Category Archives: Colchester

The People’s Church: 2008-2024

Foreword: Our Faith

I was born in Colchester in Eastern England. We Eastern English are renowned for our independence, straightforwardness, reliability and pragmatism. We are also bluff and good-natured, but are suspicious of newcomers and always test them to see what they are made of. That is why we are often underestimated. However, we can also be lyrical and poetic beneath our great skies, among our woods and fields, and on our coasts. We have no ideology – for the Gospels are not an ideology, but life itself – and we live by the motto: ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil’. This truth-telling can be seen in the victory of our great national hero, champion and patron saint, our martyred last King, St Edmund of East Anglia (+ 869). He told the heathen the truth, even though they did not like it. He was not afraid. We do the same.

Our love of the truth is why we always resisted the secularism of the recent past. This consisted of the liberal, modernist and syncretist ideology of indifference, that there is no truth, that all faiths are the same. This relativisation was a purely political manipulation of globalists, a pan-heresy, as St Justin described it, as it maintained that truth and lies, light and darkness, are equal. This was obviously untrue and was promoted only by those whose souls had been bought and paid for by the secularist politics of this world. Equally, however, we resist the post-modernist extreme, the nonsense that only one tiny sect possesses the truth and that all others are ‘satanic’. This very primitive and narrow ideology is clearly the fruit of sad and broken individuals with psychological, not to say, pathological problems of pride and broken childhoods. In history it belongs to the heresy known as Donatism.

Thus, truth-telling makes us unpopular and controversial among the elites of all persuasions. This is because the one thing they hate is the truth, for the truth undermines their grasp on power and riches. That is why they hated Christ. That is why we have one great strength: we know that the Truth always wins, however long it takes. With Christ it took three days. Because we are sinners, it takes us much longer, but our victory through Christ, Who is ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’, is still inevitable. This is our Faith.

The Beginnings

In 2008 I stood in the largest church in my native town, the future City of Colchester, and looked towards our second church, a small chapel. Both were empty, but they both now belonged to us, after eleven years of prayerful patience. Our monocled master had given his blessing for us to buy the property, but he told me I was mad. The main church, at 6,500 square feet, was ‘too big’ (much bigger than his own, which was a problem for him) and he gave us not a penny of help or any support. We just heard disheartening criticisms which came from his personal despair.

But I had a vision and said that with God’s help we shall fill this church and then need a bigger one. People mocked, especially him. But after 16 years, we have got to that point. Looking back, I can see three periods: The first period, one of foundation, went from our first service in December 2008 up to 2016. The first liturgy then was attended by only 35 people, however the number of those attending gradually increased to about 120 regular parishioners, becoming more multinational. We were becoming the local church.

Our second period, one of consolidation, went from 2015 to 2020. In that time, we doubled in size to about 250 regular parishioners and set up new parishes in Norwich and just outside Cambridge for those who were coming to us from such great distances. The third period, of protection, began in 2020 with covid, when the wolf attempted to close us for the first time. We never closed. This period, which is one of protecting the flock from the jealous wolves, even though they may mask themselves as shepherds, is far from over. Like the much-persecuted St John (+ 1966) before us, we shall always protect our flock from the wolves.

An Elitist Sect or the People’s Faith

Then we heard the young and inexperienced neophyte without seminary training, publicly in church declaring to us who were of many nationalities that the Greek Patriarch Bartholomew was ‘satanic’ and that he ‘disliked Romanians and only half-liked Moldovans’. Now we do not agree with several personal opinions and actions of Patriarch Bartholomew (like a lot of his bishops, priests and people, including the monks of Mt Athos, who are very good people who our dear friends and completely agree with us on these subjects), but we would never, never call him ‘satanic’. He may have an all too human weakness for money, like many bishops in another Local Church and we can name quite a few of them, including the one who called him ‘satanic’. The pot calling the kettle black. There are a dozen or so Greek parishes in London, all attended by 200-300 every Sunday of the year. We respect them. As for the single small church of that young convert, people flee its ‘police-state’, sectarian and schismatic nature. We know many of the refugees who have at last seen through it, as they now come to us.

His words were incredible. We were all horrified. A stunned silence fell on us as we heard his awful views. As for the racism of this Non-European newcomer, a new ‘Orthobro’, but not an Orthodox and certainly not a Christian, not just towards the many pious Greeks, who carry out dozens of baptisms and chrismations of Non-Greeks in this country every few months, but also towards the mass of very pious and honourable Romanians and Moldovans, as well as to English people who practised the Orthodox Faith before he was even born, we were absolutely appalled. And this alien individual was supported by his colleagues in distant America, where they do not understand Europe and despise us. It was clear that the young and very aggressive ideological son of NATO, who, like the rest of the American elite, claimed to be exceptional and able to impose its imperialism on us, had rejected all possibilities of helping to build the Local Church.

Helping to build a Local Church has always been the aim of our lives, as we are neither psychopathic ideologues, nor narrow racists, but shepherds, and so we welcome all the sheep without political or racial distinction to our church, as Christ commanded us to do. (Have you not read the last words of St Matthew’s Gospel? We do not send people away because they are not rich enough or are not effete enough). On the other hand, he had chosen the path of isolationism and sectarianism, cutting himself off from communion with all, even from his own Russian Church, and punishing all who disagreed with him. This was his practice of what he considered to be ‘punishing’ or, with the typically American Protestant mentality, ‘sanctioning’ us, so revealing his Lutheran/Calvinist witch-hunting mentality.  His actions said: ‘You dare disagree with me? Then I hate you and I will punish you’.

Our Struggle for Truth

In reality, he punished himself through his uncanonical and schismatic actions and destroyed his own already tiny diocese, the only remaining meaning of whose existence since 2007 had precisely been to contribute towards building Local Churches – our own aim. His act was an act of suicide. Since we left him, we have doubled our income and are now intending to buy a house for a third priest and pay him a salary. We have a candidate. At that time, we faced the choice of belonging to a weirdy-beardy sect of converts, or of belonging to a mass faith, to an elitist sectarian religious ghetto, which had usurped and replaced its legitimate head and forged his signature, or to the faith of the people. Filled with narcissism, and so jealousy, and so hatred, after forging its own head’s signature, sidelining him and creating its own Metropolitan, the group expelled all the senior clergy who know the Tradition and replaced them with itself and others who also have no heart and only an extremist ideology.

This was clearly not the way forward. They had committed spiritual and so moral suicide (loss of faith always ends in suicide) and destroyed their once immense potential. They had created an irrelevant and narrow sect, a fake Church, in full view of the broad and deep Orthodox world, to the wonder of men and angels alike. We faced the refusal, for purely political and suicidal reasons, of the canonical but once again captive (only the captors have changed from Soviet atheists to centralising State nationalists) Russian Orthodox Church (the ‘Sourozh Diocese’) to receive us on 10 May 2021. Next we faced the brute political force used to make the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Church, where we had sought refuge from persecution, abandon us, and so abandon the cause of a Local Orthodox Church of Western Europe in the Russian Church, in February 2022. Where would we go after fifty years?

As so often in history before, those who should not have been distracted by politics, did just that and so forgot about the salvation of souls. Thus, in the history of the wealthy Capital of Saint Petersburg, spiritual leadership went from the mighty bishops of this world to a widow turned tramp, St Ksenia, and to a provincial pastor, despised by his jealous bishops and hated by the aristocrats who wanted to kill him, St John of Kronstadt. Following the political captivity and so marginalisation of the now isolated two main Local Churches, who would take over the spiritual leadership of the Orthodox peoples? We would go to the centre where are the other fourteen Local Churches, to the astounding churchmen in the singing mountains of Carpatho-Russia and on the sunshone banks of the Jordan, of martyred Damascus and martyred Bachneny, of Tirana and Tbilisi, of Iasi and Warsaw, of Brno and Belgrade, of Budapest and Rila, of Kiev and Limassol, of Athos and Jerusalem. We would go to the living fountains of piety where God directed us to go.

Our Romanian Orthodox Church Home

The negotiations that took place on the very next day, 16 February 2022, with our friend Metropolitan Joseph, whom we had known for nearly 25 years, took four hours. All our churches and all our clergy (except for one new convert reader who naively fell to the sect) and literally 99% of our people transferred to the Romanian Orthodox Church, keeping everything as it was before. All this took place just eight days before the latest phase of the US proxy war against the Ukraine and Russia was triggered on 24 February 2022.

This passage to the Romanian Orthodox Church was entirely providential, as in this way we could remain outside politics, remaining multinational, keeping Moldovans, Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians and everyone else together, remaining on the old calendar, but also free to do services on the new calendar for all who wished. And what will happen if the British Establishment bans the Russian Church completely? The equally Russophobic Establishment in Latvia has already done that and it may happen in Estonia. It could happen here. Perhaps all will join the Romanian Church? Providentially we will still be here for all the Russians who are really Orthodox, who are not flag-waving nationalists or centralising ideologues. Others may not be allowed to remain here to care for them pastorally. We shall still be here.

On Palm Sunday 2024 we once more saw that our church building is too small. Nearly 100 people were standing outside, as the church can only take 500 people. Some 150 of these people were children. As for our overflow parish in Little Abington outside Cambridge, it was packed with 100 people, including more refugees from the schismatic Russians in Chiswick. Here then we face a new dilemma. With several seminary-trained laymen and excellent singers in the parish, we have to look seriously at setting up more new churches. After Norwich and Cambridge, we are now looking at Harlow and Southend. And then we still have to buy permanent premises for our growing Felixstowe Orthodox community. And permanent premises for the communities in Coventry, Wisbech and York? We have seminary-trained candidates for the priesthood. They can be ordained. After all we are the People’s Church.

The People’s Church: The Church They Tried to Close, Announced is Closed, and Which ‘is Now Empty and Where No-one Goes’!

In retrospect, we can cope with so many people because we had slowly been moving towards this point for years, ever since the repose of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John, who had established a multinational Archdiocese. However, after him, they dismantled this. I can remember exactly twenty years ago how we were told the following by those who left us in 2021:

‘We do not like other Orthodox because they have divorces, which we don’t have’. (My answer: Of course you don’t have divorces, because you have not had a single wedding for 25 years, because you are all so old, let alone have baptisms). ‘We do not like other Orthodox, they do different services in the same church at the same time. In one corner of the church one priest is doing a baptism, in another corner a second priest is doing a memorial service’. (My answer: What ignorance! This is perfectly normal. A church that is not doing this is dying out, it is underused).

‘We don’t like their church. It’s too noisy because there are too many children there’. (My answer: Yes, it can be noisy in church because there are lots of children. Children are life. It’s not like your church, where everyone is aged over 65. As a result of your dislike of children, your church is dying out’). And they even continued, quite shockingly: ‘Our church is like a glass of clean water; theirs is a glass of dirty water’. (My answer: Why are so many of your clergy being defrocked for moral reasons then? Remember your ‘Very Reverend’ Archimandrite Antony Grabbe, the protected son, who stole six million dollars and debauched nuns? Your view is in any case phariseeism). Obviously, we would never belong to this alien American sect of newcomers, when they ordered its formation and final fall in 2021.

Our Easter Message

How do we cope with so many people? For years I have been going to Kiev and bringing back what we need and reserves in heavy suitcases. We use bigger chalices (we have five of them), we have four stands for confession, use bigger and more utensils. We have the blessing from our Metropolitan for our deacons to give communion in order to cut down on the time taken by 200-400 communions. We are ready. Later this year we will have our own bishop in his new Cathedral in North London. For many years my niece used to work at St Paul’s Cathedral. I used to say that one day we would need that church, built according to the legend there where the Apostle of the Gentiles preached all those years ago, as we will be able to fill it. They laughed at me then, but that day is coming.

As for two calendars, we cope with them quite simply because we are pastors, not insecure, sectarian ‘onetruechurch’ ideologues, who tell lies about others. We do exactly like the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of the old Russian Church did, for he was the successor of St John of Western Europe. He too was obliged to leave Kiev. He had many old calendar Russian parishes, but his biggest parish in France was the Romanian new calendar parish. (Just like the Moscow Patriarchate which has new calendar parishes in Austria and Bulgaria, for example). Our Metropolitan Joseph has the same attitude, because he too is a pastor, not an ideologist, and so accepts both calendars for the fixed feasts and concelebrates with all. We clergy all agree to look after our people. People follow the example set by the clergy and accept each other and different customs.

There are people who keep the fast as strictly as possible (they examine the ingredients of all the food they buy as closely as possible), but they hate their neighbour as much as possible. Such people are not ours. Our Easter Message is quite simple. At the Last Judgement we shall be judged only on whether we showed love for others or hatred for others through the actions of our hearts. Our friend the Romanian priest who did 800 confessions in one week, staying at church from 7 am to 7 pm every day and who washed the feet of twelve parishioners on Holy Thursday, shows the way. Christ, the Son of God become man, the only Knower of hearts, showed the greatest love of all, allowing himself to be crucified out of love, so that He could offer all victory over death and the Resurrection of salvation. We follow Him and always will do. The wolves of this world have lost. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion. Together with the thousand voices of Easter Night again we say: Christ is Risen!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester, England,

Eastertide 2024

 

 

Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Part One: The Three Temptations of Roman Imperialism

The Temptation of the First Rome

Seeing the oppression of the Church by barbarian chiefs in Old Rome and by unworthy Emperors in New Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, which was later called Constantinople, in the 11th century the leaders of Old Rome took a decision. This was to make their part of the Church, in what is now called Western Europe, into a State. The leader of their part, or Patriarchate, of the Church, called the Pope of Rome, would be placed above all leaders and dubbed ‘the Head of the Church’ and ‘the Vicar of Christ’. Their new filioque ideology would claim that the Holy Spirit, the source of all truth, authority and spirituality in the Church, proceeds from their Popes.

In other words, the solution to the problem of State oppression as proposed by Roman Catholicism is that the Church becomes greater than any State. It becomes a worldwide Super-State, inherently secularising and centralising, more secular than the secular. This was, put simply, a power grab. This ‘easy way out’ was, is and always will be, a spiritual suicide. Christ did not call on legions of angels to protect Him when He was under arrest (Matt. 26). He accepted His Cross and said: ‘Put away your sword’. And that is what He still says to all those who attempt to impose the outward ways of the Church by intimidation and violence.

Naturally, in the 11th century, the remaining Orthodox Christians, at that time, the vast majority of Christendom, at once rejected this novel ‘theology’, or rather ideology. The latter became known, contradictorily, as ‘Roman Catholicism’ – for you cannot be Roman and Catholic (universal). Today Roman Catholicism remains a ‘Church-State’, an example of papoceasarism, a very secular form of Christianity, and has split into a myriad of sects protesting against the centralism which the hundreds of millions of sectarians condemn as ‘Papism’. However, those sects, now dying out through secularisation, are also subject to the ways of the world and even more deeply than Roman Catholicism, which they have rejected for the last 500 years.

The Temptation of the Second Rome

The problem of State interference in Church life remained for the rest of the Church. This is clear from the later history of New, or the Second, Rome, Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453. The elite of Emperors and State-appointed bishops was always ready to sign away their souls, and those of their flocks, in exchange for military aid from Roman Catholic Western Europe. The history of the Council of Florence and the resistance to the imposition of the Western ideology by such Christian heroes as St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) and his spiritual successor St Mark of Ephesus (c. 1392-1444), by the monasteries and unmercenary parish priest-pastors and the faithful, demonstrates our principled opposition to the corruption of the elite, always ready to compromise the Faith of Christ.

In more recent times, several Constantinople Patriarchs have appeared to want to imitate the centralist Popes of Rome, envying and admiring their power, riches and prestige, and so their policies are sometimes called ‘Eastern Papism’. As a result, a whole series of Local Churches, protesting against Constantinople centralism, has been born, in Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia in what is literally a Balkanisation of the Church of Constantinople. However, unlike the saintless Protestant sects which rejected the First Rome and justified their separations by changing the teachings of the Church, these Local Churches have in no way changed or compromised the teachings of the Church and have kept the Faith, as proved by their many saints.

However, like the National Protestant Churches, these new Local Churches have been oppressed by the national, or rather nationalist, ideologies of the States which they represent. They have accepted the Cross of Christ. Today, the Second Rome in what is now Istanbul remains, but as a shadow of its former self, for the last three generations as a tiny, compromised and highly politicised puppet of the US State Department. Its leaders have been highly engaged in unionist talks with Old Rome. No surprise here: birds of a feather flock together. Most recently, its subjection to US politics has been used to foment a violent Church schism in the Ukraine. This is the fruit of Constantinople Papism.

The Temptation of the Third Rome

This story has been repeated in the Third Rome, Moscow, which after persecution by Emperors and Empresses, especially in the 18th century, fell in 1917. And then the Third Rome became the Third International and the Gospel of Christ was exchanged for the Gospel of Soviet atheism – ‘the easy way’ to establish paradise on earth. Only the promised paradise was more like hell on earth because that ‘paradise’ was without and against Christ. The Third Rome, in Moscow, remains very large on paper, but it has a stubbornly nominal flock, who resist and resent the exploitative business model of the Church proposed in post-Soviet times.  As its righteous, like Matushka Alypia, prophesied: ‘Their golden domes will shine, but it will not be possible to worship in those churches’.

Just like Constantinople, Moscow to appears to want to imitate the centralist Pope of Rome, envying and admiring his power, riches and prestige. Its leaders have been highly engaged in unionist talks with Old Rome. No surprise here: birds of a feather flock together. This Muscovite Papism first appeared under Metropolitan, and later Patriarch, Sergius of Moscow (1867-1944), who considered that any compromises with the atheist State were justified because he had to ‘save the Church’, that is, to preserve its material assets, whatever the cost. This error became known as ‘Sergianism’ and was condemned, since it appeared to deny that Christ is the Saviour and that the Church does not need saving, only people need saving – and by the Church. This Sergianist Papism is still the model admired there today.

As a result, a whole series of National Churches, protesting against Muscovite centralism, has been born, in Poland, Czechoslovakia and today, being born in agony, in the Ukraine and in many other countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and very probably elsewhere. For the Russian Church too is compromised, but this time by the post-Soviet (and often purely Soviet) mentality, that is, the Church is compromised by the not very Orthodox State heir to both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In other words, the spectre of the centralist Roman Empire haunts both centres of the Orthodox Church. And until there is repentance everywhere, the return to Orthodoxy everywhere, there is little hope of seeing a properly functioning Orthodox Christian world in either the Second or Third Romes, let alone in the First Rome, which wandered off from the Holy Spirit 1,000 years ago.

Part Two: The People’s Orthodoxy

The Third Way

What remains? Is there an alternative? Where is there authentic Orthodox Christianity? Is there another way? Of course, there is, and none of the Roman Imperialism of the Second and Third Romes, let alone of the First Rome, is necessary. There is the other way, beyond the superficiality and pomp of the Three Romes, the path of the People’s Orthodoxy, of authentic monasteries, parish pastors and simple faithful, the way between and beyond the Imperialisms of Constantinople and Moscow. We can call this the way of the Orthodox Commonwealth, or of ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy, of ‘Carpathian’ spirituality, though this simply means the Orthodox Christian way, the royal way. We can use this expression because the Orthodox of the Carpathian mountain range live in Carpatho-Russia (currently mostly in south-western Ukraine and miscalled ‘Transcarpathia’), south-eastern Poland, eastern Slovakia, south-western Ukraine and northern Romania and ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’ spills over easily into Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria and northern Greece to Mt Athos.

As examples, two contemporary righteous Churchmen come out of this Carpathia, the Carpatho-Russian-speaking Metr Laurus (Shkurla) (1928-2008) and the Romanian-speaking Metr Onufry (Berezovsky) (1944- ) of Kiev. They are heirs of the Orthodox Renaissance of hesychasm (unceasing prayer), our Christian reply to the neo-pagan Western Renaissance. Hesychasm was spread into this huge area by a very international group of fathers from the Holy Mountain of Athos by St Gregory of Sinai (c. 1260-1346), a contemporary of St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), and his many followers, such as St Kallistos the Patriarch (+ 1363) in what is now Greece, St Roman of Tarnovo (c.1310-1363) and St Theodosius of Tarnovo (1310-1370) in Bulgaria, St Romil of Ravannitsa (+ 1376), St Athanasius of Meteora (1305-1383), St Sisoes the Sinaite (+ c. 1400), St Gregory of Gornjak (c.1300-1406) and others in Serbia, St Sergius of Radonezh (1314-1392) and his Thebaid of followers in Russia, and St Nicodemus of Tismana (1320-1406) in Romania. In the 18th century, this ‘Carpathian’ spirituality gave birth to the Ukrainian-Moldavian St Paisius (Velichkovsky) of Neamt in Romania, in the last century to St Alexis of Carpatho-Russia (1877-1947) and in our own times to St Job of Ugol (1902-1985), Fr Cleopa (Ilie) (1912-1998) and the Romanian elders of Moldavia in the living tradition.

There is nothing new in this Real Orthodoxy beyond the Romes, which could be termed ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’. It began with St John the Baptist in the Palestinian desert, it blossomed in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries, was taken to both Constantinople and then northwards to the Balkans and then to the forests of Russia and Siberia, but also to Gaul and then to the wild coasts of Ireland and the Hebrides in the 6th and 7th centuries, from where it was taken to both England and Iceland. It is also this spirit of Orthodoxy that was once so alive in the Russian emigration, though now all but dead in the dead hands of the State mentality and the property-thirsty princes of this world. Carpathian Orthodoxy is simply Christianity in life, the uncompromised Christian way of life, Orthodox spirituality. Carpathian Orthodoxy is not Constantinopolitan or Muscovite, not Imperial, but ours, the people’s, that of families, guided by spiritual fathers, by our monasteries and hermits.

The Attack on ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy by the Sergianism of the Russian Emigration

The 2001 usurping of power in the emigre Russian Church, ROCOR, and the expulsion of its leader, Metropolitan Vitaly, gave rise to a series of schisms in 2007, which were only limited in Australia and Germany because those in power had made as sure as possible that local church properties belonged to them. Elsewhere the losses were far more serious, especially in South America, North America, France and England. There followed the sidelining of the next ‘Carpathian’ Metropolitans of ROCOR, Laurus and Hilarion, who succeeded Metr Vitaly, and were turned into mere figureheads by the clique that had taken charge.

The clique appeared to have little interest in Church life, in real and, not token, monasticism and pastors and prayer, only in being ‘princes of the Church’ (one of their favourite expressions), in power and riches, property and prestige. Church was no longer about the salvation of souls, but about the ‘salvation’ of property by bishops, who wanted to take property away from monastics, pastors and the people. Thus came about the quite unjust 2016 expulsion from London of an excellent priest, the 2018 excommunication from Geneva of lifelong devoted ROCOR Orthodox trustees who had controlled the Cathedral, the closure of a parish near Saint Louis in the USA in a property dispute, and the loss of the church in Miami (it too did not belong to the ROCOR administration), in yet another property dispute.

There followed in exactly the same way the attempt to destroy Church life in parishes in England and close their churches (those properties too did not belong to ROCOR bishops). None of this left anyone in any doubt as to the utter ruthlessness of the US-financed business clique in charge of the Russian emigration Church. And the situation is continuing in the USA today, as more leave. All of this was caused by the desire of the ruling clique to imitate the Sergianism of the Church inside Russia, of the Third Rome. That clique too was going to ‘save the Church’, that is, to seize and preserve power and riches, property and prestige. In their worldliness they too confused the salvation of the soul with the preservation of empty buildings beneath golden domes and soulless property portfolios.

The Failed Attempt to Close Down the People’s Churches in England

In our own cases, after insisting on keeping our church open, despite covid regulations and aggressive and bullying intimidation, we were at various points in 2020 and 2021 the only Orthodox priests in England celebrating normally. For this defiance of death and our will to keep our churches, bought with the people’s money, open, the elite clique in charge had to punish and try to destroy us. As a result, they initiated a schism with the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Moscow Patriarchate in December 2020. As the senior priest in the Diocese, I, with all the others, was forced to seek canonicity away from schismatic bishops. We applied Canon XV of the First and Second Council under St Photius the Great and 317 other Fathers, that those who ‘have been diligent to rescue the Church from schisms and divisions’….’shall be deemed worthy to enjoy the honour which befits them among Orthodox Christians’.

Ironically, as we have said, this Archdiocese of Western Europe with which the clique began a very public schism, is under the Moscow Patriarchate. However, the then ROCOR First Hierarch, Metr Hilarion (Kapral), was far too ill to contain the sectarians of ROCOR and its mini-Synod which had for 20 years been running everything. Therefore, individuals with power in New York refused to listen to what was happening and rejected our request for stavropegia in early 2021, using the electronic signature of the ‘Carpathian’ Metr Hilarion to justify themselves. We had known Metr Hilarion since 1988 and he came to us twice, ordaining clergy and celebrating in our church before he fell ill. Persecution of us was not his will. After his illness came the end. After this and the rejection of our application to join the Moscow Patriarchate, which was frightened of New York, we had to move to another Local Church.

We had to find canonicity against the schism of the bullies and to protect our churches from their attempts to close them. They accused us of being ‘criminals’, of stealing money (!), slandered us, tried to put us on trial and then sentenced us uncanonically and illegally behind our backs. They repeated all the oldest tricks in the book, using their naïve, new followers and yesmen. This was the Golgotha that the new Sanhedrin had prepared for us. God was testing our patience and humility. So we accepted our Cross and so God led us to spiritual freedom in another Local Church and so they lost everything. The New York schism endures to this day, but many clergy and people have left ROCOR. Though we have gone to the Church of Romania, several others, controversially, have joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople, especially in the USA and the Netherlands (as also in the Ukraine and now Lithuania), and a few elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the USA all free churches are continuing to leave ROCOR one after the other.

Part Three: Survival and Victory

The Orthodox Way

Certain Greeks wanted us to join their local Archdiocese. This was not Divine destiny. We believed that the Constantinople leadership is compromised by its modernist history of ecumenism, new calendarism and other practices, and especially by its treacherous activities in the Ukraine and the persecution of our dear friends in the Czech Lands. True, Moscow has also acted uncanonically in Africa, just as Constantinople has done in the Ukraine. However, the Greek vengeance on simple Africans who want to see an African, and not Greek, Orthodoxy, with the help of Moscow has been quite as vicious as the New York vengeance on us and as the Moscow vengeance on those seeking political freedom outside the controls of Soviet nationalism, whether in the Netherlands, Lithuania or elsewhere.

Then, we have many parishioners from the much-suffering Ukraine. They are faithful to Metr Onufry of Kiev, who has been so mistreated both by Constantinople and by Moscow. This double persecution from both extremes, from Constantinople and Moscow, is a sure sign of his righteousness. True, in the US, there is a (Russian/Ukrainian) Slavic Vicariate for persecuted refugees from ROCOR, but in the US context, with others refusing to take refugees from ROCOR, there may be no alternative to this. We are free to do otherwise. Similarly, we do not judge those seven priests in Lithuania, forced to join Constantinople because of their mistreatment by Moscow. We are free to do otherwise.

Others called us to old calendarist groups. However, for us, schisms and sects of any sort are the unthinkable. That is the precise reason why we left ROCOR – because it suffers from the sectarian, old calendarist illness of schism. Being on the old calendar is very different from old calendarism, just as being on the new calendar is very different from new calendarism. For within the Romanian Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe, our ex-ROCOR group of six parishes is on the old calendar. We are following the Third Way between and beyond the Second and Third Romes. For we are turned towards St John of Shanghai (as also is the Romanian parish in Birmingham) and the New Martyrs and Confessors, and the local saints of the early centuries, to Moldovan spirituality and the heritage of St Paisius (Velichkovsky) (1722-1794) and Fr Cleopa Ilie, the great Carpathian elder (1912-1998), as well as to contemporary Ukrainian figures like Elder Iona of Odessa (1925-2012) and Metr Onufry of Kiev (1944 – ).

‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy Survives in England

Thus, in February 2022, 6 parishes, 16 clergy, including 7 priests, and 5,000 laypeople moved away from the local ROCOR diocese. Nearly all went to the Patriarchate of Romania and not a single one returned to serve in ROCOR. The departure of over three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England to the Patriarchate of Romania, left ROCOR with mainly a few new and untrained Non-Russian-speaking convert clergy, a tiny group of about 100 core faithful and 1500 nominal Orthodox. Moreover, our move took place eight days before the present phase of the conflict in the Ukraine in 2022 and the further tragic politicisation and disruption of Russian Church life.

A spiritual son of, and ordained priest by, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor in that see to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, I believe that the positive heritage of the old ROCOR has to be saved. It was Archbishop Antony who had stopped the spread of sectarianism in ROCOR in the US already in the 1970s. We followed him. We are ever loyal to the memory and practices of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and his successor Archbishop Antony, to the Presov Rusyn Metr Laurus (Shkurla) and to the west Ukrainian Metr Hilarion (Kapral) (1948-2022). We see in the politically free Autonomous Romanian Metropolitan of Western and Southern Europe, with nearly 3 million faithful, 700 parishes and several monasteries, the greatest hope for a future Local Church of Western Europe.

After nearly fifty years of faithfulness to the Russian Church and over 36 years of unpaid service at the altar, this marked a new beginning, but one to which all had been moving in the recent period of the Sovietisation of ROCOR, which sees the Church as a Business. We twelve, five priests, two deacons and five readers who joined the Romanian Church, are an international group, profoundly opposed to the sectarian trends coming from the new ROCOR in the USA. We do not want to belong to the ghettoes of egomania or the sects of pathology. They are not the way forward. These trends were exported to England during the critical illness and loss of control of ROCOR by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral). He was the last ROCOR First Hierarch able to keep ROCOR unity, before being struck down by his dementia and cancer well before his repose in 2022. We honour his memory, as also that of Metr Laurus.

Our Parish and the Future

On 20 May 2022, in one of her last acts, the late Queen Elizabeth made my native town a City. Its coat of arms, depicting St Helen and the three crowns of St Edmund, declares: No Cross, no Crown (of martyrdom). Our churches in the City of Colchester, the main one dedicated to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, and the other dedicated to All the Saints of these Isles, have become a spiritual centre for Moldovans, Ukrainians, Romanians and all patriotic, but non-nationalist, Russians. We consider that we have only one passport and under ‘Nationality’ that passport says ‘Orthodox Christian’. We have trilingual services and an emphasis on personal confession and communion and the prayer of the heart, as well as rejecting the money-making mercenary spirit of marble and gold, so evident in so many churches, especially in London and other capitals.

For us the Patriarchate of Romania, which is in communion with all Orthodox, is the royal way forward, between the extremisms of Constantinople and Moscow, which are scandalously out of communion with one another, both effectively in schism with one another. Ignoring politics and nationalism, the Colchester parish has good relations with the Greek monastery at Tolleshunt Knights, where I often met the now St Sophrony in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the monastery was still poor. Attended on Sundays by between 200 and 400 faithful, communions at St John’s number between 100 and 300 on Sundays, with between 50 and 100 children, making it one of the three largest Orthodox parishes in England. We are followers of ‘Carpathian’ spirituality. The Carpathians are on the Western edge of the Orthodox world. So are we.

We continue in the path of the everyday spirituality of the people, of Carpathian Orthodoxy, outside the Romes, with their Spirit-quenching politics, soul-destroying bureaucracies and anti-spiritual ‘protocols’. This is the same as Hebridean, Ionan and Lindisfarnian spirituality of old, practised in these isles some fourteen centuries ago. It is the one and the same ‘Spiritodox’ world, the world of ordinary families who go to their pastors, monks and hermits for spiritual orientation, making pilgrimages to Mt Athos, Moldavia, Diveevo and Ekaterinburg, and St Spyridon and St Nicholas. This is not some sort of ‘neo-hesychasm’, for hesychasm never died. Last year at the Ascension the large icon of St John of Kronstadt in the Colchester church began to give off a fragrance, noticed by all, and the Icon of Christ on the iconostasis gave out a large droplet of myrrh. So does heaven reply to the persecutors of the Church, with Love, not with the aggressive bullying and attempted intimidation of the pharisees. We pray for them all, that they may be relieved of their burden of hatred and come to know Christ.

Part Four: The Future

Rejecting the Temptation of the Romes

There are those who ask how the present stand-off between Constantinople and Moscow, the Second and Third Romes, will end. Those pessimists who see only the acts of sinful men should know that there will not be an everlasting schism. Political personalities come and then they die. True, too many harsh words have been said and too many injustices have been committed by both sides. The use of ‘defrocking’ for purely political, and not canonical, purposes is absurd. All political ‘defrockings’ are reversible, as they have been reversed so many times before, when the injustices of previous regimes are overturned, just as the tables of the money-changers in the Temple were overturned by the Saviour, Who said: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves’ (Matt 21, 12-13). Bishops who misapply the canons, those who themselves receive clergy without releases but then condemn others for receiving clergy without releases, because those selfsame bishops have instituted schisms, and in places as far apart as the USA, the Netherlands, England, Lithuania and Africa, only discredit themselves and make themselves into laughing-stocks.

There will have to be negotiations between them on territory. Moscow cannot go on behaving as though countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, like Finland, Poland, the Czech Lands or Slovakia, are any different from the other countries of Roman Catholic and Protestant cultural background in Western and Central Europe. Those countries too are de facto shared territory like Western Europe. On the other hand, as regards Africa, perhaps Hellenist Alexandria will have to return to holding only the territory of Egypt and Libya, as a century ago, and leave the rest of Africa to missions from the Russian Church. And Hellenist Constantinople will have to abandon the domain of the East Slavs, Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, to the jurisdiction of the Russian Church – for a moment.

For the coming political takeover of the Ukraine as a result of the Russian military operation against the US on the battlefield of the Ukraine and the conferring of the status of a pro-Russian Protectorate on the New Ukraine, will make no difference in the Russian Church sphere. Though the Russian State will surely win militarily in the Ukraine, as it is already winning, the Russian Church is already the great loser. It has lost through its involvement in politics and is discredited outside the Russian Federation, its churches in Western Europe often reduced to little more than embassy churches. If other Local Churches recognise the self-declared autocephaly of the canonical Ukrainian Church, this will hasten the inevitable end. The Russian Church will have to cede long-overdue autocephaly, both to the New Ukraine and then to Belarus. The three brother-peoples will belong to three Sister-Churches.

Thou Hast Conquered, O Galilean

As for us, we continue to stand in the centre. Some will say that we in East Anglian England are provincials, ‘rustics’. Well, we are provincials – but we are not ashamed of it. Though standing in the centre means that we are attacked by both extremes, this is the only valid position, for Christ was also crucified between two thieves. However despised provincial Galilee was, it was Galilee that defeated the Capital of Jerusalem, with its Sanhedrin of high priests, scribes and pharisees. Why? Because in fact Galilee was the centre, just as a cave in Bethlehem, not the Senate in Rome, was also in its time the centre. The People’s Orthodoxy is controversial to the Imperial elite, just as Christ was controversial to the scribes and pharisees. But woe unto them.

And so our ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy stands at the centre. We stand outside the politics of capitals, old and new. We reject the Three Romes and their Imperialism and Papism, both Phanariot and Muscovite, which are supported only by their readiness to compromise on everything with States. We reject both the Church-State of Old Rome and the State Churches of the Second and Third Romes. It is Imperial Orthodoxy, not ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy, that is marginal, because the Imperial Church is not the Faith of the people, of pastors, parish priests and monasteries, but of intriguing oligarchs, hard-hearted politicians and self-tortured ideologues.

In the 4th century the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363), born in Constantinople and finishing his poisonous life in what is now Iraq, returned to persecuting the Church. He became known as ‘the last Pagan Emperor’, though, alas!, that is not true. Julian wrote an attack on Christianity, ‘Against the Galileans’. The trickery of the ‘Galileans’—his usual term for Orthodox Christians – had nothing divine in it, he claimed, it appealed to ‘rustics’ only, and it was made up of fables and irrational falsehoods. Here can be seen his intellectual snobbery, like that of our present persecutors, who claim to have some worldly academic qualifications. Julian’s plan to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem had to be abandoned. He lost his fight against Christ, humiliated by ‘the rustics’. It is said that his last words were: ‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean’. The provincial Galileans had even then won.

Towards a Local Church

Our Church is already a Local Church. Indeed, other Local Churches already exist. They begin not in capitals, where there is a separate church for each nationality, often de facto embassy churches, but in the provinces, where Orthodox of all nationalities are brought together and have to be together, living with one another. In the greater picture beyond this, there is the whole problem of Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, where the absence of four Autocephalous Local Churches is absurd, despite over a century of Orthodox presence there and despite the presence there of some 10% of the Orthodox episcopate of 1,000 bishops.

We have always opposed those who tried to undermine the inevitability of new Local Churches in these Diaspora lands. They ruin all hope for them through extremism, whether of the modernist/secularist/new calendarist, or the pharisaic/ghettoist/old calendarist, variety. If your only selling-point is that you are like the whole secular world around you, whose values you share, then you have nothing to give to create a new Local Church. But if your only selling-point is your differences, or, worse still, that your differences make you ‘superior’ to all others, then you are a pharisee and you too are working against a new Local Church.

A Church of and for ‘incels’ and right-wing pharisees is not a Church. A Church of military rigidity, of the straitjacket and Stalinist conformism is not a Church. A Church of and for intellectuals is not a Church. A Church of wokeism, of anything goes, swimming with the tide and secularist conformism is not a Church. The Church is for all who accept Her as She is, the Church for all generations and all nationalities, for all who wish to live better lives and know that this is possible only through Christ. Our Church is the Church of the spiritual, not of the material and its obsessions with power and riches, property and prestige. Our Church is not the Church of politicians and businessmen, but the Church of the Saints. We too say: No Cross, No Crown. And again we say: Christ is Risen!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester, England,

Eastertide 2023

(The above is available as a printed brochure)

The City of Colchester

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-61509353

The news that Queen Elizabeth has made the town of Colchester into a City as a present on the occasion of her Platinum Jubilee is most welcome.

Once the Capital of the Celtic Trinovantes tribe, then briefly the Capital of Roman Britain, when London was still wild marshland (a possible meaning of its name), Colchester has long been known as Britain’s oldest recorded town. Its Celtic name was Camulodunum, the fortress of the Celtic war-god Camulos. Its Roman name appears to come from the word Colne, the Celtic name of the local river (there are several other Celtic-named River Colnes in England) and chester, from the Latin castra, meaning a Roman camp. Thus, for the Romans Colchester was a ‘civitas’, which is the Latin word from which is derived the modern word ‘city’.

Its crest shows the three crowns of St Edmund of East Anglia, King and Martyr (+ 869), Patron-Saint of East Anglia and Co-Patron of England, against a background of the Cross of Christ. The connection with the Cross goes back to its finder, St Helen, who is reputed to have visited Colchester together with her son Constantine. He was a military leader in Roman Britain and was proclaimed Emperor of the Roman Empire on 25 July 306 in York. Later he opened the First Universal Council of the Church in 325, which took place just outside New Rome, the City he founded, which later became known as Constantinople. Today a statue of St Helen holding the Cross, stands on top of Colchester City (no longer Town) Hall facing south-east – towards Jerusalem, where she found it.

With the largest Orthodox church outside London (and probably as big as any in London), both in terms of the building and the multinational parishioners, we wonder if Colchester may not yet also become a City in the sense that it will one day have an Orthodox bishop?

May God’s Will be done.

An Interview with a Serbian Church Website

The following interview was published last week on www.pouke.org, a Serbian Church website.

  • Being an Englishman and an Orthodox priest at the same time, how do people in your .neighbourhood perceive you?

With complete indifference. Very few people here are interested in any religion. A priest is generally viewed as perhaps rather eccentric, but harmless. Nobody is interested, people live however they want. It is all the same to them whatever I am.

  • Please tell us, is there an interest in Orthodoxy, at least in the town of Colchester where your Church is? Who are the people from your parish? Where do they come from and what brings them to Orthodoxy?

I was born and went to school in Colchester, which is about 100 km north-east of London. However, interest from most English people living in Colchester, as anywhere else, is very limited. Most English people are atheists and have no interest in any faith at all.

Our parish is mainly made up of Russian immigrants from Latvia and Lithuania, Moldovans, Romanians, Ukrainians and Russians, as well as Bulgarians, Cypriots and Greeks, together with their English-born children. Most have come here over the last 20 years. True, we have small numbers of Orthodox English people and some other nationalities, but these are usually linked in some way to Russia or else are married to Russian women. They live in Colchester or around it, within an 80 km radius.

  • Is there a Church choir in your parish? What are the specifics of your parish in Colchester? 

Yes, of course there is a choir, a good one, between about 10 and 20 people sing every Sunday. All are volunteers, we do not have or like paid choirs. On an average Sunday there are only 150-200 people in church, though we have 600 regular parishioners and, in fact, about 3,000 local Orthodox come to our services during the year, but many are only nominal Orthodox and come only once a year, for baptisms or weddings.

Our church building is the largest Russian Orthodox church building in the British Isles, about the same size as the Serbian Cathedral, St Sava’s, in London. It is white and was built of wood 164 years ago. There are 24 nationalities, most people are under 40, with large numbers of children. On average we have about 100 baptisms, 10 weddings and 1 funeral a year. Our second priest, Fr Ion, is Romanian, but married to a Russian from Latvia. Our services are in three languages, Slavonic, English and Romanian. We have many confessions every Sunday with communion from two chalices, and 100-150 communions.

  • You talked about St Edmund, can you please tell us about this Saint and his significance in your life? 

The name Edmund will sound strange and not Orthodox to most Serbs. But just because some Roman Catholics may have his name, it does not mean that he was Roman Catholic. Firstly, he is a real saint (Roman Catholics do not have real saints) and, secondly, he lived before Roman Catholicism was invented. Many Roman Catholics are called Nicholas; does that mean that St Nicholas was Roman Catholic? Of course not!

St Edmund was King of Eastern England, where I and my ancestors were born and live, and he was martyred by pagan Viking invaders in 869. His memory is still alive here and a whole town locally is named after him. I have known about him and felt his presence here from childhood, since he is the main local saint and the original Patron Saint of England. I think I grew up beneath his protection in some mysterious way. St Edmund is the first saint whose spirit I felt in childhood.

The spirit of the saints is identical, wherever and whenever they lived. Many saints of the West have always been venerated by Serbs in the Serbian Church calendar. For example, St Tatiana, St Sophia and St Alexei of Rome, St Irenei of Lyons, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Vincent of Lerins, or St John Cassian and many Popes of Orthodox Rome, like St Leo the Great, St Gregory the Dialogist or St Martin I. However, saints in Western countries further from Serbia and who lived a little later are not known in Serbia. And yet these saints who lived at this time could travel to Jerusalem and Constantinople and take communion there and feel at home; the Church was One, whatever the difference of language and even rituals, the Faith was the same.

  • Have you ever been to Serbia? If yes, what are your impressions of our country?

Unfortunately, I have never visited Serbia and there are no Church-going Serbs in this part of England.

On the one hand, I have the impression of Orthodox in Serbia who are very faithful to the Tradition. On the other hand, I have the impression that few Serbs are really Orthodox, most are atheists and very nationalistic. I suppose this is the result of fifty years of brainwashing by Communism, mainly under the Croat Tito, and then of a generation of the ‘Soft Power’ brainwashing of Western Consumerism, which has produced the Facebook generation. They dress like Americans, listen to American music, watch American TV programmes and films and so think like Americans. I have read that 30% of the Serbian media is now American-owned. How can people resist?

I also have impressions from Serbian Orthodox I know. For example, I studied with the Serbian Bishop Luka in Paris at the Russian St Sergius Institute in the late 1970s and liked him a lot. The only other Serbian bishop I know is Metr Amfilochije. I much admire him. I greatly venerate St Nikolai of Zhicha (called in Russian St Nicholas the Serb) and have read many of his books, which have been translated into Russian and English. I also venerate St Justin of Chelije, a real Orthodox philosopher, as well as Patriarch Pavle. The latter has not yet been canonized, but this is only a matter of time.

  • Since I know you that you have relations with the SOC (Serbian Orthodox Church) and that you have visited the Saint Sava Church in London, tell us please, how do you feel in the company of our people in England?

Perfectly at home. We have exactly the same Faith and values. We belong to the same Orthodox Civilization and are proud, in the good sense, of this. In today’s Europe, there are only two Civilizations: Anti-Christian, Secularist Western Post-Civilization and Christian, Orthodox Civilization. We are opposites. We should ask ourselves every day: Which Civilization and Empire do we belong to and confess: to the Anti-Christian Globalist Empire or to the Christian Empire, to the Secularist Empire or to the Orthodox Empire?

We have our own Civilization, our own Empire, stretching from Bosnia to the shores of the Pacific, with dependent outposts and oases of Orthodoxy all over the world, as in Colchester. We belong to this, it is our identity, regardless of our nationality and language, because we have the same Faith and Church. We Orthodox do not have the same values as the rest of the world and our Civilization and Empire is the only Alternative to Western Anti-Civilization.

A Serb who is not Orthodox is not a Serb, but either some sort of Titoist or else an American of the MacDonald’s Post-Civilization. In the same way a Russian who is not Orthodox is not Russian, but Soviet. And an Englishman who is not Orthodox or not close to Orthodoxy in some way through faith, is not English, but British. He is, consciously or unconsciously, an imperialist who has little time for truth or love, only for self-interest and imaginary superiority over others whom he can exploit.

  • Please tell us your views upon the latest events regarding the actions of Greek Church recognizing Ukrainian Orthodox Church?

It is all very simple. As you may know, the present US ambassador in Athens, Geoffrey Pyatt, used to be the US ambassador in Kiev. So it is clear that this is all just another American game, started by Obama, using flattery, threats or bribery, as is their technique. However, whatever the great pressure the US elite exerts on weak Greek bishops to recognize these Fascist schismatics in the semi-Uniat western Ukraine, I am ashamed of them. Whether because they are cowards or they have been bribed with dollars, these bishops are wrong. How can these bishops be so racist and weak and trample underfoot the basic canons of the Church, which every first-year seminarian knows? This is shameful. If there is no repentance, a terrible event will visit Greece for the apostasy of some of its bishops. God is not mocked. May the Orthodox bishops of Greece, like my contemporary, Metr Seraphim of Piraeus, triumph.

  • What are your relations with the ROC like? 

Relations with it?!! But I belong to the Russian Orthodox Church!

There is only one Russian Orthodox Church, whatever the administrative differences of its various parts. There are several autonomous parts of the Russian Church, the Churches of Japan and China, the self-governing New-York-based Church Outside Russia which I belong to, the Ukrainian, Moldovan and Latvian Churches, the Belorussian Exarchate etc. But we are all one, we all belong to the same Church and commemorate the same Patriarch.

  • What are your views on Constantinople? 

Until the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople was the plaything of the Turks and the British or French ambassadors in Istanbul. Everybody knew that the nomination to the Patriarchate could be bought for money. The bishops in Istanbul were finally bought by the Anglicans in the 1920s for £100,000 and so their freemason candidate, (he became a mason in a British Lodge on Cyprus in 1909), Patriarch Meletios Metaksakis introduced by force the Papist calendar. After the fall of the British Empire after 1945, its role was taken up by the American Empire, which continued its dirty work.

So the last legitimate Patriarch, Maximos V, was removed by the Americans by force in 1948 on the orders of the war criminal Truman, who had just slaughtered nearly 500,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Patriarch Maximos was too Orthodox for American tastes and was kidnapped and taken in Truman’s personal aeroplane into exile in Switzerland.

I used to know a Greek deacon who was an eyewitness to these events. He later became the Greek bishop in Birmingham in England. In 1948 the Americans behaved like thugs, cowboys, they were very violent. Patriarch Maximos was replaced by the Greek-American Archbishop Athenagoras – and we know how that ended. Since then most of the bishops of Constantinople have just been American puppets, without any spiritual relevance. One of them recently held an LGBT Conference with a ‘transvestite Orthodox theologian’!

  • English history is specific in many ways. Can we say that England was Orthodox until 1066 (12 years longer after 1054)?

The Western Schism was a gradual process, it spread over time and in some ways is not complete even today. It led to the invention of Roman Catholicism in 1054, but began much earlier than 1054, in the late eighth century under the heretic and iconoclast Frank Charlemagne. He was a barbarian who wanted to revive the pagan Roman Empire, with himself, naturally, as its Emperor. So that is what he did, setting up in 800 ‘the First Reich’. (Bismarck invented the Second Reich and Hitler the Third Reich; some say that the Fourth Reich is the EU). They called this revived paganism ‘The Holy Roman Empire’, but in fact it was Unholy and Anti-Roman.

This alien mentality of Schism spread from the Franco-German heartland (where later the EU began) all over Western and Eastern Europe, and eventually to the islands and so England too. It is clear that from about the Year 1000, and even before that, England was falling to these heterodox influences. 1066 marked the end of Orthodox influence in England, but the decadence was there already, especially under the half-Norman King, Edward (1042-1066). (Like Charlemagne, this traitor is called a saint by Roman Catholics!). 1054 (or in England 1066) is the end of the initial process of Schism, the conclusion of its fall from communion with the Church, not its beginning. Therefore we have to look carefully at what went on previously, before we can say whether it was Orthodox or not.

  • Do you think there are things in common between Serbia and England?

Strangely enough, yes.

Serbia is like the front line of the Russian Orthodox Church, the first bastion of Orthodoxy, just a few hundred kilometres from Rome. This is why the West hates Orthodox Serbia and wants to destroy it – because it loves Christ, whereas it loves Antichrist, for whom it works to bring in his reign. On the other hand, England today is like the front line of the USA, the first bastion of Anti-Orthodoxy. Nobody can forget how British airmen dropped bombs on Serbia at Easter 1999, marked ‘Happy Easter’. That was Satanic. So any Orthodox in England survive like soldiers in the trenches; and actually that is the same situation as for Serbs today. You too are soldiers in the trenches under the spiritual bombardment of the anti-Christian barbarians every day. This is what we have in common, we are both on the edges, advanced posts in the struggle for the Church of God.

  • Is there anything you would like to say to Orthodox Serbian people from your perspective?

Yes, just one thing: Stand firm in Orthodoxy! The more you resist the onslaught of the West, the US and its EU, NATO and IMF vassals, the greater the example of spiritual courage you give to Orthodox everywhere and, at the same time, the closer you draw to Christ and so to salvation. The West threw Communism and Nazism at us and we defeated both of them. For all extremes come from the demons, as the Holy Fathers say. We Orthodox shall defeat Liberal Secularism, which hates Christ just as much as Communism and Nazism, as well. Let us Orthodox show our courage, that we fear no man, that we fear only God. Then no-one can defeat us.