Author Archives: Father Andrew

On the Human Remains Found near Ekaterinburg and the Last Tsar

Introduction

On the night of 4/17 July 2018 I was fortunate enough to be able to take part in the centennial pilgrimage of 120,000 Orthodox in the Urals. For hours after the Divine liturgy, led by Patriarch Kyrill, which had ended at midnight, we marched swiftly from Ekaterinburg to Ganina Yama in honour of the martyrdom of the martyred Tsar Nicholas, His Family and their four retainers (the pilgrims also prayed to the martyred layman, Gregory Rasputin). As we arrived, day broke. But where are the relics of the Imperial Martyrs and their four retainers?

The Past

In May 1979 two amateur enthusiasts found human remains at Ganina Yama (‘Gabriel’s Pit’) near Ekaterinburg, the reputed burial place of Tsar Nicholas II, His Family and their four retainers. As the Soviet tyranny fell, in July 1991 the alleged remains of five family members (the Tsar, Tsarina and three daughters) and four retainers were exhumed. After forensic examination and positive DNA identification, the nine sets of remains were laid to rest with State honours in St Catherine’s Chapel of Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. In February 1998 the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church opposed the government’s decision to bury the remains, preferring a symbolic grave until their authenticity had been confirmed. Thus, when they were interred in July 1998, they were referred to by the priest conducting the service as ‘Christian victims of the Revolution’ rather than as the Imperial Family.

In 2007 the alleged remains of Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters, reckoned to be Maria by Russian anthropologists, were discovered at Porosjonkov Log (‘Piglets’ Ravine’), just a few hundred metres from Ganina Yama. These were positively DNA tested. In late 2015, at the insistence of the Church, Russian investigators took samples from the alleged remains of Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra for additional DNA testing, which appeared to reconfirm that the remains were those of the couple. However, very many serious Orthodox, Elder Nicholas (Guryanov), the historian Piotr Valentinovich Multatuli (the great-grandson of one of the martyrs) and many other medical specialists believed that the remains of the Romanovs had been destroyed at Ganina Yama during a ritual murder. Therefore, the alleged remains of the martyrs, as well as the place of one of the burials at Porosyonkov Log, are ignored by the faithful.

The Present

Why is there such opposition to the sets of DNA results, which clearly suggest that these are indeed the remains of the eleven victims of that dread night 107 years ago? Why has Patriarch Kyrill ‘kicked any official decision into the long grass’, as they say, by declaring that a Council of Bishops must be summoned in order to come to a decision? This is all the more a postponed decision, as no Council of Bishops could meet during the covid crisis or can meet now during the tragic conflict in the Ukraine, as the Ukrainian bishops, almost a quarter of the whole Russian Orthodox episcopate, cannot attend? The answer is because there is no unanimity within the Church or among the bishops. For the issue of ‘the Ekaterinburg Remains’ has been completely politicised, manipulated by politicians. This all began with the Western-installed Yeltsin State of the 1990s, which clearly wanted to dispose of the matter as soon as possible.

The Yeltsin regime, like its Western sponsors, wanted the DNA tests to be positive, so they could, literally, bury this painful subject. This was especially so given the Communist drunkard Yeltsin’s direct role in demolishing the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, where the slaying of the Imperial Family had taken place. Furthermore, in the 1990s, DNA testing was relatively very primitive. Moreover, it took place in the UK and the USA, so many Russians believe this allowed a further manipulation for the Western-backed Yeltsin regime. As for today, President Putin, a political strongman whose character was forged by the Soviet State, he rather despises Tsar Nicholas II as a weak ruler. As to the Church’s bishops, there is another problem. Much of the Church hierarchy is despised by many people (and many clergy). They are seen as ‘mini-oligarchs’ (to quote Russians inside Russia), who have no love for popular piety.

The Division

Thus, a gulf of distrust exists between the centralised, bureaucratised and tightly-controlled episcopate on the one hand and, on the other hand, the people, the parish clergy and the monastics. Sadly, today’s Russian Church has returned to exactly the same clericalist problems as in the pre-Revolutionary Church, by which Tsar Nicholas II was himself embarrassed and tried so despairingly to overcome. Furthermore, problems also arise from the sharp political divide within the episcopate itself. This is again just as there were before the Revolution, say between the arch-liberal Metr Anony (Vadkovsky) of Saint Petersburg and the arch-conservative Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev. Today, this political divide is again between what in secular language is called ‘left and right’, between liberals and conservatives, or in historic Church language, between Arians and Monophysites.

Thus, the Arians emphasise the human side of Church life, sometimes in a lax and modernist way, almost to the exclusion of Christ-God, whereas the Monophysites emphasise the clerical and the ascetic, sometimes harshly and mercilessly, almost to the exclusion of the human. Thus, today, of two very well-known bishops who support the DNA results, one severely compromised himself by supporting the State persecution of the Church in Russia during the covid restrictions and the other was involved in ecumenism, liberalism and a homosexual scandal, totally discrediting himself. However, some of those who oppose the recognition of the remains as those of the martyred Imperial Family and their retainers are marked by ultra-nationalism and anti-semitism. Usually, these people appear to be Non-Churchgoers, for whom Orthodoxy is a political and racist ideology, not the living Faith. What of the Orthodox?

Conclusion

In the Tradition, saints are revealed to us not by archaeologists or DNA, but by miracles. It is our belief that only when Russians have repented for the crimes of their ancestors and for their present practical atheism and changed their way of life, will the truth be revealed. However, this repentance concerns us all, for all Orthodox need to begin to live an Orthodox way of life for the truth to be revealed. For the truth of the past is only revealed when there is righteousness in the present. Only then shall we be worthy to know the Truth of God.

Convert or Converted? The Psychodrama of the Unconverted

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long, and is kind; love envies not; love vaunts not itself, is not puffed up.

1 Cor 13, 1-4

Religious psychosis, my ‘magical Orthodox thinking’, inspired by my obsession with listening to pseudo-elders on the internet, destroyed my life…I was living in fantasies that allowed me to escape reality and totally neglect my real responsibilities because I was setting myself an impossibly high standard of Christian probity and constantly failing.

Letter from a convert in the USA

Foreword

The worst case of a convert I have come across was in 1997, a young woman who had spent twelve years as a nun living in a cave in a Greek Old Calendarist sect in Greece and had come to realise that she had wasted her life. The only parallel I know of is that of that scandalous convent in the Urals led by the now fortunately defrocked Sergei Romanov, and which I visited in 2018. Time and again I return to the same conclusion: Keep to the mainstream, where there are families and children and flee from those who boast that they are not in communion with others. The Orthodox Church is the Catholic Church, that is the Church of Catholicity, of Conciliarity, and not of a lack of communion and so sectarianism, where there is no Church, only psychological manipulation.

Converts and Converted

The Apostles were all converts. How Christ gathered them together is recalled in the Gospels, for example the callings of Andrew and Peter the fishermen and Matthew the tax-collector. Then in the Acts of the Apostles we read about Saul the Persecutor who became Paul the Apostle on the Road to Damascus. However, we never think of the Apostles as ‘converts.’ Why? For the simple reason that they were converted and so their status as ‘converts’ ceased – they had become Orthodox Christians, like the rest of us. Although we were all once ‘converts’, even when we were children, we were then converted. For to remain a ‘convert’ means to remain in an infantile state. Those who think of themselves as converts need to grow up, to become adults and cease the things of children.

Pathology and the Convert

And now we come to the tragedy of ‘converts’ in contemporary Orthodox Christian life, and not only in the Diaspora, understanding that there is no theology here, only psychology, and often pathology, the manipulation of the vulnerable. For many of them do not want to know about the reality of Orthodox life and the services in Orthodox parishes and Orthodox families and how we live. Having listened to various fantasists and misguided idealists on the internet, often they straightaway want to become monks, which is impossible because to be a monk, obedience is essential. But Orthodoxy as monastic life is not accessible to them. For that would be to run before learning to walk. And that means falling. We have to start at the beginning, not to start at the end.

Pride at the Root

This is pride and it is pride that always goes before the fall. The problem with such converts is that they have entirely missed the point. They may join the Church, but this is not the same as ‘becoming Orthodox’, that is, being converted. To ‘become Orthodox’ does not mean keeping certain external monastic observances, such as growing long hair and (if a man) a long beard, (if a woman, wearing floor-length skirts and covering her hair with what looks like a table-cloth), dressing in black or talking with exotic words and incessantly and very boringly about the Typicon, ritual regulations, the canons, ‘the Fathers,’ or individual clerics. All this is irrelevant and ordinary Orthodox parishioners do not do such things, it is boring. Just look at them! Love is the sign of Orthodoxy.

Love at the Root

The essence of Orthodox Christianity is to acquire love for God, for others as for oneself. All external observances and long and boring issues about clerical personalities are irrelevant. Otherwise. it is all ‘sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’, because they have no love, as the Apostle Paul wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. And tragically there are ‘converts’ who even after fifty and sixty years have remained ‘converts.’ This is because they have no love, for love is the fruit of maturity, which is what they do not have, precisely because they have remained ‘converts’, infantiles, for they have never become Orthodox Christians. As Fr Seraphim (Rose) quoted an elderly Russian woman saying about a ’convert’ some fifty years ago: ‘He is certainly Orthodox, but is he a Christian?’

Afterword

Indeed, this disease of ‘convertitis’ has nothing to do with Christianity. It is always characterised by negativity, hypercriticism and interference in the lives of others. This dissatisfaction with others (real Orthodox are dissatisfied only with themselves and are generous and indulgent towards others) always results in the abandonment of Orthodoxy and schism, even if it takes them 50 or 60 years. There have been many contemporary examples, in the Old Calendarist schisms, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian (ROCOR). The convert disease of ‘illusionment’ always ends up in disillusionment, which, by definition, can only come from ‘illusionment’, which is called in Greek ‘plani’, in Russian ‘prelest’, in Romanian ‘inselare’, and in Latin ‘illusio’. Such a waste of life.

Papism and Protestantism as Infantile and Fascist Deviations from the Church

Foreword: Psychopathology and Fascism

Most Orthodox Christians love God and love their neighbour as ourselves. That is to say, we respect ourselves because we know that, despite our sins, we know that God made us. Those with low self-esteem, usually those who were abused in some way in childhood, belong to the realm of psychiatry, for they do not respect themselves. They are not necessarily humble, they are humiliated – and humble and humiliated are very different things, Interestingly, cult-leaders deliberately confuse the two and use that confusion to manipulate or ‘gaslight’ their victims. Those with high self-esteem, in everyday English, the proud, often from a wealthy background, seek power and domination over others, through politics or religion and, in terms of psychopathology, suffer from narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissists are always paranoid and Fascist, regardless of whether they are ‘Democrats’, ‘Christians’, ‘Nazis’ or ‘Communists’.

Introduction

Now, narcissism is precisely the most common Western spiritual disease today. Narcissism is an offshoot of the insecurity of infantility, but it is very common in materialistic or relatively wealthy Western societies. It is a result of a lack of physical suffering which causes immaturity, which is encouraged by the spoilt culture of social media, Instagram, Facebook, Tik-Tok etc. Narcissism is characterised by their insistence on a sort of ‘Papal’ infallibility, ‘I am always right’ and ‘I am superior’, as seen precisely in spoilt children. They insist that they are always right, as they are the centre of the world, which owes them its entire devotion, and they lie to and deal out harsh punishments to those who disagree with them. This sense of entitlement and vanity demands that the narcissist must constantly have his ego massaged. He is ‘right’ in a very authoritarian way (Trump and Blair are the most obvious examples).

The Roman Catholic Deviation of Authority

Historically, Papism has been a local disease of religious authority or rather of religious authoritarianism, which proclaims: ‘All truth comes from me, for I am the Head of the Church’. Papism, historically originating in the pagan Roman Emperors who had themselves worshipped as gods and mediators, is dogmatically closely connected with and justified by the later filioque dogma, which reinforces Papism precisely by dogmatising it. The filioque claims that the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father, does not pass through or irradiate the Son of God, but actually originates in the Son of God. Now, once the Pope of Rome claimed to replace the Son of God as ‘the Vicar of Christ’, this means that the Pope of Rome, purporting to be the source of the Holy Spirit, and so supplanted Christ, has absolute authority, infallibility. This is clearly a spiritual deviation or heresy and has absolutely no foundation in the Gospels.

However, there are Orthodox Patriarchs who also seem to claim absolute authority (they know their names, we do not need to repeat them here). They claim that they can supplant Church Councils, which are the real practical organs of authority in the Church, providing that those Councils are inspired by the Holy Spirit. We must recall that by no means all Councils are inspired, as we saw at the Robber Council in Crete in 2016. For the source of authority is the Holy Spirit, Who operates through the Church, the Body of Christ, Whose Head is Christ. The Holy Spirit wrote the Holy Scriptures and inspires Tradition, which are identical, as their origin is identical. With their filioque spirit, for instance, some Orthodox claim that if their particular Patriarch is not mentioned by name in any particular church, it is not Orthodox, but schismatic or heretical. This may not be systematic, institutionalised, dogmatised filioquism, but it is no less filioquism.

We can see this today in the Ukraine, the Baltic States and Moldova, where because of local State Russophobia and centralised Moscow’s refusal to grant autocephaly to the Local Church in those countries, the Russian Patriarch may not be mentioned by name during services. Therefore, racist fanatics in Russia reckon that those Churches are not Orthodox, but schismatic! These unloving people would deprive tens of millions of Orthodox of salvation. These are the ‘Orthodox’ Papists, who replace the Holy Spirit with a mere Patriarch. They seem to forget that in the majority of Orthodox Churches, the Russian Patriarch (or any other Patriarch) is not mentioned by name in services. Such is the racist ignorance of these nominal Orthodox, that they do not even know that there are other Local Churches, whose Patriarch is not mentioned at services or who do not even have a Patriarch to mention, but a Metropolitan or an Archbishop.

The Protestant Deviation of Salvation by Baptism

Rather like the submission to Islam, the simple confession of Protestantism is said by many to mean at once that ‘You are saved’. This over-simplicity, the idea that a few words mean salvation, is a reaction to the Papist deviation which declares that a few words of submission to Papism also mean salvation. In reality, it is not so simple, we are saved by the mercy of God, not by Papist or Protestant sets of words and formulas. However, in Protestantism, this idea of salvation leads to the Protestant obsession with baptism. Although in reality baptism is only the beginning of salvation, for the Protestant deviation baptism is salvation. This is why fundamentalists, including so-called ‘converts’ to Orthodoxy from Protestant backgrounds, are obsessed with literalism and forms of baptism. They imagine that this makes them ‘Super-Orthodox’, more Orthodox than the Orthodox! It is all a very Protestant, ‘OneTrueChurch’ reflex.

This is a very unloving and censorious viewpoint, typical of very conservative Calvinism and Lutheranism, and like all views which have no love, they soon become heretical. The heresy here is that such ‘Super Orthodox’ deny the Orthodox sacraments of those received into the Church by economy by chrismation or by simple confession, sacraments which those received may have been taking for years. Ironically, it is these ‘Super Orthodox’ who are the real Papists! Thus, such are ‘filioquists’, for they supplant the Holy Spirit with themselves. These quenchers of the Holy Spirit will deny even the validity of emergency baptism of babies in hospital. Another example: if you are dying in a desert and your companion is not baptised, you can baptise him with the liquid in your mouth. Baptism is the only sacrament that laypeople can perform, is accessible to all and with water, the most common liquid on earth.

Another example: There is a well-known story about a 19^th century Russian priest who discovered to his horror that because of a snowstorm and a resulting misunderstanding when he had been about to be baptised as a baby, he had not been baptised. The case was referred to Metr (now St) Philaret of Moscow (1782-1867). He declared that all the sacraments performed by that priest were valid, for the grace of the Holy Spirit is in all the sacraments, not just in one. The priest’s status was validated by the sacraments of confession, communion, marriage and ordination which he had received. It is for this reason of a literalist and formal rite that Protestants are forever counting the number of baptised and how many people go to church each Sunday. However, we Orthodox are the baptised who go to Church because we need spiritual support. Orthodoxy is in our values and so in our way of life, not in a Sunday formality or ritual.

Conclusion

We draw the obvious conclusion that you do not have to be a Papist or a Protestant to make errors or to wish to dominate. It is just that in Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, these errors of self-centred authoritarianism and the narcissistic dogmatisation of error, the lack of love, are systematised and institutionalised, because they are dogmatised. However, by no means all Roman Catholics or Protestants consciously confess these errors; most have never heard of the filioque and do not agree with the institution that they supposedly belong to. Systematised errors are called wrong choices or ‘heresies’. However, this does not excuse Orthodox, often ‘converts’, who do the same thing and indeed do worse. They should know better. Sadly, we know many an Orthodox bishop and some priests who fall into these errors of authoritarian exclusivity, which are sectarianism and cultishness – heresy.

A Suggestion for the Future: The Church of the Western Lands

Foreword: Towards the Local Church

Following a recent post, some readers have asked me how I envision the shape of a future Local Church in Western Europe in concrete terms. You may read on for this, but only as long as you understand that my view may well be completely irrelevant. God creates the Church, human-beings do not. My first suggestion for a future new Local Church was made in 1988. It was thrown into the bin of an Archbishop, who suicidally had no vision and who literally considered that the Church should only ever use Slavonic or Greek in its services. He lost all the vital forces from his Archdiocese, including the present Metr Athenagoras in Belgium and his parishes there, as well as many others. Only the freemasons stayed with him from among the younger generation.

And yet this present proposition is based on the same one made 37 years ago. However, as the old Russian emigration has since 1988 died out and there has been mass emigration from Eastern Europe, it is also different. We have always navigated between the political extremes in the Orthodox Church. Since one extreme was, and is, Greek (racist, imperialist and still CIA-controlled) and another extreme is Russian (racist, imperialist and now nationalist-controlled), it is only natural that we in Western Europe should now be with the Romanian Church. In the last eighteen years this has become easily the majority Orthodox group in Western Europe, speaking a Latin language, in communion with all, and, in the mainstream, distant from both Greek and Russian extremes.

The foundation of a new Local Church presupposes that all Local Churches which have a Diaspora on the territory concerned are able to and wish to collaborate to grant autocephaly together. Therefore, our suggestion must presume that the Churches of Moscow and Constantinople have reconciled by the time that any proposition can be discussed. It also presumes that the splinters of the Russian emigration in Western Europe (one based in Paris, the other in New York, and neither now Russian in spirit at all) will have been absorbed into the Mother Church, once they have collapsed.

As one well-known and very experienced Russian Metropolitan from Moscow confirmed to me about a month ago: ‘It is inevitable that both parts of the Russian Emigration will fall into our hands, like ripe fruit hanging from a tree’. Of course he is right, it is inevitable and always has been, ever since 2007. Therefore, unlike one German ROCOR bishop who is extremely hostile to the Mother Church in Moscow and continually expresses highly critical and sectarian attitudes towards it, we believe it would be much better to be positive and contribute the real pre-Revolutionary heritage of ROCOR towards the new Local Church, instead of rejecting all others who have different customs.

The Suggestion

This new Autocephalous Local Church would cover the territories of the 412 million people and 21 countries of Western Europe, listed below and grouped into eight regions of on average some 50 million each. (We do not include here Eastern European Hungary and the three Baltic States with Finland, which will surely have their own two Local Churches, like Poland and Czechoslovakia, long before any of the eight regions of Western Europe below).

This Local Church would be composed of the at present 2,000 or so Orthodox parishes and monasteries and the seven million or so nominal Orthodox in Western Europe. There would initially be a Synod of 40 bishops (which is about the number of Orthodox bishops present in Western Europe today), led by the ‘Archbishop of Paris and All the Western Lands’. He would be in Paris, as this has long been the centre of most of the Orthodox jurisdictions in Western Europe.

Each regional Archbishop would be chosen from the Orthodox national majority of that particular region. The terminology used here is the Greek, in which an Archbishop is higher than a Metropolitan, who is in fact a Diocesan bishop (and called a Bishop in the Russian and Serbian practice), and a Bishop is in fact an assistant or vicar to the Archbishop or Metropolitan of his nationality, if there is one on that territory, or else he is simply a Diocesan Bishop.

A Diocese would usually be defined as about 50 parishes representing 25,000 practising Orthodox, indicating about 1 million practising Orthodox. These Dioceses would not initially be geographical, but ethnic, though with time, they could gradually become geographical. The total population is given for each region.

France and Monaco (66 million)

Archbishop of Paris and All the Western Lands (Romanian)

Bishop of Southern France, French Switzerland and Monaco (Romanian)

Metropolitan of the Church of Russia in Western Europe

Bishop of Western France and Brittany (Russian)

Metropolitan of the Church of Constantinople in France

Bishop of the Church of Serbia in France

Metropolitan of the Church of Antioch in Western Europe

Metropolitan of the Church of Bulgaria in Western Europe

Metropolitan of the Church of Georgia in Western Europe

Germany (84 million)

Archbishop of Berlin and All Germany (Russian)

Bishop of Western Germany (Russian)

Metropolitan of the Church of Romania in Germany

Bishop of Northern Germany (Romanian)

Metropolitan of the Church of Constantinople in Germany

Bishop of the Church of Serbia in Germany

The British Isles and Ireland (74 million)

Archbishop of London and All the Isles (Romanian)

Bishop of Ireland (Romanian)

Metropolitan of the Church of Constantinople in the British Isles and Ireland

Bishop of Scotland and Northern England (Greek)

Bishop of the Church of Russia in the British Isles and Ireland

Bishop of the Church of Serbia in the British Isles and Ireland

Italy, San Marino and Malta (60 million)

Archbishop of Rome and All Italy, Malta and San Marino (Romanian)

Bishop of the Church of Romania in Italy

Metropolitan of the Church of Constantinople in Italy

Bishop of the Church of Serbia in Italy

Iberia: Spain, Portugal, Andorra (58 million)

Archbishop of Iberia (Romanian)

Bishop of the Church of Romania in Spain and Andorra

Bishop of the Church of Romania in Portugal

Bishop of the Church of Russia in Iberia

Metropolitan of the Church of Constantinople in Iberia

Benelux (30 million)

Archbishop of the Netherlands, Flanders and Luxembourg (Greek)

Bishop of the Church of Romania in the Netherlands, Flanders and Luxembourg

Bishop of the Church of Russia in the Netherlands, Flanders and Luxembourg

Scandinavia: Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland (22 million)

Archbishop of Stockholm and All Scandinavia (Serbian)

Metropolitan of the Church of Constantinople in Scandinavia

Bishop of the Church of Romania in Scandinavia

Bishop of the Church of Russia in Scandinavia

Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria (18 million)

Archbishop of Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria (Russian)

Metropolitan of the Church of Constantinople in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria

Bishop of the Church of Serbia in Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria

Afterword: Battling Against Exclusivism

There are those in the Church who unite and there are those who divide. The dividers are always exclusivists, but there are two different ways of being exclusive – racially and doctrinally. For example, the nationalist dividers will say such things as ‘Only Greeks are really Orthodox’ or ‘Only Russians have kept Orthodoxy’. In other words, they exclude all others on racist grounds and that swells their pride, as they of course belong to the ‘right’ nationality.

However, there are also those who divide by laying claim to alone possessing ‘the True Faith’, who exclude others by laying claim to an exclusive faith. Such love to be exotic and esoteric, using words like ‘temple’, ‘omoforion’ and ‘noetic’ for their pseudo-mystical cult, to be ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’. They spend their time digging trenches between themselves and other Orthodox, thus creating artificial divisions, for ever inventing new ‘teachings’ which are exclusive to them. This swells their pride, as they paint themselves even further into their ghetto corner. This has long been the temptation of some in ROCOR, especially the rebaptisers, whose hearts clearly lack love.

The uniters are those who do not pay attention to languages, for they are all only weak echoes of Divine language, or customs. We are Orthodox Christians, beyond nationalities. However, we are not abstract dreamers who promote some heady philosophy of intellectual theories and dreamy unfinished, because disincarnate, iconography. We are also down to earth, incarnate, and belong in our bodies to the places where we live and wish to have some influence to shape human reality there.

As long as credit is given to the exclusivists and they are put into power, there is little hope for a Local Church. However, today we are slowly moving towards a situation where the exclusivists are increasingly discrediting themselves. For instance, the same German bishop as mentioned above told the local Moscow Patriarchal bishop after the Russian reconciliation in 2007, who was rejoicing at unity, that, ‘No, we are not together, we are still enemies.’ Thus, we see that some of the greatest impediments to unity come from crazy converts, not only from Eastern European nationalists. And the crazy converts have merely used the canonical authority of the Russian Mother-Church in order to mask who they really are – sectarians and schismatics.

May God’s will be done.

The Last American Emperor?

The Russia government naively believed in the Western guarantees of the Minsk I and II Accords, which Kiev and the West never observed, and so let Kiev’s genocide of the Ukrainian Donbass continue for years. Now, on the eve of a new round of peace talks, Iran was stabbed in the back in exactly the same way, by ‘God-chosen’ Israel and the missiles of the USA. The fact that the duplicitous USA and the West lie, cheat and deceive, means that nobody will believe them again. How will any sort of trust be restored?

As for President Trump, he appears to believe in the same Hollywood scenarios that only teenagers believe in, with his insane threats against Iran, which have nothing to do with reality and suggest that he may have dementia. Hubris underestimates. And chronically so. Indeed, the Trump Presidency of the USA may be over, as he has so far shown himself to be rather the Vice-President of the genocidal US vassal Israel, from which he takes his orders. Through his lack of any basic historical, geographical and political knowledge, his bluff and bluster, his gangster-like death threats, and his extreme narcissism, he has betrayed his own pro-American MAGA base.

In this way the USA is dying at the hands of its Zionist vassal. Just as the US elite wanted to destroy Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’, as they repeated many times, so now it wants to destroy Iran ‘to the last Israeli’, egged on by the primitive theological thuggery of its Zionist Evangelicals, and in the future to destroy China ‘to the last Taiwanese’. But he promised his MAGA base that he would stop beginning new wars. It is all narcissistic hubris and fantasy. And so, as a result of chronically underestimating Iran’s might (just as they did with Russia’s might), American warships are now scurrying away from Iran and US bases in the area are being evacuated.

Just as the US made up the excuse that it could invade Iraq, as Iraq had ‘weapons of mass destruction’, so now it makes out that Iran is ‘close to making nuclear weapons’, an imaginary mantra that it has been repeating for some thirty years and still no nuclear weapons! The US is frightened, and pessimists predict a US nuclear attack on Iran and a Third World War with nuclear weapons. There is no need for that, an exit is still possible. After foolishly sending a few missiles into the Iranian mountains, Trump only has to launch talks with Iran, perhaps with Russian and Chinese help, and then back off. Then he can announce that Iran has renounced nuclear weapons (which it has never had – but no need to add that bit), and so it all turns out to be a great Trumpian diplomatic victory over Iran.

It could still be the end of the American Emperor, who has no clothes, and so the end of the American Empire. And it is also the end of its lapdog colonies, of the humiliated Macron and Merz, kneeling like the pro-Israeli Starmer at the Empire’s feet (https://www.msn.com/en-gb/politics/government/pic-of-the-day-keir-starmer-falls-at-donald-trump-s-feet-in-embarrassing-g7-moment/ar-AA1GSZvF?ocid=BingNewsSerp). It could also be the end of Western hegemony in general. Then the peoples of the Western world will have to liberate and decolonise themselves from their barbaric and parasitic elite and their millennial ideology which proclaims that they represent God on earth.

What would this mean? In Europe, the bankrupt EU fantasy would collapse. As for the even more bankrupt US (its debt has just exceeded $37 trillion), there is a danger now that it will disintegrate, with West coast liberal California already in revolt and the Mexican South thinking of returning to Mexico. As for the Centre, or Mid-West, it wants to be American and the East coast wants to remain Anglo. If the Roman Empire is collapsing, then a New World Order will spontaneously be born out of the chaos and decadence. And the chief midwife of all this would be Russia, assisted by China.

The One True Church and the Two False Churches: The Pastors Persecuted by the Politicians

Introduction

Even though they do not wish to join the Orthodox Church, let alone actually become Orthodox, certain Non-Orthodox admirers of Orthodoxy sometimes pronounce: ‘Yes, the Orthodox Church is the Church of the Holy Spirit’. They speak with naïvety and sentimentality, which is the result of their spiritual tourism. In reality, ‘The Orthodox Church is the Church of the War for the Holy Spirit, and it is a very bitter war. We Orthodox have two great enemies, those who prefer Mammon to the Holy Spirit and those who prefer Phariseeism to the Holy Spirit. Christ suffered from both and warned about both. And both of them crucified and continue to crucify Christ and His Church.

The Church of the War for the Holy Spirit

The Head of the Orthodox Church is neither a Pope, nor a Patriarch, nor any other worldly leader, but the Risen Christ. The Church is His Body, irradiated and governed by the Holy Spirit, as the Church is the Bearer of the Holy Spirit. Our Church is not a dead body, a corpse, but it makes Saints, who are the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Any organisation that does not make Saints is not the Church, it is a mere human business, a sect or a corporation, not the Divino-human Church. For the Saints are the sign of the Holy Spirit. Where there are Saints, there is the Holy Spirit. Where there is the Holy Spirit, there are Saints. And where the Holy Spirit is not, there are no Saints.

The Church of Mammon

Ask any Orthodox from any Orthodox country why they rarely go to church and they will usually tell you that it is because of priests who demand money from them. For alongside the real Church there exists a parasitic organisation known as the ‘Church of Mammon’. This is full of those, mainly clerics, who carve out of the business careers for themselves and high salaries, exploiting the people, charging them money for all. Some are sexual perverts and the unprincipled, they swim with the tide, according to the wishes and whims of those who pay them. For them, the Head of the Church is not Christ, but States, and the Church is not governed by the Holy Spirit, but by Mammon.

The Church of the Pharisees

Ask any Orthodox from any Orthodox country why they rarely go to church and they will tell you that it is in part because of narrow-minded bigots and fanatics. For alongside the real Church there exists a second parasitic organisation known as the ‘Church of the Pharisees’. The Pharisees are clerics and laypeople who self-righteously proclaim that they are the heads of the Church, national leaders, and hypocritically devise all manner of human rules to oppress and condemn others and to cling on to power. They are deeply involved in State politics, nationalism and even militarisation. The word ‘schismatics’ for them denotes those who are of another nationality and do not worship their ethnarchs.

Conclusion

Who will win in this War for the Holy Spirit against both the Church of Mammon and the Church of the Pharisees? On the face of it, we know that these two powerful groups of enemies of the Church of the Holy Spirit work closely together. The businessmen and the pharisees love each other, as they have the same interests and so feed off one another. It would seem that it is two against one. However, paradoxically, their persecution of the Church makes us stronger. Their Persecuting Church never wins over our Persecuted Church, for we know that the last word in history belongs to Christ, Persecuted and Crucified, but also Risen from the dead. Not Death will vanquish, but Life.

The Defeat of Europe and the Victory of Europeans

‘Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the dogs of war’.

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare

A Millennium of Attempts to Expand Europe

The fanatical European ruling class still call the barbarian kinglet Charlemagne (748-814) ‘The Father of Europe’. In fact, he was the Destroyer of Europeans, murdering nearly 5,000 Saxons in 782 and trying to cut off North-Western Europe from the Church. This he did with his barbarian heresy against the Holy Spirit, which replaced God with a mere man, and with his proto-Protestant denial that the Holy Spirit can sanctify matter, a heresy known as iconoclasm. Fortunately, his little empire fell after he died and his twin heretical ideology of filioquism and iconoclasm was rejected by Rome.

Unfortunately, his whole ‘European’ construct, or ideology, was later revived. For from the first half of the eleventh century on, the same barbarian Teutons took over the Western Capital in Rome. At once they accelerated their conquest and so their invention of what they came to call Europe, expanding southwards to the Italians, Spanish and Portuguese, northwards to the English, Celts and Scandinavians, and eastwards to the Hungarians, Slavs and Balts. Expansion westwards could only come much later, after the decision to cross the Ocean in order to invade and settle what they eventually called ‘the Americas’.

Thus, by the end of that fatal eleventh century, the expansion of ‘Europe’ had been extended to West Asia and the Holy Land with massacres and genocide. Then it went to North Africa and from the fifteenth century on to the rest of Africa, as well as to East and South Asia, to what is now South and North America, and on to Australasia. Amazingly, one thousand years on, this expansion is still ongoing, in the efforts of today’s Europe to dominate and colonise the ‘borderlands’ of Europe, in the Caucasus, Moldova, Belarus, the Baltics, and above all in the Ukraine.

In the Borderlands

For the word ‘Ukraine’, used in this context first by the Hapsburgs at the end of the nineteenth century, quite literally means ‘borderlands’. It is the same logic of encircling Russia by conquering and controlling its borderlands which they use as battering rams against it. This is why they want to make both the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea into ‘NATO lakes’. These expansionary efforts are pursued through corrupt local elites, with their oligarchs and corrupted puppet politicians. Now they are also trying to surround Russia from the Republics of Central Asia, Iran and Syria, where they have started fatal wars.

Just as the West uses the Ukraine as a battering ram to regime-change Russia, so the USA uses Israel as a battering ram to regime-change Iran and the Taiwan as a battering ram to regime-change China. All these countries, the Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, have to be denazified, for their militant and racist ideology of Nazism promotes their militarisation through aggressive military groupings such as NATO. Just as the Ukraine (NATO) is being demilitarised by Russia which is destroying its arms in the Ukraine, so Iran is demilitarising Israel and China will demilitarise Taiwan. Denazification will follow only after Demilitarisation.

There are even those in that elite who want to expand their ‘Europe’ to Canada! (No surprise, for the European ruling class have already extended their demonic singing competition, ‘Eurovision’, to ‘European’ Israel and Australia! Now the free world has launched ‘Intervision’ to replace Eurovision). ‘Europe’ is nothing to do with the north-western peninsula of Asia, it is not a geographical project, but a purely political project, all about power and money, which always begins by discrediting and demonising others. If you want to understand it, then, as they say in the land of the dollar, ‘Follow the money’.

But Freedom is in the Air

However, freedom is coming. The new Superpower of East Asia and Australasia is China. The Western world has at best only second place there now. In South Asia it is India. In Africa the last colonial power, France, has been kicked out by Russia and China. Will North America free itself? Could the southern part of the United States return to Mexico and Central America? For, beyond that, South America’s greatest trading partner is already China. Now, having lost its proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine, the bipolar Emperor Trump has launched yet another proxy war, this time against Iran, through its agent, Israel.

Once more the Western world has camouflaged its evil aggression behind ‘talks’. In the Ukraine it was by ‘Minsk Agreements’, in the case of Iran, it was by equally insincere American ‘talks’. The Western regime-change operations against both Russia and Iran have failed, both based on vastly underestimating and deliberately despising Russia and Iran. The West came to believe in its own delusional propaganda myths. No-one else did. The Western world has lost. One word, BRICS, has defeated it, even though the attack against Iran was an attack against BRICS, of which Russia, China and Iran are the most important members.

The rout of the Western world is illustrated by its demented leader, Biden, and its narcissistic leader, Trump, and by the political and military pygmy leaders who hold a cocaine party on a train to Kiev, use Ukrainian male prostitutes in London and celebrate their Nazi grandfathers in Brussels. None of these European ‘leaders’ with their pro-war rhetoric has any popularity among their peoples. Having created genocide and slavery for ten long centuries in Europe and then on other continents, culminating in two ‘World Wars’, now the crazy Western elite wants a Third World War. The Western monster must die.

Afterword: Sow the Wind, Reap the Whirlwind

Just now the USA stands on the brink of yet another war. This time it is against Israel’s infamous Pearl Harbour style unprovoked attack against Iran. Iran has no nuclear weapons, is 2-3 years away from having any, and was sitting at the negotiation table where it was already close to agreeing to never having any nuclear weapons. And then the USA, under Israeli pressure, broke off those talks and began to unfold its plan of two decades ago to destroy Iran, as it did Iraq. Libya, Syria etc. Trump’s mental instability has hit a new low, as he supports the genocide of Iranian civilians carried out by Israel with US arms.

As usual, the USA, and its Israeli vassal (though some say that the USA is the vassal of Israel) has totally underestimated the strength of Iran. It is now much more likely that it is Israel that will be regime-changed by Iran, and not Iran by Israel. For Israel is now receiving the same treatment as it has dealt out in Gaza. President Trump has utterly betrayed those who believed his lies that he would put the USA first and stop entering new wars. The only hope now is that either the ultra-erratic Trump can be persuaded to do the opposite of what he seems to want to do, or else that he be certified, removed and replaced.

Article 1500: Visit of Vladica Atanasie, Tonsures and Ordinations

www.saintjohnsorthodoxchurch.com

www.facebook.com/stjohnsorthodoxcolchester

https://roarch.org.uk/parishes-england/

On 10, 13 and 14 June, many of us gathered to prepare our Church and Hall for Vladica’s visit. We tidied, cleaned, hoovered, mopped, polished and painted, setting everything up for the big day. On Saturday 14 Vladica Atanasie (Rusnak) and Archdeacon Paul arrived back from consecrating the church in Padua in Italy and reached the hotel we had booked for them just outside Colchester at 11.30 pm.

Vladica arrived at church at 8.45 on Sunday morning, All Saints Day. The Liturgy began at 9.30, after six men, Georgian Cosma, Nicolae Briscan, Florin Murgu, Vadim Khoruzhenko, Ilie Nuno and Antonio Brailescu, had been tonsured readers at the Third Hour and Reader Sergiu Novitchi has been ordained subdeacon at the Sixth Hour.

During the Liturgy Deacon Sergiu Smantana was ordained priest and Subdeacon Sergiu Novitchi was ordained deacon. (Unlike in the Russian Church, ordinations in the Romanian Church in Western Europe are carried out free of charge and are therefore no candidate is forced to wait years for ordination for money reasons. However, all candidates must be qualified and have studied theology and pastoral care or be in the process of so doing).

The Liturgy was concelebrated by Vladica, Archdeacon Paul, seven priests, Fathers Andrew Phillips, Ioan Iana, Leonid Tauleanu, Grigorie Mereacre, Mihai Constantinescu, Alexandru Visan, Nikolai Bulat and our two deacons. Vladica Atanasie (Rusnak) is himself Moldovan, as were four of the priests and one of the deacons who concelebrated. As usual, both choirs, the Russian-English choir and the Romanian-Moldovan choir, with Moldovans, of whom there were many in church, singing in all languages.

With about 250 people in church, communion was as usual from three chalices, with about 70 children and many of our faithful friends coming to us from the Greek monastery in Tolleshunt Knights. The Liturgy finished at 12.45 and Vladica gave Fr Andrew various awards, including a second epigonation in honour of St Athanasius, the right to wear his mitre, awarded by a now departed bishop (Eternal Memory!) in 2020 for 35 years’ service, and a third jewelled cross. (Vladica Metropolitan Joseph had already given Fr Andrew the right to celebrate the Liturgy with the holy doors open until ‘Our Father’). The Liturgy was filmed by a representative from the Romanian Patriarchal Trinitas TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT6kyDa_nho

After the Liturgy, we all ate in the Hall, which had been decorated by our Moldovan and Romanian parishioners and beneath our two marquees in the garden. Vladica spoke to Russian speakers in Russian and others in their own languages, Romanian, English and Italian. Vladica will be returning to his Colchester parish in a few months’ time and will then ordain the next batch of candidates. It was made clear that Vladica would like to gather others of Non-Romanian nationalities into our Archdiocese. He mentioned to us that he has ordained 16 men to the priesthood and the deaconate since 10 May 2025. In Italy, where he served before, he set up 31 parishes on the old calendar. Vladica is about to start a doctorate on the subject of ‘Autocephaly’, a theme that has been dear to our hearts for some 50 years.

Vladica will be returning to us next on our Christmas, 7 January 2026. Everyone is very happy!

Come, Holy Spirit! Over 5,000 Words on over Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Church

Fifty Years of History; 2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia; The Ukraine; The Suicide of ROCOR; Eastern Papism; A New Local Church

Fifty Years of History

Q: Why is 2025 a significant year for you personally?

A: 2025 marks fifty years of faithfulness to the Orthodox Church and Faith, forty-seven of them in the Russian Church, three in the Romanian Church, and forty years as an Orthodox clergyman.

Q: When did you begin this journey?

A: My conscious journey began in 1968, when I was twelve years old. I realised then that my destiny was in the Orthodox Church and set about studying Russian, though there had been contacts with two local White Russian families before that. However, as I was under age, I was not able to join the Church until I was eighteen. Six years of waiting. In 1973 I at last managed to visit an Orthodox church. This was the Russian émigré chapel inside the house on the corner of Canterbury Road in Oxford. Soon after, the chapel became a library with the late Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, as the new octagonal University chapel, now Greek, had been opened in the garden outside.

Q: Why did you join the Russian Church?

A: Hobson’s choice, as they say in Cambridge! The only other Local Churches present in this country then, the Greek and the Serbian, would just tell you to go away. ‘You are not one of us’. They were ethnic clubs. Therefore, you had no choice. Only the two Russian jurisdictions would accept you. Not that they were very gracious about it either. They gave you the impression that they would accept you, but they would have preferred not to. Only because the elderly Russian emigres had no political power or money and were dying out, did some of them accept you. Many told us they would sooner die out than accept ‘foreigners’. They also entertained bitter political divisions and polemics, which you just had to put up with and make sense of.

2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia

Q: In 2022 three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England, the so-called ‘Colchester Diocese’, though it stretches to Coventry and Manchester, that is, many ROCOR parishes, 5,000 people and 15 clergy, including three Western rite clergy, left ROCOR and 12 of you (all except for the Western riters) joined the Romanian Church. So do you regret that you had worked for forty-seven years for the unity of the divided three parts of the Russian Church?

A: No, not at all! To work for unity is always good. Without unity Churches fall out of communion and eventually become sects. This is my real experience, I have seen this and lived this. This is what began to happen to the two Russian émigré Churches, the smaller one based in Paris and the larger one based in New York, after the last emigres who had been adults and known the realities of Russia before 1917 had died out and direct contact with reality was lost.

After them, by the early 2000s, the sectarian fantasies, to the left and to the right, in both of them became ever stronger. The Paris group began falling away definitively towards liberal secularism under masonic sponsorship and the New York group began falling away definitively into old calendarist sectarianism under CIA sponsorship, like that of the elderly CIA Colonel Magerovsky. We were eyewitnesses to both and knew all the personalities involved, writing vigorously against both extremist tendencies. There was only one way out for them, to rejoin the broad Centre, which could hold everyone together.

Indeed, we finally got both parts into communion with the Centre in Moscow and so with each other, just in time, with many of the extremists falling away, 47% of the Paris group and 5% of the New York group. However, ironically, our triumph lasted only a little more than one year, for they fell out of communion with each other again. The fault here was entirely that of the very aggressive, old calendarist pharisee-bishops of New York, who had remained in ROCOR or infiltrated it after unity and were wreaking havoc. This took place after set in the dementia of the ever-memorable Metr Hilarion, who had no idea what they were doing in his name. The schism came in December 2020. Only one bishop resisted, the anti-sectarian and anti-rebaptiser Archbishop Peter of Chicago, who had been an altar boy to St John, but who has since died. His see is now without a permanent bishop and many there are now out of control.

Q: Why did the Centre in Moscow not try and hold the two émigré parts together?

A: As the Russians say of themselves, ‘We are slow to harness, but quick to ride’. In other words, Moscow is very passive, it does nothing for, say, twenty years despite all the warnings of the coming explosion from the grassroots, and then, too late, after the explosion, it overreacts to the extreme. This is the result of not working incrementally and being pastorally interested, only politically interested. Firstly, Moscow had, and refused to have, little or any understanding of the provincial Russian emigration and its petty political arguments. Secondly, Moscow was distracted from pastoral care by international politics, for by that time Moscow had itself fallen out of communion with the Greeks, after the grossly uncanonical actions of the Greeks in the Ukraine, breaking the first canons of the Apostles. Again, here too, Moscow overreacted.

Here we see how the fall from communion with the Greeks by the Centre affected the rest. Lack of communion is like an infection, a virus. So all our work for unity was undone by the Moscow error of overreaction to the Greek error, splitting off from the Church. Then, not having turned the other cheek, Moscow ‘did a Constantinople’, by interfering in the jurisdiction of Alexandria in Africa. Little wonder that people then began to say that ‘Moscow is as bad as Constantinople’.

Q: What do you do, if even the Centre is infected by the spirit of disunity and without principles tolerates sectarianism, and ignores schism and even the heresy of rebaptising Orthodox?

A: In such a case, you must transfer to a canonical Local Church which is not infected with the disease of schism and has a Diaspora structure. Today, that means neither the Russians, nor the Greeks. As I had been to seminary in the 1970s and a couple of the seminarians had become bishops, namely in the Serbian and Romanian Churches, and since I had been around for a long time and had met lots of other bishops since then and many had read the translations of my writings into Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, German and Czech, we had a choice of where to go. After the Russian betrayal of us in the Non-schismatic Diaspora, all the others offered to protect us from the new, brutal, sectarian, uncanonical and anti-pastoral ROCOR. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

The Ukraine

Q: What was the connection between your departure for the Romanian Patriarchate and the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: None, directly. We were received by our old friend, the very experienced Metr Joseph (Pop) of the four-million strong Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Romanian Orthodox Church on 16 February 2022, as proved by the documents issued on that day (despite the blatant lies of others on the internet who said that those documents were forged (!), much to the shock of Metr Joseph – he did not know that bishops can lie). Now that was eight days before the new phase of the Ukrainian conflict began on 24 February.

It was providential that we had left before that conflict, because then we did not have to face the deep and bitter divisions among the flock which the commemoration of Patriarch Kyrill has brought to all Russian parishes, especially in ROCOR, though it happens even inside Russia. There anti-war Orthodox are also boycotting the Church in very large numbers, not least after the ‘defrocking’ and exiling of liberal but popular priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky.

The reason why we left was the schism which occurred with the official introduction of the heresy of rebaptism of Orthodox under old calendarist pressure, not the problem of the Ukraine. Our departure was clearly not directly connected with the intensified conflict in the Ukraine eight days later, on 24 February, but there was still an indirect connection. This is because both the heresy of rebaptism and the scandalous support for a war against other Orthodox were caused by exactly the same lack of pastoral leadership. The chasm between the bishops on the one hand and the suffering priests and people on the other hand, whom the bishops have been persecuting, opened up for exactly the same reason.

Q: But you seem to support the Russian side in the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: Not at all, that is not true. No clergyman can support war and violence. However, as a political observer and cultural historian, who knows very well both Russia and the Ukraine, both officially and unofficially, and has met both recent Patriarchs and President Putin, and who also perfectly well knows the aggression and hypocrisy of the West, several things were obvious.

Firstly, it was obvious from the very outset that, as a Great Power, Russia would win that deeply tragic and catastrophic conflict. That is not support, it is just a recognition of an obvious fact. It was also clear that the Kiev regime was Fascist and atheist and was acting simply as a proxy of the highly aggressive USA and the EU. It was obvious that the anti-Ukrainian regime in Kiev existed only because NATO was using it to try and destroy Russia and grab its wealth, for the Ukraine is the last chance of the West to dominate the world and pay off its colossal debts. It was also plain for all to see that the Kiev regime had been persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and all the minorities there (and the Russians in the Ukraine are a minority of 40%!) for years. Blood is on their hands – the Russians did not start this.

Moreover, the CIA and Constantinople support for the fake Church, the OCU, under Dumenko, is an abuse of the canons, on the same level as the abuse of the canons by others, as is the present ‘defrocking’ of bishops of Cyprus for their faithfulness to Christ in refusing to recognise the fake Church. The latter has totally discredited the Church of Cyprus, which kowtows to discredited Constantinople and the local US ambassador. Frankly, there is something quite satanic in the Kiev regime, as it closes hundreds of churches, threatens to turn them into casinos and propagandises LGBT.

It was also obvious that the Ukrainian people, especially the real Orthodox there, were the victims of that war. And finally, it was manifest that the ignorant and arrogant Western mainstream media, financed by the CIA and MI6, which are themselves financed by the Military Financial Complex of the USA and the UK, supported the Kiev Nazis because they could make a lot of money out of such a conflict. They told plain lies. It was the same in Britain in the First World War, where the newspapers which were owned by millionaire arms merchants told the same type of lies.

The Suicide of ROCOR

Q: How did ROCOR come to discredit and destroy itself?

A: All too many in the Russian episcopate now appear to want to suck money out of the parishes in order to finance their ‘superior’, oligarchic lifestyle and then in return sadistically punish the selfsame priests and parishes for telling the truth and living as Christians, also trying to destroy their families. Such bishops, whether inside or outside Russia, claim that they are acting according to the canons and that any who refuse to accept their vicious persecutions and slanders are committing the ultimate sin of refusing to participate in their evil. That apparently is ‘uncanonical’!

Clearly, these people are not Christians. It would be laughable if it were not so sad. We are obedient to Christ, not to those who are de facto filioquists, that is, who claim to have replaced Christ and so put their clearly twisted interpretations of the canons above the Holy Spirit. Their lust for power and money is what has temporarily corrupted the Russian Church, just as it has Constantinople. The Russian émigré Churches had never suffered from that disease, as they had neither power, nor money, which was precisely their glory, but they had died out by the early 2000s. We saw their last generation between 1975 and 2000.

The local example of a recent convert was of one who suffered from narcissistic rages and tantrums, throwing his toys out of his pram and acting as a typical unprincipled bully. Uneducated and ignorant, humiliating those who had been in the Church before he was even born, he threatened all with a metaphorical baseball bat. He was a kind of ecclesiastical Trump, wanting only to ‘grab property’ (the words of our outraged solicitor who examined his shameless claims in astonishment – she had never seen anything like it, even in the secular world) and dominate, without any understanding of local languages, history, geography, customs etc. Moscow now knows all about him, since the scandal he caused in the altar of a church in Paris last year, when he had to be restrained by another bishop from his aggressive rage and threat of violence.

Q: Was ROCOR’s entry into schism and even heresy inevitable?

A: No, not at all. As far back as 1997, a friend of mine, the late Fr Roman Lukianov in Boston USA, warned that ROCOR risked becoming a sect, as the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, successor of St John, had reposed in 1993. For decades Vladyka Antony had been the great moderating influence inside ROCOR against the American crazies. He was rightly concerned, as were others of us.

I remember one old aristocratic émigré in London, who had worked for MI6 (so many of them did) in Iran in the 1950s (himself he just said that he had worked for ‘The Foreign Office’, which was well-understood code). He said that no unity between ROCOR and the MP was possible because ROCOR was like a glass of pure water and the MP was like a glass of dirty water. I asked him then why St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of the Crimea had been in the MP? Then I asked him why were there so many scandals in ROCOR, with the Grabbe affair, his ‘six million dollar’ son, and the defrocking for good canonical reasons of immoral priests and why there were so many ROCOR parishes that did not have priests? He simply answered that he had never heard of any of that! In other words, it was all ignorance and bigotry. It was the usual phariseeism of those who see the speck in others, but not the log in their own eye.

In fact, despite such people, ROCOR did not become a sect and ten years later it even entered back into communion with Moscow, then presided over by a former émigré, the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II. That was a miracle. I witnessed it. ROCOR through the ever-memorable Metr Laurus had received the most generous canonical agreement from the Patriarch, becoming a self-governing part of the Russian Church. ROCOR had basically become an Autonomous Church of the Diaspora. This had been exactly our hope all along. My only regret was that it had taken so long. Patriarch Alexis, whom I knew, had already made the same offer in about 1995! Seven years had been wasted after the revolutionary 2000 Jubilee Council in Moscow when all our just demands had been met.

With such an agreement to autonomy, ROCOR could therefore have avoided all the controversy of the later Russian schism with the Greeks and the conflict in the Ukraine and not broken communion with but co-operated with the other Local Churches. (By other Local Churches, I do not include the leadership of the Greek Churches, whose policies were purely political, dictated to them and paid for by the CIA).

But instead of using its autonomy and working with the concert of the politically free Local Churches, self-governing ROCOR showed no independence from Moscow at all, except to express CIA views of the Kiev regime! It not only entered into schism from the Greeks, but also took several priests from the Greek Church without letters of release, and accepted in silence the persecution of priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky. All this was because it did not want to recognise the Catholicity of the Church, but to be a schismatic ghetto-group, actually denying the sacraments of other local Churches, against its own people.

Q: But you must admit that ROCOR had long been a breeding ground for schism?

A: Yes, there had been the Bostonite old calendarist schism in, I think, 1986, when about 2,000 left, the tiny old calendarist schisms in France in 1987 and 2001, then the four schisms in the USA and England of 2007. But each time the numbers who left for all these various warring ‘True Orthodox’ sects were minute, often fewer than 500, sometimes as few as 50. The ROCOR Centre had remained firm.

And all those schisms proved just how necessary it was for ROCOR to enter into canonical communion with Moscow and to eliminate the sectarian spirit of hatred and division for ever. Those schisms also proved how ROCOR had for years been attracting the wrong sort of people, pathological extremists and the dissatisfied, sometimes second-generation immigrant Russians with their inferiority complexes and fantasies about pre-Revolutionary Russia, sometimes weird converts from Protestant sects, very often with sexual problems.

These are the sort of people who call normal Orthodox ‘World Orthodox’ and themselves, in their narcissistic and pharisaical pride, ‘True Orthodox’. There is no such thing as ‘World Orthodox’. True, there can be worldly or lapsed Orthodox, but they do not go to church and therefore, they are not Orthodox. An Orthodox is one who goes to church, unlike so many of the internet Orthodox who dare to call themselves ‘True Orthodox’. The only ‘True Orthodox’ are the saints of God, to whose state all Orthodox aspire.

Today, there are all of us who left ROCOR from 2021 on, in the USA, in England and elsewhere. Only this time we left not for weird and schismatic sectarian groups, but for the mainstream Local Churches, anti-Bartholomew Constantinople (those who joined Constantinople in the USA and Paris refuse to have anything to do with his fake Ukrainian Church) and then Bucharest, which welcomed us all with open arms and great sympathy, as heroic witnesses and refugees from ROCOR schism and heresy.

This time it was the scandal-ridden ROCOR itself which had become a weird and schismatic sectarian group. True, there were others in ROCOR who were too weak and fearful, including one bishop and several clergy, who did not leave for other Local Churches, but simply gave up and resigned in disgust at the lack of canonicity and corruption they had seen inside the new ROCOR. This is the end of ROCOR, its suicide. It has outlived its sell-by date.

Q: But what do you think about the anti-Moscow Patriarchate ROCOR Synod statement of 5 June?

https://www.synod.com/synod/eng2025/20250605_ensynodstatement.html

A: This was a clearly provoked by the very recent Sister Vassa debacle and the numbers of Russians leaving ROCOR in the USA and withdrawing their donations, since the documents contains nothing new and could have been written years ago. (Why wasn’t it written then? Well, as American say, ‘Follow the money’). It was clearly written by the German Metr Mark and his entourage, who have been running the Synod ever since they removed Metr Vitaly in 2001.

It is a document that deals only with the past of 70-90 years ago and fails utterly to address the present, the elephant in the room, the war in the Ukraine. The liberals will rightly mock the document as too little, too late. However, there is even worse.

From the Moscow viewpoint, the ROCOR document is scandalous. It is well known that the German Diocese of Metr Mark still has many children and grandchildren of Vlasovites (Russians who fought with Hitler) in it. For Russians in Russia Stalin was the victor of 1945, just as for British people Churchill (who was just as racist as Hitler) was the victor in 1945. And Vlasov was a traitor. Any attack of this manner on Stalin is seen as Nazi and therefore as support for the Nazis in Kiev, who are have been killing Russian civilians and children ever since 2014, with the support of the grandchildren of Nazis in Berlin and Brussels.

This statement has quite rightly outraged Moscow, especially since it has Vlasovite and CIA connections. It was 27 million Soviet citizens who were massacred by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945. Victory came when Stalin was the Soviet leader. Why is ROCOR, with its close Vlasov and CIA connections meddling in internal affairs in Russia? If Moscow ditches ROCOR, then it will lose its last shreds of a claim to canonicity and become officially the schismatic sect that it already is. For the quite correct Russian reaction, see:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2025/06/06/sinod_rpcz_nastupaet_na_te_zhe_grabli

Q: Today ROCOR is attracting many young men. So ROCOR is not finished?

A: All Orthodox dioceses in the Diaspora are receiving many young people today. This is due to the internet effect of various influencers. But we have to be very careful and receive only the serious, not the beardy-weirdy. With such people the lapse rate is extremely high. I am now receiving at least one young person a month, though as many young women as men, including refugees from ROCOR sectarianism, now that they have understood their mistake. ROCOR is once more attracting the wrong sort of young men, the terminally online, the exclusivists, incels, woman-haters, closet homosexuals, bisexuals, extremists, narcissists, internet Orthodox. You cannot build a Church on their exclusivist pathology and hatred, and yet ROCOR usually ordains such young men, preferring them to the normal!

Thus, they claim that Orthodoxy is ’manly’ and ‘masculine’. But what about women? Are they not allowed? Why are they against family life and children? Clearly, all this is internet fantasy. Russian churches especially have always been filled with women, 80% or 90%. But you will not learn about that reality from the internet. Those remaining in ROCOR just never learn. They are just making it worse for themselves. All we can do is to pray for their repentance despite their schism and heresy.

Eastern Papism

Q: Why did some Russian hierarchs fall into exactly the same error as the Greek (Constantinople) Church before it, by proclaiming themselves to be some sort of Eastern Papacy?

A: Only about 2% of Orthodox belong to the Greek jurisdiction of Constantinople, whereas 70% (140 million) belong to that of Moscow. Moscow therefore thinks that it is No 1. However, Constantinople maintains that as the Church of the former Imperial Capital (which fell nearly 600 years ago!), it is the ‘first without equals’, that is, No 1.

Now promoting yourself as ‘No 1’ is precisely the heresy of Papism, which directly contradicts the Gospel, where Christ calls on us to serve others, not to lord it over others. The First Rome fell because it wanted to dominate. Those who call themselves the Second Rome and the Third Rome have learned nothing from its fall and have instead chosen to imitate that exact same ‘Roman’ fall. It is the sin of Rome-ism, even though you may call it worldliness, secularism, erastianism or Sergianism.

Fortunately, the Church works through Catholicity, not through becoming a State (the First Rome), ancient prestige (the Second Rome) or through size (the Third Rome). A Council of the whole Church, all sixteen Local Churches, is the solution to this childish division. In any case, as a result, both Moscow and Constantinople have punished themselves. Today Moscow is being reduced in size, losing a third of its territories and parishes, and as for Constantinople, it is losing the last shreds of its prestige, making itself into a laughing-stock, as one bishop after another in the Church of Cyprus is ‘defrocked’ for the ‘heresy’ of disagreeing with Constantinople!

Both Moscow and Constantinople are punished by the sin that they sinned with, as the Book of Proverbs says. God is not mocked. Meanwhile the real Church, the other fourteen Local Churches, goes on together with the many healthy elements within both Moscow and Constantinople are in accord. This is not a sickness unto death, for repentance is possible.

A New Local Church

Q: What after fifty years of struggle do you think of the chances of a new Local Church being established?

A: I have always believed that I would not live to see it, but I have always fought for it, for the sake of our children and grandchildren. It is still for the future and despite the present Greek and Russian squabble we are far closer to it than fifty years ago, when it was an impossible dream and even services in local languages hardly existed. The present schism does not fill me with pessimism because people in their eighties die. What is frightening is that people of that age appear to feel no repentance.

The point is that over the last fifty years I have seen both the Russian Church in the Diaspora and the Greek (Constantinople) Church dying out. Why? Because they stuck to what for the new Western-born generations of Russians and Greeks were foreign languages, Slavonic and Greek. They do not understand a word of them. The decision not to use local languages was suicide, the ethnic funeral of the Church.

On top of that, what possible missionary witness do you give to Non-Orthodox, if you do not even speak the local language and understand the local culture? Did the Apostles go around speaking in a foreign language to preach the Gospel? No, they spoke in the local language. This is one of the meanings of Pentecost. To speak in tongues does not mean to speak in gibberish in a wave of hysterical self-exaltation, like crazy Evangelicals and Pentecostalists. It means to work in order to learn another language, its culture and customs, in order to inculturate the Orthodox Christian Faith and so bring people to Christ.

St Nicholas of Japan, St Tikhon of Moscow and St John of Shanghai are recent examples, for they did exactly this. They did not impose, they set examples. All we have to do is follow them. For instance, when Japan started its proxy war against Russia with its undeclared surprise attack on Russia, St Nicholas told his Japanese clergy to pray for their armed forces and locked himself away to pray for the duration. Here is our example.

Q: And what about the chances of achieving an Autocephalous Local Church today?

A: Firstly, most Local Churches do not even have a Diaspora jurisdiction, so they are not concerned by the question.

Secondly, many of the Churches that do have a Diaspora jurisdiction would never give autocephaly to their Diaspora jurisdiction for ethnic reasons, especially if that jurisdiction is small. So there is no hope that in Western Europe, for example, the Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian or Antiochian Churches will ever grant autocephaly. This means that only the big three, the Greek, Russian or Romanian Churches could ever give autocephaly in Western Europe. True, the Romanian Church gave autonomy several years ago, but not autocephaly for very good canonical reasons, for which see below.

Thirdly, there is the question of local people who have joined that Church. This is all about missionary work. Ghetto-churches will never give autocephaly. Why should they? They are precisely not local and do not want to be local! But if there were large numbers of local people in a Church, then it would have to receive autocephaly. This so far is not the case anywhere, the numbers of native people accepting Orthodoxy have been very small.

Fourthly, there is the question of size. For example, the Greek Church is by far the largest in North America and Australia, the Antiochian the largest in South America, whereas the Romanian Church has in the last 15 years become by far the largest in Western Europe. In those regions, we must hope that the largest group would take responsibility and draw towards autocephaly. However, more of this in the final point below.

Finally, there is the issue of ability to get on with others, i.e, the absence of nationalism and narrow jurisdictionalism and even worse, of sectarianism. This disqualifies the Greek and now the Russian Churches, one of whose bishops told our Romanians and Moldovans that, ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. This is racism, chauvinism on the same level as Constantinople’s.

The fact is that the Greek Church of Constantinople has never voluntarily given or recognised genuine autocephaly to anyone because of its centralising tendencies, neither to the Serbs, nor to the Russians, nor to the Romanians and, most obviously, nor to the Bulgarians, nor to the Poles, nor to the Czechs and Slovaks, nor to the Macedonians today. Even the ‘autocephaly’ the Greeks recently gave to the Ukrainian schismatics is completely fake. Their fake Church of gangsters and thugs has no independence and depends entirely on CIA cash. Even in history, when the Copts and the Armenians broke away from Orthodoxy, the main reason was their nationalist reaction to Greek racism.

With the suicide of ROCOR and its schism from the Paris Archdiocese of the Russian Church, in Western Europe the Russians have now done exactly the same thing as the Greeks, excluding most Ukrainians, Moldovans and normal local Western Europeans from the Russian Church, that is, becoming like the Greeks a nationalistic ghetto-Church. There is only one option left – the Romanians.

Are the Romanians up to the job? I can affirm that many are, the publishing efforts in English and French of the Romanian Dioceses are formidable. But is that enough? Only time will tell. What is certain that no one Local Church can give autocephaly. It must be done in concert, which is why Bucharest did not give us autocephaly, only autonomy. Thus, there is no room either for nationalism, nor sectarianism.

Q: What might a new Local Church look like?

A: I see it as a group of bishops, with their flocks of different nationalities, presiding in turn for a fixed term over the new Local Church, its autocephaly granted collectively by all the Local Churches concerned. Each bishop would have his own diocese, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Russian and Antiochian. We must avoid the error of the Greeks who set up episcopal assemblies. These failed and no longer operate because the Greeks wanted to dominate them and sat in permanent control over them, heavy-handedly trying to impose their views. That is not the way to go. There must be complete respect and freedom for different languages, calendars and customs, not to mention different attitudes towards ecumenism. There must be no interference from the Mother-Churches. Autocephaly must mean autocephaly. There is no other way.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Pentecost 2025

The Consequences of the Russian Victory in the Ukraine

The Origin of the Western Delusion

The elites of Western European countries have always tried to invade and then colonise and exploit the lands nearest to them. This means the invasions, mainly from the lands between the Rhine and the Loire or else from Northern Italy, of Sardinia in 1015-17, then of Greek Sicily and Southern Italy, the Frankish-led 1064 Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, the Norman-led invasion of England in 1066 and from there the invasions of the Celtic lands, the Frankish ‘Crusades’ in the Holy Land and the Teutonic Knight invasions of the Baltic States and Russia. These aggressions against Russia were later repeated in every century, by the Poles in 1609-18, by the Swedes in the Great Northern War, by Napoleon in 1812 and then by Hitler in 1941, both with Collective European invasions, which became routs of Western Europe. Now history is repeated in the Ukraine.

Originally, such imperialism came about because Western Europe began to consider that it possessed a superior religion under its leader, the infallible Pope, who had by dogma replaced Christ and from whom alone the Holy Spirit comes into the world. Then it laid claim to a superior civilisation, because it had superior military and industrial technology. Next it claimed to be a superior race (most visibly among the ‘Aryan’ Nazis), and today it considers that it is superior because it has ‘liberal’ values. In fact, like all its other ‘European values’, its liberalism is Fascist, as it denigrates others. Among them, even the word ‘liberal’ has come to mean intolerant. Indeed, unsurprisingly, the grandfathers of many of the unelected, but ‘infallible’, ‘Papist’ and Neo-Carolingian EU leaders were Nazis, for example those of von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Baerbok etc.

The End-Game in the Ukraine

The ill-advised Trump has lost the US proxy war against Russia, whatever the PR drone stunts of Kiev. Ignorant of the geography, history and politics of all countries outside the USA, he believed the propaganda lies which were fed to him, that Russia was losing the war with huge losses and sacrificing ‘human waves’ of its soldiers, its leader was dying, its ‘tiny economy’ (‘the same size as Spain’s’) was ‘in meltdown’, its forces had no arms, no fuel, no weapons, no soldiers, that it ‘was a gas station masquerading as a country’. Trump may be a poker player, but he has ‘no cards’, so he cannot win. He has and never had any ‘leverage’ and the latest EU threats of piracy are laughable. Russia’s economy is in fact the fourth largest in the world, at least four to five times larger than Spain’s, indeed, the largest in Europe. Perhaps slowly, but reality is dawning.

Russia is not a poker player, but a chess player. Thus, in the Ukraine there will be no frozen conflict, no stalemate, no ceasefire, no DMZ, as there was in Korea, in that war which the Western world also lost. No, the Ukraine will be another Vietnam or Afghanistan, a humiliating capitulation, as in Saigon or Kabul. Millions of Ukrainians who had to flee to Russia from the genocidal Fascist regime in Kiev will return to the New Ukraine, once peace has come there, as well as many of the more than six million Ukrainians who took the politically-motivated bribes of the West and emigrated there after 2022. When peace comes, there will be a New Ukraine and it will be remade as a neutral State, with very deep suspicion of the West which wanted to genocide the Ukraine ‘to the last Ukrainian’, for clearly Ukrainian lives do not matter to the racist and anti-Slav Western world.

The conflict in the Ukraine has been a civil war and also a war of attrition. The Russian aim from the outset was to wipe out the NATO-trained, -armed and -financed Ukrainian armed forces. This is what Russia meant by ‘Demilitarisation’. Russia, by far the largest country in the world, needs no new territories, but the ‘Ukrainian’ territories inhabited by persecuted Russians will become part of Russia. Trump is no mediator in this conflict, the USA has always supported Kiev in every way and is still doing so, so his PR peace efforts to try and win a Nobel prize, funded by the CIA, are all in vain. The war will end on the battlefield. All wars of attrition end suddenly. This one will end suddenly too and that end may come in the next few months. In that case the conflict will have lasted about as long as the Second World War in Russia (June 1941-May 1945).

Consequences: A World of Spheres of Influence

Given NATO aggression, which caused the war in the Ukraine through its sponsorship of the puppet Fascist regime that it set up in Kiev, and the imminent NATO defeat, there will be great bitterness and a spirit of revanchism against Russia in defeated and humiliated Western Europe. We can imagine a barbed wire fence being laid out along the border between the New Ukraine and the Uniat Galician far west of Stalin’s old Ukraine, which will be separated from the Russian world by that fence. This will prevent invasions and terrorist attacks, perhaps planned, as so often happens, by the British MI6 and SAS, from Galicia or Poland. This situation will last until such time as there is a new pragmatic and realistic elite in Western Europe, the old ideological one swept away by its long-suffering peoples, who want good relations with their neighbours.

The post-Ukrainian world will be a multipolar world of spheres of influence, dominated by the three Great Powers and perhaps later by a fourth, India, if it can overcome its narrow Hindu nationalism. Thus, the USA will dominate or control Greenland (to be invaded by it), Canada (seceded Alberta may well become the 51^st State of the USA), Mexico, Central America as far as Panama, the ‘Gulf of America’ and the Caribbean. China will dominate East Asia and its influence will become ever greater in Japan, Korea, South-East Asia, the Western outpost of Australia, South America (which the US is about to lose to China) and, together with Russian arms and diplomacy, Africa. Russia will help all Northern Asia, from Europe to the Sea of Japan, including the Caucasus and Central Asia and any in Western Europe (see below) who wish for co-operation.

Consequences: An Isolated Western Europe

Now Europe has for a millennium been divided into two halves. The Western half (‘Western Europe’ – see above) consists of the former Catholic and Protestant countries. The Eastern half belongs to Eurasia and consists of Russia, Belarus and the future New Ukraine, whose precise borders are yet to be set. Western Europe is sociologically and ideologically divided between the tiny bankster- and oligarch-controlled ruling elite, supported by and consisting of some 20% of the population who benefit from the elite, 20% who oppose the feudal, oligarchic and exploitative nature of the West and then the 60% inbetween. This 60% swims with the tide, looking only for its own survival and benefit. Nobody can rely on the support of this unprincipled mass. However, we do not condemn them, they too have to eat and feed their children.

The tragedy of Western Europe is that its elite has actually believed in its own lies, known variously as ‘propaganda, spin, narrative, fantasy, fairy tales, wishful thinking, virtual reality, a parallel universe’. All of these such fantasies are delusion, more precisely self-delusion. The result is that Western Europe will be defeated and then will separate from its artificial ‘Union’ into its various constituent parts, north, west, east and south. For example, the sixteen countries of south-eastern Europe, from Austria to Cyprus, could leave for the sphere of influence of Russia, with all Northern Eurasia, linking them with the New Silk Road of China. Many in Hungary, Slovakia and Non-EU Serbia are already thinking of doing this. This will leave the twenty-five countries of the rest of Western Europe even more abandoned and isolated.

They will have to define themselves afresh, retrieving their roots. It will then be quite possible that the six countries of south-western Europe, Italy, Malta, San Marino and then Spain, Portugal and Andorra will leave the EU, in that order, to join south-western Europe and the BRICS world led by the Russian Federation. This will leave the nineteen countries of north-western Europe, from Iceland to Estonia, even more isolated. Only through such isolation and self-examination can come repentance and the decolonisation and devassalisation of the Western European peoples, the French, Bavarians, English, Poles, Dutch, Swiss, Scandinavians, Finns, Balts and all the others, from their corrupted and barbarian Neo-Carolingian elite, which today is centred in Brussels. For some, like the long-oppressed Irish, this repentance will be easier than for others.

The Consequences for the Russian Orthodox Church

By allying itself with the State of the Russian Federation, the Sovietised and nationalistic Moscow Patriarchate (and its New York ROCOR satellite) have lost their influence outside the Federation, in the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic States, just as it lost the Orthodox in Finland, Poland and Slovakia after the 1917 Revolution, when those countries were recreated. In other words, a bureaucratised, clericalised, nationalised and militarised ideology replaced pastorship in the Russian Church. In bitterness Western countries may yet ban any Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe. This is already happening in the Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia and its Patriarch has already been officially banned from the Ukraine, Lithuania, Canada and the UK. It is becoming a ghetto-Church, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

The problems of the Patriarchate of Moscow and its ROCOR subsidiary all came about through the desire of certain of its leading bishops to create an Orthodox Vatican. They have long admired the Statist ideology of the Vatican, espoused by Patriarch Sergius. This meant competing against Constantinople, which had already advanced much further along that same Statist path, that of replacing pastors with political ideologues, replacing Churchmanship with politics. The Vatican is a Church-Business, a Church-State, a Church of the filioque, according to which the Pope is the Head of the Church, replacing Christ, from Whom ‘proceeds the Holy Spirit’ and who has the right to persecute real Christians. But the real Church of God, Orthodoxy, is not a State, not a Business, not the filioque. The elitist Vatican model is alien and rejected by all sincere Orthodox.

Orthodox England

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