Author Archives: Father Andrew

125 Years of Putting Off the Inevitable

Introduction: What If?

The First World War was triggered by great imperial rivalries, above all those between Britain and Germany, and financed by the big banks, centred in London and New York, and encouraged by greedy arms merchants. They were helped by French and Austro-Hungarian revanchism and the feelings of the oppressed small peoples, the Serbian, Irish, Polish, Finnish, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Croat etc. The unjust outcome at Versailles in 1919 made the Second World War inevitable. And its injustices in turn made inevitable the collapse of the USSR, the wars in Yugoslavia and now in the Ukraine. Yet, peace could have been arrived at, perhaps in the Tsar’s Hague in 1900, without the needless bloodshed of tens of millions. For the unviable Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires would have collapsed anyway and the other colonial empires, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, German and Belgian, could have dissolved peacefully.

Towards Today’s World

Imperial Russia could have decentralised then, as it did in any case between 1917 and 1991. The world would then inevitably and peacefully have seen what we see today: an economically German-dominated Western Europe, a Russian-dominated North Asia (Eurasia), a Chinese-dominated East Asia, an Indian-dominated South Asia, an Arab-dominated West Asia (‘the Middle East’), and a US-dominated Northern America. In the Global South, Latin America, Africa and Oceania would all have gone their own ways, free of colonial tyranny and ruthless imperialist exploitation. Only because the banks and the arms dealers did not want it, did it not happen then. Just as today in the Ukraine, so then there plenty who did not want peace. However, none of this ‘what if’, suppositional, counterfactual history addresses the real situation today in 2025. How could the problems of the present be resolved, despite the huge errors of the past?

If there is to be peace in Europe, there can be no more Western support for the Fascist regime in Kiev, neither military, nor financial (nor for the Fascist regimes in the Baltics, Scandinavia, Germany, France and the UK). The ‘Ukrainians’ must be freed of the regime that has been massively killing its own men as proxies to die for the USA. Then the Russian Federation would be able to create a new, smaller, but historically-based, and not Soviet-fantasy Ukraine, with the nine provinces of Crimea and the south and east returning to Russia, the four and a half south-western provinces returning to Poland (two and a half provinces), Hungary (one province) and Romania (one province), and the remaining half of the old Soviet Ukraine becoming historic Kievan Rus. That could be its new name with a new flag, as the name ‘Ukraine’ and its flag, Austrian inventions of the century before last, are absurd.

If it created peace, the bankrupt USA could withdraw its forces from all over Europe and close its bases there, and the anachronism of NATO could at last disappear, saving the USA trillions of dollars. It should have disappeared on 25 February 1991, when the Warsaw Pact disappeared. Similarly, if there is to be peace in West Asia, there can be no more US (and UK) support for the Fascist regime in Israel (even if that means that those compromised by the Mossad Epstein, are outed). Israeli Zionism has largely bankrupted the US through the futile wars of the US and its defeats in those wars. Finally, Taiwan would at last be free to return to China, and so Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia could save hundreds of billions of dollars in needless offence (‘defence’) spending. And the USA could withdraw its troops and close its bases there too, saving it hundreds of billions of wasted dollars.

The Russian Church

If there is to be peace in the Church, a new Patriarch would have to be elected in Moscow. This would be he who would restore communion with the Patriarchate Constantinople, except with the invaders under it on Russian canonical territory, and begin talks with the Patriarchate of Alexandria about its jurisdiction in Africa. Then the ball would be in Constantinople’s court to elect a new and at last politically free Patriarch. The full Council of Bishops in Moscow could grant autocephaly to the twelve and a half provinces of Kievan Rus, also allowing the Kievan Church to control its Diaspora. Then it could grant autocephaly to Moldova, in concert with the Romanian Church, in exchange for the return of North Bukovina to Romania, retiring the four discredited Moscow bishops in Moldova, refrocking all those defrocked for political reasons and allowing the Moldovan Church to control its Diaspora.

Autocephaly could also be granted to the Belarusian Church, the Baltic Orthodox Church (covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland) and to the Hungarian Orthodox Church, which would be based on the 600+ parishes of the old Transcarpathia, the province transferred back to Hungary from the Soviet Ukraine. The already Autocephalous Orthodox Church in America (OCA) could at last rename itself OCNA (Orthodox Church of Northern America), in return receiving into itself the forty or so parishes in Northern America at present under Moscow, on condition that Bishop Alexander Belja head the new ‘Kievan and Russian Diocese’ of the OCNA. Moscow should dissolve the anachronistic and largely schismatic Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), with its Russian parishes in the USA and Canada joining the OCNA in two dioceses, of east and west. Those who refused would go off to sects, as usual.

The remaining ROCOR parishes, in Western Europe and Australia, and its few small communities still left in Latin America and the Caribbean, could be handed over to Moscow, as part of three newly Autonomous Metropolias, namely those of Western Europe, Latin America, and Oceania. Internally, Moscow’s Soviet-founded, ecumenist Department of External Relations could be transformed into the Department for Inter-Orthodox Friendship. Bishop-bureaucrats should either become diocesan bishops or else be ‘retired’. There would be no place for ecumenists and ‘cardinal-metropolitans’ in the truly post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church, which should drop the Soviet title of ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ for the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem.’ Finally, discredited bishops should be ‘retired’ and all priests and deacons absurdly defrocked for political reasons since 2022 should be refrocked and restored.

Conclusion: In the Church

As by far the largest Local Church, eight times bigger than the second largest, a de-Sovietised Russian Church has a special responsibility to the other at present fifteen Local Orthodox Churches, not least to a de-CIA-ised Constantinople. Only such actions as the above could help gather together all the other Local Churches in an Inter-Orthodox Council. Here there would be one overriding topic of discussion: the uncanonical Orthodox Diaspora situation, the inevitable resolution to which has been put off for over a century only by politics. The paralysis of the Church from the Soviet age, when Constantinople was used as a Cold War pawn against Russia, and today’s paralysis from the Second Cold War, also launched by the USA, must end. And the Soviet centralisation of the Russian Church must end. There is hope for the future, but only in a Church at last free of both Soviet and CIA mentalities and interference.

4/17 July 2025, The Imperial Martyrs

 

When the Church is Taken Over by the State and Faith Becomes Religion

Introduction: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Model of Church Administration

What exactly happens when the Church becomes part of the State? This has happened many times in Western history and shaped that history. There is not only the case of the Church-State, known as Roman Catholicism, whose head started wars, commanded armies and ordered mass campaigns of inquisition, repression and torture. There have also been the cases in Protestant North-Western Europe and wherever that model has been imitated. This is the State-Church, where Churches hand themselves over to State control.

Thus, the Protestants founded National (and nationalist, ‘flag-driven’) Churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Finland etc. In the first and well-known case, the new Church was founded by a Welsh genocidal tyrant and wife-murderer, who stole huge numbers of monastic houses and their lands and handed out their immense riches to his cronies. As for the national riches he seized for himself, he wasted them on pointless wars against France, which he lost.

The Adoption of the Model by the Russian State

This Protestant model was imitated by Tsar Peter I in Russia. Between 1682 and 1725 he forced the Russian Church into the same Lutheran mould, abolishing the Patriarchate in 1700, appointing Lutheran-educated Ukrainian bishops, and an ‘Oberprokuror’ to rule over the episcopate, effectively creating a Ministry of Religion. Some of the ‘Oberprokurors’ were not Orthodox Christians, indeed, at least one was an atheist and worked to destroy the Church. This control, resisted by Tsar Nicholas who wanted to abolish it, was copied by the atheist Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks controlled the Church in a similar reformist (in fact ‘deformist’), way, appointing a Secret Police Commissar to control the bishops, working to destroy the Church, murdering hundreds of thousands of clergy and people and literally dynamiting churches or confiscating them for secular uses. It was in this way that over some 300 years since Peter I, a special ‘religiosity’ appeared among nominal Russian Orthodox, which has lasted to this day. What are the three characteristics of this particular form of religiosity?

  1. Nationalisation

A State takeover of a Church means confusing Caesar’s and God’s, despite Christ’s words in the Gospel which command us to separate them and not to confuse them. Since the Church does not by nature belong to the State, therefore when such a takeover occurs, it means that the Church unnaturally begins to resemble the State. This means the adoption of State attributes – a persecuting, nationalistic, militaristic and bureaucratic mentality. In this way, the Church begins to resemble the State, rather like Roman Catholicism.

Nationalism means an emphasis on a narrow, exclusive, racial identity and language. In the Russian context, this means Russification and the loss of loyalty of other nationalities to the once multinational Russian Church. Militarism means an emphasis on a literal uniformity, obedience and rigidity, which cancels freedom of thought, and also integration with the armed forces. Bureaucratisation means an emphasis on protocols, paperwork and administration against the sacramental and spiritual view of the world.

  1. Clericalisation

A State takeover of a Church means that the clergy become agents of the State, that is, State employees, who develop the careerist mentality of civil servants and their ranks of promotion, awards and pensions. This in turn means that the people are alienated from the clergy, who become a separate caste ‘behind the iconostasis’ and the people begin to consider that the clergy are ‘the Church’. This creates a passive, disengaged and irresponsible mentality among the people – ‘it is not for us to do this, let ‘the Church’, i.e. the clergy, do it for us’.

This passive attitude of non-participation means that professional choirs sing in churches and services increasingly become abstract concerts and spectacles. Even prayer is delegated to the clergy, as people stop praying for themselves and ask the clergy to pray for them, an attitude that can be called ‘pious consumerism’. This view of the clergy as State bureaucrats, civil servants, means that the people begin to look at the clergy as unable to resolve their real problems and so they turn to elders, ‘startsy’, who in turn are often charlatans.

  1. Ritualisation

This mentality leads inevitably to ritualisation, the understanding of worship as ‘ustav’ or rubrics, a series of outward rites, in which participation is passive, but which just have to be tolerated. Thus, communion becomes the privilege of the clergy who may control access to laypeople’s communion by weaponising confession. As a result, communion may take place perfunctorily only once a year (the obligation for all civil servants until 1917) and sacraments are replaced by semi-private services, which have nothing to do with the liturgical cycles.

These made-up services, contractions of historic ones, include molebens, panikhidas and akathists. The latter of these are popular because they are comprehensible, since they have been composed recently in a language closer to Russian than the less accessible Church Slavonic, which is seen as the private language of the clergy (‘the Church’). The primacy of private rites means weak parish life, little sense of community, churches are patterned by outward formalities. In turn, non-churchgoers then revert to superstition as their belief.

A Nominal Church and Real Church Life

Reading the above, some may be in despair. However, we have made it clear that all these trends are the norm for nominal Russian Orthodox. Practising Russian Orthodox resist these outward trends and are critical of them. We follow the lives of the saints, who emphasise prayer and the ascetic, inward struggle. The above three trends are not those of St Seraphim of Sarov and St John of Kronstadt, even less are they those of the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Imperial Martyrs, St Tikhon and St Matrona. They are ours.

Firstly, Orthodox oppose Nationalism through cultivating the sense of the catholicity of the Church, meaning cultivating good relations with the other Local Churches, which work in other countries, where the Russian State has no control. Secondly, Orthodox oppose Clericalism through developing the solidarity between clergy and people, which is what Orthodoxy is, and this means the clergy no longer living as State functionaries. And finally Orthodox oppose Ritualism through inner life, the life of the spirit, as in real monasteries.

Conclusion: The Last Tsar and the Coming Restoration

The last Tsar opposed all three deformations of Church life, Nationalism, Clericalism and Ritualism. Thus, his intention, not fully implemented, was to open a Russian Orthodox church in every capital of Western Europe. This opposed Nationalism. As for Clericalism, he was always shocked by the spiritual emptiness of ‘educated’ bishops and priests and their careerist rivalries, for example that of Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. To them he opposed St Seraphim of Sarov, whom he had had canonised, and the Martyr Gregory.

Tsar Nicholas II also ardently opposed Ritualism and wanted to restore the architecture, iconography and Church music from before Peter I, as can be seen in his design of the Tsarskoe Selo Cathedral. Already in 1905 he had proposed the restoration of the Patriarchate. Careerist bishops, all wanting to be Patriarch, opposed him and the Tsar understood that they were not ready for restoration. Indeed, after his overthrow in 1917, this became very clear. Soon another Tsar will come and carry out the unfinished restoration.

When Will the Western Cultural Revolution End?

Most have heard of the Russian (Cultural) Revolution, imposed in 1917 by utterly incompetent generals and aristocrats, who overthrew the Tsar as they wanted power for themselves. Within a few months they had opened the doors to the Bolshevik Communist regime, which was mainly led by Non-Russians and indeed Anti-Russians. It was a suicidal act, which led to several million deaths and tried to annihilate the whole of Russian history and culture. It is difficult to say when the hysteria ended. Some would say 1941, when the Nazis invaded the USSR, others say two generations later with the self-destruction of the USSR in 1991. Yet others would say that the end has still not come. This will come only with a new Tsar, who will appear after the death of President Putin and restore what Communism destroyed and what had already been shaken before 1917.

Most have heard of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. It was imposed by Mao Zedong and his Maoist Chinese Communist Party for ten years from 1966 to 1976. Its aim was to destroy anything pre-Communist in China, from Buddhism and Confucianism to Capitalism and Western culture. It was a suicidal act, which killed most cruelly hundreds of thousands (some say more) of Chinese people, of whom Communism had already killed millions in the two decades before the Cultural Revolution was organised by Mao through his personality cult. The economic and cultural results of the Cultural Revolution were disastrous, just as they had been in Russia after 1917, when Russia lost some thirteen years of economic and cultural development, not to speak of the sufferings of Russia and the other peoples of the USSR.

Few have heard of the Western Cultural Revolution, though all know that it is real. Some say that this began with the first part of the European War in 1914, which killed sixteen million people in Europe and intensified with its Second Part in 1939, killing over forty million people in Europe. But its most active phase opened two generations after 1914, in 1964. Since then, the bloodshed of war in the tens of millions has largely ceased, only to be replaced by the bloodshed of abortion in the tens of millions. Reproducing the decadence and debauchery of Ancient Rome before it fell, it has debased not only art, but also human appearance, with an epidemic of obesity, tattoos, coloured hair, metal inserted into the face, ‘gender change’, woke perversion and widespread pedophilia. Where did this ‘Cultural Revolution’ come from? What does it all mean?

Just like the Russian and the Chinese Cultural Revolutions before it, the Western Cultural Revolution is in fact not Cultural, but Anti-Cultural. Indeed, it is suicidal, for it preaches the Culture of Death, in abortion at one end of life and euthanasia at the other end of life, and in lowering life expectancy. And then it wonders why depopulation is rapidly taking place in the Western and Westernised world, as a result of the refusal to have children and cultivate family life. Although this Revolution was started by suicidal Western Europe in 1914, it has in the last fifty years been led by the no less suicidal USA. Ruled by Oligarchy, which it falsely calls ‘Democracy’, it censors all opinions that differ from those that its mercenary Zionist media publish and all the Western countries pay homage to as vassals of their feudal master in the USA.

Do we stop here, with these words of despair? No, we cannot and we must not. Surely, the Western world can ‘walk it all back’? Of course, it can, but it will have to give up the idol of what it falsely calls ‘Western culture’, that is, it will have to give up its culture of ignorance and arrogance, its culture of imagined racial superiority and exploitation of the rest. The proud era of ‘The West is Best’ is long since over. The Western culture that created both Marxism and Nazism, the concentration camp and the World War, gender change and totalitarian liberalism, has been found wanting. It no longer has any spiritual foundation, for it lost that long ago. Only by returning to its spiritual foundations and teachings, which it began to reject already a millennium ago, can it revive. And that will take the miracle of repentance and humility. A miracle indeed.

 

Winner Takes All: The Self-Destruction of the Church of the Russian Emigration

In the years following the so-called Russian Revolution in 1917, the Church of the resulting Russian Emigration split into three parts. A few, very few, remained under the Church centred in Moscow, which eventually became known as the Moscow Patriarchate. Most of the emigres considered that that was a ‘Soviet Church’, a Communist-controlled organisation and, since members of their families had died fighting against Communism and they had been exiled by it, they would have nothing to do with its Church. This vast majority of emigres themselves split into two, a smaller group and a larger group.

The smaller group, centred at its Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and existing mainly in France, was founded and led by Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar in order to introduce a pro-Western regime, either a Constitutional Monarchy or else a masonic Republic. The larger group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), centred at first in Germany and then in New York, and with parishes above all in Germany, the Americas and Australia, was founded and led by emigres who, whatever their politics, were united by a profound hatred of Communists, who had stolen their land and wealth.

Obviously, now 108 years on after 1917, both groups are dying out, even though the New York group was much reinforced by the anti-Communist Russian emigration of 1945. As a result, the last pre-Revolutionary Archbishop of the Paris group died in 1981, and the last pre-Revolutionary Metropolitan of the reinforced New York group was deposed by his fellow-bishops in 2001 and died in 2006. Since then both groups have staggered on, declining in every way.

Both groups have since then much contracted, largely having failed to pass on the Faith to the descendants of the emigres, who are now in their fifth generation. Those born in the Diaspora have overwhelmingly been assimilated and lost all their Russian heritage. All that has survived is the political liberalism of the Paris group and the political conservatism (sometimes extreme conservatism) of the New York group. In other words, despite their radical contraction and the radical changes in their composition, their political identities have survived. However, their spiritual identity has been greatly weakened.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these political identities have largely become irrelevant, mere history. Moreover, both the ageing and ever-smaller groups were dwarfed by the post-1991 emigration of young people from the former Soviet Union, who automatically became part of the much-expanded Moscow Patriarchate. These young people found the two old émigré groups to be museum pieces and so irrelevant. As a result, both émigré groups had to join the Moscow Patriarchate, though keeping a measure of internal independence.

Today, both groups are being dismantled, or rather, are dismantling themselves, as both suffer from the same suicidal disease: a lack of bishops who know the canonical Russian Tradition and, as a result of this total lack of leadership and Christian example, a lack of money. The flock will not follow wolves. For example, after 1917 both groups built some churches, or much more often, converted buildings for Orthodox use, the majority of them very small, built for fewer than a hundred parishioners. However, they also inherited some splendid pre-Revolutionary church buildings, such as:

In Italy the two churches in Florence and San Remo, currently under ROCOR, but formerly under the Paris Archdiocese.

In Paris the Cathedral of the Paris Archdiocese.

In France the ruinous churches in Cannes, Biarritz and Pau. Although it is forbidden to enter the Cannes church, as it is too dangerous, the increasingly aggressive and increasingly small and impoverished ROCOR is paradoxically engaged in a court action against its own Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, in order to obtain property rights over this ruin.

In Switzerland the ROCOR churches in Geneva, Lausanne and Vevey.

In Germany, several ROCOR churches, such as those in Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Baden-Baden.

The two ROCOR convents in Jerusalem.

Most of these churches suffer from dwindling congregations and so dwindling income. Some are going to fall down, if they do not soon receive tens of millions of euros for repair and restoration. Clearly, in order to avoid this, only direct transfers of the buildings to the cash-rich Moscow Patriarchate can, as happened to the two former Paris Archdiocese churches in Nice and the former ROCOR church in Bari in Italy, solve the problem. In the matter of restoring historic buildings, the Moscow Patriarchate will be much aided by the Russian State, which is keen to recover pre-Revolutionary Russian historic monuments, even if they are in a ruinous state.

In this long game of chess between the 99%, the very large Mother-Church, and the 1%, the two tiny émigré fragments, there can only be one winner, the Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate. It will take it all. As we said, this has already taken place in Nice and Bari, but also in Indonesia, where in 2016 ROCOR voluntarily handed over all its sixteen mission parishes to the Moscow Patriarchate, admitting that it could not cope with them. Once one of the last old, Russian-speaking ROCOR bishops has left the stage, many of the churches in Germany will certainly transfer to the Moscow Patriarchate, as their clergy and people come almost all from the ex-Soviet Union.

As one Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan told me recently: ‘Their churches are like ripe fruit hanging from a tree which will fall into our hands’. In other words, the Patriarchate does not have to do anything, except to wait patiently for the Church of the Emigration to dismantle itself, as the Emigration self-destructs after the deaths of educated, Russian-speaking bishops, who are faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and not to weird old calendarist or new calendarist pseudo-theologies, or rather fantasies.

We have descended a long, long way from the hopes expressed by the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexei II in 2003 (yes, already nearly a generation ago!) that the Western European Metropolia of the Moscow Patriarchate would become the foundation of a future Western European Local Church. That is now a mere daydream to be forgotten in the cold light of reality, the incompetence, corruption and immorality of various bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, the liberalism of a large minority in the Paris Archdiocese, who then left it, and the schismatic and sectarian isolation of the ROCOR bishops, who still have not left it and officially founded some weird pseudo-Russian old calendarist sect, which is what they are.

Anyone has the right to leave a Church which has broken communion with another Church. That is what was done when ROCOR broke communion with part of the Moscow Patriarchate. For anyone and everyone can leave a group which enters into schism. The floodgates are opened. Moscow went to the casino, bet all its money on the wrong number and the wheel has spun and chosen another. Russia has always been betrayed by the traitors of the fifth column. In the early 17th century, boyars betrayed it to the Poles, 1917 aristocrat-traitors destroyed the Russian Empire, in 1991 oligarch-traitors destroyed the Soviet Union, and today wealthy traitors have been allowed to undermine the Russian Church.

The results are the anti-Ukrainian, anti-Moldovan and anti-English actions of Moscow and its increasing centralisation, ritualisation, nationalisation and militarisation, as it has cut itself off from communion with other Local Churches. To return to even the situation of hope of 2003 will take decades. Just like the Patriarchate of Constantinople before it, Moscow has hit the ball into the court of others, who are busy constructing what Moscow failed to do. God gave Moscow an opportunity on a silver plate; it rejected it. Now it will have to deal with the suicidal consequences, exactly as we have been warning ever since 2003. The opportunity has been presented to others.

For the Orthodox Diaspora, does this matter? Probably not, because the policy of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Diaspora has increasingly become that of a nationalist ghetto. It lives in isolation from, and so is irrelevant to, the vast majority of Diaspora Orthodox, who are not Russian. The only hope is that the Moscow Patriarchate will cast off its present nationalist and racist isolationism, returning to communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church.

Only then will Moscow return to the glorious heritage of the two great Russian saints of the Diaspora, in the USA St Tikhon of New York and Moscow, and in Europe, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, the latter the greatest man of the Russian emigration. They did not listen to St John, they persecuted him, suspended him, put him on trial and have done exactly the same to his disciples. The price they are having to pay for that is already very heavy indeed. God is not mocked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Latest ROCOR Scandal – This Time in Australia

https://news-pravda.com/world/2025/06/29/1477487.html

It is with great sadness that we have heard from multiple sources (a google search confirms all) of the latest Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) scandal, this time in Australia. There it has made all the main newspapers and media, though of course it will probably not make the largely ROCOR-run, anti-Greek, and heavily censored ‘orthochristian’ website.

Indeed, the Australian story has done nothing for the American Synod (ROCOR), which had already been publicly shamed in a court case for its blatant lies about Fr Alexander Belya and his Vicariate, as shown by the very expensive court case which it lost, and also for its blatant lies about the ‘Colchester Diocese’ in England. Here ROCOR lost half its Western European diocese through its anti-canonical, anti-Moscow schism, racist and sectarian persecution, slander and greed.

As a result, in all the nineteen churches combined of its so-called ‘Western European Diocese’, it is doubtful if on an average Sunday there are even 1,500 people inside them, many of which it does not even own. The ROCOR scandal in Geneva, with the vicious persecution and expulsion of the most faithful of the old ROCOR, all disciples of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, also remains unresolved. The Old Pre-Revolutionary Tradition ROCOR has been killed off by the New Convert ROCOR. St John of Shanghai has ben put on trial and suspended by the American Synod for a second time.

Now in Australia, after the sentencing of the ROCOR pedophile priest from Bombala, publicly known about for over seven years, though in the 1990s they had wanted to make him a bishop (!), another cleric, Fr Boris Ignatievsky, has made a shocking statement typical of ROCOR clericalism: ‘The sheep must not judge the shepherds’. Several of the Russian ‘gyprocker’ clergy in Australia, have already been responsible for scandals, including alcoholism, infidelity and wife-beating. Little wonder that our dear friend in Australia, a priest of integrity, Abbot Sergei Shatrov, left monasticism and the priesthood and became a taxi-driver. (Fr Michael Boyko, another Jordanville graduate, also left the priesthood and became a miner).

It all comes after the arrest and court case involving the notorious Fr Seraphim (Scuratov) in England back in the 1980s (the one whom they also wanted to make a bishop!), and the equally disgusting sexual scandals in the USA, in Boston, Blanco, Jordanville, Platina and Virginia. In the latter case a ROCOR monk left after being approached by a pervert-monk, went to his ROCOR bishop to talk of his trouble and then got touched up by the no less pervert-bishop, who claims to be ‘canonical’. (The monk threw off his monastic garb and walked away in disgust). Is all their monasticism composed of pedophiles? The half a dozen still active bishops of ROCOR (a generation ago, there were twenty – there are several who have ‘retired’ with disgust at the manner in which the new American Synod operates) do not know what to do.

The American ROCOR Archbishop for Australia, a former traditionalist Roman Catholic, rebaptised into ROCOR, is now spreading traditionalist Roman Catholic-style anti-birth control booklets, also to the scandal of the faithful. Russians have no truck with this. The pastoral crisis is in full swing here too. The ROCOR policy of sending out convert American bishops, who have no idea of the Russian Orthodox pastoral and cultural realities outside US convert ghettos, to the ROCOR colonies overseas, has been shown to be a catastrophic mistake.

Meanwhile, at their headquarters in Moscow, certain senior metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church (I know two of them, who informed me so) are thinking of replacing the ROCOR bishops with their own. They wanted ROCOR to be an embassy Church for them to improve their image abroad. In reality, ROCOR has made their image worse. Moscow is just waiting for the key old one to die, for he ‘zasidelsja’, has stayed on for too long. Most of the increasingly small numbers of ROCOR laypeople who are left would follow Moscow bishops. As for many former ROCOR clergy and faithful, they are now scattered as refugees from gross injustice, in the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Romania.

Moreover, both Patriarchates are keen to take even more of those fleeing the anti-canonical and schismatic actions of the rebaptising and anti-family ROCOR Synod. Therefore, they will take them all without letters of leave, which have no value or importance, as the new ROCOR is a schismatic group, which continues to persecute, in the harshest of ways, faithful clergy and people.

Scandals always accompany the decadence that comes before the end. It is just another nail in the coffin of the corpse of what was even twenty years ago a Russian Emigration Church with a largely respected and even glorious history. Sadly, a Persecuted Church has over the last generation become a Persecuting Church. All we can say to all is: Keep well away from ROCOR, approach it at your peril, for the old ROCOR is dead, killed by crazy converts, with their sexual and financial scandals.

To repeat the words of Fr Boris Ignatievsky: ‘Condemnation is a form of pride’. But the American Synod has been condemning the good and faithful for decades. Now it condemns the parents of outraged sons, who denounce pedophile clergy. Presumably then, in their view, pedophilia is a form of humility?

One commentator has asked: How did the Bombala pedophile get away with it for so long? All I know is that he had a terrible reputation when he was in Jerusalem in the 1980s. And all I can say is that either the bishops concerned are stupid, poor judges of character, or else, less charitably, they operate just like the Roman Catholics, as a gay mafia, protecting their own. One or the other. Sad, but true. The need for an Inter-Orthodox Council becomes ever more obvious to us, though apparently not to the majority of the bishops.

 

 

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 19th 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.