother of God to St John the Forerunner, from the Apostles to the Martyrs, from St Spyridon to St Nicholas, from St Basil to St John Chrysostom, from St Maximus the Confessor to St Paraskeva, from St Xenia to St Nectarius of Aegina, and faithfulness to the thousand years of Saints of the Russian Lands, are why the Russian Orthodox Church triumphs against the political schisms of mere Patriarchal ‘careerist administrators’ and ‘effective managers’. The Saints all show not the Primacy of ecclesiastical bureaucrats, but the Primacy of the Holy Spirit, the Victory of Christ. 

Afterword: God Gives Opportunities

The territory of the Russian Federation forms by far the largest country in the world. It is the territory of the USA and the Continent of Australia combined. Its natural resources are extraordinary. In a word, it has everything. It could easily support a population five or perhaps ten times greater than it has now. And yet this is the country that suicidally threw so much away in 1917, before which year the Russian Empire had undergone phenomenal growth for a generation, which was to continue. In 1914 its projected population by the year 2000 was some 600 million. That of the Russian Federation today is 145 million.

I remember visiting the USSR in 1973 and 1976 and saying that I would not return until the Church was free. I remember visiting the Russian Federation many times between 2007 and 2018 and always thinking the situation is on a knife-edge. Either it will go one way, towards Orthodoxy, or else to the other, to militaristic nationalism and purely outward and bureaucratic ritualism. It went this other way. However, there is still the chance to step back from suicide, to the catholicity of the Church, towards good relations with the other Local Churches, so rejoining the mainstream of Love and Truth. May it be so!