Author Archives: Father Andrew

The Restructuring of Europe

Foreword: Reason Replaced by Ideology

The elite of the contemporary Western world seems to be in the grip of insanity. Its political and media elite, paid by arms dealers, is irrational. This irrationality is the result of its unrealistic ideology driven by hubris, the same hubris which lay behind the insane and suicidal German invasion of Russia in 1941. This insane wishful thinking states: ‘We must destroy ourselves by rejecting cheap Russian energy and food because Russians are subhuman’.

The roots of this ideology are in the arrogant delusion or fairy tale ‘narrative’ that the West is superior to ‘the Rest’, that Western culture is better than all others. This came from the superior military technology that the West used to possess. This military advance led hypocritical European settlers to call Slavs, Muslims, Native Americans, Africans, Asians and Aborigenes ‘savages’ and genocide them. Now even its military superiority is over, as we can see in Iran.

Four Great Powers?

According to IMF figures, the Gross Domestic Product of China by PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is about $44 trillion, of the USA some $32 trillion (without finance, insurance and real estate, in reality probably about $20 trillion), of India nearly $19 trillion and of Russia $8 trillion (its vastly underestimated military production means that it is probably about $10 trillion in reality). These are the four largest economies in the world, the Four Powers.

In today’s world reality, of these Four Powers, the three former Regional Powers, China, Russia and India, have become or, in the case of the narrowly nationalist India, whose anti-Muslim nationalism is hindering it, is becoming, Great Powers. And one Great Power, the USA, is fast becoming a Regional Power. This follows its successive routs in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and the Ukraine, the results of its irrational and hateful ideology of superiority.

As a result, the tribute-paying (that is, tariff-paying) Western European vassals and court jesters of the American King Donald are becoming even more irrelevant than their master. As we can see from the collapse of the much-divided NATO and planned US occupation of the last large European colony, Greenland. If Western Europe is to survive, its leaders will have to reverse their ideology and to depend on Russia for energy and food and on China for goods.

The radical contraction of the influence of Western Europe, delusional in its wishful thinking, and the end of NATO will also mean the long-awaited end of the much-hated EU. The whole south-eastern quarter of Western Europe, centred on the largely Orthodox Carpathians and Balkans, will be connected to the Chinese economy by rail. The impoverished Baltics may follow to embrace China, and after them south-western Europe – Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The Borders of European Countries Redrawn: The Ukraine

However, none of this can happen until Western Europe’s old imperialist and racist elites, who hate Russia, China and all the ‘savages’ in the ‘jungle’ (they consider that they alone are in the ‘garden’), have collapsed in coming elections or in civil unrest. The First World War ended in injustices, which caused the Second, which also ended in injustices. As a result of those injustices, we now face the Third Recasting of Europe, which still seeks justice.

Firstly, the Soviet-invented Ukraine is over. The tyranny of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, supported by the West, will end. The Ukraine resembles tiny Wales, in the sense that 83% speak Russian as their first language and only 17% speak Ukrainian as their first language and have some limited Russian. And this is about the same as the proportions of those who speak English and Welsh in Wales, where only 17% speak Welsh better than English.

The war in the Ukraine is at last ending after Putin’s long years of diplomatic dithering. We suggest that the nine provinces of Novorossija may return to Russia, and, in a deNATOised (= deNAZIfied) and demilitarised form, the province of Chernivtsy may return to Romania, Zakarpattia may return to Slovakia and Hungary, and the three provinces of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and the western halves of Volyn and Ternopil as far as Pochaev may return to Poland.

The remaining eleven provinces, 40% of the old Soviet Ukraine, the real historical Ukraine in the centre, could retake their historical name of Kievska Rus, resembling a Southern Belarus, also landlocked, again as demilitarised zones. In return, the main beneficiary of land transfers, Poland, could grant a narrow land corridor to Kaliningrad. As for the Russian parts of Moldova like Transnistria and Gagauzia, they could by referendum be ceded to Russia.

In EU Europe

The three Baltic States are collapsing economically and therefore demographically. After the fall of the USSR, the Germans bought out and then closed the Baltic factories and their young people were forced to emigrate to live as wage-slaves in Western Europe. The Baltic elites must stop attacking Russia and grant their Russian minorities their human rights, or else be occupied, the American-appointed, poke-the-bear, puppet elites removed.

Then there are the massive injustices of ex-Yugoslavia. A whole set of non-viable countries were invented by the divide and rule US: Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia. Parts of Serbia were stolen by Croatia. Albania remains the poorest and most crime-ridden country in Europe. These all survive with a permanent NATO and UN presence, which is what prevents justice being done. Here there must be confederative resolutions with justice for all.

In Western Europe, there are four obvious cases of countries which have long sought independence. These are (a Reunited) Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, all at last to be freed of London-based British tyranny. The end of an oppressive and artificial union would mean freedom at last for all the peoples involved. No doubt, given their common history of oppression, they could co-operate together in some loose Confederation of Four Sovereign Nations.

There is also the case of Catalonia, long oppressed by Madrid centralism. However, there are also questions about the artificial, British-invented, post-Waterloo union of Belgium (in fact, the Netherlands, France and a small part of Germany), about a still not denazified West Germany (only East Germany was denazified), which perhaps should go from a Federation into a Confederation, a small part of Austria that is Italian and parts of Slovakia that are Hungarian.

The Restructuring of the Church: Twenty Local Churches?

Kievska Rus should receive autocephaly because few there will ever tolerate hearing the hated Russian Patriarch’s name at services. They will boycott any Russian churches there. If Kievska Rus is granted autocephaly, then Belarus should receive autocephaly too. The three Baltic States and Finland could also form an autocephalous Baltic Orthodox Church. This would mean three new Local Autocephalous Churches, their number going from sixteen to nineteen.

The Romanian Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of the Czechs and Slovaks would have to take responsibility for the Orthodox in the parts of the Ukraine which returned to them. Carpatho-Russians in eastern Slovakia would be greatly reinforced. Any Orthodox who live in the small part of Zakarpattia, which would return from the old Soviet Ukraine to Hungary, could join the Orthodox Diocese in Hungary.

In the Non-Slav world, we think that the administration of the Patriarchate of Constantinople should move to Northern Greece, perhaps to the town of Ouranoupolis, ‘the City of Heaven’, at the foot of Mt Athos, from which it could at last obtain a monastic episcopate. After nearly 200 years the Church of Greece could return to it. And the Patriarchate of Alexandria should be decolonised by Greeks and Russians and become a black African Patriarchate.

As regards the new Moldova, in an ideal world the Russian and Romanian Patriarchs would together grant its Church autocephaly. In return, Western Europe, already with nearly fifty bishops, could at last receive a new Local Church, to be led by the majority Romanian Church, despite Greeks and some Russians wishing to remain in irrelevant national ghettos, whose nationalism puts them outside Church unity. Then there would be twenty Local Churches.

Afterword: Ecclesioclasm – The Sin Against the Holy Spirit

Certain members of the elite of the Orthodox world are in the grip of insanity, that is, of irrationality. This is the result of their passions for power, money and lust. We say certain members, because only the secularists are in the grip of this insanity, which is the sin of Infallibility, common among secular-minded people, because they have no humility. They say: ‘We do not care for Christ, we only care for our careers, honour, ambition, villas, cars and carnal lusts’.

These are the hireling clerics, the wolves in shepherd’s clothing, who are filioquists, as they consider that they are the source of the Holy Spirit. This is the sin against the Holy Spirit. They place themselves above the canons as despots, who recognise no laws, certainly not the law of Love. They are seized by schismatic anti-Conciliarity. This is the heresy of ‘Pneumatomachy’, of the rejection of the Holy Spirit, breaking the Church by their ‘Ecclesioclasm’.

 

 

 

Their Name is Spiritual Death: Unconverted Converts as Clergy of the Orthodox Church

The (administrators of the) Church would sooner renounce nine tenths of its teachings than one tenth of its property.

Karl Marx

Foreword

Today’s Western world lives without Faith. Its last variant, Protestantism, was discredited for its spiritual emptiness and delusions. Devoid of spirituality, it was left only with sectarian moralism, which was focused on sexual puritanism, never getting to the source of sin, and making it rejected by hundreds of millions. As for Roman Catholicism, it survived longer, but has also been discredited by its State ideology, absurd dogma of Papal infallibility and pedophilia. ‘Are any of its clergy normal’?, as one Irish Roman Catholic asked me. This leaves only the Orthodox Church. However, the devil is doing his best here to wreck our presence and mission by inspiring certain Orthodox clergy to behave like Popes of Rome and certain others to behave like moralising Protestant sectarians, who have only hatred for real Orthodox.

Introduction: False Conversion

Protestants have been joining the Orthodox Church for well over sixty years, especially in the USA. The last thirty years have seen relatively large numbers, especially in the USA. And many of them have come from strict, ultra-conservative Evangelical backgrounds, especially in the USA. And quite a few of them have become members of the clergy, especially in the USA. Here they have been joining two small jurisdictions in particular: the small Antioch and ROCOR, which both desperately lack clergy. (Those from moderate backgrounds have joined the much bigger Greek Archdiocese, OCA and Serbs. They generally do become Orthodox). The problem here is that those from such ultra-conservative Lutheran/Calvinist backgrounds are tainted by them.

Such extreme Protestantism hardly exists in any Western country outside the USA. After all, the extremist Puritans emigrated to the USA precisely because of their intolerance of others and there they started witch-hunts. It is this intolerance which they also bring with them when they ‘join the Orthodox Church’ – notice we do not say that they ‘become Orthodox’ in their case. These are the individuals who believe that being as conservative and fundamentalist as possible is somehow Orthodox. So far are they from the truth, for they clearly have no idea whatever of the realities of the Orthodox Church and Faith. This trend had already become apparent among converts, especially in California, in the 1970s, in their ‘supercorrectness’.

However, today, in this rootless, internet age, this fake Orthodoxy has become a veritable epidemic. What are the symptoms of this sick pseudo-Orthodoxy, which began in the USA, especially among the oddballs of California, though it has affected a few others, especially from a Protestant background, especially in English-speaking countries? Such converts may enter the Orthodox Church sacramentally; but if left unhealed by obedience to Tradition and the mind of the Church, the Evangelical imagination simply reappears under icons, cassocks, mispronounced Russian or Greek titles, and misunderstood and distorted quotations of the canons, instead of from the Gospels. Below are twelve characteristics of these unconverted converts:

Twelve Characteristics

  1. These individuals have never lived for any time in any Orthodox country or spent years in an ‘ethnic’ Orthodox monastery or parish. Such they despise. This is why they do not speak or read any Orthodox language with any fluency and do not wish to. Indeed, they scorn Orthodox languages and immigrants. Everything must be in American, including in England!
  2. The life of ancient, suffering and often very poor peoples, who have preserved the faith through centuries of prayer, liturgy, exile and martyrdom and handed it down through the generations, remain foreign to them. Indeed, they despise and even hate them. They do not turn to the ancient, deeply rooted Orthodox countries. The historical ethnic Churches have preserved an unbroken heritage, born of centuries of profound sacrifice, exile, and martyrdom and have handed down the faith rooted in their ancestral soil of humility. But the unconverted converts want an abstract (the Protestant manner) Anglo-American product, stripped of memory, language and people, constructed as a Neo-Protestant revisionism. They want the Disney fake.
  3. They demand total loyalty and cult-like obedience in an ultra-rigid, high-demand environment. This is marked by intense expectations of personal compliance in a high-control system of psychological pressure and discipline. This is the suffocating pressure of guru-style control freakery and emphasis on purification (they are after all Puritans) in their tightly-governed religious ghetto.
  4. They speak with ‘authority’ and confidence about tradition, obedience, order, and duty. This message is especially used to manipulate and prey on insecure and lonely young men, who are disoriented and confused by the modern world. Such young men may never have had a father, may suffer from autism, may be awkward with girls, may be victims of the covid period and seek certainty of any sort.
  5. Imbued with Old Testament phariseeism, domination and conservatism (which is quite different from the living Tradition of the Holy Spirit), they know nothing of Orthodox spiritual fatherhood, self-sacrificial love, patience, gentleness and the bearing of shame for the sake of the sinner. In Orthodoxy, spiritual fathers are called to take up the Cross first, to protect and repent for others. They do not place the burden of shame on spiritual children. Orthodox spiritual fathers bear the burdens of their flock with tears, patience and unconditional love. Imported Protestant administrators impose only bullying and threats. Clinging to the works of the law divorced from mercy, they remain under the curse of the very law they mistake for righteousness, substituting self-sacrificial love with rigid, self-righteous pharisaic control. Intoxicated by self-righteousness, they never cease to fashion weapons out of holy things. The whole Church, Scripture and Tradition are cudgels for them. For the betrayal of Judas does not always come with a kiss. Sometimes it comes through ‘protocols’, calculation and signatures, and above all through intense jealousy of real Orthodox and through taking money and ‘subscriptions’ off the naïve and deluded.
  6. Ascetic life, fasting and abstention are viewed by them as parts of a punitive authoritarian regime of control freakery and abusive discipline, and not as the free offering of the heart to God for the acquisition of mercy.
  7. All who quickly see through their fakery and hypocrisy and whistle blow are put under intense pressure, fear of permanent exclusion and swift retaliation, as their ‘authority’ has been challenged by those who actually know the Tradition. All this comes from their harsh and punitive Lutheran/Calvinist mentality. Those who resist these bullies and do not give them obedience and personal loyalty (and their cash) will disappear as ‘non-people’ – they never existed.
  8. Any objection to their fake Orthodoxy is for them a source of hurt pride, wounded reputation, embarrassment, emotional distress (which causes them to turn to drink, among other things), business harm, loss of professional standing and of future economic advantage. They are money-obsessed narcissists.
  9. Such unconverted Protestants justify their pride by referring to the ‘Ancient Faith’, which is selectively borrowed and deployed to create an artificial authority, which is in fact only Neo-Evangelical fundamentalism, not the ascetic, eucharistic, conciliar Orthodox Faith. Orthodoxy for them is just an excuse for personal spiritual reinvention, renewed fakery and a very profitable personality cult. How they love raking in the dollars, just like any Protestant tele-evangelist!
  10. Their theatricality does not stop with legalistic honorifics and borrowed academic or ecclesiastical titles. They teach themselves to speak with a foreign cadence, stylised, Old World delivery, ‘an Oxford accent’ (which is in fact nothing of the sort, but could sound like one in crazy California), or Eastern European vocal inflections. These are all simply part of their brand: an artificial pose intended to project frowning severity, antiquity and the pseudo-exotic spiritual authority of the guru. Their deliberate adoption of affected speech patterns and foreign cadences to command an audience is not the sound of Tradition, it is the fake theatrical vanity of the preening narcissist. When the theatre of their legalism replaces the Church, the letter is weaponised against the Spirit and a fake juridical process is mistaken for the life of the Church. This only works among naïve and uneducated American neophytes, who know no better. It does not export. We saw through him in five minutes, but then we have been around for a long time, since before any of them were born.
  11. Tradition and the canons are not respected with humility and prayer. They are selectively ‘harvested’, weaponised and then discarded. They are only observed when they appear to justify their crazy punishments. Orthodoxy is kept only to elevate personal status, command obedience and play at being Orthodox, in order to increase their beloved income, power and prestige. The Orthodox ethos, accountability before the Tradition, spiritual fatherhood, humility and compassionate love for the sinner are discarded. Orthodox symbols on the outside, Evangelical content on the inside. Patristic language on the surface, legalistic and bullying control beneath. Tradition for them is mere conservatism a la Trump, not the Holy Spirit and repentance. For them it is all just a clerical costume, an exotic credential, a borrowed title and weaponised obedience for income for their guru selves.
  12. These unconverted converts make of the Orthodox Church a platform for their own pseudo-charismatic self-construction. They build a personality cult, used as authority, it is the Evangelical will-to-rule in outward Orthodox forms, the Protestant fundamentalist world of misogynistic patriarchal authority (how they hate women!), puritanism and punitive control. Orthodoxy is merely symbolic, it is only there to provide them with self-justification for their proud egomania and narcissism, it is only the personality-driven religious performance of Evangelical show.

Conclusion: Bringing Spiritual Death

When the Protestant cultural framework is not healed and transfigured by repentance and the sacraments, it survives. Byzantine furniture is only added to their extremist Protestantism. Their literalism (The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life, 2 Corinthians 3, 6) and Puritanical instinct to ‘purify’ (‘drain the swamp’) and witch-hunt survives. Those of Protestant background can become Orthodox. However, the old Protestant mentality, severity, control and legalism to repress what they see as impurity by enforced discipline, loyalty and ‘spiritualised’ obedience to their personality cult may remain. If so, this means spiritual abuse, exclusion and erasure, demands for submission, rigidity and a carefully curated image of self-righteousness, which also fool uninformed American bishops in the USA.

Reception into Orthodoxy requires more than changing outward jurisdiction, vocabulary, ancestry and dress. It requires inward repentance, the death of the religious ego, humility and not pride. It requires obedience to the Catholicity of the Church, not the conquest of the Church by the inherited bad habits of domination and personal ambition a la tele-evangelist. Like all Protestants, these individuals are possessed by Judeo-Christianism, a term invented only a hundred years ago. It is not in the language of the liturgy, in the Philokalia, in the Fathers, saints and ascetics. It is only in the Old Testament political language of American conservatism and Protestant fundamentalism, part of the legalistic, punitive, authoritarian, Evangelical heresy of Christian Zionism.

This is why their missionary endeavours always fail. They understand nothing of the people they are trying to convert and have no compassion for them. They are spiritually suffocating, which is why they are sooner or later thrown off. Their emphasis is not on repentance, mercy, joy, healing, the gentle restoration of sinners, but on the arrogance of puritanical moralising and hate-filled condemnation. This is why so many such bullies end up in old calendarist sects a la Boston. Bostonitis does not need theology, it needs psychiatry, for it is a pathology. Their faces express disapproval, but that is all theatre. Subjugation to them is ‘spiritualised’. Resistance to their heresy is framed as ‘rebellion’. Disclosure is disloyalty and betrayal. They kill the Church. Their name is spiritual death.

 

Political Ideologies, or the Orthodox Christian Faith?

The gates of hell shall not prevail.

All around treason and cowardice and deceit.

Tsar Nicholas II after being overthrown

Introduction: The Judgement of the Nations

The world lies in evil, says St John the Theologian. This is why the world always refuses God’s Truth. But as we Christians are called on to live in the world, to which we do not belong, we have to know what spirit directs the world and how to remain faithful to God’s Truth despite it. Thus, although it is natural for Orthodox to defend our countries as patriots, we know that Christ stands above patriotism. Therefore, we clearly recognise that wars against or even between Orthodox Christian countries happen only because Orthodox Christian countries put nationalism above Christ. Such wars are the Judgement of God on apostasy. Such was the war between Serbs and Bulgarians in 1912-1913, such is the war between Russians and Ukrainians. God does not force Himself on others. Leave God and He leaves you. Those who do not live with God choose to live with the devil, the father of lies. Such is the choice possible with human freedom.

Political Ideologies Against the Faith

Wars of the Collective West against Russia, whether Hot or Cold, have never ended. Though they began earlier, they began in earnest after the Russian defeat of Napoleon’s multinational invasion in 1812, when it became clear that Russia had become a Great Power. Since then, the tide of War has only ebbed or flowed. It flowed with Napoleon in 1812, again with the Anglo-French-Muslim invasion of Russia from 1853 to 1856, again with the Western-financed Japanese attack on Russia in 1904, part of the Imperial British ‘Great Game’. Then it flowed with the German invasion of Russia in 1914, with the British-rigged overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, with the Collective Western invasion of Russia between 1919 and 1922, and with the German-led invasion of 1941. It ebbed at times, recently after 1991 until the NATO proxy Georgian invasion of Russian-protected Ossetia in 2008, and flowed again in the Ukraine after 2014.

The situation is usually presented as follows. There are only two choices in this world: either to be for Russia and for all the propaganda in favour of Russian nationalism, for instance, for the nationalist Tsar Ivan IV (admittedly much less harmful than his dreadful contemporary Henry VIII), for Tsars, especially for Peter I and the German Catherine II, who introduced feudal serfdom, for Lenin, who created the Ukraine, for Stalin, who murdered hundreds of thousands, and for xenophobia against anything Western. Or else it is possible to be for the West and for all the racist Russophobic propaganda against Russia and Russian culture, playing on the inferiority complex of pseudo-Western Russian liberals, for anything in favour of the US substitute Patriarchate of Constantinople, for LGBT, or for the CIA-run ROCOR, and for spreading Russia-hating myths like ‘Russian roulette’, which was only ever an American invention.

In other words, the situation is all about a choice between alternative nationalist political ideologies, but not at all about the Christian Faith, it is all about viewing the Church through the lens of nationalist politics. And yet it should be about Faith. What about Christ and His Church? Have they forgotten? There are in fact 16 Local Orthodox Churches. 14, nearly 90%, of them, are not Constantinopolitan or Muscovite (even if those two have some 50% of the Orthodox people between them – once you subtract all the Non-Russians under Moscow, not least the Ukrainians). And in any case, the vast majority of Churches people and educated clergy even in these two Local Churches of Moscow and Constantinople are for Christ and have no truck with nationalist ideologies. Only their leadership is contaminated by the anti-pastoral, Papist spirit of politics, power, money and prestige. Some wonder if such even believe in God.

The Fruit of Replacing the Christian Faith by Nationalist Ideologies.

The bureaucratic elite of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, to be exact the tiny minority of Phanariots, are well-known for their love of money, prestige and power, which is why they worship and imitate the Vatican and present themselves as ‘Eastern Papists’, ‘first without equals’. They form a Dictatorship without Catholicity. Sadly, as none of them is married, this also leads to perversions, just as in their favourite Vatican. And so their political ideology is Ecumenism yesterday, the Green Patriarch today, LGBT tomorrow, and the day after the next fad from the Western woke bandwagon. But nothing changes, it all remains exclusivist Greek nationalism, phyletism, called ‘Hellenism’. The Archpastors have been replaced by Archpoliticians and, sometimes, Archbandits. And the bureaucratic and careerist elite of the Patriarchate of Moscow, where there was once great potential, similarly fell from freedom and grace.

Copying Greek nationalist Phanariots, in recent years they invented their exclusivist and racist ideology, ‘the Russian world’ – the same Dictatorship without Catholicity. However, unlike the secularist Greeks, they marketed themselves as having ‘traditional values’. Sadly, Lenin’s mummy is still revered in the centre of Moscow, the capital of abortion, and Russia is full of statues and the names of Stalin and his henchmen like Sverdlov. Traditional? And some bishops are sexual deviants or mini-oligarchs. Masculine? Well, have you seen the videos of Russian metropolitans with boyfriends and bishops? Masculine? Orthodox Christianity is about family life and that is definitely not anti-woman and anti-children. The Moscow Patriarchate will even support the new ROCOR heresy of rebaptism, as long as clericalist ritual is observed and the Patriarch’s name is heard. All others in the other 15 Local Churches are schismatics or heretics.

This is because, according to the nationalists, the schism and heresy of all the others is not to commemorate the Russian Patriarch, even though that is forbidden by the local State and ROCOR did not do it for eighty years. Certain of the senior bishops are mini-oligarchs who rule their dioceses under harsh, totalitarian regimes, as the new, all-American ROCOR has copied. One metropolitan in Russia has recently bankrupted his large metropolia. Some priests are very poor because their bishops take their money with threats, like mafiosi. As a result, you have many scandals, like those in the Skopin Diocese, in Kolomna, Rostov on Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Tatarstan, Kazan (among several others) and that here in England. And then there is the viper’s nest of careerist homosexuals who attack seminarians and honest priests. Where is the Russian Church of the Saints, of the New Martyrs and Confessors, part of the whole Church of Catholicity of All the Saints?

Conclusion: The Victory of Christ

And where is the glorious Church of Constantinople, led by the Antiochian St John Chrysostom, followed by a host of saintly patriarchs, persecuted monks and faithful? Archpoliticians and Archbandits instead of Archpastors. And it is the same problem everywhere. When bishops stopped being real monks, then it all went wrong, beginning with Rome in the late eighth century. Regardless of where human-beings live, in Moscow, Constantinople, or anywhere else, regardless of when they live, yesterday, today, or tomorrow, human nature remains the same and the temptations are the same. There is one acid test, the one that Christ gave us and lived for us in his Life on earth: By their fruits you shall know them, and, A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

On Athos, in Diveyevo, Optina and Pochaev, Putna and Prislop, and in all the other bastions of Orthodoxy, we are praying for the freedom of the Church. Away with luxury cars and yachts, private railways carriages, silken cassocks and gold! The Diveyevo Brotherhood is coming for the Great Cleansing of the corrupt in the Church. St Sergius of Radonezh, St Xenia of Petersburg, St Seraphim of Sarov, St Matrona of Moscow, Elder Nikolai Guryanov all lived in poverty. And so will you!

 

 

 

Where Oxlips Grow: A Summer’s Day in Orthodox Suffolk

Without wisdom, wealth is worthless.

King Alfred the Great

I am English, not British. ‘British’ is the name of the barbarian Norman reinvention of the British part of the pagan Roman Empire. Since we are not barbarians, but Christians, we have nothing in common with those Frankish-speaking Vikings, known as the Normans. The latter, their invasion manned by the scum of Northern Europe and financed by anti-Christians from Rouen, made their Capital in London. They abandoned the English Capital of Winchester, where St Alfred still stands, calling his people to wisdom. In East Anglia we always called London ‘the smoke’ and the best place in it was Liverpool Street Station, because that was the escape route home. With this in mind, I invite you to the Suffolk that still resists the Norman Yoke.

At 8.30 I arrived at the north Suffolk home of the Benckendorffs, whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. On one of the hottest days of the decade, after a quick breakfast we left and headed towards the breezy cool of the Suffolk coast along the country lanes. Between Mickfield and Cross Green (if you do not know where they are, you have not lived yet), by a five-bar farm gate was displayed a very large board painted with the St George’s Cross of England, red on white, and written on it were the words: ‘The British State is the enemy within, the enemy of England’. This is how and what everyone outside alien and crooked Norman London and those who have not yet been corrupted by its mercantile spirit, have always thought.

This reminded me of the story of the visit of Tsarevich Nicholas II to Norfolk in June 1894. Staying with the future King Edward VII at his newly-rebuilt Sandringham, they had gone for a walk together around the Sandringham Estate. After walking what seemed like several miles, they realised they were lost. Coming across a horse-drawn cart and approaching the driver for help, the latter said he would give them a lift to the railway station at North Wootton. On boarding the train, the guard asked to see their tickets, and the King began to explain: ‘I am the next King of England and this is the next Tsar of Russia’. ‘Pleased to meet you’, said the guard, ‘and I am the Archbishop of Canterbury. Tickets, please’. Such are the people, not the pharisees.

The other link with a Tsarevich is Newmarket in Suffolk. In 1839, the Grand Duke and future Russian Tsar Alexander II visited England. Queen Victoria, whose real name was Alexandrina, in honour of Tsar Alexander I, threw a ball for him. Lord Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, took him to the races at Newmarket. In Alexander’s honour, a new horse race was established — the ‘Cesarewitch’, the title of the Russian visitor. To this day, the Cesarewitch is an annual Newmarket race. And now they are building new homes there on the site of the former St Felix Middle School, built by the Edmundham company. We cannot get away from our local saints. They are always with us.

In the car we reached Framlingham, which was festooned with bunting and flags, especially the East Anglian flag, the red cross of St George and in its centre the blue shield and three crowns of our patron St Edmund, the Martyr-King. Then we went through mystical Rendlesham, where still stands St Gregory’s church, founded for the Kings of East Anglia soon after 625 AD in honour of the Patriarch of Rome, who had sent the mission to convert the southern English. We had entered the Sandlings, heathland and forest, with Scots pines, birches, ferns and wildflowers, heading for Orford, its Norman seaside castle quite out of keeping with its cottages, the roses and wisteria climbing to the roofs, hollyhocks, foxgloves and daisies in their gardens.

Here in Orford, all is cool in the sea-breeze. We stroll by the quay, visit a gallery, head through the town as far as the castle and then eat at the King’s Head, with its sign of St Edmund. He is said to have come here in his fight against the Vikings. Today we need his help, for we are still fighting the barbarian Vikings, though now they are called politicians, journalists and arms merchants.  We are reminded again of St Edmund’s heritage and memory: ‘The British State is the enemy within, the enemy of England’. I recall a naïve young man who wrote to me nearly twenty years ago, expressing his alarm that ‘the barbarians are at the gates’. I disagreed with him, saying, ‘No, the barbarians are not at the gates, they have been in charge for a thousand years’.

At lunch we speak of Debenham, the home on the River Deben, in mid-Suffolk, which so much resembles the little town in North Essex where I grew up. We speak of the difference between the Saxon and Anglian dialects of Germanic and how still today the Anglians in Suffolk pronounce the name of the boundary river as Stour (rhyming with tower) and the Saxon/Essex pronunciation which rhymes with tour. A similar difference is apparent in Cambridge, where those on the east bank of the River Cam/Ouse are East Anglians and drink ale, those on the west bank are East Mercians and drink beer, and have a working man’s club on their side. On the other hand, the City of Ely is all East Anglian, as it was in the time of St Audrey.

We speak of the 1959 novel Love on a Branch Line by John Hadfield, which the Benckendorffs have recently read. In it a bureaucrat from London is converted to the East Anglian way, rather as in the novel The Darling Buds of May by H. E. Bates. We speak of the nature of love. The Countess speaks to me of an elderly neighbour. Widowed, he actually bought the bus stop, which had been closed by the bus company, where he had proposed to the love of his life when he had been twenty years old. Every morning he walks down to it and sits on the bench, not waiting for the bus, but for the next meeting with his beloved wife. She tells me how she also knows a widow, who every Friday buys flowers and puts them with a candle in front of the photograph of her late husband.

We leave Orford for Claydon to visit the graves of Sophie (Shuvalova) and Constantine Benckendorff, the wife and the son of Count Alexander Konstantinovich Benckendorff, the last ambassador of the Tsar to the Court of St James. Last September we erected new crosses on their graves, where we wish to plant roses in their memory. We decide to turn for home by the country lanes, past the thatch, hollyhocks and roses of Suffolk villages, past Crowfield, White Horse Corner, Hestley Hall, Standwell Green, by the ripening fields of grain and rape gone to seed, still south of the village of St Dicul, the disciple of St Fursey at Burgh Castle and of St Edmund’s Hoxne. Here, on the back roads, lives Old Suffolk, part of the Old England that we love.

Now we are back home. The Count and Countess get out of the car and the Countess walks among the fallen petals along the path beneath the rose-covered garden arches which lead to the front door of their home and is greeted by her tabby cat, which she picks up, caresses and cradles. It is tea time; the Royal Albert chintz tea set is ready and cake too. We are home and over tea we discuss the project of opening a chapel nearby, in honour of the Dormition of the Mother of God. A building is at present for sale. I promise to speak to our Archbishop about it. Almost in the centre of the triangle of our churches in Colchester, Cambridge and Norwich, this is an ideal location for those who live further away than others. May God bless it.

Count Benckendorff speaks enthusiastically of the couple’s recent visit to Jane Austen’s House in Chawton and to Winchester. Jane Austen’s House felt so authentic for them and they saw her tiny writing table and family portraits. They felt they had been taking part in Pride and Prejudice. They quote from the novel: ‘It must be improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is known to have dreamed of her’. Then they had discovered Winchester, the City Museum, and had taken photographs of one another beneath the statue of King Alfred the Great. They want to return and visit more Hampshire villages along the valley of the River Test.

Finally, we turn to our next trip. We will start at St Botolph’s seventh-century thatched church at Iken as an act of pilgrimage, then on to mysterious Laxfield, and from there we can head to Lavenham and Kersey. Who said that Suffolk does not have hills?! In Lavenham I want to show them De Vere’s house, that is the home of Earl de Vere, whom many think wrote ‘Shakespeare’. I tell them of the oxlip flower, mentioned in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which grows only in parts of North Essex and Suffolk, which de Vere knew. As he wrote:  I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.

26 June 2026

 

 

Orthodoxy in Western Europe After the Ukraine Debacle

The Political Situation

The conflict in the Ukraine has dragged on for years, perhaps because Russia had to be ready for a war to defend itself against Western Europe. Now the West has been divided into two, with the USA abandoning Western Europe and even withdrawing from NATO after its defeat by Iran, Russia is ready. It can defend itself in a war against Western Europe. The latter’s elite wants to launch that war as soon as possible. However, the people of Western Europe have no interest whatsoever in such an attack on Russia – the words of its elite are probably just empty bluster. In any case, the hated pro-Zelensky elite of Western Europe is collapsing, with the most aggressive, Starmer, gone first.

The most disliked man in the UK, a tedious and depressing bureaucrat, the dullest of all sociopathic, Establishment-appointed functionaries, with a fake wife and Ukrainian ‘male models’, has gone. The peoples of Britain cheer with happiness, even if he is replaced by his clone, Burnham. The highly unpopular Merz and Macron may be next to fall, together with all manner of sexual perverts and cocaine addicts who belong to the Globalist elite. After this, new leaders may begin siding with their peoples. Spain has already started in its campaign against Zionist genocide. Italy and Ireland are beginning, with Poland objecting to the genocide of the Kiev Fascists against the Poles in 1943.

After four lost years of diplomatic moderation and caution, Russia will reluctantly be obliged to take over all of the Ukraine, if it wants to demilitarise and denazify it. Then it will be in a position to negotiate with its neighbours: ‘Leave NATO and we will return the lands in the Ukraine which Stalin stole from you, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Poland’. Years late, a New Ukraine can at last be dragged out of its corruption, poverty and the oppression of its Zionist bandit-oligarchs and cocaine addicts, to Russian standards of living. This will leave the Orthodox Church problem to be solved at last, but only as part of the resolution of the general Church architecture problem in Western Europe.

The Church Situation

In 1988 we proposed that there should be a new Autocephalous Local Western European Orthodox Church, in six and then perhaps eight Archdioceses. The latter could eventually become Autocephalous Local Churches in their own right. These six or eight Local Archdioceses were: Italia = Italy, San Marino, Italian-speaking Switzerland and Malta; Iberia = Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar; Iona = The British Isles and Ireland; Gallia = France, Monaco and French-speaking Belgium and Switzerland; Scandinavia = Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark; Germania = Germany, Netherlands, Flanders, Luxembourg, German-speaking Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria.

The latter three countries may now have enough Orthodox to be separated from an Archdiocese of Germania. And the two and a half countries of Benelux might one day be big enough to separate too. Eight new Local Churches? Geographically, nothing has changed since 1988, but much has changed in other respects. The Constantinople Church is now much smaller, as it dies out, though a few living parts have moved out of the Greek ghetto. The three parts of the Russian Church finally reached unity, until the now fully Americanised CIA ROCOR fell into schism from the Archdiocese of Western Europe. Now the latter is proposing to consecrate its Moldovan bishops, defying Moscow like Riga.

Above all, despite the presence of Ukrainians, Serbs, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Antiochians and Georgians, Orthodox Western Europe is dominated by the Romanian Church. Divided into two Autonomous Metropolias, there are now over four million Romanians and Moldovans (some of the latter also form the bulk of the Moscow presence, with two bishops) in Western Europe. With ten bishops, the Romanians and Moldovans have nearly 1300 parishes and thirty monasteries. This is about 65% of all Orthodox. Moreover, the Romanian Church is very close to the canonical Ukrainian presence. The two peoples get on very well and there are bilingual parishes, as in Romania and the Ukraine.

The Future?

The Patriarchate of Romania could yet move to establish an Autocephalous Western European Orthodox Church, given its majority situation, Latin language and its incarnation into several parts of Western Europe. It full well knows that, in any case, the Greeks and the Russians would not initially take part in any new Autocephalous Western European Church. They boycott localisation, as they both suffer from their anti-Incarnational, anti-Catholicity imperial ideologies, namely, ‘Hellenism’ and ‘the Russian World’. The hope would be that the below eight national Diaspora groups would band together, initially leaving Greeks and Russians out in the cold, as they so clearly desire.

Romanians, Moldovans, Serbs, Ukrainians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Antiochians and Georgians together? The parishes of the Paris Archdiocese of Western Europe would join such a new Western European Local Church quickly, leaving Moscow Russian nationalists, ROCOR American Protestant nationalists and Greek Phanariot nationalists to die out in self-imposed isolation. Their second and third generations would vote with their feet, leaving the empty buildings and the old peoples’ homes behind them. What of the other European countries, which are not included above and are not part of a Local Church (Slovenia, Croatia, Czechia, Slovakia and Poland)?

It seems to me that Finland and the three Baltic States should have their own single Baltic Church, with autocephaly granted by Moscow. All pro-Romanian parts of Moldova should return to the Romanian Church. And similarly, Hungary should have its own Church, if the 600 parishes of Carpatho-Russia return to Hungary and not to Slovakia. If to Slovakia, then Hungary should form its own Archdiocese, linked with the Romanian Church, which already has a bishop and diocese there. In a Russia in BRICS, where sovereignty is the norm, the Moscow Church would have to reform itself, at last escaping its Imperial and Soviet straitjacket, and grant autocephaly to the New Ukraine and Belarus.

 

 

The Post-Western World and the Post-Fascist Western World

After the sacrificial victory of the peoples of the USSR over Nazism which murdered 27 million of them, and the ever more obvious and humiliating capitulations of the West after 1945, in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now in West Africa, Iran and the Ukraine, we began entering the post-Western world. This is a world that is no longer controlled by the Western elites. Even their technology and infrastructure have fallen behind those of China, Russia and Iran, as the Western economy has been overtaken by the economies of India, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkiye and Mexico. These countries, and others, are banding together in the BRICS concert of sovereign, but co-operating nations.

This means that we have entered a multipolar world, in which the USA and its vassal-states in the Western half of Europe and Australasia have put the countries they control at serious risk of being permanently left behind. This is the result of their quite unwarranted, racist superiority ideology. In short, we are returning to the Pre-Western world, to the world of a millennium ago, as it was before the rise of the Western elite, who little by little came to control and manipulate first the Western peoples, and then most other peoples, through their Fascist rule, from which so many millions died. Enough is enough. We are now gradually moving towards the Post-Fascist Western world.

And this means moving back to the Pre-Fascist West. In other words, the circle is being closed. The Pre-Fascist West is the West of a millennium ago, before the Western peoples were herded into submission and propagandised by barbarian and pagan elites, who behaved as mafia gangsters with their castles, camps and knights. The phases of their Fascist control techniques of divide and rule and bread and circuses have gone from Feudalism to Imperialism, from Capitalism to Marxism, from Nazism to Globalism. These proclaim that: ‘We are superior to you all and therefore we have the right to massacre you and exploit you and you must bow down before us and capitulate to us’.

We can see this quite clearly in the case of Russia. The West, which was superior to it only in its military technology, told Russians at the end of the seventeenth century that, as Slavs, they were fit only to be ‘slaves’. They were an inferior, backward, primitive, militaristic, aggressive, cruel, violent, devious, untrustworthy mass of evil, stupid, drunken savages, so servile that they welcomed oppression and tyranny. In fact, that was an exact description of the savage West. These stereotypes were those of universal Western racism – the same stereotypes were used for Blacks, Reds, Browns and Yellows, Africans, Native Americans, Hindus, Chinese, and all who are not of the Western elite.

Although today the Russian Federation has by PPE for some time been the world’s fourth largest economy and the largest economy in Europe, it was in the late seventeenth century that Russia began losing its roots and patriotic identity and accepted the Western nonsense. The inferiority complex had begun. First, it copied Western Feudalism and then its Imperialism. Its Westernised rulers, Peter I and then the German Catherine II, enforced Western Feudalism, serfdom and conquest, which its Westernised elite so much admired, as it benefited them. In the nineteenth century, the same elite adopted the next phase of the Western ideology of exploitation, Capitalism.

Peasants and workers alike were ruthlessly exploited by the ultra-rich elite. Despite the bold attempts to regulate the excesses of Capitalism by the Tsars and to work for social justice, the decadent Westernised aristocracy, who ruled the country unjustly provoked the adoption in 1917 of another Western ideology, Marxism. Although this ideology killed off the uniquely Western elitist ideology of Nazism after it had invaded Russia, that success came only by starting the long return of Russia to its roots and patriotic identity. Marxism failed to provide what it had promised, bankrupted Russia and fell. Thus, Russia was tempted by the final phase of Western Fascist ideology, called Globalism.

After over thirty-five years of Globalism, which brought Western oligarchy, tyranny, corruption and narcissism into Russia, it too has been rejected as anti-patriotic, as proved by its treacherous role in the conflict against the Globalist Nazi NATO in its proxy war in the rootless Ukraine. Although the remnants of Globalism survive in the tyranny and corruption of pro-Stalinist Russian oligarchs, still stuck in the Soviet past, not least the bandits who seized power in the still unSovietised Church elite, a deWesternised future is clear. And that means the full return to the Pre-Westernised Russia, so admired and desired by Tsar Nicholas II, who in 1917 was overthrown precisely for that by the West.

The Pre-Westernised Russia means a Russia which has Sovereignty and therefore secure borders, because Sovereignty, not vassaldom, is the precondition for economic prosperity. This means that the country is ruled by a government which has stability and continuity, as it has the best interests of the people at heart. This allows free enterprise, but not the law of the jungle with its huge gulf between rich and poor of the Western Globalist parasitic oligarchic system. This means social justice, but also opportunities for all. Such a government and people have their roots and identity in traditional spiritual and moral values, which provide social, family and personal stability.

The Sins of Love of Power and Money Motivating Those Who Oppose the Missionary Work of Founding New Local Churches

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all people, let us pray to the Lord.

Foreword: Church Unity and the Anti-Autocephaly Argument.

Although they are not Roman Catholics, there are those who love and admire Papism. They are mainly Patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople. They love anti-missionary centralisation, keeping all power and money in their own hands, and are opposed to granting any autocephaly. They argue that unity is strength, division is weakness. Arguing for Papism, they forget that the Popes were the toys of medieval kings, more recently of Napoleon, Hitler and of the CIA, which appointed its political Polish Pope. Moreover, they forget that masses of Christians are not Roman Catholics and never will be, for they see in it just another centralist bureaucratic organisation, as tyrannical as any State.

New Local Churches and the Sin of Centralism

Since 2022 a series of clerics in the Russian Church, under threat of being defrocked by their hierarchy for not agreeing with the war in the Ukraine, refusing to pray for Russian victory, and so compromising themselves spiritually, have left it for another Local Church, the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The problem here is that they have, perhaps not realising it, passed from one extreme to the other. They remain spiritually compromised, for the hierarchy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople has for nearly eighty years been run as a sub-department of the hideously anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox US government, with its Protestant-style LGBT and all the rest.

There is only one reason why people leave the Church – because they have lost their Faith and no longer agree with the teachings of the Church. On the other hand, people can leave a part of the Church which is infected by nationalist politics because people belong to another nationality, have another language and live in a different State, which the nationalistic part does not accept. In this case, people are obliged to move to another part of the Church, which accepts them as they are, with their nationality, customs, language and government. They have not left the Church at all and, if anything, their movement is missionary, as they are in fact spreading Orthodox Christianity.

If a large number of people find themselves in this situation and are not accepted by their Mother Church because of their nationality, language or situation in another State, and have no other part of the Church to go to, then it is the duty of the Mother Church to establish a new Local Church for them. If it does not do so, then those in the Mother Church behave as a stepmother and commit the sin of centralism, which is simply the sin of love of power and money, which they cling on to. Administrative separation is not lack of unity, division of Faith or change of dogmas. The Faith remains the same. Let us explain this through some examples from ancient and modern history.

Three Examples of Centralism

Rome was the first to fall into the sin of centralism through its Germanic Popes in the eleventh century. They refused to establish or even recognise independent, ‘autocephalous’ Local Churches in different nations. They even imposed their Latin language, which few understood outside their clerical caste of scholars and bishops, ‘the princes of the Church’. This was anti-missionary. The Popes also launched bloody wars of persecution, Crusades and Inquisitions against dissidents and declared that those who massacred them would go straight to heaven. These acts of aggression created dissidents, logically called Protestants, who rejected the Popes and their Latin language.

Just like Rome, the Imperial Capital of Constantinople also fell into the sin of centralism. At first, Non-Greeks in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria and Armenia left it. Then came the departure of Rome, which was also accompanied by Greek ethnic xenophobia. Understanding that it would lose all Non-Greeks, the Greeks later allowed other peoples to have their own Local Churches. Thus, the Serbian, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian Churches appeared. However, recently, it has threatened to take back their Church independence, called ‘autocephaly’, granted centuries ago, and to become ‘first without equals’. This is pure Papism, racist centralisation.

Just like Rome, Moscow also fell into the sin of centralism, a consequence of its centralising State. As a result, there appeared protesting Russian sects: Judaisers, Old Ritualists and then Dukhobors, Stundists, Baptists. Over thirty-five years after the dissolution of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Moscow Patriarchate was finally forced to grant Church independence to Orthodox in Poland, Czechoslovakia and then to those North America, and grant partial independence to Orthodox in Japan and China. Today, over thirty-five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1991, Orthodox in the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltics also want their independence in the same way.

Autocephaly, Not Nationalism

However, those in the Ukraine who want Church independence, ‘autocephaly’, are termed by those contaminated by nationalist hatred as ‘uncanonical’ or even ‘schismatic’. Ironically, those who call pious Orthodox such names are generally Soviet nationalists who wave the Soviet flag and appear to worship Stalin. However, support for autocephaly, granted as a result of the decentralisation of former centralised empires, whether those of Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, does not mean that we approve of the other extreme, of hateful nationalism and racist xenophobia. Patriotism unites and creates sympathy with other peoples, but nationalism always divides in hatred.

Local Churches need autocephaly in order to speak in the local language of their peoples, to respect their customs and for them to adapt to local political conditions. Thus, even Greeks and Greek Cypriots have their own separate  Churches – this is because they need to deal with their local ‘ceasars’ on different territories, having political independence, always strictly following the words of Christ: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’. This is not nationalism, because nationalism puts the nation above Christ. That is as in the German anthem: ‘Deutschland ueber alles’ – Germany above everything – including above Christ and man.

All nationalists follow the same German example and as xenophobic racists put their nation above Christ. And yet He made us all, whatever our language and nationality. Our wish to see the autocephaly of Churches in countries which are politically independent from the country of the Mother Church is based on the example of the Local Churches, to Whom the Apostle Paul addressed his individual letters almost 2,000 years ago. There is nothing new then in such an ‘ecclesiology’, the incarnational theology of the Church. The persecution of those who work for future Local Churches and abuse them is proof that we are expressing a Gospel truth, which this world detests and rejects.

The Struggle for Autocephaly and the Catholicity of the Church

We have recently seen the example of the newly-founded Macedonian Orthodox Church, whose autocephaly was finally granted to it by its Serbian Mother-Church after decades of waiting, accusations and strife. The granting of Church independence, ‘autocephaly’, the founding of new Churches by Mother-Churches, is not a question of dogma. This is why the centralists’ accusations like ‘uncanonical’ and ‘schismatic’ applied to those who work as missionaries towards founding new Local Churches are absurd and vain. They go against the Catholicity of the Church, the third sign of the Church, which states that the Church is One, no matter where it is or what language it uses.

Similarly absurd and vain is the persecution of us who have always worked specifically for a new Local Church of Western Europe, which we have been proposing in concrete terms since 1988, though we have been opposed by centralising and racist Greeks and Russians. Both extremists on the fringes of the Church, these centralisers who refuse to establish new Local Churches because they are greedy to cling onto power and money, and also the sectarian schismatics, who want to maintain their power over their tiny ghetto-churches and condemn all other nationalities, have opposed us. We may not live to see it, but our children and grandchildren may live to see a Local Church.

Obtaining autocephaly has always been a struggle. Recently the Macedonian Church received autocephaly, but only after nearly sixty years, actually less than the length of struggle of the Bulgarian Church for autocephaly, which was especially bitter. As for the ancient Georgian Church, it had its autocephaly uncanonically suppressed for nearly 200 years by the Russian Church, itself then suppressed by Imperial and then Soviet control. Conversely, we do not hold with racist and politically-motivated Ukrainians who do not know the words of ‘Our Father’ and throw out icons of Russian saints from churches because they are Russian. That is just Nazi racism, the other extreme.

Afterword

Many think that today’s Russian Church leadership is just as subservient to the Russian State as the State-appointed hierarchies of the Protestant Churches, the Churches of England, Finland, Sweden, Norway etc, are towards their States. That was indeed the case of the Russian Church before the Revolution under the Protestant ‘Spiritual Regulation’ of Peter I. Under the Soviet regime, it was far worse, for bishops faced death for disobedience to the State. It seems that today’s Russian bishops are so psychologically traumatised by that period that they voluntarily do what they imagine the State wants. The State does not want such subservience, it is, amazingly, self-imposed.

 

The New World Order

The Past

The whole contemporary world has been shaped for the last millennium by the imperialism and technology of ‘the West’, also called ‘the Western world’. Although this began as a narrow racial and geographical European unit, founded by the Franks and ruled by Karl the Tall (in French called Charlemagne), it became an ideological construct – from local it went global. Thus, today we can find ‘Frankish Westerners’ of all races, in Japan, Australia, Argentina, and all over the world. Conversely, we can also find many who oppose the ‘West’ as an ideology, in the West itself and all over the world.

The Western Millennium: 992-1492-1992

‘The West’ in the ideological sense was born over a millennium ago. It began with 500 years of overland territorial expansion from the Frankish centre, from where is now the Franco-German border, moving out from its Rhineland ‘Carolingian’ (Charlemagne) base. It expanded first to what is now Central and Eastern Europe, then to Southern Italy and Iberia, then to the ‘Conquest’ of the British Isles and Ireland from 1066 on, to Scandinavia, to Palestine from 1096 on, and then to the Western Russian borderlands (borderlands in Slav languages = ukraina). This process played out from 992 to 1492.

The Western expansionists realised in the fifteenth century that their attempted conquests towards the east had failed, successfully resisted and frustrated by Orthodox Christendom and Islam. Therefore, the expansionists, initially also called by the Spanish word ‘conquistadors’, who in January 1492 had reconquered Granada and so completing the reconquest of Iberia, turned westwards. Thus opened 500 years of overseas expansion, westwards to the Americas and south-eastwards to Africa, Asia and finally to Oceania, so encircling Russia and Islam, starting in July 1492 and ending in 1992.

That millennium of expansion finally ended in 1992, after the fall of the USSR, which had been founded on the Western materialist ideology of Marxism, accepted by Russians who had lost their Faith. It ended because all the West’s attempts after 1992 to continue its overseas expansion, including that of its Israel settler colony, failed, from Iraq to Afghanistan, from the Ukraine to Yemen, from Gaza to Iran. So began the self-isolation of the West, which no longer had any credit, in contrast to the great popularity of President Putin, in Russia, Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as in parts of Western Europe.

The World Millennium

So, with the fall of the atheist USSR, began the World Millennium – the New World Order of BRICS. This went back to the vision of Primakov in newly independent Russia in 1998, the failed US coup in Kiev in 2004-2005, President Putin’s Munich Speech in 2007 and his defence of South Ossetia from US proxies in 2008, BRICS marked the New World Order. It was formally founded in 2009 in Russian Ekaterinburg, set between Europe and Asia, the City of the Imperial Martyrs, who were executed by order from New York. Today BRICS, not New York, is the real United Nations, the Concert of Sovereign Nations.

Thus, BRICS China is now set to become the leader of East Asia, including eventually Japan, a United Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and all South-East Asia, Indonesia and south-eastwards to Oceania. BRICS Iran is now set to become the leader of the whole of largely Muslim West Asia. If it can overcome its Hindu nationalism, BRICS India can become the leader of all South Asia. And as for Russia, if it too can overcome the Imperialist and Soviet hangover of divisive centralism and nationalism, BRICS Russia can become the leader of North Asia, more often called Eurasia. East, West, South and North.

Eurasia includes all of Europe, from Reykjavik to Dublin, London, Lisbon across Europe and Siberia, eastwards to Vladivostok, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Slovakia, Serbia and Hungary have already understood. First, however, its Church must be cleansed of its Soviet centralism, nationalism and corruption, planted by divide and rule Western ideologies and accepted by greedy and corrupt Russian would-be oligarchs. It must also overcome the assassination operation of its New York section, which parallels the Phanar operation, both CIA-run, and so both hating the independent Romanians and Moldovans.

The Future?

Only once it has resolved its own transatlantic moral decay, could Russia then begin to accept the independence of all Non-Russian Orthodox, starting with the Ukrainians, and then reverse the moral decay of Western Europe North America and Oceania by repentant example. Africa, Latin America and Oceania will follow China, Iran, India and Russia, as South Africa and Brazil are already trying to do, and as the BRICS peoples of Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia and the Arab Emirates want. Then the different spheres of civilisation will at last become spheres of security and spheres of peace and co-operation.

Memories of Fr Sophrony Sakharov (1896-1993)

Between 1975 and 1983 I must have attended at least 100 liturgies, presided over by Fr Sophrony. On summer weekdays in the mid-seventies I would sit in the old refectory after meals and listen to him. I did not ask him any questions. I listened, because I wanted to learn. Young men do not interrupt elderly and wise monks with foolish questions.

Fr Sophrony came from an upper middle-class Moscow family, interested in astrology and oriental religion, as was the bourgeois fashion then. As a young man he briefly became a Hindu and was marked by the mantra and the ashram. Emigrating with the Saint Petersburg aristocracy, much infiltrated by freemasonry, to Paris, he was a young artist taken with the art nouveau movement. Elena Grigorievna Evdokimova related to me in the 1980s how in the early twenties she found ‘Seryozha’ (the young Fr Sophrony) quite unworldly, harmless, in the clouds, intellectual, even slightly eccentric. So when he left worldly Paris for Mt Athos, there was no surprise at all. He was simply not made for this world.

On Athos, of course, the young Sophrony met monk Siluan (Silouan is the French transliteration; Silvanus is the Western form), the repentant peasant hesychast. His example of deep repentance, after a stormy youth, which led to his experience of the Holy Spirit, was a revelation and brought monk Sophrony to salvation. Fr Sophrony recorded St Siluan’s words, which we would otherwise never have known, and presented them with his usual poetic eloquence to a world which had little idea of the Orthodox Tradition, as one of the great spiritual revelations of the twentieth century.

It was the Prayer of the Heart which had led to St Siluan, who was to lead to St Sophrony. We recall that the Russian St Panteleimon’s Monastery on Athos was still imbued in St Siluan’s time with name-glorifying (imiaslavie) through the Prayer of the Heart. That living Spirit had been ruthlessly and unjustly suppressed by the stale, bureaucratic hierarchy in Russia. That had led to a Russian Navy ship being sent to Athos, the killing of four monks, injuries to many more and some 1,600 monks being transported by force to Russia, where they were mistreated by the hierarchy much as later monks were mistreated by the Communists.

A 1914 letter of one of the main proponents of the Prayer of the Heart, Elder Hilarion (Domrachov), had said that Russian military reverses in the First World War might be attributable to the persecution of name glorifying: ‘What further disasters this will lead Russia to, only God knows’, he had said. In 1915 he added that the persecution coming from ‘the highest members of the Russian hierarchy, is a sure omen of the proximity of times in which the last enemy of truth, the all-pernicious Antichrist, has to come’.

Thirty years later, in 1948 the xenophobic Greek government expelled three highly educated Russian monks from Athos, accusing them of collaborating with the Nazis. Fr Sophrony was one of them, my beloved Fr Siluan of Paris another, and the future Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) the third. Fr Sophrony returned to Paris. Although it was here that he published his notes on St Siluan, other efforts did not bear fruit in Paris in the tiny Moscow jurisdiction with such intellectuals as Lossky and Uspensky. An attempt to found a convent came to naught. However, in 1959, the Church of England very generously offered a church, a building and some land free for an Orthodox monastery.

So it was that Fr Sophrony and three monks moved to England. In 1965 the anti-monastic Metropolitan Antony (Bloom), also a Parisian, led Fr Sophrony and his small community to move from the Moscow jurisdiction to the Constantinople jurisdiction. Despite the reconciliation between the two in 1981, at which I was present, Fr Sophrony’s passage to Constantinople is something that Moscow has never quite forgiven, but that is another story.

Still in the 1970s the small monastery, by then essentially a convent, lived very modestly, dependent on pious Greek Cypriots from London. I remember Fr Sophrony’s stories about Athonite life in the 1930s, how monks queued to live in caves (suitable caves were in short supply), and the young monk Sophrony’s shock at seeing naked monk-ascetics. I also remember his reserve at Solzhenitsyn, whose books appeared in the West in the 70s. Fr Sophrony remained outside Western anti-Soviet politics, into which the naïve Solzhenitsyn fell, and only much later repented for.

Fr Sophrony’s unusual iconographical and architectural style, monks and nuns living in a double monastery, the highly intellectual monks and nuns with doctorates, whom he attracted, his books which are very difficult to understand, but which explain the philosophy of holiness, attract some, others less. But everybody is different. The main thing is that Fr Sophrony lived to see the 1992 canonisation of St Siluan, his lifetime’s mission fulfilled.

In 1993 he passed away. Fr Sophrony and his monastery, becoming more and more Greek in ethos after he reposed, was a one off and did and does much good. In 2019 he was canonised as a local saint, St Sophrony the Athonite. His life was the witness of one who had reflected in his way the wisdom and holiness of St Siluan. St Sophrony made known St Siluan and that was his great achievement.

In the 70s, I had spoken to elderly monks at St Panteleimon’s on Athos, who had known ‘Sophrony’, who confirmed that he was always in the library, indeed he was the librarian. (They offered me his post, since none had replaced him since 1948!). The monks also confirmed that ‘Siluan is a saint’, adding that ‘there were lots of saints in those days’. I remember venerating his fragrant relics at St Panteleimon’s, thirteen years before his canonisation.

Holy Fathers Siluan and Sophrony, pray to God for us!

 

 

 

A Note on Lost Church Unity in Northern America

When in December 1898 the future Patriarch and Saint, Bp Tikhon (Bellavin) (1865-1925), arrived in the USA via Berlin, Paris, Le Havre and New York, he was destined to take charge of a multinational Orthodox diocese: Inuits in Alaska, former Uniat Carpatho-Russian refugees from Hungarian religious and economic oppression in Pennsylvania, and Syrians in New York. Three main groups, not to mention small numbers of Greeks, Serbs and others. And Bishop Tikhon united them, moving his headquarters from Alaska to San Francisco and then to New York.

My memories of Fr Alexander Schmemann (1922-1982) are linked with this past. I knew many who had known him in Paris before and during World War II. I knew how, with the highly intellectual Fr George Florovsky moved, Fr Alexander had, miraculously, obtained Autocephaly from the then enslaved Moscow Patriarchate for the canonically disputed ‘Metropolia’, as it was then called, and from it manufactured the OCA – the Orthodox Church in America.

I had read all of Fr Alexander’s books in the 70s and had found much obvious common sense in them. I had understood that his seeming modernism and Parisian anti-monasticism were psychological reactions to the compromised and ritualistic aristocratic Orthodoxy brought to Paris, where he had grown up. Fr Alexander had done much to overcome that ritualism and point out that communion was not a once a year event, but should be at every eucharist. This came out very clearly in his Diaries, published in Russia, rather sadly ‘redacted’ in their English translation.

I met Fr Alexander in Paris in May 1980, and he invited me to St Vladimir’s, Knowing that I would be out of place there, I turned down his offer, not least since I had been offered more in London, an offer which then did not materialise. Looking back, perhaps I would have made a home at St Tikhons, of which at that time I had not even heard. I would have been closer to St Tikhon through St Tikhon’s, closer to the way.

If I had time and the means, I would love to compile a biography of St Tikhon in several volumes. This is because I believe that the future of Orthodoxy in Northern America is in St Tikhon. Unity there is surely in the return to the pre-Revolutionary piety and lack of nationalism of St Tikhon. Before us there still gleams the great prize of Orthodox unity and an authentic united Northern American Orthodox Church (NAOC). St Tikhon is the past, the present and the future in this matter, together with others who will reap the harvest.