Category Archives: Carpatho-Russia

Victory in Presov – but the War Continues

The enthronement in Rusin Presov in Slovakia on 9 February of Archbishop Rostislav (Hont) as the new Metropolitan of the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia marks a victory for Orthodox consciousness against the modernist, US-dictated policies of the present regime of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The failure by the Phanar to subjugate this Local Church with its 300 parishes, founded by the Russian Orthodox Church on 23 November 1951, is another defeat for the ageing episcopate of Constantinople and its unOrthodox, American policies.

The former head of this Local Church, the totally unreliable Metropolitan Christopher (Pulets), who seemed to have no firm bearings in either Church life or his personal life, was rejected in April 2013 for his compromises with Constantinople. Constantinople’s 87-year old candidate, the embittered, half-Serb Archbishop Symeon, was outvoted by the three young members of the Czech episcopate. The cause of Orthodoxy was much helped by Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of the Russian Orthodox Church. On 9 December 2013 he outwitted the two Greek Metropolitans, sent by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to outvote, slander and discredit the three Czech bishops, when interfering Greek bishops have no legitimate vote, and so take over and colonise the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

Of course, this victory has to be set in the context of the wider anti-Orthodox movements of the US/EU-instigated and -subsidised rioting in Kiev, the attempt by Brussels to divide and rule the Serbian Orthodox Church, the US military threats against the Syrian government and the Schadenfreude attempts by the Western media to discredit the success of the Sochi Olympics. Only today the US-loathed but truly Orthodox Metropolitan of Montenegro, Metropolitan Amphilochiy, has called on the so easily bribed and venal politicians of Montenegro to stop ‘worshipping the golden calf of Brussels’. The victory also has to be set against today’s announcement by the aggressively anti-Orthodox new papacy in Rome that it is setting up a Uniat Exarchate in the Russian Crimea.

All these events come against the proposed March meeting in Constantinople – during the first week of Lent! – of the heads of the fourteen Local Orthodox Churches and the increasingly desperate attempts by the ageing Patriarchate of Constantinople to hold a US-dictated ‘Inter-Orthodox Conference’ in 2015. (Two Patriarchs have already said that they will not attend the March meeting and it is rapidly descending into a Pan-Hellenic club meeting). It seems unlikely that the free Orthodox Churches, uncompromised by Turkish politics, Greek philetism and US foreign politics and subsidies, will yield to Phanariot papist threats that their tiny Church is ‘without equals’.

Led by the Russian Orthodox Church. which has already recently had to endure Phanariot-inspired and US and EU-backed schisms in Estonia and England, as well as threats to Church unity in the western Ukraine and even in Russia, increasingly led by the dissident and semi-renovationist Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev, the free Local Churches are unlikely to accept the politically-inspired claims of the Phanar to be an Eastern Papacy.

For long the Russian Orthodox administrative services in Moscow have concentrated on diplomacy and openness to others. With all the above events, it is now realising that its truest and closest friends are precisely those who have long warned them of too open an approach to ecumenism, especially the Russian Orthodox patriots in the worldwide Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. It is typical that the enthronement of Metropolitan Rostislav was attended only by the Patriarchate of Antioch, freed over 100 years ago from Greek colonial tutelage by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Polish Orthodox Church.

It is clear that there is now a bloc of free Local Churches which will resist any US-orchestrated claims by the Phanar to papist hegemony over the Orthosphere. With the coming completion of the international Orthodox centre at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, the time is coming when the Russian Orthodox Church, multinational and multilingual, will return to assume its natural and obvious leadership of the Orthodox world.

The Euro-American Revenge against International Orthodoxy

We must create a Slavic State in Central Europe on a strictly Catholic basis so that it can become a bulwark against Orthodox Russia.

Adolf Hitler

The present violent disturbances in Kiev and certain formerly Polish, Galician towns in the Ukrainian wild west come after the refusal of the Ukrainian government to cede to the wishes of the violent pro-Western minority and so make the Ukraine into the next bankrupt EU colony. It is crystal clear that the present carefully-orchestrated riots are the ethnocentric, Western revenge for the choice of freedom of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government and people.

After several carefully-timed ‘visits’ in support of the terrorists (many of them known violent criminals) since last November of various high-ranking EU commissars and US Republican politicians, like so many pagan Roman generals and senators 2,000 years ago, after threats from the US administration and from their puppet EU (the EU was ever a post-1945 US creation) to impose sanctions against the Ukrainian government and in support of the few thousand terrorists (many of them said to be Polish nationals and rumoured to be paid a small fortune (for them) of 30 euros a day by the US administration), after invasion threats to the territorial integrity of the admittedly artificial state of the Ukraine by forces in EU Poland, Hungary and Romania, it is clear that the Ukraine may not survive.

The Ukrainian government itself is desperate to keep the territorial integrity of the mere generation-old Ukraine. It has a softly-softly approach with the terrorists in Kiev and elsewhere, even though their tactics are carefully orchestrated and many of them have been professionally trained and equipped, as can be seen in their techniques of kidnapping women and children. If this were Belfast, Washington or Paris, clearly the riot police and soldiers would by now have shot dozens of them. But even with this approach, it may not be possible for the government to preserve the unity of the fledgling State. Just as other colonial states, like Iraq, Syria and virtually all of Africa, have not been able to survive civil wars ultimately caused by bureaucrats in London or Paris who drew up their straight-lined borders on backs of envelopes decades ago, so too the Ukraine, a Stalinist and Khrushchevite colonial formation, may not survive the present civil strife.

Notably, it now seems almost certain that the Russian centre, the Russian south (called ‘New Russia’), including the already autonomous Russian Crimea, and almost all the purely Russian east will no longer tolerate the activities of eastern Catholics and other schismatics from Galicia. It is quite notable that Catholic priests have been prominent in encouraging the riots in Kiev, and even the Cardinal of New York, Timothy Dolan, has been encouraging them. Many already say that ‘it is all Stalin’s fault’. He should, they say, have left the three pro-Nazi provinces in the far west, known as Galicia, to Poland, as before 1939. These people, Galicians, form the backbone of the ‘Ukrainian’ (actually Polish) emigration in the Western world and many of their descendants now advise the ethnocentric and utterly prejudiced US government. Their departure would leave the other 21 provinces of the Ukraine to freedom outside the pro-German EU – for the jealousy of freedom-loving Greeks, Cypriots, Bulgarians, Romanians, Latvians, Italians, Frenchmen, Irishmen, Britons and many others.

If the six million or so Galicians wish to leave the Ukraine for the bankrupt US-sponsored EU, then this would be much better for the rest. Then the rest of the Ukraine, 85% of it, by far the richest part, would be free to enjoy the benefits of multinational Orthodoxy and the Eurasian Union. As for the small Orthodox minority, they could simply become part of the Russian Orthodox Diaspora, either under the care of the Polish Orthodox Church or else directly under the care of Moscow. The only question would be what to do with Orthodox Transcarpathia, the south-westernmost province of the Ukraine, which has been so persecuted by Ukrainian nationalism since it was detached from Czechoslovakia in 1945, when it was still called Subcarpathian Rus.

It might wish to become an independent country, to be called Ruthenia or Carpatho-Russia, and join the Eurasian Union. It certainly needs protection from present EU and Hungarian imperialism, from which latter it suffered so bitterly before 1919. Its Church, with 600 parishes and a multitude of monasteries, quite big enough to be independent, could easily become a new Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Certainly, this would be in the Trinitarian unity in diversity model of Russian Orthodoxy which founds new Local Churches (unlike the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has never freely allowed any Church to receive autocephaly and does not share this vision of unity in diversity, but only crushing centralism, like the EU or its predecessor the SU).

It is no coincidence that at the same time as these carefully organised events have been unfolding in limited parts of the Ukraine, persecution has been unfolding against Tartar Orthodox in Tartarstan. Churches have been burned down and the 250,000 Tartar Orthodox are being threatened by organised Islamists, trained and financed abroad, mainly financed from the Western allies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. (How well we all remember how President George Bush protected the Saudi Bin Laden family after the Saudi terrorist attacks of 9/11). Thus, both in East and West, the enemies of Christ are attempting to destroy multinational Orthodoxy (the Church of Russia has 62 different nationalities). What the enemies of Christ want to create – and have in many places already created – by their old technique of dividing and ruling, is a disunited, nationalistic Orthodox world, a series of little, balkanised, mononational churches, which would become mere toothless departments of assorted toothless EU states, for consumers of individualistic pietism and folklore, on the disincarnate, Western Protestant model.

It is clear that in 2014 we are facing a turning point on the road of world history. On the one hand, we have the four nations of the newly-formed Eurasian Union (The Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia) with its originally Orthodox Christian unity in diversity basis and ideal of symphony of Church and State, which is in the forefront of the Spiritual Resistance Movement; on the other hand, we have the anti-Christian US/EU, much imitated by the rest of the world, largely made up of former EU and present-day US colonies, although several decades behind their colonial masters. Therefore, there are today only two choices. What is uncertain is whether this is the end or just the last shock before restoration of the Orthosphere and Orthodox government which is the only thing that now stands between Christ and Antichrist, between the Orthodox Church and her faithful and the militantly atheist Western world. Time will show which way we are going to go.

See: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/01/24/347411/west-targets-russia-by-ukraine-unrest/

The Blue Lady of Sycamore Hill

By Alvin Alexsi Currier (Available from Amazon at £5.99 in the UK)

This is a little book, published in the USA, with just 28 pages. You might think it expensive, but it is not, because this is the most Orthodox book of this year. And it will make you weep.

It tells the story of the Appearance of the Mother of God to four young Orthodox women in southern Poland in 1925. It is full of the most delightful, childlike pictures. The text also is ultra simple. But it is worth far more than all the learned tomes of ‘theology’ produced at universities and talks given at ‘conferences’. Unlike them, this book will not send you to sleep.

This book is first of all a tribute to the Carpatho-Russian people of south-east Poland, known as ‘Lemkos’. It is a tribute to their suffering under the cruel Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire, then under Fascist Poland that in turn was swept away by Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism. It therefore has a universal significance for all real Orthodox, because we all face the same devilish, this-worldly tribulations to survive anywhere, especially those of us who have been called to live in the Western world.

As the gifted author, who writes from the heart, says: ‘The Latin literacy of the West gave birth to a church rich in learning, piety and art. However, our mostly illiterate Eastern Orthodox ancestors painted, sang and acted out the Gospel, weaving it through a rich, liturgical cycle, wrapping it in a vibrant folk culture and celebrating it in their amazing churches. Our faith more than anything else is the mark of our people’.

These words are true not only for the Carpatho-Russian Lemkos, but for all of us who are destined to be Orthodox of all nationalities the world over. Put away your dusty monographs and heavy tomes! Come down from your ivory towers! Taste of the sweetness of Orthodox Christian LIFE! All 220 million Orthodox Christians of every race and clime the world over, hearken to the words of the Most Holy Mother of God on Sycamore Hill, words of revelation to us all this very day:

‘Our compassion embraces you. Here I will make a home among you. Here I will be one of you and you shall be mine. Ahead lay rivers of tears and valleys of pain. You shall tread the edge of the abyss of despair, but here a spring shall flow, to nurture your return to the love and beauty that is your heritage and destiny’.