Category Archives: Ancient Western Holiness

Two Saints of Huntingdonshire

St Neot

This future saint was born in the west of England in the first half of the ninth century. In early life he came under pressure from his father, Ethelwulf, to become a soldier, but instead he became a novice at the monastery in Glastonbury. He was probably helped in this refusal by the fact that physically he was very short. Neot must originally have had an English name. However, as at that time the word ‘neophyte’ was commonly used for monastic novices, this was shortened to ‘neot’, giving the future saint his name.

Neot was admired for his zeal with humility and would get up in the middle of the night to go to the church and pray. In time, pilgrims from all over started going to Glastonbury to listen to Neot’s wisdom. However, he desired to live as a hermit in a quieter spot. Therefore, he travelled westwards, like many English people at the time, to settle near a remote place in central eastern Cornwall, then known as Hamstoke. The location Neot chose was surrounded by thick woodland and hills. In time Hamstoke became known as Neotstoke, for Neot lived here, as if he were a novice, a ‘neot’, mortifying his body by fasting, vigil and prayer.

Later a monastery formed around him and Neot was made Abbot. King Alfred became a visitor and the King’s miraculous healing here came as a result of the holiness of Abbot Neot. In 877 the Abbot fell ill and sensing his earthly end, he took communion. He addressed his flock as a faithful shepherd, instructing all to live in peace and stretching forth his hands towards heaven, he breathed out his spirit. It was 31 July. His relics were kept at the monastery and they attracted considerable numbers of pilgrims.

A century later, and very far from Cornwall in the west, in about 975 a monastery was founded in the east of England, close to the River Great Ouse in Eynesbury. This is in what was until 1974 Huntingdonshire, though now called part of Cambridgeshire. A local nobleman and landowner, usually known by the name of Leofric and his Lady Leofleda, set up a monastery on their land and chose a notable holy person as their patron.

This was St Neot, as he had become famous through his healing of the English King Alfred and many miracles. This choice may also have been influenced by the Celtic blood and speech of many in the local population (see below). An Englishman from Celtic Cornwall would have made this a wise choice. With the support of King Alfred’s great-grandson, King Edgar (+ 975), who was encouraging monastic life, and despite some opposition in Cornwall, St Neot’s relics, apart from one arm, were brought from Cornwall to Eynesbury.

Here they were placed in a shrine at the monastery and Eynesbury came to be renamed Neotsbury, now St Neots. The church at the monastery was consecrated in the presence of the monastic founder Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester (+ 984), Æscwin, Bishop of Lincoln, Brithnoth, Abbot of Ely, and many other notables. Leofric and Lady Leofleda asked Abbot Brithnoth and Bishop Æscwin for their protection and that they would send more monks there from the nearby monasteries in Ely and Thorney.

Although the monastery of Neotsbury, that is, St Neots, was attacked by the Danes in 1010, the buildings were repaired and rebuilt, and it is recorded that the relics of St Neot, which had been saved, had been restored to the monastery by 1020. Although 31 July is St Neot’s Day, locally in St Neots in Cambridgeshire, his feast was kept on 28 October, the day of the translation of his relics from Cornwall. St Neot’s relics disappeared at the Protestant Reformation, but may still be concealed in the town of St Neot’s today and protecting it.

St Ives

St Ives (also known as Ivo) was a bishop, originally from Celtic Cornwall. His relics were uncovered in about 1001 when a peasant found his coffin with an intact body and three other bodies while ploughing at a place then called Slepe, later renamed St Ives, in Huntingdonshire. St Ives appeared to the ploughman in several visions, obliging him to tell a monk at the large monastery at nearby Ramsey, one of the five great Fenland monasteries, of his discovery. The latter did not take this seriously at first, whereon St Ives also appeared to him in visions.

When the monastic community learned of this, they rejoiced at the discovery. Abbot Ednoth of Ramsey set about building a church in St Ives’ honour near the site of the discovery and this settlement was given the right to hold a market and renamed St Ives. On 24 April 1002 Abbot Ednoth translated St Ives’ body and a small monastery was founded in Slepe. His feast was assigned precisely to 24 April. Later there was some confusion and some claimed that St Ives was a Persian saint. This is untrue.

Some non-believers have suggested that St Ives was a pure invention in order to attract pilgrims and so generate income in competition with the nearby town of Eynesbury/St Neots, sixteen miles further down the river. A generation earlier it had obtained the relics of the English St Neot from Cornwall. However, St Neot’s relics were physically brought to St Neots, whereas those of St Ives and his companions were miraculously found. This coincidence and both Cornish connections can perhaps be explained by the fact that the local population in the isolated fenlands, including around St Ives and Ramsey, was, as in other isolated pockets in England, Celtic (‘British’).

Even in the eleventh century Celtic/Brythonic speech could still be heard in the area, notably around nearby Ramsey, where some of the relics found were kept. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FHRTpEhaAs). This indicates that in the fifth and sixth centuries, before the settlement of the English, there may have been a small monastery here, set up from Cornwall to serve local remaining Celtic Christians and then centuries later a ploughman had found the relics of the monastic founders. Although the present location of the relics of St Ives is unknown, the town of St Ives still has a special atmosphere today.

Holy Neot and Ives, Pray to God for us!

The Russian-Founded New World Order and Moving to Russia

Introduction: Why I Have Not Moved to Russia

As a fluent Russian-speaker, I wanted to move to Russia when I was actually 20, when I was invited to study at the Moscow Theological Academy in 1977, but the Cold War prevented that. I would long ago have moved there, if I were 20 years old. In the last twelve months I have been invited to move there, where the futile slanders of me by one here are mocked, to serve as a priest by two Patriarchal bishops, whom I know and who know the real situation.

However, my family lives here and my Russian and other parishioners need me here. I will not be going to Russia, unless my whole family, all 27 of us, wishes to go. I prefer to stay and continue the fight against the ecumenists, against the covidists, and against the pseudo-Russian schismatics. I was, by God’s will, born here. God put me here to do something here. When I was 18 and the late Metropolitan Kallistos told me that, I did not know what that something was.

Gradually, the twofold sense of my life was revealed to me. It was to witness to Western European Orthodoxy, to St Felix, St Edmund and the ten thousand other Western Saints, whom St John also venerated, and so to restore the Non-Establishment West, and, secondly, in the words of the ever-memorable Slovak Metropolitan Laurus, ‘to keep the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. This meant to act against the rogues of left and right, against both the scribes and against the pharisees.

This meant fighting against both the spiritually empty intellectuals, ecumenists and modernists, and the equally spiritually empty ‘princes of the Church’, whose only interests are their preening narcissism and love of power and money. Both sides, acting together against the mainstream, that is, against the mighty river, of the Church of God, are too cowardly and unprincipled to stand up to such corrupt bullies, anti-family perverts and psychopaths, and they repeat their slanders against us. But we are not cowards and unprincipled. God is the Judge of those who repeat slanders against us.

Russian Military, Political and Diplomatic Victories

In the wide world, today the government of President Putin is liberating the bankrupt Ukraine and its patriotic and persecuted faithful from NATO Nazism, as promoted by the local Fascist rogues in Kiev. Clearly, this conflict will end with the Kiev regime’s capitulation. Russia hopes that this capitulation will take place through a popular Ukrainian insurrection against the Kiev regime. That is possible. The US-created Ukraine is the biggest loser of this war, but not far behind it is the now isolated and impoverished Western Europe. This has lost greatly, as it has committed economic suicide by boycotting cheap Russian gas, oil, fertiliser and other resources and has also taken in eight million very expensive Ukrainians, who became very unpopular there through their demands and sense of entitlement. As for the third loser, the ungoverned USA, it has already abandoned the Ukraine, just as it abandoned Afghanistan and Iraq before it.

Internationally, the same Russian government has created a defensive Alliance with China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Mongolia. Thus, Russia’s borders, east and west are now secured and protected, much as they were in January 1904, before the West attacked Russia indirectly (through Japan, which later wanted to destroy Korea, China and Mongolia), and then in January 1914, before the West attacked Russia directly. South Asia, India, is already with Russia and we will soon see the consolidation of the Eurasian heartland, as Central Asia joins this defensive Alliance of Eurasia.

As for the Russian-sponsored BRICS Economic Alliance, even now 45% of the world population, it was founded in 2009 in Ekaterinburg, the City of the Martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II and his Family, a martyrdom ordered from New York. BRICS, now with nine countries, includes other countries from Asia (the UAE), Africa (Ethiopia and South Africa) and Latin America (Brazil). In Kazan, in seven weeks’ time, new members will ask to join the BRICS Alliance, some say thirty countries, some say more, though most of them may not actually be joining as early as this year. Among the candidates are countries as diverse as Azerbaijan, Cuba, Bolivia, Gabon, Venezuela, Belarus, Turkiye, Algeria, Indonesia, Vietnam, Serbia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and even, one day, for the moment EU Hungary, Slovakia and Italy.

Russian victory was imminent at the end of 1916, liberating Vienna in summer 1917 and Berlin in autumn 1917, just before the Western prevented that victory by overthrowing the Tsar with its agents and replacing him with the Western agents, Lenin and Trotsky, the former of whom created the Ukraine, the second of whom was born in what is now the Ukraine. Russia is back. This Russian victory may be imminent again, in 2024 – unless the West can overthrow the present Tsar. Over a century of thwarted Russian victory may be over at last, despite the spies, traitors, perverts and schismatics who have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian-United Eurasia and European Collapse

Three of the four world’s superpowers and largest economies are in Asia: China, India and Russia.  China and India were once far more prosperous and far more advanced than Europe, before Western Europeans colonised, exploited and destroyed them. That process has now gone into reverse: Asia now dominates Western Europe. Moreover, Eurasian Russia is getting Asia to unite. East Asia (China etc), West Asia (the old ‘Middle East’), South Asia (India etc) and North Asia (Russia) are uniting. Apart from the still hesitant five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, what is missing is US-occupied North-West Asia (what is still called ‘Western Europe’, 5% of the world population) and US-occupied North-East Asia (the ever-shrinking Japan and South Korea).

The hope is that both the latter, the North-West Asian Peninsula (the Western half of Europe, which has so disastrously tried to expand into the Eastern half, in the Ukraine) and the North-East Asian Archipelago (Japan and South Korea), will liberate themselves from Americanisation (camouflaged beneath the word ‘Globalism’) and enter into this Grand Alliance of the Global Majority of BRICS. For this to happen patriotic left and patriotic right have to unite against the anti-patriotic, NATO-Nazi Globalists of the US-created Uniparty, who are the real extremists. Liberation from the 20% of the pro-US, pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-Kiev and pro-Woke Globalist Establishment is what the 80%, the peoples of Western Europe, seek. For the Globalists always put anti-national interests first, to the detriment of their own electorates.

Such liberation from the Establishment, the System, as it is called in Germany (‘the Deep State’ in the USA), is now the electoral path in the UK, France, Germany and almost every other country in Western Europe, against the highly unpopular ruling class elite. We the people want our sovereignty and our national identity, which we believe is in our saints, back. In the meantime, we have to face the contemporary Western reality. This is summed up by both the opening and closing ceremonies of the Pagan Games in Paris, which show exactly what its nature is. The Serbian Orthodox tennis player Novak Djokovich and some African athletes resisted the persecution and blasphemies against Christianity there, but few others did.

LGBT ideology and transgenderism dominate the Western Establishment (for example, the millionaire pedophiles employed by the BBC) more and more. It is shocking. The West has become the collapsing Soviet Union. It is 1989 in the West. As a result, President Putin has issued an executive order to take in spiritual refugees from the West, on condition that they share in the traditional religious values of the Russian Federation and that they are under persecution. Should people move there?

Moving to Russia

So far only one Russian family from our parish has moved to Russia, though not because they were under persecution. That was eighteen months ago.  It was a great success financially. They both have jobs which they like and they are already able to buy their own home. One other parishioner is thinking about following their example, but most of my many Russian parishioners are not even contemplating it. Let alone our Ukrainians, Balts, Romanians, Moldovans, Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and the other twenty-one nationalities among our 600 regular parishioners.

Here some should take care, not returning Russians who know the situation perfectly well, but naïve and idealistic Non-Russian converts to Orthodoxy. They should ask themselves many questions first: Why do most Russians stay here and new Russians even want to come here? Why do they not return and others still want to leave Russia? The fact is that in today’s Russia, most live in high-rise tower blocks, abortion is twice even the appalling level of Western countries, divorce is just as high as in the West, and most baptised Orthodox are still cremated when they die. Beware of ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ syndrome.

Then there is the bureaucracy (just as bad as in France) and corruption, which is especially noticeable when it comes to health care with its universal envelopes under the table. As for the Church, only 2-3% go to church, partly because of the problems of corrupt and oligarchic homosexual bishops and money-grubbing priests (those two problems helped cause the post-1917 persecution of the Church). What many in the West do not understand is that Russia is dominated by a cultural Orthodoxy, rather than a zealous, practising Orthodoxy, just like every other country in the Orthodox world.

Then there are purely practical questions. Do you speak Russian? You will have to learn. What money will you live off, if you live in Russia? What job will you find? How will your children adapt to a very different and much tougher school system? Will you attend church in Slavonic and on the old calendar? (If you do not do so here, how will you cope there?). Just a little dose of reality.

Conclusion: Avoiding Escapism

For most it is too early to contemplate moving to Russia. Let us wait and see. As long as we can still be saved here, as long as we can still fight and resist here, despite the persecution of us here, not by LGBT fanatics, but by certain so-called ‘Orthodox’ bishops, let us stay here. To leave now seems like running away. We still have the chance to win here.

 

Holy Rus in High Suffolk: An Interview with a Russian Count

Over the last fourteen years I have got to know particularly well a couple who are spiritual children and whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. Nobles of Russian extraction, they have made their home in England and chosen to live in the mystical heart of our local East Anglian Orthodox Church and Kingdom. Count (Earl in the English system) Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, agreed to this extensive conversation after I interviewed his wife over a month ago. With his permission we have slightly edited his words, though his English is excellent.

On the table in the oak-beamed living room, where we conduct the interview, stands a golden samovar, bought in St Audrey’s Ely, alongside a portrait of the Tsar’s Family. Nearby stands a lovely vase with a bouquet of fragrant roses, which the Countess has picked from the garden of their thatched farmhouse in High Suffolk, near the Norfolk border. The Countess has served us tea from her favourite Royal Albert service, the doors to the garden wide open before us. Such is the setting for this second conversation, the recording of which stretched on into the lengthening shadows of the English summer evening.

 

Q: Can you please tell us something about your family?

A: In 1775 the Benckendorff family was awarded an estate of 8,000 acres in Sosnovka in the Tambov province of Russia for services to the Crown. After the Revolution most branches of the family, like ours, remained inside the USSR, but we had to change our name for fear of being murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, one priestly ancestor is a New Martyr. At first, we remained in Russia, but after 1945 we moved to what had by then become the eastern Ukraine, though that region is now back in Russia again after 100 years of Soviet-imposed exile.

After 1917 one branch settled in England. This was the family of Count Alexander Benckendorff, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain between 1903 and 1917. His family found itself stranded in the White Russian emigration, as Alexander had passed away in January 1917. Unlike his brother Paul, who was very close to Tsar Nicholas in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander was never Orthodox. He had become a Catholic by conviction from Lutheranism and is buried in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral in London.

Q: Where did you meet the Countess?

A: In the Ukraine. There I, a Benckendorff, met and married another Benckendorff, though the Countess was previously quite unknown to me and her branch of the family had also assumed another name. Some time ago I worked out that we are eighth cousins. The way we met was quite extraordinary, neither knowing that the other was of Benckendorff descent and yet feeling that we were kindred souls. Both of us were divorced, having made bad marriages when we were far too young, like so many who were brought up in the Soviet Union. The marriages did not last very long and there were no children. Some years after we met, in 2008, we left Russia and settled in the West.

Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?

A: No, we did not know anything about the ‘English’ branch of the family until five years ago. To our surprise, we discovered that they had lived in south-east Suffolk, very close to where we first lived before we moved here. Their choice was because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Ransomes farm machinery, made in Ipswich, was used on our estate and there were also contacts with the Suffolk Fisons fertiliser company, which later came to own a very large property called Harvest House in Felixstowe.

And so the family story turned full circle. In any case, Suffolk is where we have made our home and we in no way regret it. This is the land of St Edmund, the patron saint of Suffolk and of England, and we fly his flag here. You introduced us to him and to the other local saints. We respect the Local Church and honour the local saints. That is our Orthodox duty. We had thought of calling our Suffolk home ‘Sosnovka’ from the name of our estate, but we agreed that we must be local and so we named it ‘St Edmund’s House’.

Q: What did you study as a young man?

A: In the 90s I studied history at the University of Kiev and then some years later theology at St Tikhon’s University of the Humanities in Moscow. However, I never taught history, because in the 1990s we had to practise commerce in order to survive. We were fortunate in business because of my knowledge of English and French and my wife’s knowledge of German. We did very well. That is how I came to study as a mature student at St Tikhon’s in Moscow and then we moved to the West in 2008 and England in 2010. Nearly six years ago we bought this old farmhouse. Now I still study theology and the history of the Russian Church and I have also written a novel in Russian under a pseudonym. We also breed roses which involves travel to many places, including to Germany. Financially we have been helped by the investments we made in the past.

Q: As you know, I come from the Suffolk-Essex border where the dry and sunny climate and the soil are ideal for seed growing, which was my father’s profession. He was a sweet pea expert and even has a sweet pea named after him. How did you come to breed roses and not, for example, sweet peas?

A: Like you, Fr Andrew, we love sweet peas, also lilac and many other flowers and shrubs, but both of us have always loved roses more, already in the Ukraine, where in the east the black earth is so fertile and the climate is so good. Some twenty years ago my wife fell in love with roses in a monastery there, where she had the obedience from her spiritual father of maintaining the monastery rose garden. A huge variety of roses is available in Russia and the Ukraine with sturdier stems than in England, even though you have David Austen roses. One of our favourite roses is ‘Zephyr’ from Turchinov. We also love lilacs and again there is a Russian lilac called ‘Beauty of Moscow’. We are introducing Russian roses, lilacs and others into England. This seems to be our mission!

Strangely enough, we discovered that my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, the ambassador Alexander Konstantinovich, and his wife, Sofia Petrovna, who was a Tolstoy, also grew roses. Then their grand-daughter, Natalia Konstantinovna, who passed away only in 2018, grew them. Her husband, Thomas Humphrey Brooke, who was a friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, became an internationally acknowledged expert on roses. He was a close friend of the rosarian Peter Beales at his gardens in Attleborough in Norfolk. Humphrey cultivated over 500 varieties of rose. I know Peter Beales’ son, who has just retired. Roses must be in the Benckendorff genes.

Q: Let us turn to Church matters now. As you follow Church affairs very closely, you know much about the schism between Moscow and Constantinople on account of the Ukraine. Do you see a way out of this?

A: There is always a way out. It is called repentance, the antidote to despair, the antidote that Judas did not take. Beware, he did not take the antidote and hanged himself. What must be done to undo this schism is to work in reverse. This means going back to what caused the schism and reversing it. This means that Constantinople must abandon its pretensions to the territory of the Russian Church in the ex-Soviet Union. These pretensions were formed because the Patriarchate of Moscow refused to grant anyone outside the Russian Federation autocephaly and because Washington paid Constantinople to commit the crime of setting up a fake Church in the Ukraine. Still, if Moscow had given the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly years ago, creating a national Church there, Constantinople would never have meddled, because the Ukrainians would have been satisfied already.

Next, or preferably before that, Moscow must immediately stop its schism with Constantinople, start concelebrating and abandon its excommunications and defrockings, freeing people to act according to their conscience. The schism was quite unnecessary and just brought Moscow into exactly the same isolation and disrepute as Constantinople, losing it all sympathy. Two wrongs do not make a right. How do you say that in English, when both are equally guilty? There is an expression with six and six in it.

Q: Six of one and half a dozen of the other?

A: Yes, that’s it. Anyway, Moscow must also negotiate a canonical solution to the African problem. Either Africa belongs canonically to the Patriarchate of Alexandria or to Moscow, or else the territory must be divided and different geographical regions will belong to one or the other. For example, Egypt, or even all Muslim North Africa, could remain under Alexandria and Moscow could take Black Africa, where it has a lot of political support, though only if it is prepared to set up a real, local, independent African Orthodox Church. You cannot have overlapping jurisdictions on the same territory. We must support the canonical order of the Church internationally.

Q: Is this realistic? Look at the Diasporas, where we have had overlapping jurisdictions for over a century.

A: Things are changing. Look, the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine will be over soon. The Kiev regime is collapsing. Some even say it will all be over for the Dormition, on 28th August. Perhaps not so soon. In any case, the USA is giving up on its Fascist friends in the Ukraine, who have failed. Americans hate failure. What is the way out? One way is if Trump, who is already the real President – some even say that Biden is literally, not just metaphorically, dead – could perhaps denounce the whole Ukraine project. He could say that it was all a fantasy of Biden, ‘Genocide Joe’, as they call him.

Trump must abandon the fake OCU Church that Constantinople set up in the Ukraine with US dollars, denouncing it as created by those who deceived him in Washington in 2018. President Putin will make the freedom of the Church a condition for peace anyway. The Church must be free from the persecution of the OCU, which must return the thousands of churches it has stolen. Trump must give up the illegal sanctions against Russia, release frozen Russian assets and return the stolen interest on those assets.

In this way President Trump can get a photo opportunity of the Two Presidents. He will be shaking hands with President Putin in Moscow (Trump loves having his photo taken) as the great hero, peacemaker and dealmaker, unlike Biden the warmaker and failure. Why, Trump could get a Nobel Prize – those prizes are funded by the CIA anyway, as we saw with Solzhenitsyn. Trump and Moscow can sign an agreement, stating that Washington has no claims to the Ukraine and that Moscow has no claims to the Baltics, Finland, Poland, Romania, or anywhere else west of the Ukraine. This will be historic, but should all have been done 33 years ago in 1991.

Q: What about Moldova?

A: This agreement would include Moldova, unless some minorities who live there along the border with the New Ukraine or Russia vote by democratic referendum to transfer, for example, the Transdnistrians and the Gagauzians. Most of Moldova will eventually go back to Romania. It is historically inevitable. The Patriarchate in Moscow has lost the loyalty of most Moldovans through its centralising racism and many there are already joining the Romanian Church.

Such a deal of the Two Presidents would give both Russia and Western Europe security, making NATO entirely redundant, which is what both President Trump and President Putin want. Such a new security agreement for Europe could be presented as a triumph for Trump (the Americans are experts at PR) and Moscow will be fully satisfied. Russia will set up the third Union State in the New Ukraine, which will be a second Belarus, perhaps also landlocked, as all the south and east of the old Ukraine, which are Russian, as I know, may well rejoin Russia. The Ukraine will be demilitarised and denazified, as Moscow needs. With such a deal both sides will save money and, above all, both will save lives.

Q: Do you think the New Ukraine will retain the western borders of Stalin’s Ukraine?

A: Moscow may well give some extreme western parts of Stalin’s Ukraine, for Stalin’s borders are what Biden and the EU Commissars have been fighting for, back to Poland, Romania and especially to Hungary, our ally. This would be seen as a great victory for the USA and as a great victory for Russia, though it would not be a victory for the Western European elite. But that elite does not count for anything internationally and can be ignored. Moscow negotiates only with Trump, neither with the sick old man before Trump, nor with the Western European puppies who lie and cheat.

With peace in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate in Moscow will also have to negotiate a new relationship with the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev, under which I began my Orthodox life. And probably also a new relationship with other parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. Otherwise, Moscow will lose everything there too. A wave of autocephalies must follow. The age of Soviet central planning is over. It was over with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, only the Church authorities did not keep up with changing times.

Q: Why do you say that this will not be a victory for the Western European elite?

A: The Western European political elite, its ruling class, has for eighty years been living off the USA, licking its heels and barking when told to. It has become dependent on the USA, not only a drug-addict enslaved to the USA, but also a vampire that sucks its blood. As in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, that elite does not want freedom. But Western Europe is a very expensive slave to keep and the now bankrupt USA can no longer afford it, just as one day it will no longer be able to afford to keep its other vassals, Israel, Japan and South Korea.

The American Empire is like the Roman Empire which in the early fifth century could not afford to keep Britain and had to abandon it. Western Europe will have to find its own way, control its own destiny, defend itself. Actually, it will be able to slash its futile military spending once the new security agreement or non-aggression pact with Russia has been signed. That is also what Russia wants. It is tired of being invaded by the West.

Today the USA is letting go of Western Europe. This means the UK and the EU, minus Hungary, Slovakia, others like Serbia and maybe later many more like Romania, Greece, and perhaps even Italy. The first three have already more or less negotiated their way out of the EU into BRICS. Freedom from the USA will undermine the parasitic globalist Western European elite of puppies and puppets, banksters and gangsters, unprincipled and hypocritical pawns all of them. They backed the Kiev Nazis even to their own detriment, allowing prices for their peoples to double and letting the Americans blow up the Nordstream pipeline.

That ruling class of perverts will have to resign, if they are not first voted out, or better arrested, because they no longer have the protection of Trump’s Washington. The Western European swamp will be drained. That is why they and their globalist media propagandists like the BBC feel betrayed and hate Trump. As a result of all this, we shall at last see new Western European rulers, hopefully far more respectful of the wishes of the native peoples of Western Europe. Then can be abandoned those satanic and blasphemous pagan festivals like Eurovision and the 33rd Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which openly mocked Christ, Who was crucified when He was 33. No wonder French cathedrals burn down. If that is Western Civilisation, then there is nothing left to defend.

All these countries can then be at peace with the eastern half of Europe, comprised of Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus. Importantly, this eastern half stretches on into North Asia, to the Chinese border and the Pacific Ocean. Russia is the gateway to Asia, the future, where three of the world’s four largest economies thrive. We are at last seeing the Gaullist vision of a natural unity which stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Western Europe will no longer be unnaturally cut off, but will rejoin the whole of Asia, of which it is only a north-western peninsula.

All this is possible, though if and when it happens is another story. It may all take many years and I trust more in Vance than in Trump. These are just my thoughts and hopes. We shall see.

Q: Will England take part in this New Western Europe, which will at last become a real part of Eurasia, which geographically it always has been?

A: Ah, dear old England. A good question. I really hope so. If the USA rejects England, it will have to leave the USA. It will not be the fifty-first State of the USA. And with the very fragile, violent and divisive situation in the present fifty States with their 35 trillion dollars of debt, that is not an enviable position to be in. I think England should ally itself with the new, post-American, Eurasian Europe of the BRICS Alliance. Ireland, Scotland and Wales surely will. May St Edmund and the English saints guide England towards this.

But for England to become sovereign again, the oppressive British Establishment ruling class will first have to be removed, with its private elite schools, Oxbridge, Westminster, BBC, Financial Times, Economist, tabloid press like the Guardian, the Telegraph, all those other Daily State propaganda mouthpieces, and the Blairs, Camerons, Sunaks and Starmers. As you have very often written, Father, that elite is alien, not Norman by blood, but Norman by mentality, spiritually Norman, made up of spiritual invaders.

Q: We have got into political affairs. To come back to our question, what in your view was the essential error behind the Greek-Russian schism?

A: Lack of communion. It is vital to remain in communion with everyone. It is a great, great sin to break communion, because if you do this, you cause division in the Church. And the Moscow bureaucrats who surround the Patriarch committed this sin, weaponising communion. And look where they are now: isolated, feared, unloved and scandal-ridden. It is all so Soviet. They have lost all their best friends – they even lost you, Father, who spent all your life fighting for communion and the reintegration of the Russian Church.

Q: Why do bishops break communion?

A: It is always because they want more power. And what do they do once they have power? They introduce novelties in order to justify themselves. This was exactly the case of Rome in the eleventh century. All the innovations they introduced after they had broken off communion from the Church were self-justification for breaking communion. And self-justification is the opposite of repentance.

A thousand years on and the Popes of Rome and the Vatican machine have still not repented, still claiming to be rulers of the Christian world, and so they are still out of communion with us, who follow the principle of the Local, which is the principle of Catholicity. They instead imposed the Centre, that is, Rome. Can you imagine, they tried to impose their barbarous Latin on the descendants of the Civilisations of the Incas, Maya and Aztecs! No respect for the Local!

We must be very strict about keeping in communion. The way back, the return, is in respecting the canonical territories of each Local Church. That is what Rome did not do and instead tried to impose itself by the sword on Orthodox territories, with their crusades, inquisitions and so on. Now Constantinople is trying to do the same, imposing centralisation in imitation of Papism. And Moscow Church bureaucrats tried to do the same, but God has intervened, its Soviet Empire over Non-Russians is crumbling.

Q: I would like to come back to my original question, which we did not answer. Do these considerations give us a solution to the divisions in the Diasporas, where there have been several overlapping jurisdictions for over a century?

A: In the Diasporas, where there are mixed Orthodox populations, responsibility for organising new Local Churches lies with the majority ethnic group, but that majority must respect all the customs of the minorities. This is what Bishop Tikhon, the future Russian Patriarch and Saint, did when he headed the multinational Northern American Orthodox Church before the Revolution. Then Carpatho-Russians and Russian-converted Alaskans were the majority, but minorities like the Syrians, Serbs and others were together with them.

Today the Greeks are the Orthodox majority there, as also in Australia, but unity is blocked because of the political and imperialist style of the Greeks. As long as they have that Hellenist style, unity will be impossible. Only when the Greeks have a Non-Greek Patriarch, will they be taken seriously. As regards Western Europe the Romanians are the majority. Here I am hopeful, because respect is what our Romanian Metropolitan Joseph gave our Russian and Moldovan parishes with our calendar, languages and customs, when we had to flee to his canonical protection from pseudo-Russian episcopal persecution. And we in turn greatly respect and love the Romanians. I love their singing and their simplicity! Mutual respect is vital.

Q: One well-known Russian Metropolitan said that the Moscow-Constantinople schism is as big and as permanent as the 1054 Western Schism. What do you think?

A: That was nonsense. This schism is all about personalities and they are temporary. Here today, gone tomorrow, as you say in English. Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople has renounced or changed the Creed, unlike Rome in 1054. So this schism is not at all on the same level as 1054, it is not a dogmatic issue, but a vulgar issue of territory and personalities. And personalities change and are replaced. In any case, the Metropolitan-oligarch who said that, the bureaucrat was in part responsible for the whole fiasco, is now suspended and completely discredited. Nobody is listening to him any more. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Can other Local Churches play a role in healing the Moscow-Constantinople schism?

A: Of course, and a vital role. The Churches of Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland and perhaps others like Antioch, Czechoslovakia and America, and of course the canonical Church of Metropolitan Onufry in the Ukraine, will play a vital role. Even some bishops in Greece and Cyprus are sufficiently non-racist to understand the reality. Some Local Churches are already playing that role, stressing the Conciliar principle, the principle of Sobornost, that is, Catholicity, which, by the way, is the exact opposite of Catholicism and it is precisely the spirit of Catholicism, that is Papism, which caused the schism. Read the interview with the new Bulgarian Patriarch, who was elected after the American candidate lost and was humiliated and the Greeks had to go home like whipped dogs. His words are inspired.

Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?

A: Not personally, only by sight, but I do know Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa and Archbishop Diodor quite well and they have the same spirit. The further you are from Moscow, the more you find that spirit.

Q: You mention that the essence of the schism is the lust for power on the part of bishops and the spirit of Catholicism or Papism which lies behind it. Can you expand on this?

A: We are all waiting for the restoration of canonical order in the Russian Church, but this cannot happen until the end of what some Russians call ‘Philocatholicism’. This means the fawning admiration by some Russian bishops of the Vatican power-structure, which is the concept of a Church-State, a Church which is a State, or is even more powerful than a State, as history saw at Canossa. However, I am completely against this word because I respect ordinary Catholics, who are Catholics only because they were born in a certain country and I would never insult or disrespect them. The disease inside the Russian Church is not Philocatholicism, the disease is ‘Philopapism’. That is the real heart of the issue, And, by the way, it has nothing to do with ecumenism. Some of the worst Philopapists are anti-ecumenist.

Q: In that case, can you define ‘Philopapism’ for us?

A: Yes, but first understand that Philopapism is not just a Russian disease, it has long infected Constantinople, where it is called ‘Eastern Papism’, and before that it infected Rome, where it has always been called Papism. In Rome the problem was and is Western nationalism, in Constantinople it is Greek nationalism and in Moscow it is Russian nationalism. In Russia, it is not at all a recent Soviet disease, ‘Sergianism’, unlike as some very politicised, anti-Communist emigres used to imagine, it goes back centuries in Russia too, long before Communism.

It existed, for example, just before the Revolution in the awful persecution of the so-called ‘Name of God’ monks on Mt Athos. It was Tsar Nicholas who stopped that persecution, which had been instigated by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), who later became the first leader of the émigré ROCOR. The persecution was carried out by bureaucrats who were more or less atheists. The First World War followed it. And most of those very same bishops who had persecuted simple piety, then abandoned Tsar Nicholas at the Revolution and even rejoiced at his overthrow. Later they had to repent, redeeming themselves at the price of martyrdom or of exile. They had to pay the price for their earlier vile persecution.

Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?

A: The post-Revolutionary bout of Philopapism goes back to Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Sergius, who wanted to ‘save the Church’, just like the Popes and the recent Patriarchs of Constantinople. How can you ‘save the Church’? Christ is the Saviour! The Church does not need saving, it is we, including bishops and patriarchs, who need saving. Who do they think they are? The problem is that the Philopapists see the Church as a purely worldly organisation, just like the Popes of Rome, who used to lead armies in order to defend their Church. In order to defeat the barbarians, they themselves became barbarians! Who then was the gentleman?! From Patriarch Sergius this infection spread down to personalities like Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who characteristically died in the arms of the Pope. Some say that he was a secret cardinal. Maybe. That is not the point. From him the disease has contaminated further to this day.

This disease is the mentality that bishops are ‘princes of the Church’, in fact they are perverted oligarchs, just like the Borgias in Renaissance Rome. This is poisonous. It is why I refused to go to many churches when I lived in the Ukraine and Russia. They were an immoral business operation and many bishops there are immoral, chosen only because they know how to make money, not because they believe in God, pray, or are monks. I think many of these new Russian Borgias should go to prison. The current Metropolitan Hilarion affair is only the tip of the iceberg. Others must be trembling now too. The truth is coming out and judgement is coming to them all.

Q: You said that Philopapism goes back centuries in Russia. When did Philopapism begin?

A: It came in after the fall of Constantinople, the Second Rome, in 1453. So began the idea of the Third Rome. Fighting against St Nil of Sora and the hesychast Non-Possessors – St Sergius of Radonezh had been one of them earlier on – the situation came to a head at the so-called ‘Raskol’, that is, the Old Ritualist schism 200 years later. Then the administrative centre of the Russian Church in Moscow was contaminated by Philopapism, which was also encouraged by the idea of the Third Rome, which maintains that Russia has a messianic mission. Russia does have a mission, but it takes place within the multilateral Alliance of Civilisations, which is what BRICS is about.

In other words, Philopapists think that Russia is exceptional, indispensable to the world and therefore anything its rulers do is justified. The antidote to this was in the concept of Moscow as a Second Jerusalem, but that option was cruelly rejected by the Moscow bureaucrats. It is not that I am in favour of Old Ritualism, which was a form of ignorant nationalism, but I am against persecution. What difference is there between the State persecution of the Old Ritualists in the seventeenth century and the State persecution of Orthodox in the twentieth century?

The Philopapist mentality creates pharisees and ‘high priests’, as Christ called them in the Gospel, those who like ‘the first places at table’. Philopapists consider that they are the chosen people and so above the law, above the canons, ‘exceptional’. But this mentality is why the pharisees crucified Christ, Who called them to order, what we call canonical order, and told them that our Kingdom is not of this world. He overturned the tables of these new moneychangers, which is what you did, Fr Andrew, when you chased out the new pharisees who were threatening you and screaming at you in 2021 and 2022. All those who persecuted you are one by one being removed. Bishops are not above the canons.

It is the Holy Spirit Who chooses us for mission, not pharisees. Pharisees think only in worldly terms of money and power, and camouflage themselves with messianism as self-justification for their lusts. It is simply lust for money and power that contaminates these people. Once they have money, they want power. It is always the same old sordid story of corruption and perversion. That is Philopapism.

Q: But Phariseeism itself is universal, isn’t it?

A: Yes, of course. It was this same missionary, messianic mentality which inspired the atheist Jew Bronstein-Trotsky, who wanted to spread the Communism of the Third International (which replaced the Third Rome) worldwide. He also persecuted, leading the Red Army and causing the deaths of millions. But it is not only Jewish, it can be Frankish, Norman, Venetian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, Soviet, American, or anything else.

For instance, Soviet messianism strangely resembles American messianism. This is because the struggle between Washington and Moscow is in fact the struggle between the First Rome and the Third Rome, for the USA is the heir to the infallible Popes of the First Rome. ‘We are the exceptional people, the indispensable nation’, the infallible US have been saying of themselves ever since the collapse of the SU (Soviet Union), though its collapse had nothing to do with the Americans. (See how even the initials US and SU and their symbols, the white star and the red star, are the same, just the other way round).

Communism collapsed because it is unrealisable and went bankrupt. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union went to the heads of the US elite. They claimed absurdly: ‘This is the end of history and we have won. As the victors, we can set up a World Empire, called Globalism, we have exceptional authority, therefore no laws apply to us, we can carry out genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Libya and Syria, in the Donbass and Gaza, we can ignore the International Criminal Court. We can do whatever we want’. In reality, this is just the same vulgar old imperialism, absolutism, immorality, cloaked in their smug Protestant self-righteousness and infallibility. It is Philopapism.

In reality only God is exceptional. No human being or country is exceptional.

Q: What do you think of what some call the ‘liberal opposition’ in the Russian Church, clergymen like Protodeacon Andrey Kuraev and the popular pastor Fr Alexei Usminsky? They are also opposed to these Vatican-adoring, ‘money and power’ Russian bishops, the pharisaic Philopapists, as you are.

A: The dissident liberals are opposed to the Philopapists, but not for the same reasons as I am. The liberals are opposed to such bishops because the liberals are in reality rationalistic and modernistic Protestants. Like all Protestants, they are naturally anti-Catholic, anti-Papist. However, like all Protestants they are also generally pro-Western and some are traitors to Russia, just like their corrupt enemies whom they fight and are also traitors to Russia (I make exceptions for some who are just extremely naïve and not very intelligent). We disagree with the liberals because we are not Protestants and we follow the historic Orthodox Faith.

We are not traitors, we are patriots of Russia, that is, of the real Russia, of Orthodox Rus. President Putin is preparing the way for that, for the coming Emperor. He took on not just Paris and Berlin, but the whole West and won. We hope that God gives him time to help cleanse the Church next.

However, I do disagree with the appalling way that the liberals have been treated, with their so-called ‘defrockings’ by the selfsame corrupt bishops. You cannot defrock a clergyman because he has different political views from his bishop under the absurd pretext that he is being ‘disobedient’. The threat of defrocking forced them and many others, in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Spain, USA and in Russia into joining Constantinople – they had no alternative. This is yet another example of the Moscow bureaucracy weaponising a sacrament, this time not the eucharist, but the priesthood. But grace is given by the Holy Spirit, not by pieces of paper signed by jealous or wicked bishops. Thank God, Patriarch Kyrill is beginning to remove them, suspend them or retire them. He has  a lot of work to do.

Q: How is authentic Orthodox missionary work different from American missionary work?

A: If you have a missionary message to spread to others, the message of Christ, then you do not spread it by violence and threats. This is what the ‘Roman Union’ of the Vatican did. This is what the ‘Soviet Union’ did. Now this is what the ‘American Union’ (which is USA and NATO – basically the ‘European Union’) does. They have all used violence and threats. This has guaranteed the downfall of all of them. It is what is happening now.

The American Union, usually called ‘The West’, is collapsing, it too has gone bankrupt. They have done it to themselves, just like the Soviet Union. As someone from the Soviet Union, I can see very clearly how the European Union has become the same. The commissars, mentality and lies of its politicians and journalists are exactly the same. But the Godless are always defeated because they are all from Babylon. Their Tower always collapses.

Authentic Orthodox missionary work does not use violence and threats. I have recently discovered the Russian saint, German of Alaska as an example. What a great monk! And how he has been ignored by Church authorities and was resisted by Russian State authorities (long before ‘Sergianism’!). He is unknown in Russia. St German lived among the Inuit people ‘as one of them’. Not even a priest, he did not impose his language or customs by violence or threats against the people. He did not try and steal their property. He was their servant and defender, not their persecutor or a ‘prince of the Church’. He was the real Apostle of Alaska. He was able to convert people, because he was Christlike.

In this he was just like Sts Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, St Stephen of Perm, Apostle of the Zyrians, St Nicholas, Apostle of Japan, or St Macarius, Apostle of the Altai, he respected others. That is the problem of the Moscow Patriarchal bureaucrats today, lack of respect for others, for the Local. And that is why they are losing everything, they put politics above the Church. If I may paraphrase St Matthew’s Gospel: Seek ye first the kingdom of man, and all these things will be taken from you’. They do not deserve to keep it. God will take it away from them because they are unworthy, just as He took Constantinople away from the Greeks in 1453 because of their racism. St German of Alaska’s way is the only way that Russia could convert the world and in no other way. Any other way is Philopapist.

Q: Whenever we talk, I feel nostalgic, as though I am talking to one of the old Russian emigres I knew in the 1970s, like my godfather, Nikolai Zernov. I would sit in his apartment in Northmoor Road in Oxford and look at the huge picture, almost fresco, he had of the Kremlin ‘before the deluge’, as he called it. Then there were Princess Kutaissova, Elizabeth Lopukhina, Dimitri Obolensky, Nadezhda Gorodetskaja or Lydia Slater, Boris Pasternak’s sister. They all had the same mentality. Why is this?

A: This is because we are Russian emigres like them! But I take your remark as a compliment. All I can say is that though we lived in the Soviet Union, we always kept our family traditions from before. Above all, we never, never accepted any Sovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has increased this Philopapist corruption and perversion today. This has made it and those who are too closely allied with it, like those crazy ROCOR Protestant converts in New York, into pariahs. It is so sad and so unnecessary. They have painted themselves into the corner with their notorious scandals, as you say. Now they are complaining because the rest of the Church at best ignores them and at worst openly mocks them. But how else are you going to treat psychopaths?

Q: Do you have any words of hope for our readers?

A: Yes, there is one thing. You know, I never used to like Trump. I thought he was a clown as well as a criminal and a narcissist. He was also a Russophobe and armed the Neo-Nazis against us and sanctioned us. But recently, he said something very Orthodox, no doubt for the first time in his life and without knowing it. He said: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! I even wanted to buy a picture of this moment, but my wife stopped me. She has no interest in politics and says it is all a waste of time. She prefers gardening and our two cats to politics. She says cats are far more intelligent than politicians.

She may be right, she so often is. But I still maintain that the concept of ‘Never surrender’ is Orthodox, because Christ never surrendered. If He had surrendered, there would never have been the Resurrection. So I say that Trump was saved for a purpose by the grace of God, the bullet missed him, but hit Biden instead and stopped World War III, and we should all repeat: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! Another American said something like: ‘Only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world do change the world’. This is in fact the definition of our fools for Christ. They change the world, corrupt and perverted bishops do not. Why, they cannot even change themselves.

July 2024

 

 

Pessimism or Optimism?

Introduction

The tragic events in the tragic Ukraine are a turning-point in history. The defeat of the Western elite there is not a defeat that comes every 500 years, but every 1,000 years. For already in the eleventh century through its ‘crusades’, the elite had proclaimed the racist ideology that it is exceptional, superior to all others and has the right to conquer, control and exploit the rest of the world. The rout of the elite in the Ukraine proves rather that it is exceptionally aggressive and in fact spiritually and morally inferior. However, the cornered beast that is the contemporary Western elite is a dangerous animal. It will lash out at anyone, as it does not want to admit reality, that its power is temporary and that it rules over just a few countries in the world community, which it is long since time to integrate on an equal footing with the Global Majority.

Pessimism

World War III

Pessimism about the world situation is understandable. Washington is for now controlled by highly belligerent and delusional hotheads, whose ideology is American superiority and whose puppet is the demented Biden. He will do and sign anything they want. Could the US NATO vassals, some of whom have even since 2014 had troops in the Ukraine, launch an attack on Russia through Kaliningrad? Or through Belarus? Or through Transdnistria? (US, French and Romanian troops are already in Moldova). Or will the US directly attack Iran? Or will the US launch a direct war against China through the ‘Chinese Ukraine’ of Taiwan? Or will they begin a nuclear war? Such are the speculations of pessimists on ‘World War III’ and possible further Western folly. For this is undoubtedly folly, insanity similar to Hitler’s in 1941.

Hitler’s Folly

Until June 1941 Hitler had reigned victorious and supreme in Western Europe, from Greece to Norway. Italy, Spain and Portugal which he had not invaded, were ruled by Fascist allies. And he could do whatever he wanted with and obtain anything he wanted from the supposedly neutral but hypocritical Sweden and Switzerland. Offshore Britain, which he had humiliatingly routed and chased back into its island at Dunkirk in May 1940 and repressed in summer 1940, was not worth wasting any more resources on. The main British interests were its colonies and dominions, from Australia to Canada, from Kenya to South Africa, from India to Egypt. These were irrelevant to Hitler. Entirely dependent on the USA for food and arms, despite its rhetoric Britain was incapable of launching an invasion of German-controlled Continental Europe. But the triumphant but delusional Austrian megalomaniac wanted more than just control over Western Europe. In June 1941, like the triumphant but delusional Corsican megalomaniac Napoleon before him, he attacked eastwards, the USSR, and then in December 1941 he declared war on the USA. It was suicide for little Germany.

The Isolation and Delirium of the Modern West

And so today Washington and its European puppets, who include Zelensky, are committing suicide, just like Napoleon and Hitler before them. The name ‘Biden’ will go down in history as one who was defeated just like Napoleon and Hitler. Washington has declared war on Russia through its Fascist proxies from the far west of the Ukraine. Washington has declared war against the whole Muslim world in Palestine, Yemen and Iran through its proxies in Israel. And now Washington wants to declare war on China through its proxies in Taiwan and the Philippines. India, Africa and Latin America stand by in support of Russia, the Muslim world and China. The billion of the West stand isolated against the seven billion of the Global Majority. The West has isolated itself in its aggressive, paranoiac and self-destructive folly.

Optimism

In the Ukraine: Liberation

The Ukraine is being liberated from the US Nazi puppets in Kiev, illegally installed there by the billions of dollars pumped in by the US elite. Many predict the liberation in the coming weeks or months, sooner or later. But what will come next? It is one thing to win the war, another thing to win the peace. The East and the South of the Ukraine are Russian, they were part of Russia until 1922. That is clear. But the centre and the west are different. The centre is different, it is not Russia, the west is Ukrainian and the far west is more like Poland than Rus and its people are generally not even Orthodox. There will be a New and Sovereign Ukraine, an independent country, with its own ways, free of US interference. And Soviet-style centralisation from Moscow will not work. The real Ukraine has its own identity.

In South-East Europe: The BRICS Alliance

It was the BRICS 5. It will soon be the BRICS 10. Tomorrow will it be the BRICS 20 or the BRICS 30, or the BRICS 40, or the BRICS 50? The Alliance keeps growing and overtook the old US-controlled G7 some years ago. The Alliance is also replacing the old US-controlled ‘United’ Nations, which was only ever a puppet show. Now the Alliance, a genuine World Alliance, could liberate South-East Europe. South-East Europe consists of sixteen countries, previously largely those of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires: Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, (North) Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria and Hungary. Moreover, half the population of South-East Europe is Orthodox. The leader of one of them, Hungary, is Viktor Orban, the only outstanding leader of Europe, the only non-puppet. Moreover, his country geographically connects Russia to Serbia, which latter with Hungary is both soon to be visited by President Xi of China. Could Serbia and Hungary one day join BRICS and then form a loose Confederation together with the other countries of South-East Europe? In ten years from now all may be possible.

In the Rest of Europe: Realism and Repentance

Realising that it has failed, that its ethnocentric values of superiority to all others were all along false, the Western European world has to return to its roots and its own identity, which is not that of a pseudo-America. Under its present management of puppets, appointed by the US elite and protected by the US media which manipulates the zombified populace, the West can return to roots. It is possible. A Western world under new management would be a different matter. ‘Make Europe Great Again’, as Viktor Orban has said. And he is the only longstanding ‘Western’ leader we can talk to, as he alone understands our Orthodox mindset. Perhaps this is because the first Hungarian Christians were Orthodox. If Europe is to be great again, it must understand that this means spiritual and moral greatness. The time of its military and colonial ‘greatness’ is long over. Its return to its roots and identity is the return to the first millennium of Europe, the Age of its Saints.  The Age of its Shame, however, is  the now ending second millennium since Christ’s Crucifixion.

Conclusion

Western elitists, like the disastrously failed British Prime Minister Truss, proclaim that they must be saved within the next ten years, or else they will lose all their power. Perhaps it will be so. We can only note that pessimism about the possible aggressive intentions of that elite does not take into account Divine Providence. Tomorrow there could be a tsunami or an earthquake in the Sodom and Gomorrah of California and all will change. We may note that in August 1918 St Aristocleus of Moscow prophesied, and this prophesy was recorded over sixty years ago: ‘The end will come through China. There will be an extraordinary explosion and a Divine miracle will be revealed. And life on earth will be quite different, but not for very long. The Cross of Christ will shine forth over the whole world’. We shall see. Only God knows the future.

 

The Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in Europe and Russia

 Foreword: European Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy

On my almost daily travels through Suffolk, I regularly see flying in gardens the Suffolk flag, the golden crown crossed by the two arrows of St Edmund on a blue background. It refers to the martyrdom by arrows of St Edmund, the last King of East Anglia, in the Year 869. This was part of European Orthodoxy, the England which was defending itself against paganism because it was in communion with, and part of, the Orthodox Christian world. This is just the opposite of today, when England has gradually returned to paganism because it has for nearly a millennium been out of communion with, and not part of, the Church.

In writing these words about the love for St Edmund, I am reminded how just over 14 years ago I sat with our own Suffolk Count and Countess Benckendorff in that oasis of culture, the Munnings Museum in Dedham, Essex. Then we discussed my recent visit to our Russian Orthodox ‘catacomb’ community in Old York and next fell to discussing the poetry of Masefield, a great friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, which we compared to that of Hoelderlin, de Vigny and Tyutchev. This is Russian Orthodoxy, not brash and alien, modern American or European anti-culture, which Sir Alfred used to mock. After that conversation the Benckendorffs returned to Church life, reassured that the Church at least locally survives.

On 5 April this year we and the Benckendorffs met again, at the Cock Inn in Polstead. This time we discussed a recent visit to our mutual friend, Baroness Olga Tiesenhausen, in Surrey, to whom I gave confession and communion. The daughter of a White Russian noble, turned seamstress in exile in Paris, she loved the old parish in Meudon outside Paris, where she grew up, and our then rector, Fr Alexander Trubnikov, who was one of us who love the Tradition and therefore hate extremism of both sorts. She had recently been made very unwelcome in both Russian churches in London; the one a political extension of the post-Soviet embassy; the other under the control of pathological crazies, fanatical and culture-less converts who hate all who are not schism and sect like themselves. Tragically, through their schism they missed the great opportunity to become a canonical, but also politically free and multinational part of the Russian Church, working with others in Catholicity. They have zero understanding of the real Russian Orthodox Tradition and Russian Orthodox culture.

They ‘defrock’ conscientious and principled Orthodox pastors of integrity and of the Tradition. This imaginary punishment, as it comes from schismatics, is worn by them as a badge of honour and makes them even more popular among ordinary Orthodox and proves that they are not unprincipled bureaucrat-clerics and careerists. It is all so different from the beloved real Russian Church and its European culture in which we were all brought up, like our parishioners in Old York too. With the Benckendorffs we fell to discussing the post-Soviet nightmare, which began in 1991 and continues today. We concluded that the solution can only be in the coming Tsar and the complete cleansing of Church and State of the pre-Soviet diseases of bureaucracy and corruption (as portrayed for example by Gogol), of the Soviet diseases of centralisation and persecution (as portrayed for example in the late Soviet film The Irony of Fate), and the post-Soviet diseases of (US-imposed) militarisation and nationalism.

Introduction: The Restoration of Russian Orthodox Culture

Just before the 1917 palace revolt in Russia, falsely known as the ‘Revolution’, British spies murdered Gregory Rasputin. It was the ‘first shot of the Revolution’. His name means ‘the parting of the ways’, whereas the name ‘Putin’ means ‘the way’. His way is not the way we want to take, but we believe that it will, by the paradox of Divine Providence, lead to where we need to be. This is a quite different place from now. We have far greater aims than post-Soviet deviations. These include the cleansing of the fringes of the post-Soviet Russian Church from American schism and hate-filled sectarianism, and of the post-Soviet Russian Church itself from politicking, financial corruption, careerism, moral decadence and the extremism bred by them.

Together with all our dear friends in the Patriarchate of Romania, gathered over the last three decades and who have welcomed us as refugees from the vicious persecution by Russian schismatics and hysterical converts, as well as with our dear friends all over Europe, in Russia, Moldova, the Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus, the Baltics, Belarus, Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Czechia, in the cleansed St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris and our friends in the churches in Geneva and Baden-Baden, we will see the Russian Church restored to what Tsar Nicholas II wanted it to be. That is what the whole mainstream Orthodox world also needs it to be. The Orthodox world has been patiently awaiting this restoration for generations. The now very isolated Local Church of Russia has not yet taken up in the spirit of Catholicity the place waiting for it in the concert of the sixteen Local Churches, of which it is only one, albeit by far the largest in number. Only together can they be the voice of God.

Instead, it isolated itself by its refusal to turn the other cheek when uncanonically attacked by US-financed and homosexualised Constantinople in the Ukraine. Then it imposed on itself the further isolation of cutting of communion, followed by uncanonical revenge in Africa, and nationalistic and militaristic politics. The martyred Tsar’s vision of the restored, pre-Imperial Church, like the church of the Fyodorovsky Icon which he built in Tsarskoe Selo and which was restored over a decade ago, is also ours. It is like our church, also free of the decadence that began with Peter I, free of its decadent iconography and Italianate opera singing, its theatrical ritualism, bureaucratic clericalism, anti-pastoral, Statist rigidity, money-grubbing and love of luxury, nationalistic and militaristic phariseeism, hatred for others, and practice of rare communion – at best once a year.

The whole Orthodox world, not least here in Western Europe, awaits a restored, post-post-Soviet, broad and benevolent Russian Church, a Church of European culture, not of convert fanaticism or of narrow, nationalistic and militaristic post-Soviet politics, without sympathy for others and without mission. And we are the majority, the mainstream, representing all the free Local Churches, fourteen votes against two. This is the future of European Orthodox culture, though not of modern Europe. Modern Europe, for all of us heirs to Tsar Nicholas II, is like someone intent on committing suicide, both economic and moral, by hating Russia. Russia is poised to become the fourth largest economy in the world, overtaking Japan. (Russia has already overtaken Germany, indeed the latter is about to be overtaken by Indonesia). Let us look at the example of Great Britain to find the roots of this suicidal bent.

British Establishment Hatred for Imperial Russia

Emperors Paul I (+ 1801) and Nicholas II (+ 1918) of Russia were both removed and then murdered as a result of plots hatched by the British ambassadors in the Saint Petersburg of their times. As John Gleason points out in his 1952 book The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain, systematic and institutionalised British Establishment hatred for Russia began after the liberation of Paris by Russian troops in 1814, which had shocked Britain. This Russophobia was ‘an artificially manufactured product’ of ‘a campaign of a relatively small number of men’ who ‘won acceptance for their views by force of repetition’. In other words, if you repeat the lie often enough, it will stick. It was all about the British elite’s fanatical ambition for world hegemony. No rivals could be allowed.

Thus, the British ruling caste, ‘the Establishment’, engineered wars in which European countries destroyed one another, thus destroying any rivals. It was the same divide and rule policy of the pagan Romans, whom the British elite so admired. Thus, the Victorian Age became that of the purely British Establishment-invented ‘Great Game’, of which the Russians had never heard. In this the British Establishment obsessed itself with its deluded idea that Russia wanted to liberate British-occupied India. This self-delusion led the British Establishment to invade Afghanistan and lose three wars there, to occupy Cyprus (from where it now feeds the Israelis with bombs to genocide Palestine), to help finance the Suez Canal, to arm Japan to the teeth and get it to invade Russia, and then to invade and massacre in Tibet. All unnecessary.

Such British Establishment-orchestrated Russophobia was even reflected in the 1905 children’s book by Edith Nesbit, called The Railway Children. It came as no surprise, for London has long been a centre for plotting and exiled Russian traitors like Herzen, the murderous anarchist Bakunin and then the genocidal and Christ-hating Lenin. Even the evil Trotsky-Bronstein was later sent from arrest to Canada to foment revolution in Russia by the British elite. Today London is again the welcoming centre for anti-Russian oligarchs.

Conversely, the Suffolk Benckendorffs had a relative, Count Paul Benckendorff, who always remained faithful to the Tsar, as he recorded in his book The Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo. As the martyred Tsar’s noble sister, Olga Alexandrovna, who knew Count Paul, somewhat naively wrote: ‘My best friends and so many of my relations are British and I am devoted to them and to much in the English way of life….It has never been possible to discuss with them the utterly vile politics of successive British Parliaments. They were nearly all anti-Russian – and so often without the least cause. So much of British policy is wholly contrary to their own tradition of fair play’ (The Last Grand Duchess, Vorres, P. 240).

British Establishment Hatred for Soviet Russia

Through meddling in Russia in 1916 and 1917, the British elite inadvertently set up the USSR. They had imagined that they would remove the Tsar and then a group of selected oligarchs (that is, British-style aristocrats and ‘liberals’ like the transgender murderer Yusupov – there is nothing new in LGBT) would set up a British-style ‘constitutional’, that is, oligarchic, monarchy. It was clear to anyone outside the West that this would never happen in Russia. So the deluded British indirectly ended up imposing an evil Tsar, called Stalin. And then they sent Hitler to destroy the USSR. Only once again, it all went wrong. Instead of the Nazis destroying the USSR, the USSR defeated the Nazis.

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the other horror camps of Western anti-Semitism, despite Churchill who unnecessarily genocided Leipzig civilians as a warning to Soviet troops. Yet they still arrived to liberate Berlin from the Western dictator Hitler, just as they will soon do when they liberate Kiev from the Western dictator Zelensky. The shock of 1945 Berlin was a repeat of 1814, when Russian troops liberated Paris from the Western dictator Napoleon. And so in 1945 Churchill thought up his ‘Operation Unthinkable’, in which the US, Germany and the UK would invade their supposed ‘Ally’, the USSR, and destroy it. Only nobody wanted that, though the Americans did drop nukes and kill 250,000 Japanese civilians as a warning to the USSR and began the ‘Cold War’, proclaimed by Churchill soon after.

After World War II the half-American Churchill reluctantly handed over the tattered remnants of the British Empire to the Americans and the British Empire became the American Empire. However, the latter had no colonies, it was a rogue-state which camouflaged its hypocritical asset-stripping greed behind the excuse of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’. So it brought the debilitating slavery of poverty and the corrupt tyranny of capital to the banana republics it created. Who cares about freedom and democracy, when you have nothing to eat and drink? As in Latin America, Africa, Italy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Gaza.

Even in 1956, when the US abruptly shattered British delusions of empire at Suez, and the British Establishment finally began to admit that it was only a US satellite, the British flattered themselves that they still had ‘a special relationship’ with the US. It is special, like every master and slave relationship. However, such a relationship also infects the master, for he too becomes vain, just as emperors, including those who have no clothes, become vain when they are constantly flattered by yes-men courtiers like the British Cameron and court jesters like the British Johnson. Thus, when the USSR fell because of its economic failure, because, as they said at the time, its Marxist centralised economy could not even supply its women citizens with hygiene products, the US imagined that it had defeated Russia. It is as delusional as the British imagining that they still have an empire.

British Establishment Hatred for the Russian Federation

After 1991, the British took part in the general triumphalist contempt felt by the Western world for Russia, and in the rape of Russian assets, inviting thieving oligarchs to come and live in London. The West failed to understand that Russia had not been defeated. Certainly, in 1991 the Soviet system collapsed, just as in 1917 the Imperial system had collapsed. But a temporary political system is not a country, especially it is not the largest country on earth with its millennial civilisation. The transformation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Empire and then into the Russian Federation did not persuade the West that the real Russia could survive the failed Western political and economic systems imposed on it.

This age-old Russophobia has been summed up in the recent book of the perceptive Swiss author, Guy Mettan, now translated into English: Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria. When Britain finally began to understand that the West had not defeated Russia in the 1990s, it invented or took part in various sad conspiracies to frame and discredit the new Russia. First, there was Litvinenko, then the Skripals, then MH17, shot down by Ukrainian Nazis, then the plot to destroy the Russian Federation through helping to arm and train the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime in British military camps, the terrorist attack on Nordstream, the deployment of British Special Services to the Black Sea and British PR companies to the propaganda department in Kiev, with their invented ‘Bucha’ narrative myth and such like.

The British Establishment has shown itself to be the most aggressive of all the Western Establishments for absurd propaganda rhetoric during the US proxy war in the Ukraine and in the ‘Cancel Russia’ campaign. It is a fact that even at the height of Nazidom, there was never any ‘Cancel Germany’ campaign. Indeed, the British theme tune for the liberation of Western Europe from the German Nazis consisted of the opening notes of the German Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The British Establishment took a zealous part in applying the 16,500 illegal and backfiring sanctions against Russia in order to destroy it. They failed and made Russia even stronger. It tried to regime-change Putin, quite possibly the most popular leader in Russian history. It failed and made him even more popular. It sent Kiev regime Nazis against the Ukrainian people. It failed and Ukrainians defected to Russia. It decided the only way of winning was through creating terrorist attacks such as that on Crocus City Hall. It failed and made tens of thousands of Russians volunteer to fight against the West in the Ukraine. Today the British MI6 continues to supply Neo-Nazis with weapons in the Ukraine and the Baltics, just as it did throughout the 1950s. In their vain imagination they are working for ‘the Anglosphere’. In fact, the reality is that they are slaves to the Americanosphere.

Russia will not disappear as a reality, whatever the wishful thinking of Hitler or Thatcher, who both equally wanted to reduce Russians to a few millions of people to be herded onto ‘reservations’ for the natives in Siberia, as they openly declared. Millennial Russia will always continue in one form or another, for the moment as the tripartite Union State of East Slav Rus. In the face of the new reality of the rout of its Kiev regime proxies and the cleansing of the Ukraine from Nazi tyrants, the USA will make peace with the Union State. After seeing the US abandoning its failed Ukrainian tool and with NATO and the EU collapsed, the Western European war party, including the British Establishment, if it is not first overthrown by the English, the Scottish and the Welsh who yearn for basic health care, schools, roads and social justice, will be replaced by real leaders. They will be the peace-party, who will make peace with the Union State of Rus, because they look eastwards to the future towards Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and not westwards to the past across a vast and empty ocean.

Conclusion: The End of Western Superiority

The Western war against Russia in the Ukraine is existential for Russia. It is in fact a repeat of the 1962 Turkish missile crisis, (known absurdly in the West as the ‘Cuban’ missile crisis) which the USSR won, when the US was forced to withdraw its missiles from the Turkish-Soviet border. However, this Ukrainian war is not at all existential for Western people, only for the Western ruling class, because it has invested everything in its superiority complex, of which this war is its expression. For the British and the Western Establishment in general, the war is existential because the mere existence and survival of Russia challenges its delusion that it is exceptional, superior and indispensable to all others.

American and Western European elites declare: ‘It is essential that the Ukraine win’. But it is not essential for the peoples of the West or for the peoples of the Ukraine, only for the Western and Ukrainian ruling class, so that they can cling on to their stolen power and stolen money a little longer. Western Europe is certainly not indispensable to Russia, though Russian culture, like Russian gas, is indispensable to Western European peoples. Russian gas can give physical energy back to Europeans. And real Russian culture, which is still largely buried beneath the weight of present post-Soviet Russia, is that of Europe. It is far more European than the modern, Americanised, cultureless Europe of today’s elite. Real Russian culture, once fully revealed, can give spiritual energy back to European people.

After Russia has discredited ‘Western values’ (= orders from the Washington elite), the Western millennium will be over. The time is over, when the American elite arrogantly tells the Central Asians, the British elite tells the Chinese, and the French elite tells the Africans, how to live their lives. Nobody wants to live in the decadence of the modern West. Today the USA has accumulated 34 trillion dollars of debt, which is increasing unsustainably by one trillion dollars every 90 days, 10 trillion dollars every 30 months. It is estimated that it will take 800 years to pay the debt off. Who wants to join bankruptcy? Geopolitical and geostrategic problems and the existence of real European Orthodox and Russian Orthodox culture are ultimately geotheological. It is all about spiritual values. One day the modern West will understand this. Only by then it may be too late.

In the meantime, we of Orthodox Europe will hold on to our European Orthodox and Russian Orthodox culture. One day, once all the post-Soviet extremes in the Russian Orthodox Church, both shrill, hysterical and homosexual American convertitis and Soviet careerism, militarism and financial corruption, have gone, Russian Orthodox culture will find its rightful place in the mainstream of the great conciliar symphony of multinational Orthodox culture. This is not a place of domination or of intimidation of the fourteen free Local Churches by politicised Greeks or politicised Russians, but a place of international co-operation and diplomacy, of the Catholicity of the Church, of the Word of God, not of the CIA or of Papal-style personality cults. Then the real Russia will be restored – after over 300 years of erring along the torturous paths of Imperialism, Marxism and post-Sovietism, imposed by Western hatred for Russia and accepted by the anti-patriotic inferiority complex of Russian traitors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Situation of the Orthodox Church in 2024

Introduction

The Orthodox Church is a Confederation of sixteen Local Orthodox Churches, totalling some 200 million faithful, with about 80,000 priests and 1,000 bishops. Most Orthodox Christians live in Eastern Europe, though there are minorities in most countries in the world.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Greek Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (now called Istanbul) stands out as the historically most prestigious Local Orthodox Church. For over a thousand years of history until 1453, it was powerful and in Constantinople there lived the only Orthodox Emperor. However, today this Patriarchate is very small in numbers, with a few million faithful at most, of whom fewer than one thousand actually live in Istanbul.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Russian Church of the Patriarchate of Moscow also stands out, partly because many see it as the successor to the Church of Constantinople, but above all because it has, or used to have, about 70% of the total number of the faithful, 140 million. This is because it is, or used to be, multinational, with a third of its members Non-Russians of many nationalities. This is unlike the other Local Churches which are in effect National Churches. However, today, this is increasingly less the case, as we shall see below.

The Negative

As a result of the pre-eminent positions of these two Local Churches, the powerbrokers of this world have always striven to take control of their senior clergy.

Thus, after the Ottoman capture of the City in 1453, the Constantinople Church gradually fell under foreign, later French or British, control, with their ambassadors appointing the leader or Patriarch of the Church for payments of money to the Ottomans. After the fall of the British Empire at the end of the Second World War, Constantinople came under the control of the successor Empire, the USA.

In 1948 its Patriarch, Maximos V, was removed by the Americans by force and flown in President Truman’s personal plane into exile in Switzerland, dying there in 1972. He was at once replaced with a Greek-American puppet-patriarch, who proceeded to do anything the Americans wanted. Some forty years ago I got to know a Greek bishop who had been Patriarch Maximos’ personal deacon at the time and was an eyewitness to those events. He told me how the CIA thugs took Patriarch Maximos with violent threats, intimidating him with possible death if he refused to obey them. ‘We have ways of making you come with us’, were their exact words.

As for the Russian Patriarchate, after 1700 it came under the control of Protestant-style laymen, called ‘oberprokurors’, who were appointed by the government. Russian bishops were appointed by politicians, some anti-Orthodox and often strongly anti-monastic, just as in the Protestant Churches, in Germany, Scandinavia or England. For example, in the latter country the Prime Minister, who may be an atheist or a Hindu for instance, is still responsible for appointing all Anglican bishops. As for the former Russian Empire, after 1917 the situation became even worse and Soviet atheist laymen openly persecuted and controlled the Russian episcopate, most of whom it murdered and martyred. After the fall of atheism in 1991, the Russian Church revived, but its senior clergy remained with the subservient mentality of the previous three centuries.

As a result of such politicisation, Orthodox who are part of the Russian Church but who live outside the borders of the Russian Federation and are not Russians, are leaving the various parts of the Russian Church. This is most obvious in the Ukraine, but also in Moldova, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as in Western countries. They do not wish to belong to any part of the Russian Church, which is being nationalised, that is, Russianised. They want to worship Christ, not a national, political system. In other words, the Russian Church is becoming alien to them. As one of its very young but senior metropolitans, filled with ethnic hatred and conceit, said when he expelled some Non-Russian clergy and faithful from the Church recently and handed them to another Local Church: ‘Too bad for them’.

In this way, clergy and people are leaving the Russian Church because of their desire for self-determination, they are ‘voting with their feet’. As a result, the missionary work of the Russian Church has all but ceased. Who wants to belong to a Church which persecutes its own? Only a few extremists. The numbers of the faithful in the Russian Church could eventually go down to 50% of the total number of Orthodox from 70%, as a result of the foundation of new Local, or National, Churches for Orthodox, who live in independent countries or regions outside the Russian Federation. These could be formed in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Western Europe, South-East Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America or elsewhere.

As a result of the acts of politicians there is at present a serious schism between the Constantinople and Russian Churches, which between them number some 72% of all Orthodox. In 2018 the Constantinople Church, egged on and very generously financed by the US State Department, was told to try and destroy the Russian Church. Therefore, Constantinople created a purely political schism with the Russian Church by opening its jurisdiction on what had for centuries been uniquely Russian territories, namely in Estonia, the Ukraine and now in Lithuania.

Consequently, since then the Russian Church has refused not only any communion with the Constantinople Church, but also with other Greek Churches or bishops who for ethnic, financial or political reasons support Constantinople. This includes the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Russian Church has in revenge opened many parishes on African territory, which Alexandria has claimed for nearly a century. Both sides are excommunicating each other and defrocking each other’s clergy tit for tat, quoting the canons in false justification for their own purely political and punitive purposes. There is no Love, only the spirit of revenge, and so the Church is under attack and there is chaos.

The Positive

Some might conclude from the above that the situation in the Orthodox Church is dark and desperate, given the views of senior hierarchs of both the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow and their schism. However, those outside the Church refuse to understand a vital fact: senior clergy are not the Church. This is important because senior clergy die and are replaced. There is no reason to think that the succeeding senior clergy will take the same line as before. All wars sooner or later end in negotiations.

For example, within the Patriarchate of Constantinople there are a great many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people, who remain faithful to Orthodoxy. Many there regret the anti-Russian aggressiveness of their Patriarchal authorities and their uncanonical actions under US pressure, just as they regret the equally aggressive Russian response. When asked by the faithful about those actions which have led directly to schism, such pious Greeks simply reply: ‘It is all politics. Pay no attention’.

In other words, the storm will pass, just as the storms of earlier centuries have also passed. And within the Russian Patriarchate, most also have the same viewpoint. Here there are also many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people who refuse to take part in the politicisation of any part of the Russian Church, either by the Russian secret service, the FSB, or the American, the CIA, which are both trying to undermine the Russian Church, bribing individual corrupt clerics.

As a local example we have for exactly fourteen years been greatly supported by a new White Russian family in East Anglia, Countess Benkendorf, strongly supported by Earl (to give him his English title, which neither of them uses publicly) Benkendorf. They support the Tsar and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, having a new martyr as a direct ancestor, and give no support to mere politicians in any part of the now unfree Russian Church. They are among the new White Russians who now live here in East Anglia, but are in fact relatives of the old White Russians. For the last ambassador of Imperial Russia to Great Britain was Count Alexander Benkendorf (+ 1917) who lived here with his wife Countess Sophia (+ 1928 in Ipswich), whose descendants were also friends of my late aunt in Colchester.

They are devoted to the local St Edmund the Martyr, the last King of East Anglia and have East Anglian rose-growers and sweet pea growers among their close friends. Earl and Countess Benkendorf reject all politics and extremes in the Russian Church, whether of the old politicised and money-minded White Russians, who worked for MI5 and MI6, or of the new nationalistic and secular-minded post-Soviet Russians. They remain in the centre, in the mainstream, following the golden mean, the middle way of the Fathers and the Saints. The Earl and Countess represent us all, they are our Connection, but they are just local examples of a far, far greater and worldwide movement.

Thus, apart from the majorities in both these Patriarchates who reject politicisation, most of the other fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, although slightly more or less close to one side or the other, still keep their independence. Nearly all stand somewhere in the middle, not taking sides, like the traditional Greeks and Russians described above. We note especially the position of the Romanian Church, the second largest Local Church, and of the Albanian Church, together with the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch and the Polish and Serbian Churches. They all show great independence. Here bishops and the faithful insist on the catholicity and conciliarity of the Church. We all call for a Church Council, where the Church can come to unity through depoliticisation, the rejection of bribes and political pressures from States and their secular minions, who wrongly think that they can buy the Church.

Conclusion

Non-believers, as well as those who believe only weakly, overlook Divine Providence in the history of the Church. The greatest proof that the Church is run not by human beings, but by Divine Providence, is that it has survived extraordinary human stupidity, pathological individuals and incompetence for nearly 2,000 years. Human institutions, like clerical elites, survive for a few centuries at best, and often only for a few decades or even a few years. God’s Providence protects us, for the Church belongs to Christ the Son of God, not to mere men, and Christ is always victorious.

 

Why Has the West Fallen into Atheist Culture, but not Russia?

Seeing this title, many will say: ‘Absurd! Russia fell into atheism for 75 years. Anyway, I know two Russians personally and they are both atheists and refuse to baptise their children. On the other hand, I know several Western people and they all go to church every week!’ To such, I simply reply: ‘You have misread the title’. Let me explain.

There are only a few places left in Europe where people still practise their Faith. Thus, there are still some believing Protestants in Northern Ireland, some real Roman Catholics in Malta and some active Orthodox, particularly in Moldova and parts of Romania. Outside that, church-going accounts at best for 1-2% of virtually any general population, whether in Spain, Greece, France, Russia, Italy, Bulgaria, Germany, the Ukraine or anywhere else in Europe.

Countries that a generation ago were still Roman Catholic, like Italy, Ireland and Poland, have long since dissolved into Secularism, which has long been the norm in Northern Europe. Ex-Protestant Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Britain have led the way and there the decline of religious practice has gone even faster, less than 1% of the population practise. The rest of the Western world is going the same way and rapidly, towards 0%, as the last believing generation dies out and is not replaced.

However, Christianity is about a lot more than church-going. That is only one indicator. Getting baptised, married and buried in church are others. Here again we can see that since the early 1960s, these practices too ceased, marriage ended in divorce, and Christian burial was largely replaced by pagan cremation in incinerators, like the Nazis used. With the Protestantisation of Roman Catholicism in the early 1960s, there is no real difference between it and Protestantism. However, the greatest indicator of real Christianity is your national, cultural values and the way of life you lead as a result of those values. The clearest example of this today is the acceptance of ‘homosexual’ marriage.

The acceptance of marriage as uniquely heterosexual was in fact the last Christian value left. ‘Homosexual’ marriage is the final stage in deChristianisation. It was introduced into the Netherlands in 2001 and through a range of other Western countries until Germany in 2017. After the understanding of marriage as uniquely heterosexual disappeared in formerly Protestant and Catholic countries in Europe and Northern America, others began to go. We can see this in the decision of the EU-appointed Greek ruling elite last week, when it in turn imposed ‘homosexual’ marriage on its population. Greeks are being asked to return to the sexual practices described by their pagan philosophers, writers and historians of the time before Christ.

After homosexual ‘marriage’, transgenderism, the result of the end and confusion of ‘traditional’ male/female roles, the subsequent breakdown of family life with the epidemic of divorce and so the absence of father and mother role-models for children, inevitably follows. Christianity in the countries which accept transgenderism is clearly more or less dead. In other words, in talking of Christianity we are not talking merely about church-going or about those who profess a mental atheism (‘I don’t believe in God’), we are talking about the way people live, their national culture.

For example, most people in Europe, from France to Russia, never set foot in any church, but they can still be divided into two categories, those who live values that belong to Christian culture and those who live values that belong to atheist culture. Despite Soviet atheism, their proportions between France and Russia are very different, in France an ever-decreasing minority belongs to Christian culture, in Russia an ever-increasing majority. In other words, it is the direction of travel that is significant. In this respect, France and Russia are like two trains which have passed by one another, going in opposite directions on different tracks.

Notably, a few decades ago we could see how in officially atheist Russia, ‘Soviet’ people professed Christian values. There homosexuality was banned and transgenderism was unthinkable, and people professed the ‘normal’ Christian values of social justice. ‘Social conservatism’ and social justice side by side. Indeed, the latter is unthinkable there today. This is what in today’s Western societies is called ‘social conservatism’, and yet for Christians it is what we call ‘normal’ and for us it is ‘homosexual’ marriage and transgenderism that are extremist.

Why the apparent contradiction between official Soviet atheism and actual practice in everyday life? Simply because although Soviet people were supposed to be atheists in their heads, they still professed the values of Christian culture in their hearts, that is, in their way of life. Moreover, when the Soviet regime fell in 1991, official atheism also fell and 100 million people got baptised within just a few years. They had not been baptised before, only because baptism had been forbidden, not because they did not want to be baptised. In reality, they had all the time been living largely according to Christian cultural values, an integral part of their national culture.

This is also clear from the fact that so-called ‘Soviet’ free healthcare, education and social protection had nothing to do with the atheist Soviet Union, but existed before it, in the Tsar’s Russia. They were simply an inheritance from pre-Soviet Russia, like literacy, which had reached a high level before 1917, or technical progress like electrification and industrialisation, which had all been developing very rapidly before 1917. Thus, the Soviet Union won the Second World War thanks to generals and officers from the Tsar’s Army and military technicians, military inventors, scientists and engineers, all trained in the Tsar’s Russia.

In other words, in Soviet Russia Christian culture survived, even though it excluded church-going, as the atheist elite had closed most churches. When atheism, a Western ideological import, collapsed there in 1991, Christian culture was fundamentally all that remained. The fact that a small minority of Russians are still atheists and their children are unbaptised does not mean that they do not profess Christian cultural values at all. What I am saying is that in Russia, Christianity has permeated the national culture so thoroughly that there is no real alternative to it and even those who are mentally atheists largely profess Christian culture in important respects.

In the West all is different, because for nearly a thousand years there have been two cultural spheres, one secular, the other religious. In other words, over nearly a thousand years of Western history the religious has progressively dissolved into the secular, like a religious flask that has emptied through percolation into a secular flask, through a millennial drip-feed. It is this that has resulted in modern Western Secularism. Here there is then a long-established inherently Western alternative to Christian culture – Secularism.

In Orthodox Christianity, as in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism, indeed in all world religions, civilisations and cultures, except in the Western, there is no separation into the religious and the secular. There is no separation of ‘Church’ and State. In the Orthodox context, the national culture is Orthodoxy. Thus, Russian Communist Young Pioneers said that: ‘We are all more or less Orthodox’, even as they were stopping people from going to church. The Belarussian President Lukashenko says that he is an ‘Orthodox atheist’. Unbaptised Serbs tell me that they are ‘Orthodox’. Greeks tell me that: ‘You go to church? You’re a better Orthodox than we are’. I emphasise the last three words ‘than we are’.

All these people are Orthodox by national culture, they cannot be anything else. If they are not, they denationalise themselves, like some Russians did to themselves in the 1990s and as homosexual Greek couples do to themselves today. Some who left Orthodoxy come back to Orthodoxy, saying that they cannot do otherwise because otherwise they renounce themselves. (This does not mean that they go to church. They will tell you that they are put off by money-grubbing priests, who are ordained by money-grubbing bishops – so am I, and I suffered at the sharp end of such for many, many years. That we do not care about money has always made our churches popular). However, in Orthodox societies once you are baptised or received back into the Church, it is for life. You cannot renounce that culture. You can sin, you can stop practising, you can even blaspheme, but you cannot renounce it. It is in your soul, it is in the culture which you belong to.

The question then is: Why is Western civilisation different from all others? Why does it have a secular alternative? What happened nearly a thousand years ago, when Secularism was born and made the West so different from all other faiths, civilisations and cultures, which have no secular alternative? Of a host of unanimous Western historians of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, English (Dawson, Southern, Morris, Brooke, Brown, Moore, Bartlett), French (Le Goff, Pognon, Feller, Poly, Bournazel) German (Tellenbach, Fichtenau, Leyser), Spanish (Fontana) and others, none perhaps has summed it up so well as Tom Holland in his 2008 work Millennium:  

‘The three decades that preceded the showdown in Canossa (in 1077) and the four that followed it were…a period when the ideals of Christendom…’changed in almost every respect’. Here…was the true making of the West…Pope Gregory VII (1020-1085) was…introducing to the modern West its first experience of revolution…In truth, there existed no precedent for the upheaval exemplified by Canossa – neither in the history of the Roman Church, nor in that of any other culture…there was only one break in the evolution of the West… a cataclysm without parallel in the annals of Eurasia’s other major cultures…the defining characteristic of Western civilisation. That the world can be divided into church and state, and that these two realms should exist distinct from each other: here are presumptions that the eleventh century made ‘fundamental to European society and culture, for the first time and permanently’…Certainly, to a pious Muslim, the notion that the political and religious spheres can be separated is a shocking one – as it was to many of Gregory’s opponents…Not that it had ever remotely been Gregory’s own intention to banish God from an entire dimension of human affairs…A piquant irony: that the very concept of a secular society should ultimately have been due to the papacy; Voltaire and the First Amendment, multiculturalism and gay weddings: all have served as waymarks on the road from Canossa. (Pp. xviii- xxii).

In other words, fatally split Western civilisation has for nearly a thousand years had an alternative to faith, and that alternative is inherently culturally Western. This alternative is called Secularism and it began nearly a thousand years ago when, ironically, the anti-people, pro-elitist Papacy decided to split its world into two spheres, the religious versus the secular, the compulsorily celibate clergy versus the people. This meant that, ironically, it was the Papacy with its new philosophy of ’scholastic theology’, which created an alternative to the religious – the secular, since it gave up on the concept of sacralising or incorporating the secular into the religious. And this philosophy claimed to be rational and reasonable.

In any case, today this Secularism dominates and predominates to such an extent that the religious sphere is dead and dying throughout the Western world. Moreover, the West has always aggressively tried to export this Secularism and impose it on the rest of the world. So far, outside the Western world, once the West had overthrown the Russian monarchy, Russian society fell to it for a time, but eventually it came out of Secularism because it was alien to its national tradition. Now, the Westernised Greek elite has fallen to it, though not the masses of the people. Other Orthodox too may fall to it, but in the end it will all be rejected. As for the future of the Western world itself, it has only one chance of survival. This is to return to its values of the First Millennium before the fatal choice of inventing Secularism that it made in the eleventh century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foreword to the Fourth Edition

The priest must be above the lordly arrogance of the well-born and overprotected and not cringe or fawn before that arrogance; he must not lower himself or be cowardly before the powerful of this world, but conduct himself with a sense of his clerical dignity, gravely, evenly, in a pastoral manner – and serve unhurriedly, not to please people. He must denounce whims, lordly arrogance and any coldness towards matters concerning the faith.

St John of Kronstadt

Local Transformations Since 2014

Fifty years since the first of the essays in Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition was written and nearly thirty years since the first edition was published, we have been asked to reissue the anthology, as the third edition has sold out. We are hoping that this will be ready by Easter.

Since that third edition appeared in 2014, we have bought and established more new churches in Eastern England, in Norwich and in Little Abington, just outside Cambridge. These followed the foundation of the new inter-Orthodox parish in my native Colchester in 2008, though we received not a penny from the Church authorities. Indeed, quite the opposite. We bought this extremely large wooden building and opened it as a church for Orthodox of all nationalities against the views of the clerical doomsayers, who later became jealous and tried to close us and even told others that we were closed (!), just as we gained ever more parishioners. Thus, we now have permanent parishes in Essex, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. This still leaves Suffolk without our own permanent church building. There is work to do here, though we do have a special, indeed mystical, place here in mind.

Not having closed our main church in Colchester during the covid persecution – at one point we were apparently the only church to be open in the country – our multinational parish community thrives. Furthermore, my native Colchester was made a City in one of the last acts of the old Queen. And once we were safely anchored inside the Romanian Orthodox Church in February 2022, we received another influx of Orthodox, including refugees from the tragic deviation of a schismatic and a spiritually alien ‘Russian Orthodox’ sect. (You do not obey schismatics). Today, in 2024, with a throughput of 5,000 Orthodox a year, an average Sunday brings 200 Orthodox to church and there are Sundays with as many as 400. Then the church building begins to look too small.

The Patriarchate of Bucharest allowed us to defend the church from the swaggering foreigner and ‘confound their politics and frustrate their knavish tricks’. First, the money-obsessed wished to take the church from us by legal subterfuge, then, power gone to their heads, he persecuted us and tried to close all our churches and missions and prevent us from providing services and books in understandable English. All this went against the fruit of our life’s work, forty years of struggle, which they tried to destroy. Thank God for the canonical protection of the Romanian Orthodox Church, as agreed by the two Patriarchs, in view of the new narcissistic cowboy culture of the psychopathic schism which we opposed.

With its repressed homosexuality (which is why it is so aggressive), bullying, betrayals and total lack of respect for local people, language and culture, it made the CIA task of destroying the Russian Church from the inside so easy and at no cost. It was all so different from the old and noble White Russian culture of the past. To this new mentality we repeat the old English saying: Tell the truth and shame the devil. We are English, our forebears fought against Hitler because we love freedom and we the people shall not be persecuted by any more arrogant foreigners.

International Transformations Since 2014

However, our small struggle in the East of England against a proud foreigner has been mirrored on a vast scale in world-shaking events. For the publication of this new edition comes at what we can only call a millennial turning-point in history, one which we already sensed was coming in the seventies of the last century and which is now here. The headlines succeed one another at breathtaking speed: Protestant apostasy, Brexit, Trump, a schismatic American-founded ‘church’ (another one) in the Ukraine, covid, transgenderism, the African Exarchate, the corruption of Washington, Prince Harry in a narcissistic trap, the proxy war in the Ukraine, the death of the Queen, the fall of Germany, genocide in Palestine, BRICS expansion, the apostasy of the papacy, the cancer of the new King. Astonishing tectonic shifts are turning the world upside down, the Angel of History is looking East, while the West, corroded and paralysed from the inside, looks on.

300 years after the Russian Orthodox Lands (Rus’) became an Empire, based on Western aristocratic ideology, and 100 years after the formation of the USSR, based on Western proletarian ideology, the now Russian Federation has been forced by Western aggression to choose between the West and the Rest (of the world). At the receiving end of Western bullying and betrayals in the Ukraine, the Federation was welcomed by the Rest, that which used to be called ‘the Global South’. This is a historic moment, the long-awaited restoration of the sovereign and multipolar world, the attack on which began not 500 years ago, as some wrongly write, but 1,000 years ago.

The ‘cancellation’ of Russia, illegally-sanctioned by the aggressive West, and the Shakespearian tragedy of the American war against the Ukraine and Russia in the Ukraine are precisely the processes which both the Russian Federation and the Russian Orthodox Church have to go through, in order to be cleansed of their spiritual, moral and financial corruption. Only then can the unity of the threefold Russian Lands be reconstituted. This war is precisely existential for this reconstitution of Rus’. Only thus will a renewed, de-Sovietised, decentralised and financially and morally cleansed Russian Orthodox Church be made ready for its real destiny after three long centuries of tragic losses, illusions, misdirections and divisions. The schismatic traitors and bullies, including those who have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church, have been revealed. Indeed, we were used as one of the baits used to trap the naïve narcissists, who thought they were destroying us, before the Great Cleansing could begin.

The unnecessary American war against the tragic Ukraine and Russia, indeed against the whole of Rus’, which started in 2014 and is still being fought in the Ukraine, largely by Ukrainians on both sides, could have ended within a few weeks. Instead, the war is taking over two years, as the West has in fact demanded that the Russian Federation not only liberate, demilitarise and denazify the American-occupied Ukraine (its original aims), but the whole of NATO. Delusional narcissists and their lies (narcissists are by definition always delusional and always tell lies) will be driven out as the real enemies of both Ukrainians and Russians, just as we drove out the delusional narcissist here. As regards Europe, now a vassal of the USA, its spiritual and so moral self-destruction, which began in Sarajevo in 1914, continued in Warsaw in 1939 and was renewed in Kiev in 2014, continues apace.

The Hubris of the USA and Its Vassals

In Greek mythology Hubris, the narcissistic demon of insolence, violence and outrageously rude behaviour was, according to some, the daughter of Dyssevia, which means Impiety. And so it is in Biblical language too – the impiety of pride always goes before the fall. Hubris is the superiority complex of arrogant pride – we are better than you, exceptional, and therefore you must do whatever we want. This is in fact the cruel racial pride of Roman paganism which, revived, began to reinfest Western Europe in the eleventh century. It was the same delusion of hubris as had infested the builders of the Tower of Babel, then the eleventh-century Papacy, Great Britain before the Titanic and 1914, then was renamed Nazism in Germany, and from there contaminated the USA, indeed many ‘ex’-Nazis were at the founding of the CIA. This last infestation became especially severe after the fall of the Marxist pseudo-paradise, established in the former Russian Empire after 1917 and falling in 1991, whose fall the elite in Washington wrongly credited itself with.

This is not the end of history, as falsely announced in 1991, but it is the end of the history of that hubristic Western elite. For the great loser of the tragic war against the Ukraine and Russia, the result of 1991 and still ongoing in the Ukraine, is precisely the US elite. This war is existential for the elite, whose first victims are not the poor Ukrainians, but the longsuffering peoples of Northern America and Western Europe. The elite will have to dissolve its fragmenting NATO pact and flee back across the Atlantic in order to struggle to keep American unity, which is threatened by the current internal disintegration of the USA and its huge debt. Will Alaska return to Russia, as some believe?

All the US vassals in East Asia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia, will be freed, just as those on the now sinkable US aircraft carrier of Israel. Other losers will be the Baltics, Scandinavia and the UK, that is, the whole basically ex-Protestant North-Western and North-Eastern Europe, which so deludedly backed the ex-Protestant USA. Impoverished Europe has made itself not only the political and military graveyard of the United States, but also an economic graveyard.

In North-Western and South-Western Europe

The for now twenty countries of Western Europe (North-Western and South-Western Europe) will become a Confederation after the collapse of the US-made EU and after they have rebecome nation-states. These countries are for the moment: its leader, Germany, then Switzerland and Liechtenstein; Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland; the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; the UK and Ireland; France and Monaco; Andorra, Spain and Portugal; Italy, San Marino and Malta. Artificial unions like the UK and Belgium may not survive, new nations, like Catalonia, Scotland and Wales, may re-emerge. The tiny population of Scandinavia will have to back down from hostility to the reality of the reunited Russian Lands. In the UK, the US-manipulated British Establishment elite will be cast off, new leaders will appear. Hopefully, the liberation of the UK will lead to a reunited Ireland, to an independent Scotland and Wales and, above all, after a thousand-year wait, lead at last to a Sovereign England. Thus, the Isles of the North Atlantic (IONA) can be cleansed of the parasitic, vampire-like British imperial myth, which enslaved it after the 1066 tragedy and has sucked on our blood ever since.

In North-Eastern Europe

In North-Eastern Europe, the three tiny, impoverished and depopulated Baltic States and Finland may yet become truly independent republics, allied with the future Union State of Rus’ in order to survive economically. Certainly, they will all have to rid themselves of their US-appointed puppet elites, stop behaving like disruptive teenagers, come to terms with reality as mature adults and, with Russian help, become prosperous once more. The fifth country here, largely ex-Catholic Poland, already has its own Local Orthodox Church, and is where remaining traditional Catholics have worked out what is really going on. It will also have to make its peace in maturity with the reality of a reunited Rus’ and stop wasting money on useless weapons. This will be all the more urgent for the Polish Republic, once Germany returns to sanity from anti-German hysteria and commits anew to mutually beneficial agreements with the Russian Federation.

In South-Eastern Europe

The great victors of the American war in the ‘borderlands’, which is the translation of the Russian word, ‘Ukraina’, will be Hungary and Slovakia. Then, by repentance, can come a reunited Serbia and Montenegro, (North) Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova, Greece and Cyprus, followed by Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Czechia, with a Bosnia-Herzegovina reintegrated and an at last prosperous Albania, attracting like a magnet Albanians at present living outside it, especially those in Serbian Kosovo and Macedonia. Thus, all the for now sixteen countries of South-Eastern Europe, many of them Orthodox, can be drawn into a Russia-friendly but independent Confederation, part of BRICS, supplied by Russian energy. All of them have a Local Orthodox Church except for Austria and Hungary, which will surely form a new Austro-Hungarian Local Church.

The Return of the Church

I apologise for the long geopolitical digression above. However, it is necessary, for the results of geotheology are precisely geopolitics and pastoral. Whereas once people could find some sort of spiritual refuge and survival in parts of the Protestant denominations, and then in Roman Catholicism, today most can see that in the Western world where those two decadent structures are not entirely dead, they are rapidly dying. The tragedy of the second millennium Western world is that it ended up by voluntarily and suicidally renouncing the values of its own Civilisation, thus ensuring its own death. However, this also means that the Western Lands now have an opportunity to return beyond those to their real roots in the first millennium.

When the masses return to the Church of their ancestors, we must be ready for them, like forerunners, who prepared the way for them. Schismatic psychopaths whose evil deeds have already gone down in history, will have to stop persecuting their own clergy, trying to close their own churches, forbidding their own clergy from doing missionary work, and receive former Roman Catholics and Protestants into the Church canonically, as the 1,000 canonical Orthodox bishops in the world do, outlawing such schismatic novelties as ‘corrective baptism’ and ‘corrective ordination’, as practised by at least one Russian bishop in the USA, and using accessible books written in accessible English, not in a pseudo-archaic American jargon.

Orthodoxy, which has providentially returned to Western Europe, must make ready to receive the believing remnant after it had been usurped for a millennium by structures which are now rapidly disappearing into the black hole of apostasy. The Orthodox Church, severely battered, bruised and abused after a thousand years of persecutions from both inside and outside, has returned. We are indeed at a turning-point. We have made ready for the return of many here in Eastern England, preparing the way against all the extremists of the secularist left and the arrogant foreigners of the secularist right, ever keeping to the Royal Path.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester,

England

 

The Globalist Empire or an Alliance of Sovereign Civilisations

Introduction: Missionary Work and Repentance

Missionary work among heterodox Christians in the Western world has had very limited success, because it needs millennial repentance to become Orthodox Christians. By ‘millennial repentance’ I mean not just the realisation that the West has been in a state of apostasy for a few decades, as nostalgic and conservative old people have it, or even a few centuries, as anti-Protestants have it, but for a full thousand years, for the whole second millennium of Western history. There must be a realisation that the apostasy began in the eleventh century, with ‘The Making of Europe’ (1). Between the year 1000 and the year 1100 the old Western European Civilisation of the Saints was usurped, revolutionised and replaced with a Feudal Empire of power and wealth (2). For example, the First Crusade did not begin in the Holy Land in 1096, but in England in 1066, though organised Western violence actually began in 1030. In other words, Western Europeans were the first victims of those who had usurped the Western Civilisation of the Saints, Americans are only the last. Newcomers to Orthodox Christianity have to grasp this.

Only once those who have shown an initial interest in the Church, have been to real services and have grasped this point, can newcomers start casting off their old mentality. This is vital because otherwise newcomers will come to the Church with their old negative baggage, try to impose it, naturally fail, and then lapse and disappear. It is not enough to join the Church, they must become Orthodox, taking on the Orthodox Christian mind and so way of life. Here there is a great difference with the heterodox mentality, which contents itself with abstract agreement, but there is no conversion of words into actions. Orthodox Christianity, as shown in the Gospels, the Acts (not Thoughts) of the Apostles and the Epistles is a way of life, not some intellectual abstraction or ideology. We are judged on our actions, not on our words and thoughts, for only actions incarnate words and thoughts. The most important witness to this is the Lives (not Thoughts) of the Saints, especially in our context, the Lives of the Saints of Western Europe, all those who are in communion with All the other Saints of Orthodoxy.

A Competitive Empire or Co-operating Civilisations

The contemporary world of eight billion human beings is divided into two parts, which are not at all halves. One part is a small, but extremely powerful and uniform minority and the other is a vast, until recently not powerful and diverse majority. The first part can be called ‘unipolar’, as it has only one centre, it is unicentric, imperial and anti-civilisational. The second part can be called ‘multipolar’, as it has many centres, it is polycentric, ’non-imperial’ and multicivilisational. For the sake of argument, we shall simplify the numbers involved and call them one billion and seven billion, though probably even a division into 5% of the world population and 95% of the population would be generous to the minority, given that so many of us who were born in Western countries have no sympathy for our elites and refuse to be brainwashed and zombified by their endless propaganda. On the one side is the Globalist Empire, and on the other side is the Sovereign World, an Alliance of Independent Civilisations, at present known as the Russian-founded BRICS. What exactly is meant by these two opposing realities?

The Empire: Western ‘Liberal Democracy’

One the one hand, there is the Empire, which is now centred in Washington. It consists of Northen America, the USA and Canada, and Western Europe, which at the moment can be defined as stretching as far as the borders of the Russian Lands. However, it also includes post-1945 vassal-states like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel. Although the Empire calls itself ‘democratic’, in reality, it is run by oligarchs (e.g. Trump) or the candidates of oligarchs (e.g. bank clerks like Macron and Sunak, Biden, Scholz and Starmer). People have to vote for one or other of them – no others are permitted, no free choice is allowed. The Empire is ruled by banksters and financiers, hence its system is called Capitalist. In other words, the Empire is ruled by the love of capital, venal and mercantile interests and banks. Although the first great bank, the Bank of Venice, was founded only in 1582, its history began among the merchants of Venice (fifteen years before Shakespeare wrote a play by this name), long before, for their bandits and thugs had already plundered and looted the Christian Capital in Constantinople in 1204.

The financial centre was transferred from unsafe and declining Venice to Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 1609, from there to a newly purged England in 1694 (the wars of Cromwell, the murderer of the King of England and a million Irishmen, had been financed from the Netherlands and the old line of monarchs replaced in 1688 by a false monarch, financed by Isaac Israel Suasso from the Netherlands). Finally, in the twentieth century the centre was transferred to New York with the Federal Reserve, established in 1913, not by coincidence one year before the First European War in 1914. The Globalist Empire is obsessed by finance (even the GDP of the Empire is unreal and is based only on finance, not on the production of goods), law of the jungle, ‘dog eat dog’ competition, stock exchanges, share prices, exchange rates, credit ratings etc. The essence of the Globalist Empire is Nazism, the power of the few over the many, regardless of how many hundreds of millions of people, especially, Non-Western Europeans die as a result of its ruthless imperialism and exploitation. Its only ‘value’ is inhuman – it is money.

The Sovereign World: The Alliance of Civilisations

In 1914, the only countries in the world which remained uncolonised by the Globalist Empire were monarchies: Russia, China, Ethiopia, Thailand, Morocco. Since monarchies ensured popular sovereignty in every sense, including religious, political and financial sovereignty, clearly, the Empire had to overthrow them, especially the Russian, which was by far the largest and by far the richest. However, even the overthrow of the Russian Monarchy by its globalist agents in 1917 and then the murder of the Tsar and his Family, ordered from New York, did not lead to Russia’s colonisation by the Empire, though various Western countries did attempt invasions of the former Russian Empire. Later, the same attempt to colonise China also backfired. Today, both Russia and China have essentially returned to being monarchies, even though President Vladimir Putin does not have the title of Tsar of All the Russias, he is that, and even though President Xi does not have the title of the Emperor of China, he is that. For they rule out of national interest, out of patriotism, they want their countries to be sovereign and independent.

With independent extractive, industrial and agricultural production and services, the economies of the Sovereign World are regulated by their States for the benefit of all the people, not just for a small number of ultra-wealthy oligarchs, as in the Globalist Empire, which is patterned by ‘trickle up’, not by ‘trickle down’ economies. The Empire laughably calls these countries ‘autocracies’. They are not, they are part of the Non-Colonial, Sovereign World. Many therefore want to join these ‘autocracies’, indeed, the whole conscious and still free world. The essence of the Sovereign World is Anti-Nazism, the power of the many over the few. This is attractive to the countries of the ‘Global South’, to all whose countries have been taken over at some point by the Globalist Empire. The Denazification of Europe is now under way, with the freeing of the occupied and Nazified Ukraine from the Empire. As for Hungary and Slovakia, they are escaping EU tyranny by themselves. Others, at first in Eastern Europe, then elsewhere, including in the so-called USA, will follow, as the peoples rise and take control of their own destinies.

The Cleansing of the Orthodox Church from Traitors to the Globalists

Of the many faiths and philosophies in the Sovereign World, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Orthodox Christianity, it is the last that I have known very well for fifty years and from inside. Without the slightest doubt the main problem of Orthodox Christianity and the Orthodox Churches is the corruption of its episcopate, some of whom are traitors to the Faith of the Church. Some who know history will say that this has always been so and think at once of the notorious Patriarch Nestorius, always a politician, never a churchman. That is true, but never to such a vital degree as today. Episcopal corruption follows the same pattern as in the Empire’s founding ideologies of Non-Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, many of whose leaders are careerists and were corrupted long before these individual Orthodox leaders. Here I will speak only of the largest Local Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, some 70% of the whole Church and which I know best. Two ideologies are promoted by these traitors and often by the selfsame individuals. These ideologies are:

Extremism

Extremism in the Church is represented by two political and secularist, that is, anti-spiritual, currents: ultra-liberalism/modernism/ecumenism and ultra-conservativism/traditionalism/sectarianism. The first is pro-Western, not traditional and likes to change or ‘reform’ the ways of the Church according to the latest secular fashions. The adherents are often intellectuals and appear to put greater trust in the delusions of their own intellectual powers than in the bimillennial Tradition of the Church and the piety of her people. The second set of individuals are often narrow, pharisaical, ghettoish, attaching huge importance to tiny details, erecting national, local or personal customs into vital and saving universal traditions. In other words, these provincialist people are intensely inward-looking and do not see the world around them. However, the differences between the two extremes are mostly ultimately irrelevant. This is because both are founded on and patterned by exactly the same psychology, not by theology, the Word of God. It is the same psychological deformation of the imposition of self.

Many of these individuals from both sides are easily exploited by the Secret Services of various States, though most notably by the richest and most powerful, the American CIA. Several of these treacherous individuals are, (if they love money especially much) consciously or (if stupid, naïve or particularly subject to flattery) unconsciously, CIA plants, infiltrated into the Russian Church in order to destroy her unity and oppose the liberation of the Ukraine, actually calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces! These individuals are flawed personalities, very weak in faith, and so are easily manipulated by payments of money, illusions of power or just by flattery, all of which they love. The liberals are pro-Protestants, promoting congregationalism and confederations of parishes. The conservatives are pro-Roman Catholics and promote centralising clerical power as they think that they are ‘princes of the Church’. Both are anti-Orthodox, anti-missionary, for their ghetto-like and self-centred narcissistic mentalities are sufficient for them. They both put their hope not in Christ, but ‘in princes and in the sons of men’.

Homosexuality 

I know perhaps 100 members of the 400-strong Russian episcopate. I know of 12 who are homosexual, both in the lands of the former USSR and in the West. There was always such a small minority and indeed their names are known from the Middle Ages, though one of the best-known is the notorious Greek Paisios (Ligarides) in the seventeenth century. Well-known contemporary cases are Bishop Gury in Paris, who in the 1990s had an affair with his boyfriend priest and was exiled as punishment to freezing Magadan, then two very young bishops, both called Ignaty (Buzin and Tarasov), both sent to monasteries (none of these three was defrocked), then Bishop Flavian (Mitrofanov). As a priest in London only a decade or so ago, he was notorious for his orgies and when he was made bishop after returning to Russia, it caused a huge scandal here. How could they do that? The Russian security services discovered that his boyfriend had a drugs laboratory in his apartment. This now defrocked bishop fled to London, where he had previously obtained British citizenship and where he is protected from justice.

Here are four cases. I will not speak of the other eight cases here. However, each of them is well-known for his disgusting perversions, as well as for his persecution of married clergy, women and children, whom they detest out of jealousy, and their narcissistic love of luxury, fancy houses, cars and money. Perhaps their existence and impunity are why there has only been a muted Orthodox reply to the new and shocking Roman Catholic decree of Papal blessings for homosexual couples? So far only the Metropolitan of Budapest, Hilarion (Alfeyev), has stated in an excellent interview with The American Conservative that the blessing of LGBT couples, confirmed by the Papal Fiducia Supplicans document, renders talks about the unity of Orthodox and Roman Catholics impossible. This is logical and consistent, for the introduction of the ‘marriage’ of LGBT couples led to the ending of conversations between the Russian Church and certain Protestant sects. Why not break off talks with Roman Catholics as well? It is disturbing to think that compromises with the Vatican may be impeding the statement of the Christian truth.

Conclusion: The Cleansing of the Unprincipled Traitors

Among Russian people there is a saying that when a man is ordained priest or consecrated bishop, a demon comes to him. When I first heard this saying in my teens, I was shocked. However, after a few years of experience, I came to understand it. What it means is that when a man receives grace, the demon also tempts him according to his weakness, whichever that may be. The non-ordained only undergoes ordinary temptations, as the demon is not too interested in him. However, the demon tempts a priest ten times more and a bishop a hundred times more, as a result of the spiritual potential they have gained through ordination or consecration. We can see this in the Gospels, where Christ overturned the tables of the moneychangers, which were not in someone’s house, but precisely in the Temple, and where we hear of the pharisees who love sitting ‘in the chief seats’ and being honoured (Matt. 23). And which bishops do the people love? The humble ones – like the slandered St Spyridon, St Nicholas, St John Chrysostom, St Nectarios of Aegina and St John of Shanghai, the bishops of the people.

When you have a destiny, you are driven, single-minded, for you know that you have to do the Will of God. You will not want to do what you are called to do by Him, because you are all too human and you want to live loosely like others. However, you cannot do otherwise, but you are inwardly compelled to follow the law of your being, which God planted inside you and which drives your conscience. You cannot do other than this, because otherwise you will die and you will kill your own soul. Do not mess with those who have a destiny to fulfil, they are always tougher than you because God has sent them, quite unworthy though they are. Like the prophets of old, we know what will happen in the future – it is inevitable, so we are not afraid, not intimidated by individuals who block the path to the fulfilment of God’s Will, whose Will must be done, sooner or later. You cannot live like others and so you follow the Royal Way, beyond extremes. In time, God will put everything and everyone in their place. The traitors who punish faithfulness to God will be cleansed by Divine Justice. I have long trembled for them.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

2 February 2024

Notes:

  1. For example: The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350, Robert Bartlett, 1993
  2. For example: The First European Revolution c. 970-1215, R.I. Moore, 2000

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Apostasy of Western ‘Civilisation’ and Our Salvation

Introduction: The Rise and Fall of the Western Empire

It has become customary to speak of the Middle Ages in Western Europe as a ‘Papal Empire’, later of ‘the Spanish Colonial Empire’, ‘the Portuguese Empire’, ‘the French Empire’, ‘the British Empire’ and most recently of ‘the American Empire’. In fact, all these empires have only been facets of one single empire, ‘the Western Empire’. Although this has been an Empire that has covered much of the world geographically, it is also an Empire of the Mind. One day, and probably quite soon, someone will write a book called ‘The History of Western Exceptionalism’ and will show how this imperialist mentality developed. Certainly, this will mention the model of the Pagan Roman Empire that obsessed the barbarians who invaded Western Europe and how a Frankish barbarian princeling called ‘Karl’, later known as ‘Charlemagne’, wanted to ‘renew’ that Pagan Empire and failed, but how he was still ‘the first neocon’.

More interestingly than this failed forerunner, it will then go on to speak of the crucial eleventh century, of the appearance of the Western superiority complex, ‘we are right, everyone else is wrong’, or as they say now ‘West is Best’. They will speak of elitist Papism and castle feudalism, of 1054 and 1066, of the ‘formation of a persecuting society’ to persecute all others, of hatred, intolerance, genocide and ‘crusades’, on which ‘Europe’ was created and united, of the bloodshed on which the Western Empire was founded. Since then, there followed 900 years of slow but steady rise to world domination and then the dramatic and suicidal events that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and led to those in Kiev in 2014, which have led to the progressive fall of that Empire to the mess that it is in today, when we have once more reached a millennial turning-point. Below we give an outline of what is happening now.

Belief and Unbelief

A few years ago, I took part in a BBC Radio 4 ‘religious’ programme – although as with all BBC ‘religious’ programmes its direction was purely secularist and in fact anti-religious. There I was told by a former MI6 agent/BBC journalist who took part that since only 2% of Russians go to church, the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Civilisation in Russia is irrelevant. I was astonished by his total lack of understanding and limited secularist/post-Protestant view of the importance of religion. But then what else can you expect of a typical British Establishment atheist? It is values and actions that matter, not how often you go to church to gain spiritual strength. He had missed the point. They all have.

Although only 2% of the population may be in church on an average Sunday in Russian Orthodox countries (though not necessarily the same 2%), the rest do believe. This is different from the West, where only 2% go to church, and it is the same 2%, but the rest do not believe. In other words, the West has lost the roots of its Civilisation, it no longer has any Civilisation. If it had a Civilisation, it would not support Ukrainian and Israeli genocide and would not promote LGBT. Here is the difference. The West no longer believes in its roots. What remains is its profound self-delusion. Whether it is slanted to the left or to the right is irrelevant – the disease is one and the same.

The European Union Repeats the Soviet Union’s Fate

As a result of this lack of belief in civilised values and actions, the main political and economic institution in the historic European centre of the Western world, the yellow-starred European Union (EU), is corrupting, fragmenting and collapsing in exactly the same way as the old red-starred Soviet Union (SU). It is a Soviet Union II. Just as most had stopped believing in the Soviet Union by the 1970s (as I know from living there then), knowing that its unelected commissars were lieing, that it was bankrupt in every sense and had failed in its aims, so most have stopped believing in the EU, because it too has failed, is bankrupt in every sense and has failed in its aims. Indeed, the EU’s once strongest ‘locomotive’ economy, the German, is being deindustrialised, is in recession and was overtaken last year by the booming Russian economy, which is now the fifth largest in the world and is due to overtake the Japanese economy in two to three years. In front of it then will be only the expanding Chinese and Indian economies and the disastrously flagging US economy.

The EU has not only failed to make Europeans prosperous, but it has also failed in its aim to unite Europe. For instance, it has failed to unite the Western European peninsula edge with most of Europe, which is mainly in Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. It has failed to unite with the Western Balkans and failed to keep the UK in itself, let alone getting prosperous Switzerland, Norway and Iceland to join itself. On top of that, it is now financing on a huge scale the Nazi regime in Kiev and the proxy war in the Ukraine in order to try and force that country to join it. Just as few in the SU had the courage to say that the SU was dead, so too today, for the same reasons of censorship and punishment, few in the EU have the courage to say that the EU is dead. The difference is that in the SU, all people bought the Izvestiya and Pravda newspapers, because there was no toilet paper, but in the West some people still buy newspapers and, incredibly, read them and actually believe in them, despite the availability of toilet paper. Such is the level of the delusion of some of the EU population.

Delusionists: The Western World

After the defeat of its multinational Western invasion of Russia under Napoleon in 1812 and stalemating in its invasion of Russia in 1854-6 under the Franco-Ottoman-Sardinian-British, the West tried to fight its wars using proxies, ‘colonial’ troops, as cannon fodder. For example, in the nineteenth century in its colonies and also in the First and Second World Wars, which were essentially tribal European Wars, it used millions of Indian and African troops. The Ghurkas and the Foreign Legion are the remnants. The Far West, the USA, used this proxy method too and in both those wars joined in after they had begun, hoping for easy pickings after the suicidal Europeans. In the Second World War, the Anglo-Americans hoped that the Nazis and the Russians and their allies would kill each other and then they would be able to pick up the pieces. That did not entirely happen. Nevertheless, in the 1990s the West used the same proxy technique in yet another anti-Russian war, using Chechens. However, the Chechens realised that they were being used by the West, turned on their Western masters and sided with the Russians.

In the latest Western War against Russia, being fought by proxies in the Ukraine, similar things are occurring, as Ukrainians slowly realise that they too have been deceived and betrayed by the West. Here again, the Western Ukrainian proxies, encouraged to die ‘until the last Ukrainian’, are being routed by joint Russian and Eastern Ukrainian forces. Afraid of facing reality, the delusional West is refusing to negotiate and negotiations have been banned by law by the Ukrainian puppet dictatorship, which tortures those who speak freely, has banned other political parties and democratic elections and plans to ban the Church. It has disguised this refusal to negotiate with the absurd claim that Russia wants to take over Western Europe. This laughable propaganda claim, invented by US and British PR hireling firms in Kiev, has been made in the Ukraine and duly been repeated in the Baltics, Germany, Sweden, the UK and Norway so far. It is the familiar old excuse ever since Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941, who claimed to be saving ‘Western Civilisation’ from the ‘Asiatic barbarian hordes’ of Russia, ‘better dead than red’.

Realists: Hope in South-Eastern Europe

In its current war against ‘the Asiatic hordes’ of Russia, which war the West began in 2014 with its unprovoked, full-scale invasion of the Ukraine, the West has committed suicide several times. Having given eight years to Russia to prepare a Plan B in case it had to fight a full-scale war against the ever-aggressive West, the West imposed thousands of sanctions which have helped destroy its own economies. The present revolts in Western Europe are about the impoverishment resulting from the facts that so much money has been given to the Ukraine, that there are so many Ukrainian ‘refugees’ being paid for nothing and because the USA ended by violence the supplies of cheap gas from Russia. These revolts are not only of farmers in Poland, Romania, Germany and France, but include mass strikes of millions of workers in the Dickensian UK, Germany and France. In all these countries the destitute have been forced to use food banks to survive. In Northern America too, the rulers are extremely unpopular and revolts are ongoing in Canada and in Texas.

Deluded Western leaders have actually believed their own delusions, which they call ‘PR’. Most people no longer believe in those lies, repeated ad infinitum by the State-controlled Western media and nearly all Ukrainian flags have been taken down in Western Europe – only the now panicking very rich still fly them. Many are beginning to understand the great manipulation. Nowhere is this more obvious in Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders are the only Western leaders not to be US puppets. As the Russian victory becomes obvious, other countries will also free themselves from US/EU tyranny. Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and even perhaps neutral Austria may enter this Union of Free Europe. In other words, the whole geographical entity of South-Eastern Europe may come to link itself with Russia and the other BRICS economies, of which Russia is the closest to them. This is the future path to peace, justice and prosperity, away from the disaster and decadence of the warmongering US-created EU vassal.

Conclusion: The Mystical Presence: North-Western Europe

Some ask: How then do you in North-Western Europe, in England, survive, as you still labour under the tyranny of the Norman-imposed British Establishment and its moral perversions and lies, and now completely under the heel of the corrupted Washington elite? Around us blow hurricanes, however we remain calm. Why? We have a secret. It is because our saints, in our case, those of Eastern England, are with us. Never have we felt the intercession and mystical presence of our saints so strongly as over the last three years, when so-called ‘Orthodox clergy’ began persecuting us. Only this week we were in Ely again and felt the prayers of and experienced a miracle of St Audrey, as we bowed before her right hand, whose fingers are still clasped in the sign of the cross after exactly 1350 years. She responds to real veneration, not to that of the pseudo-Orthodox sectarians who suffer from that selfsame American exceptionalist complex that they are right and all others are wrong, They persecute real Orthodox Christians and their families and try and steal our saints and our churches. Those outside the Church cannot feel the mystical presence of our saints, for their pretended veneration is political and sectarian and in fact is a perverted persecution of the faithful.

But we have felt the presences of St Edmund in Hoxne and Bury St Edmunds, of St Fursey in Burgh Castle, of St Botolph in Iken, of St Felix by the old fortress in Felixstowe, of St Osyth in the woods in Chich, of St Cedd in his still standing church in Bradwell on Sea, of St Eanswythe in her relics in Folkestone, of St Walstan in Bawburgh, of St Withburgh in Dereham, of St John in his holy relics in Beverley, of St Guthlac and St Theodore in Crowland, of St Huna by his hermitage-farm in Chatteris, of St Ivo in St Ives and of St Neot in St Neots. They are all present and have all resisted the great millennial apostasy of the new Western world, whose depth has become so astonishing in its present death-throes. The patience of these saints is unending, calling those who live here back to repentance, waiting for them to return, like the father the prodigal son. Victory is theirs and, because we venerate them and ask them for their protection, victory is ours too. We feel the warmth from their relics. It will not be long now. And the same presences are all over Western Europe as the First Millennium says to the finishing Second Millennium: We told you so, but we are still waiting for you to return. Herein is their witness and herein is our salvation from the devil’s yoke.