Author Archives: Father Andrew

Keeping the Faith: Pastoral Considerations and Church Unity in the Diaspora

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!

Psalm 133, 1

Exactly 50 years ago I stood in the then newly-built Serbian church in Birmingham and listened to a sermon given by the late Fr Vladimir (later Bp Basil) Rodzianko. He spoke of the ‘sin of jurisdictions’ and looked forward idealistically to a time when there would no longer be any jurisdictions. I knew then that that was unrealistic. Indeed, 50 years have passed and there are now more ‘jurisdictions’ than ever. After over fifty years of life in the Orthodox Diaspora in Western Europe, divided into several separate Church jurisdictions, I have come to certain conclusions.

These conclusions were fed firstly by observing how the post-1917 Russian Diaspora died out in Western Europe (as a clergyman in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s I buried many of its last very elderly representatives, who had been adults before 1917). Then, secondly, I have seen how the 1950s Greek Cypriot Diaspora has also nearly completely died out in Britain. They both died out because they failed almost wholly to pass on the Faith to their locally born generations.

In 1973, I met the future Metr Kallistos (Ware), who tried and failed to unite local Russian, Greek and Serbian Orthodox into one shared church in Oxford. In 1980 I met the late Fr Alexander Schmemann, who invited me to become a priest in the USA. I politely refused his offer, as I felt my place was in Europe. I witnessed how in North America his attempt to found a new Local Church, called the OCA (the Orthodox Church in America), failed to unite Orthodox there – it unites only some 10-15% of Orthodox. Both were valiant attempts by sincere and often admirable people to do good, but both failed.

Others also tried to do something in this respect, like those who argued with each other, Fr (now St) Sophrony (Sakharov) and Metr Antony (Bloom), who tonsured me reader in 1981. The outstanding figure with Fr Sophrony was undoubtedly Fr Raphael (Noica), who gave me very good advice between 1975 and 1983. Another influence was Protopresbyter Alexei Kniazev, the rector of the St Sergius Institute of Orthodox Theology, where I studied.

However, the most outstanding figure I met was Archbishop Antony (Bartoshevich) of Geneva, who ordained me priest in 1991, after I had served for seven years as a deacon. He led the multinational Archdiocese of Western Europe, veering neither towards liberal modernism, nor to sectarian old calendarism. He was the successor of St John Maximovich as Archbishop of Western Europe. Clergy of seventeen different nationalities concelebrated at his funeral.

One of the problems with the experiments in Oxford and the USA was the lack of respect for the people in the parishes. Firstly, any Diaspora parish must use at least two languages, that of the main national group (or national groups, if there is more than one) and the local language. The latter is necessary for the children and grandchildren of immigrants in the Church, for the locally-born spouses of the inevitable mixed marriages, as well as for those received into the parish from local people who wish to join the Orthodox Church.

We do not wish the children of immigrants to lose the language of their parents, but they go to school in English, they think in English, they speak their parents’ language with an English accent. If they can understand the Church in English, then they will not reject the Church in the language of their parents. This is a psychological fact and, as any pastor will tell you, more than 50% of what we do is understanding our parishioners’ psychology.

Respect must also be shown for the calendars used by the parishioners, and for their cultures and customs. In order to do this, there may need to be at least two priests of different nationalities in each parish and choirs must be organised. We have seen too many cases of just the opposite, of disrespect and even mockery for different languages, calendars, cultures and customs. That is unacceptable because it is unChristian. Expressions of hatred for others are unChristian and eventually will lead to the downfall of parishes and even of whole dioceses. We are eyewitnesses of this. You cannot build a Church on negativity or hatred.

Here is a brief outline as to how we could perhaps proceed to keep locally-born generations inside the Church and also to help unite the Diaspora Church, which is divided administratively. The secret is in not being exclusive. Thus:

  1. No National Flags

A Church with flags is a Church which divides. Christ has no flag. Our only ‘flag’ is the Cross. Flags belong to the secular world, not to Christ. The absence of a flag, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian or other, does not of course mean that it can be replaced by a local flag, by some sort of local nationalism, British, American, French or other. That is just as negative. If we want to have flags with their nationalism, let us keep them at home and not bring them to church.

  1. No Political Ideologies or ‘Isms’

Ideologies, or ‘isms’, are always divisive because they are narrow and sectarian. For instance, I have witnessed how the OCA tried to impose the new calendar on Slav origin parishes in the USA and condescendingly impose non-traditional, liberal and even modernist liturgical practices on them. This was very divisive and as a result many parishes left the OCA and many more did not want to join it. They felt they had been excluded.

On the other hand, I have also witnessed how certain clergy in one Russian emigration splinter tried to impose an extreme right-wing ideology, allied with old calendarism. They promoted themselves rather pharisaically as an exclusive ‘One True Church’, refusing concelebration and communion with the Local Churches, as ‘they are in error’ and ‘we do not like them’.

This sectarianism was very divisive and it only attracts converts from Catholicism and Protestantism with pathological problems, while turning away from the Church those with healthy psychologies. Such an aggressive splinter can never be part of a future Local Church and does not want to be. That is why we belong to the Romanian Orthodox Church, away from all extremes and schisms.

  1. No Money

What makes Orthodox of all nationalities reject their own Church more than anything else is the story that the clergy are only interested in money. Fixed tariffs for baptisms, weddings, funerals, memorials etc are fatal in this respect. The stories of laypeople about such matters, true or untrue, are legion. Either priests must have a secular profession and parishioners pay only for the often high costs of the church-building, or else an arrangement must be made with parishioners that they make known their salaries and they give a percentage of their salaries to the priest. In this way the priest’s salary will be the average of their salaries. For example, if there are 100 salaried parishioners, they could each give 1% of their salary to the priest. If there are 200 salaried parishioners, they could each give 0.5% of their salary to the priest etc.

The Church as a Family

Without national flags, political ideologies or money scandals, if we wish to keep everyone together inside the Church, then we must experience the Church as a warm and loving Family, to which all Orthodox can belong.

Orthodox who have been uprooted from their homelands, usually for economic or else, as in the Communist past, for ideological reasons, want to belong to something. Perfectly naturally, they have a problem of identity. ‘Who am I’?, they ask. However, those born locally, of such Russian, Greek, Romanian, Serbian or other immigrant parents, and who all speak the local language better than that of their parents, also want to belong to something, they also have a problem of identity. I tell all my people that, although we have a State passport with a flag on it, our spiritual passport has no flag, or political party, and under the Nationality section, it says: ‘Orthodox Christian’. This is our spiritual nationality and identity, we belong to the Orthodox Christian Family. Our unity is in our common Orthodox Christian Faith and Love.

 

A Time of Folly in State and Church

Folly in the State

Western Liberalism is in fact Fascism. They proclaim to all who refuse their dominion and asset-stripping: ‘We will bomb you into liberalism’. This is what they call ‘humanitarian bombing’.

The Coalition of the Killing declares: ‘Let us create our own reality’. Here is the justification for their lies, propaganda, spin, narrative, fairy tales, virtual reality, that is, for their delusions, in which they, and a few brainwashed old people, actually believe.

Meanwhile, the dictatorship in the US is ending. Like all ending empires, it is ending in decadence, ‘conquering’ Venezuela, Iran and Greenland. Fraud, aiding genocide, kidnapping, theft, piracy, attempted murder – the charges are mounting. Like all narcissists, including Church narcissists, he is first sexually perverted, then deluded, then spectacularly rude, then sadistic, allowing his Gestapo stormtroopers to murder openly on American streets, and finally he goes mad, like Caligula of old.

Folly in the Church

Everything here is recounted objectively by a very moderate journalist who is not Orthodox and has no axe to grind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPgwY1eyT8s

Let us compare today’s Church Folly, as related above, with the events of 1963.

In 1963 Archbishop (now St) John of Shanghai was suspended from his office by the American Synod (Sanhedrin?) of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and removed from the See of San Francisco. As St John related, several bishops of the Synod almost came to physical blows about him in a ‘punch-up’, accusing him of being a Communist (!). Others accused him of being ‘preoccupied only with spiritual matters’, as though this were a major fault meriting ‘defrocking’! (Nothing has changed here). Of course, it was a major fault, as the accusers and slanderers were only preoccupied with secular matters, grasping money and power. (Nothing has changed here).

On 6 June 1963 the future saint received a summons to court and on 9 July he sat as a defendant on the court bench, supported by only three other bishops from the whole New York Synod of the Russian émigré Church. This unmercenary Archbishop, who had always lived in poverty was accused of embezzling money! Russian parishioners even spat in the face of this fragile old man, shouting hysterically against him, as one of the eyewitnesses, Hieromonk Seraphim recalled.

However, the judge, Edward O’Dey, an Irish Catholic, showed only respect for St John during the four-day trial. And like the four-day dead Lazarus of old, St John was naturally found innocent. However, in the 1990s the bishops who had accused him were still denouncing him with venom.  I know, because they denounced him to me.

St John kept and renewed the living Church Tradition in the Diaspora, not introducing anything from outside the Tradition and rejecting decadent political divisions of any sort. He created churches from nothing, helped the poor and sick, and was a beacon of unity for people of all nationalities. He united not by politics, but by his example of a holy life, living in prayer and fasting, keeping liturgical and spiritual traditions. He had spiritual authority because he kept strictly to Orthodoxy, rejecting fanaticism and extremism. He showed that bishops can make a spiritual and not administrative contribution to Church life.

For eight days now, beginning on the Vigil for Old Christmas on 6 January, the feet of St John of Shanghai, depicted in the icon giving our church to St Alban the Protomartyr of Britain, as he had promised in November 1962, have been giving off a scent of roses. Today the feet of St Alban are also giving off the scent of roses.

13 January 2026

 

The Fall of the USA, the UK and the European Union Soviet Republic

Introduction: The Fall from Faith

As we have mentioned before on several occasions, when Roman Catholics lose their Faith, they become Fascists (Napoleon, Hitler), when Orthodox lose their Faith, they become Communists (Stalin/Ceausescu), and when Protestants lose their Faith, they become ruthless, bullying and meddling asset-stripping Capitalists, who believe that all is permitted them (Thatcher, Reagan) (1).

The USA: ‘Tyrant Captured by Lunatic’ (2)

The latest example of Protestant ‘Might is Right’ asset-stripping is the thuggish Zionist Trump dictatorship. This has set about creating a new Vietnam in an attempt to asset-strip Venezuela of its oil. (The drugs consumed by Americans, the excuse for kidnap, do not come from Venezuela). But to remove the democratically-elected President of a country, ‘regime-change on the cheap’ or rather ‘regime-capture’, by murdering some 80 people and buying off members of the elite in order to kidnap him, is not at all the same as taking over a country. This is why another Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan is on the cards, not only in South America, but also in many other countries. Beware of the rogue US State and its terrorist leader. Or will he next kidnap the Globalist leaders of the EU and Germany, France, the UK or Israel, leaders far less popular than Maduro?

With the CIA attempt to murder the Russian President in his residence by drone, its kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader, the psychopathic Roman Emperor parading him in New York for his show-trial on ‘trumped-up’ charges, and fomenting protests in Iran, the US elite has abandoned the post-1945 settlement, the UN Charter, and international law. The next victims of its terrorism may not be boats and tankers, but buying off Greenland (by 4 July this year so ending NATO), Iran, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Columbia, Iceland and finally Canada. As usual, the EU/UK appease their Hitlerish Daddy. The door is open for China to kidnap the renegade leader of the Chinese province of Taiwan and for Russia to kidnap the renegade leader of the Ukraine. Taiwan is China, most of the Ukraine is Russia, and Greenland and Canada are in North America.

This is the Wild West, as practised by the USA throughout the last two centuries and as practised more recently by the USA in Kosovo, or by Israel in genocide in Gaza, the Lebanon and Iran. Western elites used to make excuses for their imperialism, claiming that they were ‘freeing Jerusalem from the Mohammedans’, or ‘bringing the heathen civilisation and the Bible’ (even if that meant ‘bombing them back to the Stone Age’, as Curtis Lemay promised), or bringing Non-Whites ‘freedom and democracy’, because ‘God told me to’ (George Bush Junior). Now there are no more Public Relations excuses, it is plainly all about stealing their oil and resources. Perhaps the Chinese will send in helicopters to Florida and kidnap Trump, this new Caligula? This would give a completely new and ironic meaning to the phrase ‘holding the trump card’.

The UK: The Sinking Titanic

This leaves the UK in a strange situation. Having cut the country off from the EU because of Brexit and failed to make trade agreements with other countries beforehand, then cut the country off from Russian energy because of the Ukraine, its ruling elite now dares not criticise Trump for fear of cutting itself off from the USA. However, the abandonment of the Ukraine by the USA and the increasing war-weariness with the corrupt Ukraine in parts of Western Europe leaves the UK like a Titanic drifting rudderless in the North Atlantic, a vassal vessel without its US and EU masters. The reason for this isolation goes back to the shock the British elite received in 1814, when Russian troops liberated Paris and in 1945, when Russian/Soviet troops liberated Vienna and Berlin. The British elite will have to liberate itself from 200 years of jealousy of Russia.

The EUSR: Open Fascism

The EUSR (European Union Soviet Republic) is ruled by the Politburo of von der Leyen and her corrupt and unelected Commissars. Democracy and free speech there are ending. They lead the Brussels war machine, which has led to the Ukrainianisation of Europe, that is, to its loss of democracy and to its rule by the candidates of oligarchs like Rothschild (Macron) and Blackrock (Merz). They are the generation whose grandfathers were largely Nazis, who were defeated by the Soviet Union, and therefore look at the past with a spirit of revenge. This thirst for revenge is all the greater in that the successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, opposes their Globalist ideology. The latter is the ideological successor to Nazism, the ideology of their grandfathers, which also wanted to conquer the Globe because of its mythical belief in Western supremacism.

However, blinded by its hubris, the EUSR nomenklatura has no military power to enforce its Globalist, Superstate fantasies. Its armies, like its weapons, are worldwide laughing stocks. The main fantasy is its fairy-tale that there is such a thing as ‘Europe’ and ‘Europeans’. They do not exist. However, what the Eurocommissars do have is some economic power – unremitting sanctions, tariffs, threats of economic excommunication and debanking. Their only interest in the Ukraine is revenge, even if that is suicidal for them. This means clinging on to war in the Ukraine, which is the excuse to retain and increase their own power, creating ever more taxes, profits, debts and militarisation. War is the only project which unifies their desire to retain their kleptocratic Superstate, which is why they reject peace. ‘War, not peace’, they cry to the whole world.

In Brussels they want to kill them all to the last Ukrainian because that will mean that some Russians will also die, which is the whole aim of their proxy war. And that makes them happy. This means that the EU leaders want to send back to Kiev the hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainian men who have fled to the West over the last four years, precisely in order to avoid military service and so suicide in the Ukraine. I meet such young men every Sunday. The EU leaders even threaten to kill the sons of their subjects (but not their own sons) for their pointless, but very profitable, war in the Ukraine. Their subjects do not agree with them. Their death cult of young men is similar to that of the politicians who created the First and Second World Wars. Little wonder that many see the conflict in the Ukraine as the Third World War. The murderous elite is the same.

Conclusion: The Coming Spiritual Victory

After the coming Kievan, and so EU and UK, defeat in the Ukraine, the EUSR will break up into its 27 constituent republics, just as the USSR broke up into its 15 constituent republics 35 years ago. For the new Soviet Union is the European Union. With the coming collapse of the EU and also of its failed NATO military arm, freedom will come. The mystical always triumphs over the worldly.

Notes:

  1. As with the new ROCOR elite, so many of whom have now too become ruthless, bullying and meddling Protestant asset-strippers, claiming that ‘Might is Right’. Malignant narcissistic personality disorder, to the point of conscience-free psychopathy, is the order of the day. Like CIA assets, they think that all that Europeans want is to become Americans! In fact, it is the last thing we want. We will not become cowboys or cowards who bully those who are too weak to stand up to them. However, the real question here is about the extent to which the Russian Church has been infiltrated by the CIA.
  2. British newspaper headline (6/1/26)

What We Left Behind: How Did a Persecuted Church Become a Persecuting Church?

History

In the course of the fourth century the Church which had been bitterly persecuted at the start of that century by Pagan Rome was adopted by the Roman Empire. And as the Roman Empire began persecuting dissidents, so individuals representing the Church, specifically bishops, allied themselves to the persecuting Roman State, which demanded obedience from all. Thus, a State Church was born and the once Persecuted Church became a Persecuting Church. To counter this enslavement and proclaim spiritual freedom, the monastic movement boomed, ’the desert became a city’, Egypt and Palestine filled with monks. The pious in the parishes followed them, not the persecuting bishops.

Such ‘State Church’ compromises have patterned the whole history of the Church, most notably in Western Europe, a former part of the empire of Pagan Rome. Here a new ideology, with its self-justifying filioque and Papist ideology, which came to be called ‘Roman Catholicism’, was based not on certain bishops of the Church allying themselves with the State, but on the Church actually becoming the State. In fact, it became a ‘Superstate’, like the modern EU, which imitates the medieval Papacy in every way. This saw the Roman Pope, the head of the new Roman Catholicism, leave the Church and in 1054 become independent from the Church and even condemn the Church as ‘schismatic’!

From that moment on, the Popes of Rome, heirs to and imitators of the pagan emperors, could lead armies, persecute and murder dissidents, bless invasions, order so-called ‘crusades’ and implement inquisitions against all who disagreed with their imperialist cult of absolute claims to power and wealth.  Inevitably, from the eleventh century on that spawned many Protest movements, which further discredited them and divided the totalitarian religion that they led. And so the Church that canonised the Martyrs and Confessors, despite the worldly-minded, became the Persecuting Church, instead of love, showing hatred, and then refusing to repent in self-justification. This went down in history.

An Example in the Present

In case some think that this is simply a polemic against Roman Catholicism, let us make the truth clear. Plenty of Orthodox have followed suit, becoming ‘Philopapists’. For example, in recent times, the New York Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) did the same. And so a Church that had canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands in 1981, despite all the worldly-minded who criticised and mocked it, became in 2021 the Persecuting Church, instead of love, showing hatred and then refusing to repent in self-justification. This too went down in history. Like the Papacy, it preferred money and power to the Holy Spirit, to the Martyrs and Confessors.

But when did this decadence begin? This spirit was certainly absent in 1981 from the unworldly Metr Philaret, who at last canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors. The turning-point was perhaps in 2001, when his successor as leader of ROCOR, Metr Vitaly (Ustinov), by then very elderly and quite ill, was usurped. The Metropolitan who had opposed the CIA Grabbe faction was replaced by those sympathetic to that faction. Those who seized power replaced him with a series of pious, but very weak, metropolitans, and so continued to exercise power from behind their thrones. Their first act was to begin to fill the episcopate with their candidates in order to consolidate their power.

Therefore, in 2003, despite a threefold opposition from one Archbishop, they proposed one of that group’s episcopal candidates, a well-known homosexual (I had been shown his compromising photo as long ago as 1995). During the ceremony, one in the crowd, an acquaintance of mine, shouted out ‘anaxios’, ‘unworthy’, meaning that he opposed the consecration of that candidate. My acquaintance was taken aside by the wealthy brothers of the bishop and duly beaten up. And they call themselves Christians, and even call themselves ‘Orthodox’ Christians! The inevitable alcohol-fuelled scandals duly followed, ending up with the notorious property grab in Missouri. As had been foretold.

One of the techniques that has always been used by such groups is slander, that which was done in the Old Testament against St Job. It was in use already before the Revolution with regard to Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their Family and all those who supported them. Murder started then. As the media have developed, we have seen it in the Greek Church with ‘the slandered saint’, St Nectarios of Aegina (+ 1920), in ROCOR with St John of Shanghai (+ 1966), who was suspended and faced ‘defrocking’ by the CIA faction in the American Synod, which he defeated, and in the Romanian Church with the great saint, St Arsenie of Prislop (1989), who was so hated by the atheists. Such is our destiny also.

Those ‘Philopapists’ are then always opposed to the saints and slander them. In the case of St John of Shanghai, they will claim that he did not give his shoes away to the poor because he had compassion on them, but because he did not like wearing shoes! They also claim that St John was very much a bureaucrat because he had studied law! They, of course, like wearing expensive leather shoes and love issuing decrees and ‘protocols’. In other words, they slander St John in order to justify their own Anti-Gospel behaviour. They always divert attention from whatever in the saints contradicts their perversions and accuse the saints of exactly their own weaknesses by psychological transfer.

The ROCOR ’gang’ behind the 2003 consecration then continued their activities in order to consolidate their power further. The main aim for themselves and their candidates was to amass as much wealth, property and power as possible, usurping any who opposed them and replace them with their candidates. This was exactly what they had done with the bishop who had vigorously opposed their 2003 candidate. In the decades following 2003, more homosexuals and further CIA/NATO candidates took over in various places, with the Mother-Church in Moscow naively looking on, but never opposing the pro-CIA American Synod, as if paralysed, stunned by the cowboy behaviour of the Americans.

Indeed, even when ROCOR shockingly opposed the Russian campaign against the CIA/NATO takeover of the Ukraine from February 2022 on, Moscow remained paralysed, as if hypnotised. Had it too been infiltrated by the CIA and the Hitlerite spirit of Vlasov? A still unanswered question. Here we must not confuse the dogmatic with the pastoral. For example, although one of their bishops was very greedy for money, we paid him what he wanted, even though he constantly insulted us, jealously demanding ever more, tried to steal our church buildings like a common criminal, and slandered us, saying that we had stolen money from him! We stayed, as this was a pastoral, not a dogmatic, issue.

The Pastoral and the Dogmatic

Indeed, we only left him after he had publicly gone into schism with the Church by breaking communion with Her and had then begun rebaptising Orthodox. These were dogmatic issues, as he had gone against the Creed: I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. This is an attack on the Church, for which we are prepared to die and we will win because our slanderers are not prepared to die for their greed and schism. Those who confuse the pastoral and the dogmatic would have left him before. For example, there are those who create a schism around the calendar. However, the true calendar is the one which your bishop blesses you to celebrate on. Disobedience is the only error here.

The old ROCOR never had any problem with the calendar. We had many Romanian and Bulgarian new calendar refugee parishes with us, when the atheists were in power in Romania and Bulgaria and were persecuting those Local Churches. When freedom came, those parishes quite naturally returned to their Mother-Churches. Similarly, hundreds of Russian parishes in Africa use the new calendar, as do their parishes in Vienna, Sofia and elsewhere. And today the Romanian Church has received several hundred refugee parishes which use the old calendar. Our situation is similar to that of St Paisy (Velichkovsky), who before us also had to take refuge in the Romanian Church from the Russian.

However, those who deny the dogmas of the Church and change the Creed, whether in words with the filioque, or else, all the while hypocritically retaining the words of the Creed, in deeds, put themselves outside communion with the Church. They become schismatic sects of pharisees, failing to understand that communion is the visible, external sacramental sign of the internal catholicity of the Church. To be in communion means to be part of the Church, inherently and organically connected with the whole Body of Christ, members of Him. This is not about administrative bureaucracy and protocols, but about the life in Christ through the Holy Spirit. This is real Orthodoxy, the Church of the Holy Spirit.

 

 

Cursed are the Warmakers: The End of the Year and the End of Western Supremacy

The old world is dying, and the new world is struggling to be born; now is the time of monsters.

Gramsci

Introduction: War and Peace

In early 2022 I was asked who I supported in the conflict in the Ukraine. I answered that what I supported is peace and I pray for peace at every service. I added that if Russians and Ukrainians had been Orthodox, there would never have been a war, (At most only 2% of each actually go to church; both countries are racked by very high abortion and divorce rates and so have a huge demographic problem). In fact, this is a proxy war between Great Powers, the pro-Nazi, NATO West and nationalist Russia. The Kiev regime has been armed for half a trillion dollars by NATO nations as a naïve proxy, exploiting its provincial nationalism, to destroy and break up Russia, which is far too big and strong for the jealous West. All are victims in this war of attrition, which will end, like all such wars, like World Wars I and II, very suddenly, in just a few months.

Four Years of Conflict in the Ukraine

For Kiev to fight against Moscow is industrial and strategic nonsense, because Russia’s economy is many times larger than the Ukraine’s, indeed it is the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world, even by the vast underestimate of Russian GDP by the absurd PPP measure. Then Russia’s population is five times larger than the pre-war Ukraine’s (and millions of Ukrainians have since fled for Russia – today Russia’ population is at least seven times larger than the Ukraine’s) and its territory is 30 times larger. How can Russia, a military superpower, with production so vastly superior to that of the whole West and weapons so advanced that the West can only dream of them, not win against the corrupt and bankrupt Kiev puppet regime? It is motivated, as it is fighting an existential war, for the West this is just a neo-colonial war.

The 30,000 or so illegal sanctions against Russia (legal sanctions are voted in by the United Nations) harm only the West. Notably, they are destroying Western European industry and have doubled the cost of energy for consumers. For example, German car companies are moving to China, where they can obtain cheap Russian energy, unlike in Germany. The Russian economy is autarchic, independent, and has almost everything it needs. If ever it wants something else, it can simply obtain it from the 90% of the world which ignores those absurd sanctions. The world will look back on 2022 as the year when the Western world began its final act of suicide. In trying to destroy and take over patriotic Russia, it repeated its same failures as under the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, the Swedes, Napoleon I, Napoleon II with the British, the Kaiser and Hitler.

The West never learns from history. This is because it is utterly blinded by the history of its arrogant hubris – ‘we are allowed to do everything’. The discredited Kiev regime is in place only because the West had in 2014 usurped the previous democratically-elected and peaceful Ukrainian government by violence. By its own admission, it had used five billion dollars in US bribes to install the genocidal, pro-Nazi regime. The conflict was inevitable. If Russia had violently overthrown the democratic government in Mexico, trained and armed the Mexican Army to the teeth, ordered ‘Trump, tear down this wall’, threatened to supply it with nuclear and bioweapons and, despite peace agreements, genocided 14,500 Americans, women and children included, who lived in Mexico, would the USA not have reacted? Such was the situation in the Ukraine.

After fourteen years of incredible hesitation, naivety, disorganisation, corruption and weakness, its military in part outsourced to the incompetent and corrupt, Wagner private mercenary group, Russia did finally react, in 2022, just as it said it would, but failed to, in 2008. This time, since 2023, the Russian military has been strong. And so, alas! much too late, some in the US administration in Washington have at last realised that the US cannot win its very costly, lost war in faraway Ukraine. The US, now engaged in Caribbean piracy, genocide in Gaza and taking over Greenland, is deindustrialised. In its greed it started making all its needs in China. The US can never match Russia’s technology, productivity and vast and advanced military potential. Most US needs are made in China. That is not the case for the booming Russian economy.

The War Party in Western Europe

Unlike the US elite, the grandfathers of the Western European ruling elite were mostly Nazis and political failures in their own countries (like Merz, Kallas, von der Layen, Metrevelli). Their grandfathers were defeated by Russia and they want to avenge them. The elite has swallowed its own virulently anti-Russian wishful thinking propaganda (‘narrative’), and so amazingly, it still believes that it can win in the Ukraine! This is because that elite and its globalist media are deluded by their colonial and imperialist past. After French and German leaders refused to back the illegal, US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, political power in Western Europe was seized by US-backed oligarch candidates. Reality began to dawn in bankrupt Washington only in 2025, after a string of trillion-dollar foreign policy disasters, that the USA must extricate itself from its quagmire in Kiev.

This meant the new US abandoning its Western European elite, which had been imposed by the pre-2025 US elite. However, the Western European elite, feeling betrayed by Trump’s new policies, is stuck in its threefold megalomaniac delusions, those of Napoleon, Hitler and Churchill. The US is abandoning it, together with its similar, regime-changed and losing elite, which it positioned in Kiev in 2014. The US has only existed for 250 years and can abandon any of its useful idiots in Eurasia, Western Europeans or Ukrainians, and blame them for everything. However, dictatorial Western European leaders cannot abandon Kiev, for they are prisoners of a proud, feudal ruling caste and its thousand-year Nazi ideology of ‘The West is Best’ and ‘We (the elite) are the garden, the rest (the 90%) are the jungle’, of which garden, they claim, the Ukraine is part.

Only belief in this ideology, perhaps credible on account of Western European colonial empires before 1914, but today completely delusional, can explain the irrational and suicidal behaviour of the present autocratic Western European warmaking elite. This group, largely composed of sexual perverts, pedophiles, transgenders and cocaine addicts (Epstein, ex-Prince Andrew, H. Biden, Zelensky and all the others – we know their names), is doing its utmost to foment an unjust and lasting war against Russia by 2030. It uses censorship and bogeyman tactics against its own population: ‘The Russians are coming’. According to it, Russia had been losing the war for three years and ‘is on the brink of collapse’, and yet they are begging for a ceasefire and ‘Russia intends to invade all of Western Europe’. Which set of their contradictory lies should we believe?

The elite needs to seize ever more money not only to finance the bankrupt Kiev regime, but also to buy time for itself. It has no interest in the Ukraine, Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian subhuman people (‘Untermenschen’), but it is interested in prolonging its careers. In its demented and narcissistic delusions, it is forlornly hoping that in 2029 Trump will be replaced by someone from the equally demented US past who still thinks like them. But in reality, it is too late. The Kiev regime is already collapsing militarily. No amount of money (or lies) to further the Kiev regime’s corruption will help it now, for with its much depleted stocks of its very mediocre weapons, lying burned out on the steppes, the West lacks arms for Kiev to buy and Kiev lacks soldiers to operate the non-existent arms, which are to be bought with their non-existent money.

Conclusion: Sons of Satan

The warmaking ruling elite of Western Europe has utterly isolated and alienated itself from the rest of the world, from international law, which it no longer observes even though it created it, and from most of its own population. The latter, the ‘serfs’, detests the undemocratic and repressive elite, which bans free speech and debanks and hounds its critics into exile, so that it is supported by the 10% of the population which is sufficiently brainwashed. For a change of policy on the Ukraine, the old dictatorial elite will have to be replaced by candidates from the peoples of Europe, the ‘populists’. The latter are not Western supremacists, not Globalists. They want to work with the Global Majority, not against it. The perverted warmakers of Western Europe should be warned: Cursed are the warmakers, for they shall be called the sons of satan.

 

 

The Continuing ROCOR Schism and the new Canonical Russian Orthodox Bishop for Britain

In December 2020 the New York-based ROCOR (those initials used to stand for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) of the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) consciously engineered a schism by forbidding communion with its sister Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, based in Paris. Thus, ROCOR cut itself off from communion with canonical Orthodoxy, from the catholicity of the Church.

ROCOR lost everything because of its crazy converts. This single act of folly resulted almost immediately in ROCOR in England losing well over half its Diocese, 5,000 people in six parishes, with twelve clergy. They included the senior priest of the Diocese, with 36 years of faithful service to the Russian Orthodox Tradition and the Russian Tsar, who had played a role in the crucial and long-awaited canonical reconciliation of ROCOR with Moscow in 2007.

Although the Moscow Patriarchate itself declared that ROCOR’s act was insanity, it did nothing to counter it and a senior Metropolitan in Moscow instructed all who had quit ROCOR to join another Local Orthodox Church. This was a suicidal act of support by the MP for the ROCOR schism and a stab in the back for its decades-long missionary work in Western Europe. Thus, in obedience, we all fled the new, uncanonical ROCOR and joined another Local Orthodox Church, of which many were only too happy to take us.

Since then, the new sectarian ROCOR (apparently now standing for the Russian Old Calendarist Church Outside Russia) has refused to repent. As a result, it has now lost another subdeacon (and future priest) in Northern Ireland, a priest in Canada and a priest in the USA. All were converts, who had recently come into the new American ROCOR. Without any sense of history, they had never known the old canonical ROCOR, which was an integral part of the Orthodox Church and Tradition.

All of this is a replay of ROCOR’s Boston schism of 1986, exactly as the late Fr Seraphim Rose had time and again warned would happen back in the 1970s. Then some sixty small parishes of rootless people left ROCOR for old calendarist sects, just as other smaller groups would later leave in 2000 and in 2007.  The Protestant-style 1986 schism was a clear consequence of sectarianism among ungrounded ROCOR clergy and converts. Those who took part in it had no knowledge of the Tradition and so fell away from the Church into old calendarism.

These schisms are what happens when you abandon communion and concelebration with the Canonical Local Orthodox Churches, that is, with the mainstream of the Church. Now the chickens are coming home to roost again, for when ROCOR bishops claim that no other Orthodox bishops apart from themselves are Orthodox, what can their uninformed converts conclude? Only that, if there is ‘One True Church’, it must be schismatic, not one which is in communion with others, even if only on paper, like ROCOR.

The viewpoint of the schismatics is the only logical one for their sectarian mentality, which makes even the calendar into a dogma of the Faith. When their ROCOR bishop – although on paper in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church – publicly declares that the Greek Patriarch is possessed by demons and that he personally hates Romanians and half-hates Moldovans, what can you expect from his followers? His converts demand logical behaviour of him, that he abandon communion with all others formally, not just in words. Otherwise, they see him as a hypocrite, as they publicly say.

These schisms are the clear result of the new ROCOR’s rejection of the Orthodox Tradition, the Tradition confessed by St John of Shanghai and his successor as the ROCOR Archbishop of Western Europe, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. They quite naturally concelebrated with everyone. Here today is the result of the crazy convert policy of the very ignorant bishops of the new American ROCOR. With no love for others, they fall out of communion with all, like judgemental pharisees.

Little wonder that in despair at the behaviour of the new ROCOR, Moscow has now gone ahead and at last consecrated its first local bishop in Britain. Bishop Augustine MacBeth is for its Archdiocese of Western Europe (the former Rue Daru jurisdiction) of the MP. Given the ROCOR schism from Moscow’s Archdiocese of Western Europe and its refusal to accept and respect local people and local languages, relying on convert Americanisms with their theological and historical ignorance and google translate to communicate, Moscow had no choice but to consecrate a canonical Russian Orthodox bishop from the local population for the local population.

Of course, it is all too little and much too late, as the Orthodox left for another Local Church four years ago, as advised by the MP Metropolitan Antony (Sevryuk)! Then the Moscow Patriarchate refused to receive those who had quit the schismatic ROCOR even in the face of the sectarian and hate-filled actions of the new ROCOR episcopate.

Since then, the former members of ROCOR, zealous for canonical communion and the catholicity of the Church, forced to join another Local Church by the new ROCOR fanaticism and ignorance of the Tradition, have gone from strength to strength. Now we live in canonicity, in the mainstream of the Orthodox Church and concelebrate with all (though not with the schismatics), far from the tiny ghettoes of crazy convert bishops, their clergy and their incessant scandals.

The Fall of the Empires and the Rise of the Anti-Empire

Foreword: Orthodox Church Life

Ever since 1917 the life of the Orthodox Churches has been pulled apart and polarised by manipulators who have wanted to weaken and so control the Church in order to further their own, anti-Christian political aims. Thus, Greek Patriarchs in Constantinople have been manipulated and their nationalism flattered by their secularist paymasters in the American Empire in Washington. As for Russian Patriarchs in Moscow, they too have been manipulated by the power- and money-seeking spirit of those who want to try and make and remake the Soviet Empire.

However, in reality, despite the negative concentrations at the extremes, both Local Churches have a broad left to right spread. The spread goes from Constantinople’s pro-Catholic gay ecumenists to the old calendar monks of Mt Athos (though they too are divided 1). And it goes from Moscow’s gay clerical intellectuals who visit the Pope of Rome as often as possible to the American Synod of the now spiritually irrelevant, New ‘ROCOR’, which resembles a Neo-Protestant American old calendarist sect that even dares to rebaptise other Orthodox! (2)

However, there are the many who keep the Tradition in both Patriarchates who agree with the majority who follow the Tradition in the fourteen other Local Churches. We follow the golden mean of the pastors, steering between the extremes created by politicians, and we maintain the piety of monastic and family Church life. But what if both the American Empire and those who want to restore the Soviet Empire fell and the Church were left alone? Surely then the Centre would be strengthened? Is this about to happen because of current geopolitics?

Introduction: The Fall of the Pagan Roman Empire

A long, long time ago, in 409-410 AD, Emperor Honorius of Old Rome sent the ruling elite in Britain an instruction known as the ‘Rescript of Honorius’. In this he told its members that they must in future defend themselves. With bankruptcy which was caused by usury ending the dominion of Old Rome over its Western provinces, the Roman Legions were leaving. True, New Rome and its Christian Roman Empire would continue until 1917, but that is another story. This story is about the fall of the Western provinces, which are now called Western Europe.

All the subsequent attempts by the only superficially Christianised to restore the pagan Empire of Old Rome failed. These attempts were made by the Carolingian, the Papal, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the German, the British and the Soviet empires, as well as today’s EU sub-empire. Similarly, today the American Imperial successor to all of them is falling and now has to retreat from the sub-American Empire of Western Europe, despite EU false flags (non-existent Russian drones, aircraft and submarines), desperately staged to keep the USA in Europe.

The Fall of the American Empire

In 2025 the bankrupt American Empire had to retreat from Eurasia because of its imperial overreach, as it had repeated the errors of its predecessor and model, the British Empire. The latter began its fall, due to overreach, in 1900, overtaken by the German economy, defeated by Dutch Boer farmers, losing the Titanic in 1912, suffering humiliation in 1914 and 1929, and later the humiliating routs of its Army at Dunkirk in 1940 and Singapore in 1942. The American Empire is following the same path of failure and has to admit that its sphere of influence is very limited.

Five generations behind the British, the dementia-led American Empire is following its own narcissistic decline, having refused to learn from British hubris and history. The US is having great difficulty even holding on to Latin America, already dominated by China, as shown by its pirate attacks on Venezuela. The US already has to abandon Afro-Eurasia, after the bloody and costly routs of US forces in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and today the Ukraine and Gaza, with millions of lives and trillions of dollars squandered, leaving all to China and Russia.

The Fall of the Ukrainian Empire

The nationalist junta in Kiev, busied with the theft of tens of billions of dollars of ‘NATO aid’ and of Russian assets, and its oligarchs busied with laundering money and buying seaside villas in warm countries, is made up of war criminals. It has sent a whole generation of ill-trained and ill-equipped Ukrainian soldiers, aged between 25 and 55, to the slaughter, all for vain dreams of nationalist power and ever more lucre. Two million Ukrainians are already dead or maimed. And yet for Western European political leaders, as for Zelensky, Kiev’s proxy war must continue. Why?

Firstly, because they do not want to admit that they were from the outset wrong. Secondly, more than this, , they do not want to stem the cashflow that they and their political industrial, military and media oligarch masters have pocketed. The desire to continue to line their bloodflowing pockets is why they repeat the absurd lie that after victory in the Ukraine, Russia will invade the financially and spiritually corrupt and deindustrialised EU. They think that Europeans are so stupid that they too will be willing to send their sons to die on their behalf.

The Fall of Soviet Western Europe

Having learned from the errors of the Soviet Empire, Russian politicians would hardly invade the bankrupt museum-countries of Western Europe. The latter are plagued by debt, social breakdown, failed infrastructure, illegal immigration and their costly defeat in the Ukraine. Of course, the Western leaders never had any interest in the Ukraine or the ‘subhuman’ Ukrainians – the latter were only ever useful idiots employed to weaken Russia and, if necessary, die for the Western elite ‘to the last Ukrainian’. Today’s Western elite is more Sovietised than today’s Russian.

Indeed, the unelected Eurocommissars of the European Union form today’s Soviet Union. Western political theatre and its fairy-tale media narratives, do not change the realities of the Russian victory in the Ukraine. Despite the blatant lies of the Western media about their corrupt Ukrainian puppets, it is clear that the West is destroying the Ukraine. The corrupt EU and NATO Empire will expand no further. Both are crumbling, as they fantasise about peace negotiations with themselves. They cling to their Ukrainian dream, as it alone holds them together.

The Fall of the EU Sub-Empire

Having cut themselves off from cheap Russian gas and oil and illegally stolen Russian assets, the EU Globalist elite has deindustrialised its peoples, showing their hatred of Sovereigntist patriots. They preach that their bloody sub-Roman empire stands above the interests of their own peoples, whom they so despise. Imperialist globalism is opposed to patriotism and persecutes and mocks it. Thus, the proud elite of ‘Great Britain’ mocked ‘Little England’, for it did not understand that only humility will ever make Little England, or any other country, Great.

For the same is true for every single country in Western Europe, naively deceived by the Great Delusion of the EU and the illusory allurements of now failed and defeated US hegemony. As a result of the retreat of the American Empire from Western Europe in the face of Russian might and of the Western rout in the Ukraine, the EU is crumbling, the countries of Western Europe, a mere 14% of the world economy, but once, in 1990, 30%, are now only minor powers on the world stage. Those countries, their sovereignty restored, will have to join the future – BRICS.

Conclusion: Towards the Anti-Empire

Having regained their freedom, the peoples of ex-Habsburg and ex-Ottoman South-Eastern Europe will join BRICS first, escaping the autocratic clutches of the unelected EU Commissars. The EU sub-Empire has lost because, thanks to its stupid and racist hatred of Russia, China and Russia are now completely united. Decommunised China already economically dominates East Asia, including Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and more. And desovietised Russia will economically dominate Western Europe, once its present elite has been dismissed.

Post-1945 Western organisations, weaponised against the Global Majority by their masters, have been pushed into the background. They have become irrelevant. Thus, the G7 has long since been a secondary organisation, like all the other post-War Western organisations, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the EU, NATO, which are all collapsing. BRICS is the new United Nations, replacing it as the one and only Anti-Empire, composed of the Sovereign Nations of the world, the real United Nations, led by China, Russia and all decolonised and free peoples.

Notes:

  1. Monks of the Tradition on Mt Athos told us only three weeks ago, when we were there, that if there are currently many earth tremors on Mt Athos, it is because certain abbots have weakly accepted instructions from Constantinople to allow the gangster ‘clergy’ of the so-called OCU (‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’) to celebrate there.
  2. The new ROCOR has rejected the vital spiritual heritage of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John of Shanghai, and all us disciples, who have kept to the royal way between both new calendarists and old calendarists, as St Paisios the Athonite himself praised Archbishop Antony for doing. Thus, Vladyka Antony heroically rejected the extremist right-wing policies of the CIA agent Grabbe, who manipulated the Americans in the 1980s New York Synod with various absurd directives. Vladyka Antony and his disciples, like Bishop Ambrose (Cantacuzen), consistently refused to have anything to do with old calendarist schismatics, never concelebrating with them, unlike those in the CIA-funded American Synod. The CIA has always tried to split the Russian Church, whose unity we fought for so hard, and under its NATO-CIA bishops, besieged by homosexual and pedophile scandals, has now achieved that aim, sundering the new ROCOR from the Russian Church and from all canonical Orthodoxy. Quite simply, old calendarists are not Orthodox, as they are not in communion with the Orthodox Church.

 

 

On the Rise and Fall of Empires

Introduction

Forty years ago I used to work for a well-known French company in Paris. Founded in 1900 by a very dynamic man, who had seen a market opportunity, it had become quite large. However, the son, profiting from his father’s success, had simply managed the company, resting on his father’s laurels. All went fairly well, but there was no innovation. The company had then passed on to the grandson. He did nothing and took out money for his expensive lifestyle. By the 1980s all was in decline and it was something of a ‘museum’ or ‘heritage’ company. As there was little investment in new equipment and ideas because the grandson was taking out the money, it was declining. A three-stage process similar to this one happens with empires.

Imperial Rise and Fall: The Three Stages

There are apparently some 200 theories to explain the fall of the old pagan Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. This clearly suggests that there was not one simple cause for it, but a combination of causes. Nevertheless, perhaps we can put forward three general stages associated with the rise and fall of empires, as did the British military hero Sir John Glubb (1897-1986) in his interesting analysis, The Fate of Empires. Here he suggested, controversially, that many empires seem to last about ten generations, 250 years, before they fall. He admitted that although this was a generalisation, his remarks did come purely from practical observations, not from some intellectual theorisation or ideology. We too suggest three stages in the rise and fall of empires:

  1. The first stage, that of the grandfather, in the rise of empires is the Age of Conquest, in which great self-belief, energy and courage, as well as great cruelty, greed and racist superiority are shown. (‘All others are barbarians’. ‘The West is Best’). We can see this with the aggressive expansion of the West in the eleventh century, which led at the end of that century to the official ‘First Crusade’ and to the accelerating expansion of settlement, colonisation and exploitation, starting in 1492, with a further drastic and global acceleration about 250 years ago with the conquest of India. This period is the age of the spirit of enterprise and positivity, of ‘we can do it’. We can clearly see this in the recent Victorian Imperial Age of Great Britain and then in the post-1945 Imperial American Age.
  2. This is followed by the second stage of profit-taking, the stage of the son, of affluence, arrogance, self-congratulation, complacency and hubris. ‘We will rule for ever’, as was expressed in the Edwardian British anthem Land of Hope and Glory, glorifying the Empire ‘on which the sun never set’. That ended with the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic and the suicide of 1914. This was also the slogan of the ‘thousand-year’ Third Empire (= ‘Reich’) of Hitler, which lasted for exactly twelve years. Complacency means that there is a refusal to learn from history and from mistakes, a lack of openness to others, to anything new. ‘We are the greatest, we have nothing to learn from others’. At this stage, empires fall into denial and cannot see how low they are sinking.
  3. The third stage in the fall of empires, the stage of the grandson, interests us most, since we believe that this is what the Western world is now going through.

Falls are marked by mismanaged crises, dissension, lack of cohesion and common goals. This produces a disparate society because of the lack of shared beliefs and values. As society pulls in different directions, there follow disintegration, negativity and pessimism. Immigration takes place, for there are few to do, or who are interested in doing, vital tasks, since those who were born into that society are interested in the selfish infantilism of ‘fun’. ‘Why bother?’ The lack of energy comes from the lack of self-belief, courage and so passivity. One of today’s phenomena is ‘snowflakes and wimps’, those who constantly suffer from ‘anxiety’ and ‘stress’. People say: ‘There is nothing in it for me’, which shows the selfishness that comes from their lack of aims and values.

Decline is also marked by loss of faith in any religious aim or belief. This creates personal and collective decadence. As Glubb remarked: Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease, resulting from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving. This cynicism is the result of despair. In the case of Britain, no longer ‘Great’, this can be seen in the satire that has pervaded society since 1945. The spirit of mocking everything, especially the discredited Establishment, can be seen in many satires, such as Monty Python and Mr Bean. There is even a satirical show called Mock the Week.

Conclusion

This cynicism or, in English, world-weariness, can be seen everywhere in contemporary Britain, and in Western countries in general. The lack of self-belief can be seen in the young people, in fact beggars, who stand in the street and sing American songs or, at least, songs in an American accent. When you cannot even sing in your own language, that is the end. The result of the absence of any respect for God and for neighbour ends in a lack of self-respect. This nihilistic attitude to self is seen in poor dress and diet, tattoos, pieces of metal fixed in the face, and the use of drugs, whether vapes, tobacco, alcohol or harder drugs. The decline proceeds generation by generation until it results in nihilism. The cynicism is such that all alternatives are rejected. And so the fall comes.

On the Six Divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Diaspora

In the twentieth century the Russian Orthodox Church outside the borders of Russia split into six groups, three splits took place for ethnic reasons and three splits took place for political reasons.

The Three Non-Russian Ethnic Divisions

Firstly, there was quite a large Carpatho-Rusyn group in the USA, founded by immigrants who had been forced into Uniatism. They had arrived in the US from 1880 on, not from the Russian Empire, but from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Once in freedom in the USA, most of them returned to Russian Orthodoxy (the strongly Uniatised did not and were called by the absurd term ‘Ruthenians’). The return was for two reasons. Firstly, an infamous Roman Catholic Archbishop in the USA, called John Ireland (1838-1918), refused to let the Carpatho-Rusyns have married clergy and, secondly, he tried to steal their churches from them. As a Roman Catholic bishop (just like ROCOR bishops today), he did not understand that Carpathian Orthodoxy is founded on churches built or paid for by the people for the people. In real and not clericalist Orthodoxy, the hierarchical principle is always balanced by the congregational principle.  Led by the future saint, Fr Alexis (Toth), most people returned to the Church. The People’s Orthodoxy always triumphs over greedy clericalist bishops, who have the State mentality and dreams of power and riches. The Carpatho-Rusyns came to form a group known as the Metropolia and then from 1971 on the OCA (Orthodox Church in America).

After 1945 there formed second and third groups, a small Belarussian group and a very large and also very nationalistic Ukrainian group, mainly in Northern America, but also to some extent in Western Europe and elsewhere. After the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, most of the Ukrainian group, hating Russians, ended up under Constantinople. The small and weak Belarusian group more or less died out.

The Three Russian Political Divisions

As for the ethnic Russians in the Diaspora, after 1917 they too split into three. Initially, until the 1990s and renewed emigration, the smallest group was the Moscow Patriarchate group. This was at the centre of Soviet patriotism, which after 1991 transferred to Russian Federation patriotism. Many in this group never dared contradict whoever was in power in Moscow, whether they intervened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan or the Ukraine. A blind patriotic loyalty even to an atheist regime (!) prevailed among some in this Church. For them, the Russian Patriarch is an ethnarch, in the same way as the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople is an ethnarch. For example, when Orthodox in Latvia were recently obliged by the local government to stop commemorating the Russian Patriarch, many there stopped going to church. I was asked if people should continue to attend churches there. I answered: If churches there continue to commemorate Christ, then of course they should attend them. Clearly, for many, the commemoration of the Patriarch was much more important than the commemoration of Christ. This is a parallel to the Roman Catholic attitude to the Popes of Rome. For them too the Pope is the head of the Church. No Pope, no Church! And the same ‘phyletist’ disease is present among some in Constantinople, Moscow and elsewhere.

The second smallest group in the Diaspora after 1917 was the Paris-centred group. This was led by Westernised aristocrats and intellectuals, mainly from Saint Petersburg, who had betrayed the Tsar, organised the first ‘Revolution’ (palace coup) to overthrow him and showed loyalty to Western values such as liberalism, ecumenism etc. In general, they showed little interest in fasting, monasticism and piety. This is now an even smaller group, as it has largely died out.

The largest émigré group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, also Russian Orthodox Church Abroad or in Exile), was always anti-Communist. However, since being anti-Communist is not the same as Orthodox Christianity (to the amazement of some of them!), this led them into deviations and perversions, such as Nazism, then the CIA, NATO, the Republican Party and American Imperialism. The erroneous idea was that anyone who was anti-Communist was their friend. That hatred blinded many of them to the fact that all those movements embodied hatred for Russia. And yet these people were supposedly pro-Russian! After multiple scandals in ROCOR over the last decade, involving narcissists, homosexual and pedophile clergy, this group has also become very small. Many have left it in disgust at its anti-Christian ethos and so it has in recent years become a rather irrelevant fringe group and a very great embarrassment to its Mother-Church in Moscow.

As for us, we continue to confess our loyalty to Christ and His Saints, the New Martyrs and the New Confessors, in faithfulness to St John of Shanghai and his successor the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. In 1975, we were already venerating the still uncanonised (after some 50 years!) New Martyrs and Confessors. Moscow refused to canonise them, like the two other groups – refusals all from lack of spiritual freedom. Apart from some quite exceptional individuals such as St John of Shanghai, all three groups also refused to venerate the Saints of the first millennium West when it was still Orthodox.

After the long overdue reconciliations with Moscow and apparent unity of the three ethnic Russian groups between 2007 and 2018, in the 2020s, the situation worsened sharply, as nationalism, Russian, American or French, seized hold of the leadership of the three groups. Moreover, as a result of Soviet-style nationalist centralisation, the Russian Church began to suffer from further splits with Orthodox in Estonia, the Ukraine, Moldova and Latvia. These splits spread everywhere outside the borders of the Russian Federation, among all who felt they had been treated as second-class citizens by the Centre and its emissaries. This left the Russian Church drifting rudderless and heading for shipwreck, as we continually described at that time.

Although we ordinary clergy and people were left leaderless and abandoned by politicians instead of pastors, we shall never respond to lies with lies, to slanders with slanders, to hatred with hatred. But neither shall we remain silent in the face of lies, slander, hatred, schism and sect. We shall continue to defend our canonical communion with the mainstream, all the Local Churches of the Orthodox Faith, and defend the spiritual freedom of our clergy and parishioners to be in communion with the whole Conciliar Church, to guard our Catholicity, and to keep the memory of the Saints, who are the identity of our Church. And in our case they are the identity of our England, as also of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And no foreign sectarian and schismatic interloper from the USA has impeded us from so doing.

 

Keeping to the Golden Mean: Avoiding both New Calendarism and Old Calendarism

Last week the Greek Patriarch once again compromised himself with the Pope of Rome, this time in Muslim Turkey. Many have been shocked by his ecumenism. It seems strange, since this Greek Patriarch has been doing such things for decades. And he is not the first Greek Patriarch to do such things. Many fail to understand that he has once again compromised only himself, not the Church. The Church is not some member of the clergy, a mere individual, whatever his title. Our salvation comes only through Divine Mercy following our repentance for our own sins, not through trying to save someone else. Only Christ saves.

Just because one of the Twelve was called Judas Iscariot, we do not reject the Eleven. Christ did not do so. Just because one of the apples in the basket is bad, we do not throw away all the others. To do so is puritanism, phariseeism, the heresy of the Donatists. As I remarked to a parishioner, at the Dread Last Judgement we shall have to answer for our own sins, not for the personal sins of someone else’s Patriarch. And even if he were our Patriarch, his personal sins would engage only himself, not us.

Here is the error of those who are scandalised by the deeds of such a Patriarch and join the old calendarists. Through not wishing to be in theoretical communion with such a Patriarch, they then put themselves out of actual communion with the whole Church! The old calendarists are not Orthodox, as they claim to be, since they are not in communion with the Orthodox Church, but only with a tiny sect, made up mostly of neophytes who are not rooted and grounded in the Faith.

Once again, the old calendarist group in question consists of members of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlTaXUfyL6U&ntb=1&msockid=c33b6ec0ce1e11f0b05ac565ade6baa5).

That small group which has been spawning and feeding multiple old calendarist groups ever since 1986. In 2007 the campaign, in which we played an active part, to reunite ROCOR, especially in the USA, with the Mother-Church in Moscow, so that it would never again entertain the temptation of falling away from the Orthodox mainstream, seemed to be successful. All went well for the first ten years after 2007 until about 2017. Then sectarian elements in the USA, basically Russian old calendarists, took over ROCOR.

Then ROCOR soon began to fall out of communion from the rest of the Church, most notably in December 2021 under pressure from a former old calendarist priest, from another part of the Russian Orthodox Church! To quote the Book of Proverbs and the Second Epistle of the Apostle Peter, the dog returned to its vomit. When this became known, six parishes, twelve clergy and some 5,000 people, well over half of the ROCOR Diocese in England, warned the governing body of ROCOR in New York. However, that body, the American Synod, backed the schism. Thus we left the newly schismatic ROCOR, so that we would be able to remain in communion with the mainstream, the Church of God.

The only confusing matter here is that the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow itself did not take any action against the uncanonical and schismatic actions of ROCOR. For ROCOR, by the Act of Canonical Communion signed by ROCOR in 2007 (I was present), was supposed to be in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. This was why in 2006 my friend, Fr Alexander Lebedev, had visited the tiny old calendarist groups in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania to make it clear to them that no part of ROCOR was any longer in communion with them (our Western European part of ROCOR had never been in communion with them anyway).

It has been suggested that the inconsistent policy of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow in this matter was connected with political affairs connected with the Ukraine. Once the military operations in the Ukraine have been concluded, we can only hope that Moscow will discipline ROCOR and bring it to obey the canons. However, much of ROCOR will refuse to do this and break away from the Church into full-blown old calendarist schism.