Author Archives: Father Andrew

Translation of an Interview with the Russian Chrisma Church Website

Bright Tuesday 22 April 2025

https://t.me/s/chrisma_center

 Part One: The Orthodox World and Inter-Orthodox Relations

How would you characterise the situation of the Orthodox world and of inter-Orthodox relations today? What are the main forces and factors influencing this situation?

In the fifty years that I have been a conscious Orthodox, I have never known such a situation. The Schism, indeed multiple schisms, between Local Orthodox Churches today are unprecedented. This is a crisis.

As you know this crisis began with the action of the Patriarch of Constantinople, whose Patriarchate  received $20 million from the CIA to set up a fake nationalist Church in Kiev, composed of gangsters and murderers. (In reality he only got $15 million, as $5 million ‘disappeared’ in Kiev. Someone has to pay for the villas and the Bentleys….).

The West has used either naïve or else mercenary Ukrainians, exploiting their sense of entitlement, for its purpose, which is to destroy Russia, so it can then plunder its resources, which it has valued at nearly $100 trillion. (The Ukraine itself is irrelevant to these Western war criminals). Setting up a fake Church and using Nazis in the Ukraine were merely parts of the Western operation to weaken, destroy and then dismember Russia. It convinced nobody and failed utterly.

We see then a new ‘Cold War’, though that expression was always absurd. Both the first Cold War and this Second Cold War have been hot wars, which have left millions dead. After its rout in Vietnam, the US decided that Americans should no longer die to expand their Empire, that others should die for it, Afghans in Afghanistan, Iraqis in Iraq, Ukrainians in the Ukraine, ‘until the last Ukrainian’, as the West proclaims.

However, I remind you that the word ‘crisis’ means in Greek ‘judgement’. And this war is the Judgement of God on all concerned, on Orthodox and Non-Orthodox alike, not least the Judgement of God on Ukrainians and Russians. This is the Judgement of those who bear the Orthodox Christian Spirit, dukhonostsy, and those who fight against the Orthodox Christian Spirit, dukhobortsy. Which side are we on? That is what we must ask ourselves.

What are the fundamental positive and negative tendencies in the Orthodox world and in inter-Orthodox relations?

A Schism means that there is no communion between two parts. Negative tendencies are among those who create schisms. Thus, the only positive tendencies are among those who are trying to restore communion, despite the nationalist politicians, money-lovers and ‘Orthodox’ chauvinists, who caused these schisms. And I remind you that there are multiple schisms, although that may not be clear to all in Moscow.

Once Constantinople started in the Ukraine and Moscow broke off communion with it, other Greek chauvinists in Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus, who put their Hellenism above Christ, followed. Then Moscow moved into Alexandria’s canonical territory in Africa, apparently in revenge. There followed another schism and the Non-Greek and Non-Russian Local Churches began to lose sympathy for Moscow, which they began to see as no better than the Greeks, for it too had begun to operate on someone else’s canonical territory.

Then Moscow, through its Soviet centralisation, lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which now has over 100 of its own churches in Western Europe, outside the jurisdiction of Moscow. In Moldova there are now also over 200 parishes which have transferred from the Moscow Church there to the Romanian Church. Not a single one is going the other way and others are leaving Moscow every month. Will Moldova declare that it is autocephalous and set up its own jurisdiction in Western Europe, taking its many clergy and parishes there from Moscow? What exactly is this self-destructive streak in the Russian Church, which centralises and then attacks those who object to centralisation in search of freedom and the right to use their own language?

Then Orthodox in Latvia broke away from Moscow with a self-declared autocephaly, Estonia may follow, some in Lithuania have already left. And many liberal clergy and parishes in Western Europe and several liberal pastors inside Russia, like Fr Alexei Uminsky, have left Moscow because of what they see as Patriarchal support for the conflict in the Ukraine. His case sparked a huge scandal and reached the mainstream Western media. How, they asked, did the Persecuted Church of Russia become the Persecuting Church?

Fr Alexei has been well-known for years as a liberal, a charming but very naïve man, in the style of the former Bishop Basil (Osborne). We may not agree with liberals and their anti-patriotic streak, but he was an excellent pastor, sincere and kind, and he received the support of well over 14,000 Orthodox, who were opposed to his defrocking. And yet he was defrocked. Which is the canon that states that a good and loving priest can be defrocked because his political opinions differ from those of his bishop? Then Fr Alexis’ place was taken by an aggressive and militant maximalist, of whom it is asked: Where is the love in his words? Why do Church authorities persecute good pastors? We have received no answer to this question.

However, it is not only the pro-Western liberals who have opposed Moscow, the very conservative bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) have also publicly called on Russia to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine. And yet they have not been defrocked, even though on top of this they fell into schism from Moscow’s Western European Archdiocese and into the heresy of rebaptism, persecuting those who uphold Moscow’s viewpoint.

We are reminded that the CIA has great influence and also recruits in ROCOR and that eighty-three years ago ROCOR bishops supported Hitler and his Russian Fascist Vlasovtsy troops. Moscow appears to have no objection to this anti-Russian position of the highly Americanised ROCOR, which seems to have completely forgotten its Russian and Orthodox origins, despite its name. But inside Russia, it is different….

The falling away of the same New York-run ROCOR into the heresy of rebaptism, rebaptising Orthodox who want to go to its churches, despite the Creed which proclaims that ‘I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins’, and this, apparently, with the full support of Moscow, is serious. Yet ROCOR has since 2017 increasingly become just another American convert sect with cult followers, like other old calendarist sects. It has no knowledge of the real European Orthodoxy and it has become a type of Uniatism, a closely imitated Orthodox rite, but without the inward Orthodox and Christian spirit.

In all this I am reminded of a story from the life of President Putin. At the end of 1989 he was stationed in Dresden in East Germany and that country was breaking up around him. So they phoned Moscow: ‘What shall we do? What must we say?’. And there was no answer. ‘Moscow is silent’. Those words really marked him. But today Moscow is still silent, though this time Moscow means the Moscow Patriarchate, the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow is in denial.

Since the refusal of Moscow to deal with the unresolved ROCOR schism and then heresy (unresolved schisms always turn into heresies, look at the Roman Catholics), over thirty churches, 10% of the whole, have already left ROCOR for the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Bucharest. The former has set up a whole vicariate for them in the USA and a whole group with several churches and 15 clergy left for Bucharest in England. The fact is that the Russian Church is beginning to collapse outside the borders of the Russian Federation and Belarus. Why? Because it appears to have no adherence to the catholicity and canonicity of the Church. Moscow is silent.

Here is the fruit of Moscow’s breaking of communion. The Moscow jurisdiction is itself breaking apart. Unity is the most important thing in Church life, but it can only exist where there is love. Now chauvinism is hatred. Little wonder that in view of all this, heterodox, and not only Roman Catholics, say that the Orthodox Church no longer exists, it is broken into warring pieces, it has no catholicity. Moscow is silent.

Do you think that practical unity between the Local Orthodox Churches can be restored? What must happen for this unity to reappear? Could there be some kind of Amman format meeting?

Of course, the restoration of unity is possible, everything is possible. But it will need repentance. You may say that Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is too proud to repent, as he started it all. But there are two groups in Constantinople, that around the present Patriarch and the other, who quite openly declare that their Patriarch is mistaken. I think one of these will be the next Patriarch. The present one is very old and it is clear to all that he blundered in the Ukraine under financial pressure from the Americans, then governed by Trump who gave the Ukrainians military training and weapons, but who has now changed his tune in view of the Russian victory over the US-run NATO in its proxy war in the Ukraine.

However, there is also the schism between Moscow and Alexandria. There must be a solution here too. Moscow lost so much sympathy in the Orthodox world by entering into Africa, Alexandria’s canonical territory.

I think that after the Special Military Operation (SMO) is over in the Ukraine, there must be a Council of all 16 Autocephalous Local Churches. It is the Catholicity of the Church that has been under threat, ever since both Constantinople and Moscow insisted on centralisation. Both want unity, but Orthodox, unlike Roman Catholics, want unity in diversity, on the model of the Holy Trinity. And the word for Council is basically the same as the word for Catholicity in Slav languages. Constantinople and Moscow should not impose some Roman Catholic type of unity, that is, centralisation and rejection of Non-Greeks and Non-Russians.

Which hierarchs, theologians and others are working for the destruction of or, conversely, for the building up of Orthodox unity?

All who work in the Name of Power, Money and Outward Splendour, instead of in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, work for the destruction of Orthodox unity. The latter are the prophetic voices, those of Patriarch Porphyry of Serbia, of the Patriarchs Daniel of Bucharest and Sofia, of the late Archbishop Anastasy of Albania, and of all the others, in Poland, Georgia and Jerusalem. But all are waiting for peace in the Ukraine first. Nothing can be done until then, when a host of decisions will be taken, after the present paralysis is over.

  1. The Russian Orthodox Church. The Ukrainian Question.

What successes do you think that the Russian Orthodox Church has in external affairs, Church diplomacy, its foreign missions etc?

Here there are no successes, only catastrophic failures. Even its embraces with the Pope of Rome discredit the Russian Church. Why do you want to embrace the leader of a Church of so many homosexual and pedophile clergy, whom ordinary Catholics cannot stand? Orthodox and Catholics begin to think that the Orthodox who embrace Catholic clergy must themselves be homosexuals and pedophiles. Birds of a feather flock together, as they say.

One very young, very inexperienced, very racist and very arrogant Moscow Metropolitan said a few years ago, when he learned that masses of Non-Russians were leaving Moscow: ‘Too bad for them’. He did not see that in fact it is too bad for the Moscow Patriarchate, which is the loser, and so much the better for those who leave it. In such a situation, the Russian Orthodox Church should be renamed ‘The Russian Nationalist Church’. Perhaps he would agree to that? Catastrophic failures, indeed.

Only 20 years ago, the Orthodox world was praising the Russian Church, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, the bastion and hope of Orthodoxy. In 2003, His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II, whom I knew, wanted to found a Local Western European Orthodox Church. And now all is lost! Moscow is losing its Diaspora, of which at least half, if not three-quarters, is made up of Ukrainians and Moldovans, whom Moscow has continually treated as second-class citizens. Last year Metr Vladimir of Moldova himself wrote publicly about this ill treatment to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill. We, who are at the grassroots, have seen concrete examples of this racism and hatred towards Non-Russians every week over the last fifty years. Non-Russians have gradually been chased out of the Russian Nationalist Church.

As a result, the numbers attending Russian chapels and communities in this country, outside the Cathedral in London., are of the order of 10, 20 or 30 people. The numbers are tiny. Conversely, Greek and Romanian churches get hundreds, up to a thousand every Sunday. The Russian Church is dying out. For example, in our Romanian parish we have to give communion from three or four chalices every Sunday to those who have had confession.

I was brought up in the old Russian emigration. Metr Antony of Sourozh, who tonsured me reader in 1981, the St Seraphim-like Archbishop George (Tarasov) in Paris, who had been a pilot on the Western Front in the First World War, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor of St John of Shanghai, and who ordained me priest nearly 35 years ago, and above all the greatest Russian emigre of them all, Vladyka John of Shanghai, the saint, born in what is now the Ukraine, would be horrified by what is happening now. I spent my life working for the unity of the Russian Church; now the young and inexperienced, younger than our children, have been allowed to destroy that unity. Why? Who are these Young Turks who create schisms, sects and heresies?

What would you say are the strengths and the weaknesses of the Russian Church as regards its external activities and in inter-Orthodox relations?

I can see no strengths at all, as it has quite isolated itself from the Orthodox mainstream and at present shows no humility or desire to return to the mainstream.

The weaknesses of the Russian Church are eight in number, as follows:

Centralisation, militarisation, nationalisation, bureaucratisation, oligarchisation of the episcopate (corruption). From here you have a great many cases of careerism, ecumenism, episcopal homosexualisation.

It is all politics instead of pastors, protocols instead of the Gospel of Christ, chauvinist hatred instead of Love. Ask any Ukrainian from Kiev. Ask any Moldovan. Ask any Orthodox in Western Europe.

What could reinforce the positions and authority of the Russian Church?

The restoration, not reinforcement (it is too late for that), of the authority and positions of the Russian Church can only come through repentance and missionary work. The latter can only be successful if it accepts Non-Russians as they are. Otherwise, the Russian Church will die out here, just as the first and second waves of the Russian emigration died out here. You cannot Russify what is not Russian, though you can make it Orthodox. To do missionary work means to decentralise and grant autocephaly to the missions, once they are large enough to stand on their own two feet.

To my mind, the Church of the Ukraine (that is, the Church inside the new borders of the new Ukrainian State, whatever they will be and whatever it will be called) should receive autocephaly, as should Orthodox in Moldova and in the four Baltic States of Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Lithuania. These three should at once receive autocephaly. Otherwise, the Orthodox in those countries will go on splitting into different groups in disunity. It is still not too late to recover Church unity in the Ukraine, Moldova and Estonia in particular. Moscow centralisation only kills unity, as we can see everywhere in the Diaspora.

I have to mention here that the quality of the Russian bishops sent from Russia to Western Europe has been disastrous, apart from the one exception of Metr Nestor, who is excellent. There has been one scandal after another, though I will not go into details here. You cannot hide or censor scandals in the open, internet societies of Western Europe. For example, in London there lives Maxim, the ex-bishop who was defrocked for running a drugs factory with his boyfriend in Saint Petersburg. He was already notorious for his depravity when he was a priest in London, so they sent him back to Russia, where they made him a bishop, along with the two Ignatys! It is all so sad.

And in ROCOR it is no better, we have seen them all pass by here, one an anthroposophist, another a fanatic, one an alcoholic, another a homosexual parading with his boyfriend and his narcissistic and vindictive rages and alcohol, another CIA…God save us all!

How is the Russian Church perceived in the Western world today?

After all the above and then after the Budapest scandal, how do you think the Russian Church is perceived? It has totally discredited itself and is seen as hypocritical. How can the Russian Church be against the LGBT brigade, when it has so many homosexuals? If a priest were homosexual, he would be defrocked, but not a bishop. Strange. It is so sad, when 15-20 years ago the Russian Church was riding high on zeal for the New Martyrs and Confessors, and everything was still possible.

What for you would be the best outcome of the Ukrainian Church problem?

Let us be frank. The Soviet Ukraine, exactly like ‘Europe’ or the UK, is an artificial construct, created for purely ideological reasons. The Ukraine must be broken down into its component parts. It was constructed by three atheist dictators, Lenin who in 1922 gave Novorossija to the Ukraine from Russia, Stalin who between 1939 and 1945 grabbed land from Poland, Hungary and Romania, and then Khrushchov, who in 1954 gave Russian Crimea away to Kiev. It is strange to see how the West, supposedly the advocate of self-determination, freedom and democracy (!), so ardently supports the oppression and injustices of these three Communist dictators! Kiev oppresses all its minorities, some 40% or more of the population, and the West supports that oppression. But then the West is just as atheistic as the Communist dictators, so I suppose it is normal. Atheists everywhere have the same values, whether Communists or Capitalists. They are all oligarchs.

It seems to me that North Bukovina (Chernivtsy) should be returned to Romania, so-called ‘Zakarpat’e’ (Subcarpathian Rus) to Hungary and the two and a half Greek Catholic provinces next to the Polish border (‘U-krajina’) of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and the western half of Ternopol should be returned to Poland (or else they should become an independent Galician State and be closed off by barbed wire from the Orthodox world). Novorossija should be returned to Russia, leaving the ten and a half provinces of Kiyivska Rus, Kievan Rus, to be independent and sovereign. All that would have to be confirmed by self-determination, by referenda, after the full liberation of the Ukraine from the Neo-Nazi Banderists in Kiev and Galicia. Then the canonical Church in the new Kievan Rus State should be given autocephaly by Moscow. Will any of this actually happen? God will decide.

What could change in the Orthodox world after the end of the SMO in the Ukraine?

I think Patriarch Bartholomew will retire or ‘be retired’. There are plenty of anti-Ukrainian Greek bishop-candidates ready to take his place and Trump and Vance would support one of them. Just as Biden supported Patriarch Bartholomew.

More generally, there would have to be an Inter-Orthodox Council, a free one, held in humility, unlike the absurd meeting in Crete nine years ago.

It is a strange thing that the greatest economic and political event in the world in the last sixteen years was the Russian foundation of BRICS in Ekaterinburg in 2009. BRICS is an Alliance of Sovereign Nations, based on the profoundly Orthodox principle of Unity in Diversity, the principle of the Holy Trinity. It is strange that secular countries can follow that principle and hold summits every year, but not the Church, which seems to want Roman Catholic style or Soviet-style centralisation, instead of Councils and Conciliarity/Catholicity.

President Putin has on numerous occasions remarked that: ‘He who is not nostalgic for the USSR has no heart, but he who wants it back has no brain’. It seems to me that there are some in the Russian Church who have not yet heard his words.

Do you have refugees from the Ukraine among your parishioners?  What churches do they attend? How do they see the conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches? Are there any difficulties with them?

Of course, we have many refugees, who come from the canonical Church of Vladyka Onufry. They attend any churches except for Russian churches. In London they have their own Ukrainian parishes. Russians must understand that the vast majority of Ukrainians will now never attend churches where His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill is commemorated. The Russian Church has lost the Ukraine for ever. We have no conflicts with any Ukrainians, because we accept them as we accept all Orthodox nationalities, including canonical Ukrainians who have been here for many years.

Does the British government support these refugees?

Of course, as do all Western governments. However, that support is political, not humanitarian. One day Western governments will drop them. All that Western governments are interested in is people who are anti-Russian. It is all very hypocritical, they do not care for Ukrainians as such.

  1. Orthodoxy in Great Britain

What is the situation of the Orthodox community in Great Britain? Is it growing? Or is the Orthodox presence the same as before?

There has been massive growth here over the last 15 years. This growth has been by immigration, specifically that of Romanians and Moldovans. Until then, there had been about 300,000 Orthodox here, with 200,000 Cypriots, and some 100,000 Serbs, Russians (mainly from the Baltics), Bulgarians, non-canonical Ukrainians and others. Then, over the last fifteen years, there arrived 1.1 million Romanians and Moldovans, meaning that today 1.4 million, 2% of the UK population, are Orthodox, I in 50, the vast majority Romanian-speaking.

Which Orthodox Churches are the most active and authoritative in Great Britain today?

Without doubt the Greeks and the Romanians. The Greeks now have several bishops, I think, six, and only on Lazarus Saturday they baptised 200 adults, nearly all Non-Greeks, in a mass baptism. They own many churches, though they suffer from the problem of elderly clergy, the result of 30 years of paralysis before their new Archbishop arrived here in 2019.

The Romanians are continually opening or buying new churches and dozens of seminary-qualified men are being ordained priests. I cannot remember when a Russian man was last ordained priest. It must be at least 10 years ago. As a result, the Russian Church is dying out. Other Orthodox, like the Serbs, Bulgarians and Georgians, also live in very small national ghettoes and do not produce their own clergy. As for the very small Antiochian group, virtually without Arab immigrants, they are intent on recruiting minute numbers of Anglicans Evangelicals, which is all rather strange and, just like the very small ROCOR, including their bishop, their clergy are not trained in Orthodox seminaries, but are untrained and the priests are part-time. That level of ignorance creates many problems. Thus, the Antiochians here are proud to give Copts and Ethiopians communion.

What is the attitude of the British government to Orthodox? Does it favour one jurisdiction over another? Is any support given? Are there political pressures on Orthodox clergy?

The British government remains, as always, completely indifferent to all. The government is atheist. There is no support at all for Orthodox, but no political pressure or persecution either. It is a free market.

Do native English, Scottish etc people join the Orthodox Church? If so, what attracts them?

Over the last 75 years some thousands of native people have joined the Church. I am one of them, 50 years ago. The late Metr Antony of Sourozh was one of those who played a role in this movement, though he seems to have converted almost only from the upper class. But a few thousand is a very small number over 75 years and many have passed away in that time. What attracts them? Spirituality, definitely not politics or nationalism. Nationalist parishes never have any converts. The heterodox world is unspiritual and woke. Who is attracted to that? Spiritual emptiness does not attract, just as a desert does not attract. The Faith of authentic Orthodoxy attracts, but not flag-waving nationalism, meaningless ritualism or corruption. Some Orthodox will die out, others will survive and expand. It all depends on spiritual content, or lack of it.

How do Orthodox perceive the immigration of Africans and Asians. Are there conflicts with them, with Muslims for example? Are they frightened for their future?

Forgive me, but this is a very strange question! You live in Russia, where there are two to three times more Muslims than here! Here most Orthodox are immigrants themselves, why should they have problems with other immigrants? The second language in England is Romanian, the third is Polish. I find Muslims especially respectful. One of them told me that only Orthodox are real Christians. They have little time for the others. We have baptised three former Muslims into our congregation, two Turks and one Iranian. One of our Ukrainian parishioners, who has been here for over 15 years, is a builder and helps build mosques for them. What a pity that Orthodox do not build churches! There are certainly no conflicts with such immigrants. We are not racists! Why should we be frightened of them? I do not understand your question.

Chanting not Singing: Nationalist Convert Pathology versus Mainstream Orthodox Christianity

‘Faith without love is fanaticism’.

From a Russian Prayerbook

‘The Greek Patriarch is possessed by demons, as for the Romanians, I don’t like them, the Moldovans I only half like and the Russians annoy me’.

A ROCOR bishop, 2021

Speaking as a politician, yesterday President Putin made some very generous comments about the late Pope Francis of Rome. Who is shocked by that? Certainly not mainstream Orthodox with our broad acceptance of other human-beings, even if we do not agree with their views. Non-sectarian Orthodoxy is that of all who accept the Orthodox Creed. Outside sects and cults, we in the mainstream respect others with their different experiences of life. We do not practise intolerance or dogmatise personal opinions about, for example, the late Pope of Rome, who, frankly, is nothing to do with us, though he was of interest to Roman Catholics and politicians. However, the extremists, who love the sect and the cult, who ‘chant, but do not sing’, are shocked. These are the people who for all practical purposes are out of communion with the mainstream, out of communion with the Orthodox Church, who, in reality, are not practising members of the Orthodox Church.

Centred in the USA, they spread their poison to lonely young men, ‘Orthobros’ and ‘incels’, via internet podcasts of such personalities as Jordan Peterson and Jay Dyer. These are the ‘Youtube Orthodox’, the theoretical Orthodox, who have never been inside an Orthodox church, but want to ‘become Orthodox’. I am contacted by several of them every month. They never appear. I never see them, because I tell them that they first have to come to church in order to join the Orthodox Church, let alone ‘become Orthodox’. The only exception was a very strange-looking young man, with a long beard and hair, dressed in black, with prayer beads around his wrist (the usual convert uniform), who informed me that he was so Orthodox that he ate glass. Literally. Apparently, he thought this was ‘ascetic’. After I told him to stop it, he never appeared again. In any case, he did not like our church, as it is full of families and children – definitely not for incels – and they all dressed normally and the men did not have beards.

The converts persecute those whose culture does not use American English, as they live in a US sociological ghetto or greenhouse, with an intolerant sectarian ideology. They dogmatise extreme opinions to the point of bigotry and the pharisaic condemnation of others. Visitors to their tiny churches and chapels are interrogated, betraying the innate Calvinism and Lutheranism of the converts. They promote the Victorian English of Hapgood, as they are more English than the English. We are reminded that the ancestors of these people were so intolerant that they had to leave England, and, arriving in the future USA, slaughtered the natives and witch-hunted each other. We do not want them back here in Europe, thank you! US Fascist colonialism and persecution, which says that we must change our language and culture. They, people, clergy and at least one narcissistic bishop among them, are in reality white supremacists, with profound hatred for real Orthodox, Russian, Greek, Romanian or any others.

The Root Cause of the Present World Chaos

History (= World War I – author) repeats itself first as a tragedy (= World War II – author), and then as a farce (= the conflict in the Ukraine – author).

Marx

 Foreword

The claims to supremacy of the Western world over the rest of the planet have been undone. Its last and fatal mistakes were to try and force its aggressive secularist atheism on the Christian Civilisation of Eastern Europe, specifically of the Ukraine, and then on the Confucian culture of respect of China. Russia has defended itself and Christian Civilisational values in the Ukraine and so has encouraged the whole of the long-bullied Global Majority, from Africa to Latin America and from India to Indonesia, to stand up to Western humiliations with illegal sanctions and illegal tariffs. Now China, also feeling its strength, has also followed the Russian lead. It seems that Biden made Russia great again and that Trump is making China great again. The fact is that the US needs China far more than China and its ‘peasants’ need the US.

The colossal debts of the USA have forced it to realise that it can no longer afford to finance its control over the rest of the world. It is a classic, but contemporary story of punishment for hubris and overreach.  These explain the whole story of how the USA and the Western world in general totally underestimated the military might of Russia and the economic might of China, which stand together in an unbreakable alliance. And the rest of the Non-Western world, from India to Brazil, from Iran to Venezuela, from South Africa to North Korea, from Niger to Cuba, stand in support of them. You can only enact protectionist measures when you have something inside your country to protect or a State planner to set up industries. Trump may have the cards, but China makes them and now he will have to pay more for them. The protectionist extortion racket of the US bully has been rejected.

The Western World

A: The USA

As a result of US bankruptcy, the world is filled with chaotic tensions, conflict and even the possibility of terrible wars. Sanctions and tariffs are the sign of a Unipolar empire which knows that it is declining, but is still trying to hold on to power. These tensions are happening because the world is passing from a ‘Unipolar’ or ‘Globalist’ moment, when the only Great Power was the USA, back to a normal ‘Multipolar’ age. Multipolarity means a world where there is more than one Great Power and, accordingly, more than one sphere of Influence, as had always been the case until 1991. The US is now in conflict with four regions:

Between the USA and Russia in the extremely expensive and humiliating Western proxy war implemented under NATO orders by the pro-Nazi regime in the Ukraine. The West has clearly lost this war, with over a million Ukrainian dead soldiers (and 100,000 Ukrainians, Russians and Chechens on the other side), the West’s outmatched weapons left burning on the steppes.

Between the USA and East Asia, in China, Taiwan and on anti-Chinese tariffs. These tariffs have seriously backfired on Trump, as was eminently predictable, given the deindustrialised state of the USA and its inability to replace Chinese imports, which he has made much more expensive for Americans. China, on the other hand, does not need the USA, which it outproduced and overtook years ago.

Between the USA and its Israeli proxy and West Asia, in Gaza, the Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Here the genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, carried out with US weapons and finance, has morally discredited the USA, and in Yemen missiles have forced the US Navy to run away.

Between the USA and the Western half of Europe and Canada. President Trump has demanded 5% from their national budgets to buy US weapons and then he threatened and tariffed those same countries.

All four conflicts are taking place because the world is passing from the post-1945 settlement to the New World Order, symbolised by the loss of authority of the New York-based, Western-controlled UN and the handover of that authority to the BRICS Alliance. This is very hard for President Trump to accept, as his main characteristic is that he lives in the past, in the period between his childhood 1950s and until 1991, when the USA was powerful and respected. However, Trump at least realises that the Unipolar world is over, as his Secretary of State Rubio himself admitted last February. The USA can simply no longer afford to be the world’s policeman and finance its over 750 military bases in over 80 countries worldwide.

B: Western Europe

Western Europe (together with the most European part of Northern America, Canada) is the only part of the world where delusions are even greater than Trump’s. Western Europe is still stuck in its pre-Trumpian EU and NATO Unipolar ‘narratives’. In this way, the Western European ruling class is more American than the Americans, stuck in the past of the Biden neocons and financial irresponsibility. This is why Trump is asking it to double and triple its military spending and buy US weapons. In reality, of the world’s 193 nations, 153 nations categorically refused to support the 30,000 suicidal Western sanctions against Russia, only 40 nations have supported them. As a result, Western Europe is quite isolated from the rest of the world and has in turn isolated itself from the post-Biden USA, preferring to live in a virtual reality.

Western Europe is still haunted by three forms of delusional Imperialism, which are: Latin imperialism, the delusions of preening and delusional narcissism, such as that of Napoleon, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and the pharaonic Mitterrand and Macron; Germanic imperialism, the delusions of outraged and offended jealousy, such as that of the Hapsburgs, Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler; British Imperialism, the control freak delusions of the desire for total hegemony, such as those in the imagined Great Game in the century before last, or in the British-created Litvinenko and Skripal cases, or the British-invented Russiagate in the USA in recent years, or in Starmer’s delusional ‘100-year’ deal with Fascist Kiev today. These astonishing delusions are summarised by the increasingly authoritarian and pro-Nazi EU, whose leaders, often the grandchildren of Nazis, are actually boycotting the 80th anniversary celebration of the Soviet defeat of Nazism and will punish anyone who attends. Why? Because they are themselves Nazis and never wanted to be liberated from Nazism.

The New World Order

With the fall of Western supremacy, this Order is now taking shape and will probably consist of eight spheres of influence:

A. Inside the Heartland:

  1. East Asia, led by China, including Japan, South Korea, Mongolia and South-East Asia, with some 2.3 billion people.
  2. South Asia, led by India, with some 2 billion.
  3. North Asia (Eurasia), led by the Russian Federation, including the present 41 countries of the Western half of Europe, as well as the Caucasus and Central Asia, where Russian is also widely spoken, with some 1 billion.
  4. West Asia, led by Muslim Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia, with some 450 million. B. Outside the Heartland:
  5. Africa, led by Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa, with some 1.3 billion people.
  6. Latin America, led by Brazil and Mexico, with some 660 million.
  7. Northern America (USA, Canada, Greenland), with some 380 million.
  8. Oceania, the sparsely-populated Sino-American sphere, led by Australia, with only 34 million.

The Church in the New World Order

The Western world is largely spiritually, morally, economically and militarily bankrupt, as can be seen from its failed terrorist campaign in the Ukraine. Few parts of the world know anything of Christianity, at best only of distortions like Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. There are huge missionary opportunities to preach the uncompromised Gospel of the Orthodox Church in all eight spheres, especially in the three spheres of Black Africa, Latin America and East Asia. However, two parts of the sixteen parts of the Church must first put their own nationalist houses in order:

Russian Orthodoxy, which is riven by political and ethnic divisions, caused by bureaucratic and nationalist centralisation in Moscow. A favourite term seems to be ‘raskol’ (schism), as can be seen in the 17th century ‘Raskol’, a ritualistic division caused by the centralisation of the Russian State. At present several Non-Russian parts of the Russian Church are leaving it and one part of the Russian Church is in schism with another part because of the first part’s insistence on rebaptism, which is a heresy. All the while Moscow is silent.

Greek Orthodoxy, which is riven by provincial racial pride, caused by its isolation from the 93% of Orthodox Christians who are not Greeks. A favourite term seems to be ‘Hellenism’. This has developed especially from the 19th century on and places Greek nationality above Christ. For over six years it has been in schism from the Russian Church, having invaded its canonical territory.

The other fourteen Local Churches more or less belong to the mainstream of the Orthodox Church, including the majority of ordinary Russian and Greek Orthodox, outside the elite. They pursue what may be called ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’. This is not a geographical term, but one that expresses the Faith that is concerned with neither political nor nationalist ideology, but with the Tradition of Life, love of God and love of our neighbour. This puts pastors above politicians.

 

 

The Message of Ekaterinburg

‘The circus has left town, but the clowns have stayed on.’

Old Saying

Foreword: The Present

In English one who causes chaos may be called ‘a bull in a china shop’. Without wishing to pun, the current US President may be described as ‘a bull in the China shop’. His bullying, threats and then retaliation are like those of a spoiled child, who throws his toys out of his pram in a tantrum when he is contradicted. However, apart from tariff terrorism, he also threatens threefold military war – against Iran and Yemen, China in the ‘Chinese Ukraine’ of Taiwan, and Russia in the Ukraine. Some call his policies suicidal, some doubt his sanity, though these are his equally insane political enemies. US authority used to be based on three pillars: military, moral and economic might. Today, the first has been pushed over by Russian military superiority, the second by the US genocide in Gaza and the third by the economic might of China. Can the Temple still stand now?

If the ‘eccentric’ Mr Trump, whose slogan appears to be MMGA, ‘Make Me Great Again’, rules one part of the Collective West, what can be said of the other part, Western Europe? Here the sinister, pro-Nazi EU wants to raid the savings of EU citizens for a trillion euros for its forever war in the Ukraine, rigs elections in Germany and Moldova, bans the AfD, the most popular Party in Germany, imprisons the ‘far right’ (= Anti-Fascist) leader Le Pen in France, in Romania bans the priest’s son and future President, Calin Georgescu, so as to use the country as a base to invade Russia, just as Hitler used Romanians before, blackens Meloni in Italy and Orban in Hungary and tries to assassinate Fico in Slovakia. As for its ‘Big Three’ political leaders, Napoleon Macron, Blackrock Merz and Harmer Starmer, they seem to be squabbling for the crown of ‘Most Foolish in Europe’.

The Way Down: The End of the West

When I become Tsar, there will be no poor and unhappy people. I want everyone to be happy.

Tsarevich Alexei

Western hegemony is unsustainable, as we know from the huge accumulation of US deficit and debt, which are echoed in all Western European countries. The system has reached breaking point, it cannot go on any longer. This is why President Trump introduced tariffs, though they are not at all the solution and are instead threatening to collapse the US economy altogether, which is much smaller than the Chinese. The problem, after all, is caused by the US having lived far beyond its means for two generations and weaponising the dollar and its banking system against the rest of the world, policies enacted by US presidents for over five decades. Weaponising the dollar was a fatal error. At any moment, foreign investments in the dollar and US government bonds can be withdrawn, shattering the already weak US economy and causing a run on the dollar.

The Collective West, a mere 10% of the whole planet, has long lived off cheap Russian energy and cheap Chinese manufactures. It has now sanctioned Russia 30,000 times and the US has tariffed China by 145%. Both parts of the Western world now suffer suicidally from its own tariffs or sanctions – while 90%, the rest of the world, trades with one another normally, tariff and sanction free. As for Western Europe, it is ruled by degenerate colonial oligarchies, who live in a virtual reality, the delusion that makes them think that it is still the century before last. Its Empire is in reality determined by transnational banking corporations, whose anti-patriotic ideology is Globalism. To make matters worse, these Western European leaders have fallen out not just with European Russia and Asian China, but also with the new, post-2024 nationalist USA.

As a result, Western Europe, having squabbled with everyone, is now critically isolated. Although its leaders still maintain control of their captive populations through very tight censorship of their legacy media, intense surveillance and nightmare threats to the children of a bogeyman enemy, in effect, through Nazification and militarisation, there is ever greater polarisation between the rich 10% and the 90% of the rest within those Western European societies. Nevertheless, the decadent ruling elite, symbolised by a dying, divisive and perhaps even disbelieving Pope of Rome, is facing the growing possibility of a social uprising against its millennial control. The people laboured for 500 years under a feudal medieval con-trick, for 400 years under social control moralism and puritanism, and are now being zombified by their condescending elites.

As under Old Pagan Rome, so under New Pagan Rome, Western people labour under the rule of bread (consumerism) and circuses (the legacy media, ‘entertainment’ and ‘sport’). However, there is now a growing Sovereigntist wave of revolt, the revolt of the people, Populism against the Dystopian future offered by the Western Establishment, to the point where populations are starting to collapse. Fewer and fewer want to bring children into the Nazi world on offer. The Victory of Sovereigntism is the only solution if humanity is to survive in these countries. This Populism is already perceptible on the horizon in every part of the Western world, despite the imprisoning, slandering and persecuting of the leaders who oppose the Globalist ruling class. In some places, maybe first in violent France and Romania, this revolt may even turn violent.

The Way Forward: The Future

‘Today, we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, or our culture can be erased from history. Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation and justice. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion’.

President V.V. Putin, 2022

The Way Forward is in a World Alliance of anti-colonial peoples, a People’s Globalisation, founded on fairness and compassion. This is already here, the decentralising but co-operating BRICS, which already has 56% of the world trade. Its popularity and unity have been hugely reinforced by the incompetence of Western leaders, not least the US leader. Dozens more countries are waiting to join it, perhaps soon European Hungary, Italy and Spain, as well as other victims of Western colonialism of the past and its alphabet soup of UN, EU, NATO etc. Founded in 2009 in Ekaterinburg, the City between Europe and Asia where the Tsar and His Family were martyred ninety-one years before, BRICS has as its premier members Russia, India and China, the largest countries which were sabotaged or suffered humiliation under Western colonial manipulators.

From the eighteenth century on, the whole Indian Subcontinent endured its humiliation at the hands of the exploitative British elite; from the nineteenth century on, China endured its ‘century of humiliation’ from the Western world, symbolised by the anti-imperialist ‘Boxer’ rebellion between 1899 and 1901; and from the twentieth century on, the peoples of Russia endured their humiliation, from which they at last freed themselves only in 2022. Each time the humiliations included huge massacres of their peoples at the hands of Westernised materialists, in India by luxury-corrupted rulers, in China by Mao, and in Russia by Lenin and Stalin. Thus, BRICS began as an Anti-Colonial League, but it looks to a future together, of sovereign, independent, but co-operating peoples.  This is not Corporate Globalisation, but the People’s Globalisation.

Now is the time of the humiliation of the Western world. The West has failed to prevent Russia from freeing the peoples of the Ukraine from the Western-installed Nazi regime in Kiev. That regime was the unnatural extension of default Western European Nazism to the Eastern half of Europe, which eighty years ago valiantly and self-sacrificingly defeated the old Western European Nazism, at the cost of 27 million lives. After the defeat of the West in its proxy Ukraine, the peoples of Western Europe have been left with only one choice – to overthrow their Fascist elite and join BRICS as individual, respectful and respected nations, especially now that the USA is walking away from the imperialist Project Ukraine of its previous dementia. Already in Eastern Europe 75% of the population supports Russia, in Central Europe 65% and even in Western Europe up to 40%.

Hubris and Humility

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest those who are sent to thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you would not!

Matt. 23, 37

The Marxists were installed with their materialist ideology by the Western Powers in Russia, after their useful idiots of aristocrats, generals and intellectuals had overthrown the old order and deposed the last Christian Emperor. It was after all from New York bankers that the order went out to murder the Tsar and His Family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918. The bankers feared only genuine Orthodox Christianity, the Orthodoxy of the Holy Spirit, of pastors and prophets, confessors and martyrs, not that of protocols and careerists, bureaucrats and politicians, who killed the prophets because the latter would not allow Jerusalem to be turned into Babylon. The bankers wanted to feudalise the peoples to enslaving finance. They tried to Sovietise the Russians and Americanise the Greeks, making both bow down to and worship pagan models.

Thus, the Russians were supposed to admire the Soviet-installed Patriarch Sergius and his followers, who like new Popes of Rome wanted to ‘save the Church’, by glorifying the atheist State and imprisoning the righteous in its Russian Vatican. And as for the Greeks, to their everlasting shame, they were bought out by the CIA-installed, American Patriarch Athenagoras through the power of the Almighty dollar, a model just as Western as a Russian Pope. It is time for Russians and Greeks alike to return to real Orthodoxy, to quit centralising bishop-politicians, who amass power and wealth and are wolves in shepherd’s clothing. It is time to return to the spiritual values of the New Martyrs and Confessors, to the pastors and fathers, who are shepherds in shepherd’s clothing and who denounce the wolves in their shepherd’s luxury camouflage.

The essence of the millennial barbarian Western ideology is Hubris. This is the fatal pride which believes that the Western world represents God on earth, arrogating to itself all that is Divine, giving itself the dogmatic right to lord it over the rest of the world, when in fact it is at best human, at worst devilish. From the Western Institutions of Papacy to Parliament and President, each Western European nation in turn went through this absolutist Nazi sickness that it is God on earth: the Papacy that preached bloody ‘crusades’, Spain that massacred in the Americas, France with its narcissistic Sun-King, Britain with its never-setting imperial sun that nevertheless set, Belgium with its massacres,  Germany with its racist Nazism, and the USA with its Global Empire. They all preached the same ideology that Might is Right, of their ‘rules-free international disorder’.

It is time to turn away from the Hubris of the Jerusalem that killed the prophets and stoned the envoys of God, silencing their voices for a while, and turn back to the Humility of old, which each people of Western Europe once had in the Lives and voices of its Saints, the followers of Christ. This means returning to Europe’s spiritual roots, to turn away from those who tried to conquer, exploit and oppress the rest of the world, justifying themselves like Bush by claiming that ‘God told them to do it’. These spiritual roots are those of the Old West, the Western Europe of the first millennium which followed the Light of the Son of God Incarnate in Asia. For the Saints what is Greatness? It is in His Victory over Death, not in power and riches. It is in the Civilisation of the Saints which is not the Civilisation of Death and Decay, but the Civilisation of Life and Resurrection.

Eve of the Resurrection of Lazarus, 2025,

Monastery of Curchi, Moldova

 

The New World Order and Communion and Decentralisation

Foreword

I had a great interest in British and European history and geopolitics long before I started lecturing on these subjects at the ESSEC Graduate School of Business in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s. I suppose that I am probably one of the few Orthodox priests in the world who has also worked in lecturing in geopolitics and Western and Russian history. As such, I cannot help applying observations – and they are observations and not opinions – about the political world to Church life. Church life after all exists in the world shaped by politics, so the human side of Church life reflects politics, Cold War and post-Cold War. For example, the decentralisation or deglobalisation, now going on internationally, will be followed in Church life, though Church decentralisation originates from the model of the Holy Trinity, Unity in Diversity. But let us first look at the world and this process of momentous changes, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and has now reached the highest political level in the USA.

Part One: The End of the Old World Order

The End of the Millennial Western Cycle

In the last millennium Western Europe gradually came to dominate the world, reaching an apogee in the British and French colonial empires of the nineteenth century, which controlled nearly half of the planet. (Indeed, quite anachronistically today, those two countries, which no longer have colonial empires, still have seats on the unrepresentative UN Security Council). Then, as a result of Western Europe’s twentieth-century suicidal wars, falsely dubbed ‘World Wars’, power passed to the USA and to the ‘Wild West’ in California. Now that the US has also failed to keep its supremacy because of its own countless lost wars, we are returning to the old multipolar, pre-Western Globalist world, a decentralised world, which is what the ever-expanding BRICS, founded in Ekaterinburg in Russia in 2009, is. BRICS exists because it is representative of the real world, unlike the unrepresentative UN Security Council. And BRICS has been hugely boosted by the rout of West in the Ukraine and now by Trump’s tariffs.

The Rout of the West in the Ukraine

The Collective West’s last attempt to cling to power was to try to hang on to its domination by fighting a proxy war in Europe itself, against Russia in the Ukraine. Once Russia had been ‘reduced to rubble’ by the West, as promised by the demented Biden in 2022, the plan was to destroy China. This is why the ‘West is Best’ Westerner, the discredited liar, Boris Johnson, rightly warned that if the West lost in the Ukraine, it would lose its ‘hegemony’, that is, its domination of the world. This is correct as the Western rout in the Ukraine is now obvious. The recent sight of ‘invincible’ German tanks burning in their scores in the south of Russia’s Kursk province, a repeat of the same German defeat there in 1943, tells us the outcome of that attempt. As a result of seeing this NATO defeat, the West has been divided and Trump’s bankrupted USA is walking away, recognising that that his resources are much too limited and the Ukraine lies in the Russian sphere of influence. The ball is in the court of ever-squabbling Western Europe.

The End of Western European Power

With the anti-diplomatic insults wielded by European politicians like Macron and Starmer against Trump (anti-diplomatic because diplomacy only exists where there is free speech, and there is no free speech in Western Europe today, which is why it now has no free trade), it is clear that Western Europe has little future. None of its war criminal leaders, guilty of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, has more than 25% of support from their electorates. Thus, Trump marks the end of the globalist and centralist EU and NATO as he marks the end of centralisation. The EU elite is opposed to such decentralisation because it benefited the most from centralising Globalism, unlike the 90% at the bottom of their societies. That is why, for example, Brexit was supported by the bottom half of society and is opposed by the UK Metropolitan elite of politicians and journalists, who hate economic nationalism in favour of their self-interest.

The End of the EU and the UK

The West is divided. Europe collapses. Leading an authoritarian regime, the unelected EU elite, like the anti-Brexit UK elite, is based on top-down centralisation. European centralisation (‘unity’), like Europe itself, is artificial and depends on a European Deep State, a Superstate, an authoritarian EU or ‘Frankish’ (in the UK, it is not Frankish but Norman) Dictatorship. Thus, the EU is run by autocrats and commissars like von der Leyen. They are opposed to democratic leaders like Georgescu and Le Pen, trying to imprison them, and also to states like Russia and China, where leaders, who govern in the national interest, are very popular. (The only exceptions to unpopularity in Europe are pro-Trump leaders like Orban and Fico). As they say, Western countries are governed by different Parties, but by the same Policy and therefore the Parties are called the ‘Uniparty’. On the other hand, countries like Russia and China are governed by One Party, which changes its Policies in the national interest.

Import Tariffs

The irrational, plutocratic, narcissistic and even megalomaniac import tariffs of President Trump exist because he is the only one who has the courage to try and wipe out the huge US deficit and debt of $36.7 trillion, accumulated since 1991. Though the tariffs are not the solution, they mark the end of Globalism and US domination of the world, known as ‘Unipolarity’. Unipolarity began in 1991 after the fall of Bipolarity and the fall of the Marxist Soviet Union and rule by only one Power, the USA. These tariffs are not new. They echo the attempt by Great Britain to keep its Empire through ‘Imperial Preference’. Although the decline of the British Empire can be dated to 1878, Imperial Preference, that is, British Protectionism, was systematically implemented only in the 1930s. It failed. The introduction of Protectionism, through import tariffs or other anti-free trade measures, is a survival method which comes at the end of empire, when a country is on the way out, as is the USA, despite Trump’s fantasies.

BRICS: Decentralisation Defeats Globalism

As we have said, in 1991 the world moved from Bipolarity to Unipolarity and so Western-controlled Globalism. Today we are rapidly moving back to Multipolarity, which historically speaking is Normality, for Bipolarity and Unipolarity are historically abnormal, as we can see in India before 1711, China before 1839 and Russia before 1917. And today’s Multipolarity is embodied in BRICS, the Alliance of equal and sovereign countries, the model for decentralisation and anti-imperialism. BRICS, with half the world’s population and GDP, already has many representatives from the whole Non-Western world and dozens of countries are waiting to join it, and is led precisely by three of the world’s four largest economies, China, India and Russia. Thus, China overtook the USA in 2020, even on corrupted PPP figures, in reality, probably in 2008. India is fast catching up. And, at No 4, sanctioned Russia, which two years ago overtook Germany and then Japan, already has the largest economy in Europe.

Part Two: The New World Order

The USA versus BRICS

Today, the USA elite has isolated itself through imposing its bullying tariffs and united the world against it. All Afro-Eurasia’s 128 nations are uniting against it, despite resistance from the isolated, discredited and tariffed EU, former US allies, but now isolated from Russia, China and the USA. Thanks to the tariffs, the former enemies, China, Japan and South Korea, have met together. South-East Asia is drawing towards China. China is meeting Pakistan and Afghanistan. India is meeting Bangladesh. China and India are meeting together in friendship. Russia is meeting African countries. Powerful Indonesia has joined BRICS. Few of these countries need the USA, especially a USA which imposes tariffs on their goods. They not only can, but now have to, trade with one another. Even Western Europe and Anglosphere Oceania will be thrown into the embrace of China and, in the case of suicidal and much-weakened Western Europe, ironically, also into the embrace of the Russia that it once hated. How?

The Anglosphere

The US appear to be abandoning Africa and Western Europe with its EU and NATO, which Trump hates, but it is laying claim to Latin America, together with Greenland and Canada. In the Americas it is very doubtful if the USA can lay hold of Latin America or anything outside Northern America, that is, outside Greenland and Canada. It could, if it wished, probably and logically lay hold of the whole of the rest of the Anglosphere, the UK, Ireland (once both are divorced from the EU) and also Oceania, though with new elites. As for the rest of Western Europe, the suicidal old Western European elite must also be replaced, once the people have grasped that elite’s defeat in the Ukraine. This will mean the appearance of a new political governing class, drawn from the people, one which will respect others because it respects the people. It will mean introducing a democratic system, for the first time and respecting others, including Russia, which answers our question as to how Western Europe can embrace Russia.

England Versus Britain

Norman-founded Britain caused nearly a thousand years of continual violence, invading 171 of the world’s 193 countries, mainly since the seventeenth century, at war all the time, like the USA since 1941. But the Norman regime’s first victims were always the English, followed by the other native peoples of these Isles. Despite them and despite perceptions, parts of England still survive among the people, in the countryside, market towns and hidden places. True, films exist comparing the best of other countries with the worst of British England. This is as absurd as comparing the worst of others with the best of English England. True, the worst does exist. In Britain political instability has become the norm, with one minority authoritarian government after another, there is mass illegal immigration, caused by the Globalist elite, money is given to corrupt Kiev, parts of the health service are in a disastrous state, while potholed roads and litter-strewn pavements make parts of the country look rundown and third world.

Pessimism and Optimism

Thus, there are indeed good reasons for pessimism. And yet, England has been under threat since 1066, but we the English ‘plebs’ are still here, still alive, as are the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh. The day of liberation of all of us and of our lands from the oppression of the British Norman elite is at last dawning. We all await liberation and the overthrow of British oppressors. A new political elite in the UK will also mean the end of pedophilia, which pollutes its politicians, economists, media like the BBC, the bishops and clergy of its strange Establishment Religion, founded by the sadistic maniac and thief, Henry VIII, and for centuries its queer German Royal Family. The fall of that perverted elite will be the end of the Norman Empire, whose first pervert was William Rufus. And he was only the first, which culminated in Victorian times, with Victoria’s children, and the stream of twentieth-century royal perverts, from the Duke of Kent, who died while crashing a plane in 1942, to the rotted Battenbergs.

Part Three: The Church

The Decentralisation of the Church and Communion with the Church

In May 1983, I asked Fr, now St, Sophrony (Sakharov) why heresy and schism are dangerous. He replied that danger comes from them because they are based on a lack of love. I learned from this that if you see a bishop consciously, self-justifyingly, and publicly falling into schism, and even condemning other Orthodox peoples in order to justify schism, you must leave him as soon as possible, unless you want to take part in his spiritual suicide, caused by his hatred of others and their views. In 2021 our alarm bells rang, when schism, falling out of communion after we had worked so hard and for so many decades to regain it, was implemented. We could not take part in it. So we all left. We do not regret obeying our conscience, indeed, we thank God that we escaped from that sin of hatred of others, which even the blood of martyrs cannot wash away. To fall into schism and so to fall out of communion with the Church is to be dreaded. Communion is the sign that we belong to the Church. And we do.

Communion and Decentralisation: Unity in Diversity

Schism is caused by excommunicating yourself from the Church because you are trying to enforce a politically-inspired, Papist centralisation. This can be seen very clearly in the present shameful schism between two of the most important Local Orthodox Churches, Moscow and Constantinople, which is a purely political combat about centralising power and gaining money. In the Church, unlike in the secular world in recent centuries, we have not Excommunion and Centralisation, but Communion and Decentralisation. If we have in our hearts and minds, as we should as Orthodox Christians, the Holy Trinity, Three in One, Unity in Diversity, there is no contradiction between Communion and Decentralisation. Like the Holy Trinity, Three in One, Communion and Decentralisation describe relations of Love. It is time for Moscow and Constantinople to respect other nationalities and other lands, decentralising without losing Communion, the sign that we belong to the Church. And we do.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Chisinau, Moldova.

Feast of the Archangel Gabriel, 26 March/8 April 2025

 

 

 

 

 

The Ten Pillars of a Defeated Ideology

Western support for ‘the Ukraine’ – not for the real Ukraine, but only for the Galician pro-Fascist regime in Kiev – was always based on a delusional fantasy (‘narrative’). This was about a Ukraine whose borders had been established by three Communist dictators. Now the new dictator-blasphemer is closing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, attacking its saints, just like the Communist dictators before him. There is nothing new here. Atheists remain atheists. This virtual reality fantasy and Western support for Communist tyrants were present from the outset. In reality, support for ‘the Ukraine’ was based on a deluded ideology of white (‘Euro’) racial and civilisational superiority (which may be called ‘Rhodesism’ in the atheist British context and ‘Nazism’ in the atheist EU countries and in Kiev). It was never based on reality.

That racist ideology also explains why the Ukrainian Fascists even claim to be racially Germanic and Viking ‘Aryans’, and not Slavs, despite the obvious historical, linguistic and DNA evidence to the contrary. This European myth of racial superiority, self-justifyingly adopted by the Galician Nazis in Kiev, defines the Western world. In the words of the former Vice-President of the ‘European’ Commission, the pro-Nazi Josep Borrell, Europe is defined as ‘the garden’, while all outside it live in ‘the jungle’. In order to justify their and their grandparents’ support for Nazism, the supporters of the Kiev junta constantly speak about an ‘unprovoked, full-scale’ Russian attack on the Ukraine. The reality was the opposite, the unprovoked, full-scale NATO attack on Russia. That NATO attack and its now defeated racist ideology was based on ten pillars:

  1. Globalism. Globalists, the richest fifth of Western society, composed of those who admire oligarchs the most, supports the foundation of a homogeneous One World Government. This will be controlled, of course, by the Western oligarchs, who will delegate administrative details to this top 20% ruling class, who will benefit. They camouflage this ideology under the name of ‘Democracy’, a system in which the people are manipulated into believing that they have ‘freedom’, that is, the gracious permission of the oligarchs to vote for one of two oligarchs or oligarch-puppets (often bankers, as today In France, Germany and Canada). Globalists are opposed by anti-Globalists, who assert the primacy of the Nation-State, that is, Sovereigntism, meaning the patriotic protection and promotion of national and local identity and interests.
  2. Oligarchic Capitalism. This means the rule of the few and the richest, who are known as Oligarchs. Oligarchy is opposed by those who work for Social Justice, which provides a safety net of compassion for those who are otherwise forced, not through their own irresponsible choices, but through injustice, disability or sickness, to live on the margins and at the bottom of society.
  3. Anti-Trumpism. This means opposing Trump’s USA, which has at long last escaped being used as a catspaw by the European, especially the British, elite. This means anti-populism. ‘Populism’, the values of grassroots people, as expressed in some of the ideas of President Trump, is the opposite of this anti-Trump elitism.
  4. Pro-EU. The EU is a Globalist and Unionist project which tries to make a top-down, feudal union out of a multitude of nations and rule them through its own imposed unelected elite. The opposite is to be in favour of Europe-wide friendship and co-operation in Confederations of Sovereign Nations.
  5. ‘Pro-Establishmentism’. This is a value promoted by political parties, all run by the upper middle-class. They are opposed by those who are Anti-Establishment.
  6. ‘Pro-Centrism’. Oligarchs claim to rule from the Centre, that is, for themselves. As a result, they are opposed by those on the political Left and Right, who represent respectively the forces for social justice and for social conservatism. In the UK this means the opposition of Galloway and Farage, in Germany of Wagenknecht and Weidel, in France of Melanchon and Le Pen, in Hungary of Orban, in Slovakia of Fico, in Romania of the EU-banned Georgescu, not to mention popular movements in every other European country, from Denmark to Czechia, from Bulgaria to Croatia etc.
  7. ‘Pro-Ukrainianism’. The support for the pro-Nazi Kiev regime, which everywhere flies the flag of the unelected EU Commissar elite, who are often the grandchildren of Nazis, is opposed by those who, like the Russian Federation, promote Freedom and Self-determination for the various peoples who live in the Ukraine, as well as in other countries.
  8. Pro-legacy media. The legacy media are the mercenary propaganda outlets of the ruling elite, the so-called ‘mainstream media’. In the US, this means the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, or in the UK, The Times, the Telegraph, The Guardian, the BBC and all the other Ofcom (the official Establishment censor) approved ‘Dailies’, still read by pensioners, and other media. The situation in all other European countries is very similar with all the best-known media outlets, like Bild in Germany or Le Figaro and Liberation in France, which are run by or financed by the same oligarchic elite. They are opposed by the as yet still uncensored Independent Media.
  9. Pro-Wokeism. Wokeism is opposed by those who believe in Traditional Values, in the Family, the Community and the Nation. In England, Wokeism is well represented by the State-run ‘Church of England’, from whose buildings, still frequented by 1% of the population, fly Kiev regime flags, just as they also fly from other Establishment buildings.
  10. Anti-Christianity. The conformist secularist atheism of the elite is opposed by Christianity, of which the purest form is Orthodoxy, which the secularist elite particularly hates and persecutes, as can be seen in the Ukraine this very day, where the Orthodox Church is viciously persecuted, including by a fake Western ‘church’, composed of gangsters.

 

Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Future of the Orthodox Church in Western Europe after the Western Defeat in the Ukraine

The colonial era is widely accepted to have started in the 15th century…, but in fact colonialism started in the 11th century.

Fadi Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, Clarity Press, 2023

Introduction

Europe

The 10 million square kilometres of what has for several centuries been called Europe is divided into two almost equal halves. The Eastern half is populated very largely by East Slavs and consists of only three countries. It stretches from the Urals in the Russian Federation to the borders of Belarus and the future Ukraine (when the borders of the Ukrainian people have at last been self-determined). It has a population of some 185 million, if we include the smaller numbers who live beyond the Urals, as far as the Pacific coast. The vast majority of them are baptised Orthodox Christians.

The Western half stretches westwards from those borders to the Atlantic coasts of Iceland, Ireland and Portugal. Unlike the Eastern half of Europe, the Western half is divided into forty-one countries and is populated by different races, with some 555 million people, three times more than in the Eastern half. Most of the countries in the far West have since the eleventh century colonised much of the world. By background these are mainly the new Roman Catholics or Protestants, but there are also 55 million of the much older, original Orthodox Christian population, mostly living in the smaller and poorer countries.

Part One

The Eastern Half of Europe After the Conflict in the Ukraine

The future of Russia was already clear to Tsar Nicholas II (+ 1918), who wanted to restore Russia to the era of Tsardom before the Western-minded imperialist, Peter I (+ 1725). Tsar Nicholas II was prevented by aristocratic traitors from this restoration, as he rejected their feudal system of serfdom of the Russian Empire (1721-1917). In his turn, President Putin has today rejected the anti-Russian system of atheism of the Soviet Empire (1917-1991) and the Western system of capitalism of the corrupt oligarchy of the three countries of East Slavdom (1992-2022). This 300-year period and its illusions ended, ironically, thanks to Western sanctions, illegally and suicidally applied to the Russian Federation, after the conflict in the eastern Ukraine became large-scale.

In other words, after a 300-year interruption, Russia and all the East Slavs are about to return to the period of Pre-Imperial Tsardom. This means economic sovereignty and independence, not subservience to the Western Powers and their Globalist ideology. Unlike the Feudal-Capitalist period of the past 300 years (1721-2022), which was chiefly concerned with money-making, as loved by pseudo-White, that is anti-Tsar, Russian emigres, and then by Westernised oligarchs, Tsardom also means social justice. The Revolution came about precisely because of the lack of injustice. Like all Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Russians are socially conservative, but also value social justice, the sources of stable family life and stable national life. Here is the future.

The Western Half of Europe After its Defeat in the Ukraine

The first and second parts of the Great European War, known as World War One and World War Two, were caused by imperialist rivalries in Western Europe, notably the British elite Round Table’s and the German Kaiser’s ambition to exercise global hegemony, controlling the whole world. Through its failed aggression, in 1916 that British ruling class ended up having to begin to cede its dreamed-of global hegemony to the US elite. Failing to manipulate the US for its own purposes, later even the arch-manipulator, the half-American Churchill, was to see his beloved British Empire dismantled by the US. The present conflict in the Ukraine, which is as close to World War Three as we can get, was caused by the similar ambition of the US elite. It tried to reproduce the dream of the British ruling class, to exercise global hegemony, killing ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

That conflict has already lasted for over three years, for ‘as long as it takes’ (= for as long as it takes for the Ukraine to collapse). The EU and UK still refuse to admit the defeat of their Ukrainian proxy. They are too proud to lose face and admit defeat and so continue to justify themselves and talk about making war and not peace (strangely these warmongers want to take part in peace talks!). This refusal to accept reality is so deranged that it is delusional. Thus, the coming end of the Nazi Ukraine will also be the end of the Nazi EU fantasy. In reality, Europe does not exist, there are only the at present forty-one countries of Western Europe. After the eventual collapse of the EU and the UK, the approximately 555 million people of the forty-one nations of Western Europe may perhaps divide into four Regional Confederations of Sovereign Nations.

Part Two

Four Regional Confederations in Western Europe

In the Southern half of 280 million, the two Regional Confederations could be that of the at present eight largely Latin countries of South-Western Europe (France, Monaco, Italy, San Marino, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Andorra, numbering some 185 million), and that of the sixteen countries of South-Eastern Europe (Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus, numbering some 95 million). This smaller group, with its large Orthodox presence would naturally be close to Russian-oriented Eastern Europe.

In the Northern half of 275 million, the two Regional Confederations could be that of the at present ten largely Germanic countries of Northern Europe (Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland and the British Isles, numbering some 110 million), and that of the at present seven largely Germanic countries of Western and Central Europe: the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Poland, numbering some 160 million). These two Northern Confederations have much in common, as do the two Southern Confederations. Perhaps they would combine?

Old and New Countries

However, new countries, forced apart into separate countries for purely political reasons, and those artificially constructed from regions of their neighbours, could reform and reunite. Thus, on the one hand, the now politically divided Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and perhaps Bosnia-Herzegovina, could reunite into one. On the other hand, the territory of Belgium could be returned to its three component countries, the Netherlands, France and Germany, of which it was artificially composed. And although we presume that Italy and Germany will remain united, this is not certain. Notably, there are great differences between eastern and western Germany and northern and southern Italy.

On the other hand, centralised Spain could at last cede independence to Catalonia and the artificial union of the UK, a failed state, could dissolve back into England, Scotland and Wales. These could finally reclaim their freedom and independence from Britain, and with the long overdue reuniting of Ireland. Thus, that ruthless band of colonial Vikings, raiders and traders (much the same thing), who formed and imposed the British Establishment in their Crusade in 1066, began their worldwide aggression. Their wicked legacy is continued by the British State and its propaganda mouthpieces over nearly a millennium, may at last disappear. Such possible changes would still leave a Western Europe of forty-one countries.

Part Three

The Russian Rejection of a Western European Orthodox Church

In this new reality of Western Europe (effectively, Non-Russian Europe) and Eastern Europe (effectively, Russian Europe), what is the future of Orthodox Christianity in this Western half of Europe? In the last four years, the Russian Church has refused to tackle its own internal schism there, caused by the sociopathic hatred among its converts and their breach of internal communion. If, as it seems, Russian nationalism has taken hold and indifference to Non-Russians is now the norm, the Russian Church will indeed lose everything outside the Russian Federation, where it has already rejected its age-old, best friends. It seems to have turned its back on the West, rejecting the legacy of the old Russian emigration and the hopes of Patriarch Alexis II, who had himself been an emigre. For now the Russian Church is looking to Africa and Asia.

Some prophesy that since 1991 Russia has been condemned to wander in the wilderness for forty years, but that it will be led out to the Promised Land by its Moses-like Saints and only then, in about 2030, will a Tsar come. Only then will come renewed interest and the awaited Great Cleansing of the Church. Indeed, over the last thirty-five years the Vatican-style homosexualisation of the Moscow episcopate has been accompanied by pseudo-intellectualism, ecumenism and financial corruption a la Alfeev. The abandonment of the Western world by Moscow and its reduction to ghetto nationalism has left a vacuum in its discipline. This is being filled in part by the CIA takeover of the New York branch of the Russian Church, with its sectarian doctrine of the rebaptism not only of Catholics and Protestants, but also of other Orthodox Christians.

The Greek Rejection of a Western European Orthodox Church

This new self-imposed irrelevance of all parts of the Russian Church to the foundation of a new Local Church of Western Europe repeats the same self-imposed irrelevance of the Greek Church of Constantinople. The latter also turned its back on a Western European Local Church, though several decades ago, as a result of Greek nationalism. We remember many, many incidents of such nationalism over the last sixty years, with Western Europeans being told by Greek archbishops and priests to ‘go away’ (in fact, much less politely than that) or being told to ‘join the Anglicans’ or ‘become a Catholic’. One well-known Cypriot ‘spiritual father’, who possessed a doctorate, informing us that Orthodoxy only exists because of Plato and Aristotle, ‘who are virtually saints’, as without those pagan Greeks ‘there would never have been any Christianity’!

Over the last sixty years the Vatican-style homosexualisation of the episcopate of Constantinople has gone hand in hand with the same pseudo-intellectualism, ecumenism and financial corruption, this time, a la Zisioulas. It is curious to see how these four phenomena are always interconnected in both Churches. The recent revelation, long-rumoured, that the CIA paid the Phanar $15 million (in fact $20 million, but the corrupt Kiev regime filched $5 million for its own slush fund) to found their fake gangster Church in the Ukraine is symbolic of the spiritual decadence. After all, the CIA escorted under threat of death Patriarch Maximos V to Switzerland in 1948, since when the City has indeed been lost, captive to politicking. Only a new Patriarch can ‘retire’ all the homosexual bishops and cleanse the Phanar, in effect refounding the Patriarchate.

Conclusion: The Input of the Romanian Orthodox Church

With both the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox worlds fallen to political nationalism in the last few years, and without hope, for now, of restoring the old multinational catholicity of Russian Orthodoxy, now out of communion with many other Orthodox, who can we local Orthodox look to? Abandoned by Greeks and Russians alike, the responsibility for the possible foundation of a future Western European Orthodox Church falls for now to the second largest Local Orthodox Church, the Romanian, if only because of its size.

The Romanian language is not only a Latin language which uses the Latin alphabet, but the Romanian Orthodox Church is also in communion with all the Local Churches, unlike the Greeks and the Russians. The Romanian Church is also by far the largest in Western Europe, with 5 million baptised, 1,153 churches and 10 bishops. However, a future new Local Church must encompass all Orthodox, inclusively, non-politically and non-nationalistically. This can only come in an alliance of Churches, in the spirit of catholicity of the whole Church.

 

 

2025: The Death of the Empire Which Had Refused to Die

The British Establishment Empire exploited peoples worldwide, in the Afro-Caribbean slave trade, in ethnic cleansing in Canada, in continual atrocities in India, in the ‘Opium War’ genocide in China, in massacres in Oceania, in enslavement in Africa, and elsewhere. We also recall the hatred of the British Establishment for Russia, which began in the 19th century (1). We recall its invasion of Russia in the so-called ‘Crimean War’ (1854-56) and its constant lies about it, with the British-orchestrated assassinations of two Tsars, Paul I and Nicholas II, helped by apostate Russians and, in the latter case, by Zionists like Trotsky and his New York backers. This was all because that British Establishment had to have the greatest Empire, on which ‘the sun never set’.

In 1916 the ideologues of the British Empire, in the footsteps of the Darwinian racist and homosexual Rhodes, those like Grey and Milner, who had set up extermination camps to murder 28,000 women and children in South Africa and founded the imperialist Round Table, realised they risked losing their 1914 war. That war was the result of their attempt to eliminate their rivals Germany and Russia. So they recast their plans. They decided to overthrow the winning Russian government in 1917 (with finance from Zionists, who were promised the Balfour Declaration in the same year) and to involve the USA in their war against Germany, also in 1917. Ever since they have used the USA for their own purposes, as in World War II, in return promising support for US projects.

Thus, the Establishment Empire has since 1916 lived on through the USA, though all the time resisted by Russia with its sense of justice and humanity. This had already been evidenced by the close relations between President Abraham Lincoln and Tsar Alexander II, the Tsar-Liberator, who had supported the President with Russian naval power. Together they liberated serfs from Westernised aristocrats and slaves from plantation-owners, and Tsar Alexander sold Alaska to the USA, not to British-run Canada. Both were soon assassinated by dark forces, supported from London, which later assassinated the prophet Gregory Rasputin in 1916 and Tsar Nicholas II and his Family in 1918, who had been abandoned by his cousin, the British-German King, George V.

Today the British ruling class is once more performing its Perfidious Albion act. It has involved itself in its Second Crimean War, once more trying to obtain control of natural resources and ports in the Ukraine. Its present panic is because the bankrupted US is abandoning the lost cause of the Ukraine and the British NATO catspaw (2), no longer wanting a British-style globalist empire, a ‘world state’, but only a US-based regional empire in Northern America. For reality has at last struck home in the USA, whose electorate voted for the alternative. Thus, the UK elite is desperately looking for a new catspaw. Therefore, the anti-Brexit British elite, through Starmer, the puppet of its bankster-controllers, has turned to the only Globalist project left in town.

This is the EU, headed by the Fascist eurocrats, the grandchildren of Nazis. For the Eurocrats, like Starmer, von der Leyen, Kallas and Zelensky, are warkeepers. That is why they want to put warkeeping troops into the Ukraine. Since even the Eurocrats understand that the now impure and so divided NATO is unwilling, their group is called ‘the coalition of the willing’ (that is, those who are naively willing to die for the bankster elite, as in World War I). As regards the ceasefire proposal of the US-Ukrainian talks, losers always want ceasefires. Hitler too wanted a ceasefire, as forces neared his bunker. In any case, the offer of restoration of US aid guaranteed the ceasefire would be rejected. Ceasefires are nit unconditional and only take place when victories are complete, not before.

Like the British Establishment, the EU elite, the descendants of the Crusaders, still does not understand that the world has changed. Reality has not yet dawned on them. The only place in the Western world where reality is dawning is the USA. The world car has four wheels, which are Russia, China, USA and India. None of them is Western Europe. Moreover, all four wheels have suffered from Western European colonialism and exploitation. In fact, the EU/UK are only the car’s spare wheel, a burdensome weight, irrelevant except in a temporary emergency. Or if you prefer, we can use the image of the US locomotive, which has detached itself from the European carriages. The latter are still moving, but only from inertia, they have no direction and can easily derail at any moment.

The European and British Unions should disappear as main players from the world stage. Their nations should take their places as modest and humbled bystanders among the world’s 200 other nations. They are no longer, if ever they were, essential, or even particularly important. This is called humility and that is good for all. If so, in England it will be time to raise up statues not to British, but to English, heroes, such as Alfred the Great, Edric, Hereward, Robin Hood, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Blake, Wilberforce, Cobden, John Clare, William Morris, all who rose up from the people and protected the people, resisting the collectivisation of ‘the Enclosures’. England, ruled for the first time in over 950 years by English people, will resume normal relations with other peoples.

The UK itself will have been dissolved by freedom and renamed England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. For all such Unions collapse – just like the Soviet Union. Normal relations can be established with immediate neighbours, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Here new statues could be erected; in Galway in Ireland, to the victims of the Potato Famine; in northern Scotland, to the victims of the concentration camps and deportations of the ‘Highland Clearances’; in south Wales to the exploited miners of the coal, dug to fuel the Establishment’s Empire. For all unions collapse e.g. the Soviet Union. Then the contents of the British Museum, the greatest crime scene in history, will be returned to their owners. They can be replaced by artefacts and documents from the history of the British Empire.

Exhibits would include statues of the murderous members of the Establishment, from the beginning to the end, from William the Bastard, Henry II, Edward III, Henry V, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Cromwell, Wolfe, Clive of India, Nelson (and others from Trafalgar Square), Wellington, Queen Victoria, Palmerston, Disraeli, Rhodes, Kitchener, Lloyd George, Churchill, to Thatcher and the pygmies who followed her, with all the other ne’er-do-well imperial relics, politicians, generals and admirals, of the British Empire, where they belong. Then it can be renamed ‘The British Genocide Museum 1066-2025’. All of them will then be where they belong – in a museum, the British Museum. And schoolchildren will gaze at them in horror, as at any aberration or deviation from national destiny.

Note:

  1. The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain from 1815 to 1841: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion, by John Howes Gleason, 1950
  2. For all the British, NATO, in the words of the British Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, was created to ‘keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’.

Autopen!

President Trump has stated that President Biden’s January 6 committee pardons of his family and friends are void because the former President signed them using an autopen. This means an electronic signature, as was used, for example, on documents allegedly ‘signed’ at the end of his life by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral). For both President Biden of the USA in Washington in 2025 and Metr Hilarion of ROCOR in New York in 2020-2022 suffered from exactly the same illness at the end of their lives. This meant that disreputable people could ‘sign’ documents, as though the signatures actually represented the people whose signatures had been imitated by autopen.

We live in interesting times. The Truth will out.

Hopes for the Future of the Orthodox World: A Personal View

Foreword

I sometimes feel as though I have lived four lives. The first was childhood and youth. The second was over fifty years ago with the old Russian emigration in England and France. Already old then, those ‘antediluvian’ emigres died out in the last century. I knew them all – the Zernovs, Golitsyns, Andronikovs, Tieshenhausens, Lopukhins, Kovalevskys, Rosenschilds, Meyendorffs, Schememanns, Ossorgins, Kedrovs, Rehbinders, Nelidovs, Struves, Obolenskys, Evetzes, Sollogubs, Losskys, Rodziankos, Bloom, Sakharov, all the old ones.  They are all gone now. My third life was from 1997 on, in England, helping to create unity with the freed Russian Church among the vestiges of that emigration.

My fourth life, though becoming apparent already in the 2000s, has been since 2022 in the new and young generation of energy and faith. They know nothing of that old world, with its extreme snobbery and racial exclusivism.  Today all parts of the Orthodox Church here, especially Romanians and Greeks, not only accept English people into the Church, but even encourage us and adopt our local saints. Gone are the tiny and poor ghetto chapels of between 10 and 30 ‘holy huddlers’. Today we have mass Orthodoxy, with 200-400 at every service. It was long ago time for the old ghetto-dwellers to adapt and accept the post-Communist mainstream Church, or else close down, as they are doing.

My Background

My writings can be found from the 1980s onwards in several journals and in six published books on the Orthodox Church and Faith in Russia, Western Europe and England and on English history. Many of these have been translated into other languages. Since 2000 I have written on the Orthodox England website and blog and since 2012 I have written in Russian for the Russian website RNL. In 2022 I temporarily wrote for the website of The Saker and in 2023 for the Global South website, when I had to use the pseudonym of Batiushka, ‘for fear of the Jews’. Now I still write on the Orthodox England blog. My writings concern three main themes: authenticity, acculturation and new Local Churches.

My first theme has been faithfulness to the authentic Orthodox Christian Tradition. This means avoiding the deviations to the left-hand side of Westernisation, due to some inferiority complex vis a vis the West, that is, liberalism, modernism and globalism, as especially in the last century, and, on the other hand, avoiding the deviations to the right-hand side of nationalism, due to insecurity, that is, sectarianism, phariseeism and ghettoism, as especially over the last two generations. My second theme has been the acculturation of Orthodox Christianity into Western societies, based on Western unity and communion with the Orthodox Church in the first millennium and on our saints.

This was before the process of spiritual decomposition began in Western Europe, slowly from the reign of the barbarian Charlemagne ‘Father of Europe’, at end of the eighth century on, but far more rapidly and very noticeably, during the eleventh century and after. This brings me to my third theme, the foundation of new Local Churches in the Diaspora. For only through acculturation, based on spiritual and historical fact and without deviations, can authentic new Local Churches be founded, avoiding, for example, the errors of certain in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), the gallant but failed attempt to found a Local Church in North America, now over fifty years ago.

In the distant past I grew up spiritually in the Russian emigration both in England and in France, among people who had been adults or at least children in Russia before 1917, or, in the cases of the second emigration, adults there before 1945, before they died out. I also lived in the 1970s in Soviet Russia, worked in Greece and studied at the Russian émigré seminary of St Sergius in Paris. I was influenced by seven people. Firstly, there was the Romanian monk, Fr Raphael, son of the famous philosopher and poet Constantin Noica and who is still alive. Secondly, there was Elder Seraphim of Belgorod, a living saint, whose blessing I received through Fr Lev Lebedev in Kursk, whom I met in Russia in 1976.

Then there was Elder Ephraim of Arizona, whom I met on Mt Athos in 1978, Fr Alexei Knyazev, the brilliant rector of the Russian seminary in Paris, fifthly, Archbishop George Tarasov in Paris, who had been a Russian pilot on the Western Front in World War I, then Fr Alexander Trubnikov, the rector of the ROCOR parish outside Paris, where I served for many years, and finally the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony (Bartoshevich) of Western Europe and successor of my ‘spiritual grandfather’, St John of Shanghai. I have been an Orthodox clergyman for over 40 years, serving in France, Portugal and England, and today I serve in England as an archpriest of the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese.

The Life and Death of the Russian Émigré Church

The tragedy of the Russian emigre Church is that after the Revolution it split into three warring parts. This split lasted until 2007 and, for some fanatics, still exists. These splits were purely political in nature. By far the smallest émigré group until 1991, loyal to the captive ‘Red’ Church inside the USSR, at times put Soviet patriotism above all else. Some of them, intensely nationalistic, defended the Soviet State and the compromises made by its hostage-bishops inside the USSR, such as denying that the Church there was persecuted. After 1991, become through emigration by far the largest of the three groups, most of its members became patriots of the Russian Federation, sometimes also nationalistically.

The second group was largely composed of Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals, often with German Baltic surnames, based in Paris. These aristocrats, already Westernised long before 1917 and emigration, were often strongly opposed to the Tsar and advocated a compromised Orthodoxy. They were known for their political liberalism and support of the February 1917 overthrow of the Tsar, their ideal being a Constitutional Monarchy or a French-style Republic. They even left the Russian Church and joined the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople. Over 40% of the small group chose to remain there, though now, over 100 years on, their links with Russia are very tenuous.

By far the largest group, over 80%, was called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia). This was composed of White Russians. Vigorously anti-Communist, some were not so much Orthodox Christians as people who wanted the downfall of the USSR and the return of their properties and wealth inside Russia. Politically very much on the right, this wing of ROCOR practised a culture, rather than a Faith. They generally had great cultural nostalgia for a vanished State. After World War II, their leading bishops left Europe for the USA. Here the best continued to have an inspiring witness, being, until 1991, the voice of the free Russian Church and faithful to its Tradition, martyrs and confessors.

However, the long-term results were disastrous, as, losing its historical roots in Russia and Europe, the Westernised descendants of the old emigres were co-opted into the CIA. Like others, I used to belong to the non-political, spiritual wing of this Russian émigré Church, most of which with many others I helped reunite with the Russian Church in Moscow in our victory of unity against sectarianism in 2007. However, within a decade, many of its members had reneged on this, refusing to integrate into closer unity. Finally degenerating into a tiny, alien sectarian group, influenced by anti-Russian US politics, it gave way to ‘Orthobros’, incels with Amish-style Calvinism, Lutheranism and Puritanism.

Those of us who know the historic Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian language, history, classical literature and, above all, real Russian people, knew that ROCOR had become an American fake, a ghetto-fantasy degenerated from Russian Orthodoxy, and become irrelevant to mainstream Orthodoxy. It would never contribute to building Local Churches, in Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania. Essentially, it had become psychopathological control freakery, a Disneyfied version of Russian Orthodoxy, and so marginalised itself. In reality, the survival of the Russian emigration is in witness to the Orthodox Faith, in new Local Churches, giving up exclusivism and working closely with other Orthodox.

The Two Problems of the Contemporary Orthodox Church

Today, two major issues face the mainstream of the 200-million strong Orthodox Church, which is made up of 16 Local Churches, on the model of the Holy Trinity of unity in diversity. These issues are the purely political division between the Russian Church, 70% of the whole, and the once prestigious Greek Churches, 7% of the whole. These are now out of communion with one another as a result of the US bribing of the nationalist Hellenist Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople and nationalist ideological pressures on the Russian Patriarchate of Moscow. Secondly, there is the uncanonical situation of the Orthodox Diasporas in Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, which have no Local Churches.

This Diaspora issue can only be solved once the primary issue between Russian and Greek politicians is solved, for both of these have to agree as pastors with all other Orthodox on setting up new Local Churches for the multinational Orthodox in the Diaspora. Being in communion is the sign of belonging to the Church. And that issue can only be solved by decentralisation, as the conflict between Russians and Greeks was caused precisely by nationalist centralisation, the refusal to decentralise, to let go of power and money and devolve to pastoral work. For this to happen, three Centres, Moscow, Constantinople and Alexandria, need to make concessions. Solutions to this issue could be:

In Moscow

To help distance itself from politically-inspired nationalist influences and to let go, the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Rus could be renamed the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus, moving its administrative centre to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. It could refrock all Russian Orthodox clergy who were uncanonically ‘defrocked’, for purely political reasons, after 24 February 2022, in Russia, Lithuania, Western Europe and elsewhere. Then it could devolve and decentralise itself, initially establishing four new Local Churches in once Soviet countries, which have for over 30 years been independent republics outside the Russian Federation:

The Kievan Rus Orthodox Church (Kievan Rus being the historic Ukraine, that is, in all probability after the conflict there is over, the 12 provinces of the North-Western and Central Soviet Ukraine), to be led by Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev and his Synod.

The Baltic Orthodox Church, for all Orthodox in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, to be led by a new Metropolitan of Riga and his Synod.

The Carpatho-Rus and Hungarian Orthodox Church, for all Orthodox in the Zakarpattia province of the old Soviet Ukraine, which will probably be returned to Hungary, and for Orthodox in Hungary.

In conjunction with the Patriarch of Bucharest and his Synod, the Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod could jointly grant autocephaly to all Orthodox, bishops and people, under their joint jurisdictions on the territory of the independent Republic of Moldova. This would at last form a single Moldovan Orthodox Church, centred in Chisinau. Moldovan Church unity could at last become real. At the same time the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem could refrock all Orthodox clergy, whom it uncanonically ‘defrocked’ for purely political reasons for joining the former Metropolia of Bessarabia of the Romanian Church, the present Romanian Metropolia centred in Moldova.

In Istanbul

In response to these decentralising concessions by Moscow, a new Patriarch of Constantinople could move the headquarters of that Patriarchate from Istanbul, where fewer than 500 Orthodox actually live, to Thessaloniki in Greece. It would absorb the Greek Orthodox Church, uncanonically set up in Athens by the British 200 years ago, though keeping Turkiye as part of its historic, canonical territory. This would at last free the Church from political interference by the Turkish government. It could recognise the five new Local Churches created by Moscow (and one together with Bucharest) above, instructing its small groups there to join the new Local Churches, and to recognise the situation in Africa, as below.

In Alexandria

The colonial administration of the Greek Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and his Synod could cede jurisdiction of Africa to found an authentically African Orthodox Church, headed by a single African Patriarch, with the title ‘of Alexandria and All Africa’ and a Synod of mainly African and some Greek and Russian bishops, centred in Kampala. Greek, Cypriot and Russian bishops at present in Africa could either join the new Patriarchate of Alexandria under its African Patriarch, or else return to Greece, Cyprus or Russia. All clergy ‘defrocked’ by the Patriarchate of Alexandra for political reasons since 2019 could be refrocked. Thus, there would be 20 Local Orthodox Churches.

Afterword

These are the first of my hopes for the future of the Orthodox Church. If communion, which is the sign of Orthodox Christianity, can be restored between the three above Local Churches under new Patriarch-shepherds, the path will be open to holding a Council of the whole Church. There can only be one question on the agenda – the situation of the Orthodox Diasporas. There are other questions, but they are all pastoral and can be dealt with by Synods of Local Churches. The Diasporas need new Local Churches, with autocephaly granted by all the Churches together. This would create four new Local Churches; for Western Europe, Northern America; Latin America and the Caribbean; Oceania.