According to the National Herald, in Istanbul the 79 year-old Patriarch Bartholomew is set on removing the 91 year-old Archbishop Demetrios of the US Greek Archdiocese, who has already refused to leave three times. The Patriarch is also set on removing the Cypriot Archbishop Gregorios from the Greek Archdiocese in Great Britain and Ireland. He is also aged 91 and has faced several problems with a flock that is dying out. At the end of 2018 the Patriarch visited the Archdiocese incognito in order to study the situation. He now wishes to divide the Archdiocese into two. The new bishops may be Greek from the USA. A similar situation prevails in Australia where the 83 year-old Archbishop Stylianos, a virulent critic of Patriarch Bartholomew, is ill. Here too the Archdiocese may be divided into two or even three. Such changes will ensure the required total control of Patriarch Bartholomew over his Greek Diaspora.
Category Archives: Constantinople
My Life, the Last Battle and the New Orthodox World (N.O.W.)
‘Tell the people: Although I have died, I am alive.’
St John of Shanghai
Foreword: The War
Forty-five years ago I was told by one who could have known better that, as I had been waiting for years to join the Orthodox Church, I now faced a choice: I could either join the Greek Church of Constantinople or the Church of Russia; it was all the same. But only to him was it all the same, as, in spite of, or rather because of, his great intellect, he was spiritually confused. He lived in an alien compromise, washing his hands before the critical choice. I joined the Russian Church because, since the age of twelve, I had known through revelations to my soul that my destiny was most definitely in the Russian Orthodox Church. However crippled it may have been after 1917, I was destined to share in that agony, indeed, although it seemed foolishness to the Jews and to the Greeks alike, only by sharing in that agony could I hope to find my own salvation. I sensed even then that what he had told me was somehow untrue. At best it could only have been a delusion. It was not all the same – and recent very sad events have shown this to all absolutely clearly. Let me explain:
The Church is not to be found in a people who believe that it is a chosen people. Many Hebrews believed that they were the chosen people, but they stoned the prophets and crucified the Son of God. To this day many of their descendants reject Christ, some considering themselves superior to the rest of humanity. Then the Western European elite came to believe in their ‘exceptionalism’ (that is, their claim that they too were above God) too, all in order to justify their organized barbaric aggression. So a thousand years after Christ, they too fell away from the Church, rejecting the Holy Spirit and seizing control of the Church in the West in order to justify their conquistador power-grab. So, like pirates, they began persecuting us ordinary Christians and conquering the rest of the world by fire and the sword. Then their secularist descendants, in turn the Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, German and finally American elites, did exactly the same, demanding world hegemony (‘globalism’), also rejecting Christ because they consider themselves superior to the rest of humanity. (Hence their anti-Semitism: the other ‘chosen people’, the Jews, were rivals to them, therefore they had to be eliminated). In the Church there has now come the turn of certain Greeks, telling us that only they are Christians, that God speaks only Greek, and, as one very well-known Cypriot archimandrite told me, even that their pagan ancestors had prepared the way for Christ! Many Russians fell victim to the same delusion, in the same way believing in themselves instead of believing in God, taking communion only once a year. So they lost everything and overthrew the God-appointed Christian Emperor in 1917. Only through the blood of the New Martyrs and the tears and sweat of the New Confessors did repentance eventually begin to come to them.
All these ‘chosen peoples’ failed to understand that salvation comes only from the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Church of Christ through the Mercy of God and the Holy Spirit – not from some earthly ‘Jewish Rome’ of some mythical ‘chosen people’. For this reason, once I had chosen the Russian Church, I was to spend the rest of my life at war, in tireless battles, in unceasing strife, in the trenches, on the Western Front, fighting for real Christianity, for the real Russian Orthodox Church, together, of course, with many others. We all fought against the narrow-minded, nationalist delusions and impurities of those who had lost the big picture, who could not see the wood for the trees. They told us that only Russians could be Orthodox, that only their own exclusive little fragments of the great Imperial Orthodoxy, which had not undergone the blood, tears and sweat of others, could be right, that God’s Church needed ‘saving’ or ‘reforming’ (naturally, by themselves!). Some of them even persecuted and took to court as a common criminal the greatest saint among them all, St John of Shanghai. Little wonder that the Lord sent me to a military Church. I never sought any of this; it was all imposed on me. My soul would have died had I not taken part in this spiritual warfare. My life has been unceasing warfare in four battles, all fought beneath the Protecting Veil, which my patron-saint saw and which is the only reason why I am still alive.
Three Battles
My first battle was to take part in the struggle to help free that small part of the Russian Church Diaspora in England, which was dependent on Moscow, from spiritual impurity. After nine years, by 1983, I realized that I would fail in this. It was a task quite beyond me, with my very feeble abilities and from my modest, provincial, rural background; the enemies were invested with the strength of a personality cult, with all the authority of men and their city establishments, they had no time for a ploughman’s grandson. I was knocking my head against brick walls. So I left into exile, seeing my limitations. I understood that it would take far-reaching political changes inside Russia and indeed the departures or deaths of some outside Russia before this battle could be won (I did not know then that this would mean twenty-four years). Victory was inevitable, but only God Who created time, could in time bring the victory. My battle had been premature. By myself I could do nothing. It was good for me to know this.
My second battle was to take part in the struggle to help free that small part of the Russian Church Diaspora, which was dependent on Constantinople (Rue Daru), from spiritual impurity. I fought in Paris and thought that this battle was winnable. It was – almost. However, after six years in 1988 there came a turning-point when I saw that I would fail in this battle too. The intrigues of freemasons in high places meant that I could not help win this battle – all my friends were in low places. I knew then that this Paris group would eventually (I did not know then that this would mean thirty years) disappear into spiritual irrelevance. Those who had betrayed the Tsar and made him and his Family into martyrs had also betrayed the Church. So I left, having understood that here too it would take far-reaching political changes inside Russia and indeed the departures or deaths of some outside Russia before the battle to bring even a part of this group home to the Russian Church could be won. Victory was inevitable, but only God Who created time, could with time bring the victory. My battle had been premature. By myself I could do nothing. It was good for me to know this.
My third battle from the first day of 1989 onwards was to take part in the struggle to help free that part of the Russian Church Diaspora, which was dependent on New York (ROCOR), from spiritual impurity. Here there was a much greater chance of success, for the contaminating Protestant disease of ‘super-correctness’ (as another disciple of St John of Shanghai called it), with its ignorance, phariseeism, extremism, sectarianism, old calendarism, psychological (not theological) deviations of convertitis and Cold War money, had many opponents in the USA itself and even more in Western Europe where I was fighting on the Front. And above all, my Diocesan Archbishop supported me and I supported him. The ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, a spiritual son of and the European successor to St John of Shanghai, was in effect the first real Orthodox bishop I had met. We had an identical understanding of the Church. By myself I could do nothing, but now I was far from being alone; I was simply one of very many, a little cog in a large machine. I did not know then that this struggle would take eighteen years, for only in 2007 did the Church win the day. I was taking part in our first victory, together with millions of others, in the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, to which I had always belonged in spirit. Only geography had ever divided us.
After the Three Battles
Once this battle, in which I had played only a tiny role, eventually from my provincial home-town, had been won by the many, especially by the bishops who had been inspired by the grace of God, I knew that the two other houses of cards where I had earlier lost the day would fall in their turn. I just did not know that it would take another twelve years. Between 2007 and today, in 2019, I have seen both these first lost battles won. History won them. What I knew in the past, that they would be won only in God’s own time, has come to pass. What we have fought long and hard for has been obtained. Thus, we now at last have for our Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland a bishop, pleaded for during over four decades. He is Orthodox, understanding the local language and people, not phyletist, venerating the local saints and not denying them, missionary-minded like us, encouraging us and not destroying us, not under the control of laypeople, in good health, and who will be resident here in just a few weeks from now.
Secondly, the Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Western Europe, awaited for over three decades, was at last established in Paris only a few weeks ago. This means that our House will be built on rock, not on sand, and that the ‘Euro-Orthodox’ fantasy of the Paris Brotherhood is now dead. The future Local Church of Western Europe will be authentically Orthodox. For what we have sought for and fought for since 1988 now is. There is now a real Orthodox Exarchate for Western Europe, with many regional dioceses and young bishops, hundreds of parishes and several monasteries, venerating the local saints and not denying them, the foundation of the new Local Church. Led by Metropolitan John in Paris, who bears the name of our missionary father in Christ, St John of (Shanghai and) Western Europe and so continues in the tradition of Archbishop Antony of Geneva, it will of course need much more time to develop. It consists of the generally newer Russian Orthodox parishes of Western Europe, in many dioceses and with many bishops. However, alongside it and complementing it, also stand the two (Western European and German) dioceses of ROCOR, with their five bishops, two of them younger and active. This consists of the generally older, more integrated, Russian Orthodox parishes of Western Europe, a few of them until recently under Constantinople, but now at last come home. The two parts need each other and hopefully their bishops will meet regularly in order to help each other in their own joint Synod.
However, in this Year of the Lord, 2019, there is the last mystical battle (last for me) in the series of mystical battles in this Hundred Years’ War, which for a century has so deformed Church structures in the Diaspora. This battle is also against spiritual impurity, against masonic ecumenist and modernist intrigues. However, this last battle is the battle inside the Russian Lands, inside historic Rus’; it is therefore not a local battle for English, French and American Rus’ in London, Paris and New York, for part of the small Russian Diaspora, it is a general battle which concerns the whole Church. This is taking place today in the Ukraine, but it affects all. For the Church is the mystical centre of the world and it is the Ukraine which is now the mystical centre of the Church. And this is why we have come here now, sent to fight from the Western Front to the Eastern Front. All will stand or fall by their attitude to what is happening in the Ukraine today, to this battle between Christ and Satan. Whose side are you on?
The Fourth Battle
The internal administrative centre of the false Orthodoxy against which I fought in all our four battles, was formed in Istanbul a century ago. It came into being only because of the long-planned overthrow of the restraining protection of Imperial Tsardom. However, the Western disease which had overthrown the Christian Emperor and so the Christian Empire and then brought that centre into being had already infected Russia and elsewhere before that. For the disease contaminated all nationalities, including many in the Russian Lands and from there in the Diaspora. The disease came to be called renovationism and the renovationists were keenly supported from Istanbul. Today it has become crystal clear that the whole of the supposed Orthodox world has now to side either with real Orthodoxy or else against real Orthodoxy. The time of reckoning has come; the time of compromise is over. No-one can stand by any longer with the indifference and conceit of Pilate. Even though this battle is of exactly the same nature as the series of three battles which we fought in the Diaspora before this one, now it is not the Diaspora, but the Ukraine which is the sword that divides. The battlefield has changed to the Ukraine, but the battle is the same one; it is the battle for spiritual purity, for canonicity, for real Orthodoxy.
Gradually, over the last two months, one Local Church after another has decided to side with spiritual purity, canonicity and real Orthodoxy and so support Metr Onufry and the Church of God of the Ukraine. The rest of the Russian Church with ROCOR was the first to support him wholeheartedly. The Local Churches of Serbia, Bulgaria, Antioch, Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, Cyprus, and unofficial but spiritually free (= non-political) voices in the Churches of Greece, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Georgia, followed. So far, thirteen out of eighteen Athonite monasteries have joined us. And a few days ago the episcopate of the basically Carpatho-Russian OCA (Orthodox Church in America), which had dithered for several weeks and where some had for years even been threatening to desert the Church for Istanbul, decided the same. This is their spiritual victory and our very great comfort after decades of spiritual slumber, of wandering far from the Church with American phyletist delusions. It means that the little OCA is maturing, at last deciding to accept its destiny, abandoning its eccentric spiritual isolation and so finding its positive identity by returning to its roots under St Tikhon. Inspired by the breath of new life, it can at last begin to play a significant and fulfilling role as one of the component parts of the future, united, much larger, multinational Russian Orthodox Churches of the three continents of the New World, of the Americas and Oceania.
This leaves the episcopates of only two Local Churches, the large Romanian and the tiny Albanian, not politically free and sitting on the fence, paralysed like Pontius Pilate ‘for fear of the Jews’. They are silent, neither supporting nor rejecting, awaiting instructions from above on whether to support the petty nationalism of the phyletist schism of Constantinople or not. The false church in the Ukraine, founded by the US-backed separatists in Kiev, is officially under a certain Sergei Dumenko. He is actually a Vatican- and US-approved puppet-layman, therefore both pro-Uniat and pro-LGBT, and not a metropolitan, His false church has been seen to be without grace, without sacraments, without the Holy Spirit. His church is that of ‘the Ukrainian god’, as one Ukrainian minister has put it. His enthronement in Kiev six days ago was ignored by all the Local Churches. His so-called ‘Church’ is only a regime-manipulated charade of empty rituals, just another small ultra-nationalist organization – an absurd anachronism in this global world. It is supported by teams of police-backed Nazi bandits who intimidate and beat up Christians, because Nazis have no concept of the meaning of the word ‘Christian’. And these anti-Christian men of violence are directly supported by an alien and corrupt political regime in Kiev, supported by alien and corrupt regimes elsewhere, and, to their eternal shame, by Greek ‘bishops’ in Istanbul.
Afterword: The Victory
The decadent, self-appointed, Paris-School ‘theologians’ from the past slip away one by one. With them their secularizing ideologies from the past, Ecumenism (anti-Orthodoxy; against the Father), Modernism (anti-Sovereignty; against the Son) and Liberalism (anti-People; against the Holy Spirit), slip away into spiritual irrelevance. Their books of intellectual fantasy-philosophy are ready for the dust of forgotten library shelves. Those who frustrated, wasted, impeded and persecuted us for so many decades are leaving the stage and we are beginning to see the future clearly now. For the New Orthodox World (N.O.W.) is taking shape. The New Orthodox World (NOW) is led not by anachronisms, relics from the past in cities of empires which have not existed for centuries, but by vibrant and missionary multinational Local Churches, Autonomous Churches and Exarchates worldwide. These are not narrow and corrupted nationalist museums for State rituals, flag-waving and cultural nostalgia or the playthings of disincarnate but very aggressive, politicized and politically correct, liberal intellectuals, but living organisms, cleansed to prepare us all to meet the King before He returns in all His glory. And in the New Orthodox World, NOW, there is the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Church of Christ, awaiting Him and resisting the Enemy of Mankind, who comes before Christ in order to create disunity, disorder and distress among us.
The death-threat which I received three years ago, sent me because the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, did not stop me or deter me for a single second. In a dream, come to me after receiving that death-threat, I opened my front door and saw an agent on my doorstep. He at once fired his revolver at me, but the bullet rebounded off my priest’s cross, killing him instead of me. He fell to the ground and his corpse was dragged away to a waiting car by his colleague, who in fear and astonishment uttered powerless curses. I left and hid in a secret and remote place where I could not be found. I was rescued by the prayers of one who long, long ago had also taken refuge in such a place and I was taken to a faraway land. I have never paid any attention to dreams, especially such dramatic ones, but I remembered this one. However, I only really understood its meaning and symbolism on my first day here. It means that, like all of us, I will die when God decides, not when men decide, for though man proposes, God disposes. It means that the bullet rebounds, for if men want to kill the truth, they kill only themselves (exactly as they have done for the last one hundred and five years, with their atheist wars, one after another). And those who try to kill the Church in the Ukraine are committing spiritual suicide; indeed, their death-bearing bullet has already lethally rebounded onto themselves.
Victory has been ours in the Diaspora, because we have been willing to die for the Church of God and our enemies have not – because they are inherently attached to this world and so fear death which is of this world. Victory is ours in the Ukraine, because we are willing to die for the Church of God and our enemies are not – because they are inherently attached to this world and so fear death which is of this world. This is why we shall win this last battle now – because we do not fear death, for we believe and we know that Christ is the Life-Giving God, Who rose from the dead and freed the captives in hell. They, however, have only heard of the Risen Christ as a theory and symbolic myth for their heads. They believe it not in their hearts. Therefore their heads, like their lives, are full of the philosophies and works of death. But we do believe and we know and we tremble in awe before the Living God, Who is the Great God, Who works wonders and Who is with us, so that none is against us. Let the dead bury the dead. As for us, we shall not die, but live, and we shall declare the works of the Lord. The Lord is our Enlightenment and our Saviour, whom then shall we fear?
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Kiev, 1-8 February 2019
Four Ecclesiologies
There used to be three ecclesiologies (teachings as to what the Church is), but last month we saw the birth of a fourth. What are these ecclesiologies?
- Orthodox Ecclesiology (‘Christianity’)
This is the ecclesiology of the Holy Trinity, Unity in Diversity. It is the ecclesiology of the Family of Churches, which together form the Body of Christ, of which obviously Christ is the Head. In practical, that is, incarnational terms, this results in the existence of a family of Churches, like those described by the Apostle Paul in his letters to the Corinthians, the Ephesians, the Thessalonians, the Philippians, the Romans etc. Their differences and problems are regulated by Councils. Indeed, this conciliarity, in theology and history called Catholicity, is one of the four basic signs of the Church, together with Oneness, Holiness and Apostolicity. Therefore, a ‘Church’ which does not have this Catholicity is not the Church, certainly not the fullness of the Church, as it is deficient in one of the Church’s four essential qualities.
- Papal Ecclesiology (‘Papocaesarism’)
Papal or Roman Catholic ecclesiology asserts that the Church is centralist and imperialist. There is only one Pope, Who as the Vicar of Christ is the Head of the Church. This is the ecclesiology of centralism, which cannot survive without the Pope, Who is Infallible, as He is the source of the Holy Spirit on earth. This is the ecclesiology of the Crusader, the Inquisitor and the Conquistador.
- Protestant Ecclesiology (‘Caesaropapism’)
As a reaction to centralist Papism, this says that you can make your own church, everyone is a pope, everyone is the head of their own church: ‘Make it up as you go along: we are all popes now’. If you disagree, you go off and start your own church. Inevitably, and from the very start, this leads to small, weak and divided groups being taken over by States, kings, princes, presidents and politicians, a process known as erastianism, whereby the State controls the Church. Inevitably, and from the very start, this has led to State Churches, phenomena like the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, the Church of Norway. These are all State-controlled organizations, which inevitably end up adapting their doctrines to the demands of the secular State.
- Phanariot Ecclesiology (‘Eastern Papism’)
This power-grabbing ecclesiology, which has been a century in the making in the Diaspora has just now been born in all its fullness in the Ukraine. It is in effect not Orthodox ecclesiology, but a mixture of Roman Catholic and Protestant ecclesiologies, Papocaesarism and Caesaropapism. On the one hand, it is centralizing Papism: all must be gathered together under the Patriarch of Constantinople, who is the ‘Eastern Pope’ (not ‘Western Pope’). On the other hand, it gives what it calls ‘autocephaly’, in reality only a diminished autocephaly or minor measure of independence, to any Church within any nationalist organization or ‘State’ – even though that ‘State’ may be new, temporary, artificial and tyrannical or even already have an authentic Orthodox Church on its territory.
In other words, this new imperialist/nationalist ecclesiology is a combination of the worst of both the Papal and the Protestant worlds. It is a pastiche of authentic Trinitarian Orthodox ecclesiology. On the one hand, it is centralizing, able to exploit its new ‘churches’ as subservient cash cows. On the other hand, it provides a measure of independence to pseudo-autocephalous entities, but no protection for them from the local dictatorship, even in dogmatic questions. For the local ‘State’ can demand and force changes in doctrines in accordance with its own demands, which subordinate Christ to its nationalism. Thus, Phanariot ecclesiology does not affirm Local Churches, it only affirms, Protestant-style, the right of ‘States’ to have their own ‘Churches’. In other words, it merely uses Protestant-style nationalism to increase its own power base. Therefore, this is a double heresy.
Revolution in France
The three-week old revolt of the French people against their young Rothschild banker President, the anti-populist favourite of the rich EU elite, is intensifying. Insulted by Macron’s arrogant contempt for them and his blinding narcissism, his decision to delay fuel tax increases for only six months has only poured oil onto the flames. Little reported by the State-controlled media either there or here, the rioting concerns not simply a few streets in the rich quarter of Paris which have been ransacked, it is the revolt in the real France, dans la France profonde, outside the capital, that counts.
Here supermarkets and fuel distribution centres have been blocked. Many have nothing but bread and pasta to eat. The retail sector is heading for bankruptcy. The police refuse to break blockades because they too sympathize with the protests of the ‘yellow vests’. Roads are blocked and high schools are on strike. So now the great democrat Macron is considering calling in his Army to crush the people. France’s situation is like that of other EU countries in that the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. However, on top of that France has a rigid class system and social mobility is virtually non-existent.
Whereas in the UK the people were allowed (though only by elitist mistake) to vote for Brexit and in Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland and elsewhere anti-EU parties are gaining control, in France they are not allowed. Hence, the frustration of the disinherited masses. In France, which is run by five-year long virtual dictatorships of its presidents who control the media, the only way to get your voice heard is by street protests. Parliamentary representation is totally ineffectual and therefore elections are boycotted, since the gilded political elite and State-paid journalists have no time for the people.
Meanwhile, the Paris Exarchate in Rue Daru has declared that it does not recognize its dissolution by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Here we see that its controlling elite seems to think and act like secular French people, with little understanding of how the Church works. In yesterday’s declaration, the Rue Daru elite boasted that it has adopted the Western mentality and ‘democratic values’. Unfortunately, if your Patriarch dissolves you, that is it. You cannot go on strike or go into the streets. When your boss sacks you, you are sacked, and although you may say that you do not agree with your sacking, you have no choice. Your words are not heard.
We feel sorry for those in Rue Daru who have been let down by their Patriarch. When we others went through the same trauma decades ago, we simply joined the Russian Orthodox Church, even though we were derided and slandered for it by the Rue Daru elite. Today, no-one will deride you or slander you for taking the only logical and canonical course of action available.
Istanbul: The Young Turks Take Over
The three-day Synod in Istanbul, the last of the year, ended yesterday.
Firstly, after over three generations of indulging its illusions, it finally dissolved the rebellious Rue Daru group in Paris, reducing its 75 year-old French archbishop to a vicar-bishop. We had long expected this, but did not know when and in what despotic conditions without any consultation. Now in each community of that little group infighting will follow between opposing clans, those who are actually of the Russian Tradition and the anti-Orthodox Russophobes. This mirrors the present and coming battle in the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) group, which as such was founded by Paris intellectuals nearly fifty years ago at the height of the Cold War and is equally divided between Orthodox and Russophobes.
Secondly, the Synod sacked the 90-year old Archbishop Dimitrios in North America, as had been expected earlier this year. This sacking involves a large sum of ‘missing money’.
Thirdly, the Synod did not give the Tomos for Ukrainian autocephaly, just as they said they would not two years ago before their disastrous meeting in Crete, but as they had been paid $25 million for by the US taxpayer to do this year. This leaves President Poroshenko, who demanded this Tomos (he was the only one who wanted it, apart from his US paymasters) with a very red face, outwitted by Greeks who came bearing (apparent) gifts.
Why did all this happen now?
With an ageing (and, according to some, ill) Patriarch and many other elderly and ill bishops, such as the unstable John of Pergamos or the above-mentioned 90 year-old Archbishop Dimitrios or the arch-rebel Archbishop Stylianos in Australia, it seems as though the young generation of ‘Young Turks’ has taken over in Istanbul. These include the ultra-papist Metropolitan of Prussa, Elpidiphoros (Lambriniadis), the Metropolitan of Gaul, Emmanuel Adamakis (said to be the very ambitious successor in Istanbul), or the now notorious Archbishop Job (Getcha).
This new generation lacks pastoral experience and is bound to an extraordinary ideology of Eastern Papism, that comes from a fantasy that ended 565 years ago in 1453. They will eventually come down to earth with a very cruel bump. Meanwhile, the self-imposed spiritual suicide of the New or Second Rome does mean its end, except as a small and schismatic group of ‘new calendarists’. This in turn means that the Russian Orthodox Church is now free to establish canonical Orthodoxy worldwide. A great burden has been lost. Freedom has come. The eyes of the Orthodox world are now looking to the Russian Church to take on the mantle of authority and prove itself worthy by at last setting up the infrastructure in the Diaspora which we have so long been battling for without support. To those who have been given much, much is expected.
On the Liberation and Restoration of Church Life
It is impossible to recall peace without dissolving the cause of the schism – the primacy of the Pope exalting himself equal to God.
We seek and we pray for our return to that time when, being united, we spoke the same things and there was no schism between us.
St Mark of Ephesus
Fall and Liberation
The near-750 year process of the fall of the See of Constantinople since the so-called Councils of Lyon and later Ferrara-Florence is now over. It has finally fallen under a Jesuit-trained Patriarch, who in his delusion actually justifies himself, to the same millennial disease as Old Rome – Papism. New Rome fell to the same heresy of Old Rome: the lust for power justified on ethnic grounds – the mythical superiority of one race over another and over Christ, in the first case, of Latinized Germans and, in the latter case, of phyletist Hellenes. St Mark of Ephesus was right.
As a result, Constantinople parishes, few and scattered already, have been cut off from the Church and true Orthodox have begun leaving them. Withdrawing, they will join one or other of the thirteen Local Churches. Fragments of the Russian Orthodox world in North America and OCA, under Constantinople for political reasons, are hopelessly divided. Now the Orthodox elements in them can rejoin the worldwide Russian Church, returning in repentance to Orthodox practices and values in canonical conditions, without phariseeism or sectarianism.
Restoration and Rise
Now, to assume the leadership of service of the Church on earth, Whose only Head is Christ, the Patriarchate of Moscow, perhaps better repentantly renamed the Patriarchate of All Rus, must too cleanse itself of all the same Phanariot poison. This poison is the fatal mixture, summed up in utterly failed Muscovite diplomacy, of narrow nationalism and modernist ecumenism. Thus, the Third Rome must beware that it too does not fall to the same disease. When will we know that the Russian Orthodox Church is ready to assume this leadership of service, so that Church life can be restored?
- When there is no more Great Russian chauvinism and so no more talk of the Patriarch of Moscow as the ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’. This is the title which the Orthodox Pope of Old Rome, St Gregory the Dialogist, rightly condemned already at the end of the sixth century.
- When there is no more Russian Orthodox dallying with the Papacy of old Rome and the Pan-Protestant World Council of Churches, with both of which the representatives of the Phanar are naturally active. And so when there is no more new calendarism and experiments with the spiritual death of Paris ‘theology’.
Then, at last unhindered and uncompromised by the shackles of the past, we will be able to get on with our sadly interrupted mission to the seven billion Non-Orthodox, in concert with the other Twelve Local Churches. And only then shall we see Church life restored after such a disgraceful period of decadence.
The Orthodox Teaching on the Church
The following is the English translation of the statement we made at the Conference on ‘The Orthodox Teaching on the Church and Contemporary Challenges’, which was held in Moscow on 26 October and organized by the Analytical Centre of St Basil the Great.
http://ruskline.ru/video/2018/oktyabr/27/konstantinopolya_bolshe_net/
The Russian Orthodox Church suspended Eucharistic communion with Constantinople because of its politically-backed and therefore uncanonical support of schism in the Ukraine. The Russian Church has the canonical authority to do so, for by supporting schism Constantinople entered into dialogue with the anathematized, and so fell under anathema itself. But is this event a disaster or an opportunity?
We believe that this is an opportune time for the Russian Orthodox Church to re-emerge as the Church of the Third Rome. As before 1917, it can now assume leadership of Orthodox Christendom by agreement with the other twelve Local Churches. All of these are very small, but some are very ancient. This is unlike Constantinople, which only had a political claim to leadership, as the former capital of the Empire.
The ancient Patriarchates of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch go back to the apostles and their voices in particular must be heeded. As Patriarch John of Antioch has said, we need a Council where all Orthodox can meet. We would say, as we have been saying for the past eleven years, that such a Council can take place outside Moscow, on the Istra: this will be the long-awaited New Jerusalem Council.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
1918-2018: The Hundred-Year Nightmare Ends: As Day Breaks the Third Rome Wakes Up At Last
Introduction
Parroting the words of the Russophobic Brzezhinzki school of string-pullers in Washington, President Poroshenko has declared that with autocephaly granted to the Ukraine ‘one of the basic geopolitical problems of the world has been solved’, adding that: ‘This is the fall of the Third Rome as the concept of Moscow having world domination’ and that autocephaly is ‘part of our pro-European strategy’ and ‘the basis for the path of development of our State and our nation’. Clearly Poroshenko, a Jew by his father and who has been seen on one occasion taking communion from the Uniats, believes in the Neo-Nazi chant of his extremists, who, instead of the traditional greeting ‘Glory to Jesus Christ’ uses: ‘Glory to the Ukraine’. In other words, he lives in a world of illusions and xenophobic lies.
In reality, the Ukrainian affair was ordered by the scared US State Department, which has used its puppet fantasist Patriarch Bartholomew to carry out its plan. The latter wanted petty revenge for the failure of his Crete junket, but in fact he has had to cut off his nose to spite his face. This marks a very positive turning point. It marks an end to the dalliance of those in the Russian Church who cultivated the dangerous Phanariot illusions of apostasy, secularism, modernism, ecumenism and venality, illusions of an Orthodoxy for show. Now Moscow has to wake up from the illusions of ‘Church diplomacy’. Now at last the tiny group in Moscow concerned can stop playing with the World Council of Churches, the Vatican and the Phanar and start being the Third Rome. We have waited for so long.
Assuming the destiny of the Russian Orthodox Church, all can now tell the Truth. After all, it is not diplomacy that sets us free, but the Truth that sets us free, and the Church is the last bastion of the Truth in this world of illusions. This means that the paralysis is at last ending. Some in Moscow weakly allowed the Phanar to interfere in the Russian Diaspora in Paris, then, much more recently, in the Ukrainian Diaspora, then in Estonia, then in the Sourozh Diocese, now at last they are waking up. We who have been abandoned for so long by the Third Rome, all the while defending it, can at last be heard. The Orthodox world can now be reconfigured – providing that the Russian Church acts responsibly, in concert with the Twelve Disciples, the other Local Churches, as the Third Rome.
I can recall nearly 40 years ago how Fr Alexei Kniazev, the rector of the St Sergius Institute in Paris, told us seminarists how he went to Constantinople in 1966 and put the question directly to Patriarch Athenagoras: ‘So are you the Oecumenical Patriarch or are you just a petty Balkan bishop?’ He never received an answer, except between the lines, and so soon after tried to join the Moscow Patriarchate – which irresponsibly rejected him. So today we ask that Moscow assumes once more the role of the Third Rome. In this matter it is not the Russian Church that is the servant of the Russian State, it is the Russian State that is the servant of the Russian Church. For the Russian Church is not Russian, but God’s, as the Church does not belong to Russia, but Russia belongs to the Church.
History
Let us recall how all this came about:
In 1948 the freemason and notorious atomic mass murderer, Truman, obsessed with the unchallenged power of having the only weapons of mass destruction in the world, decided to take over the Patriarchate of Constantinople. His gangsters removed the Patriarch Maximos V and duly installed his fellow-mason Archbishop Athenagoras as Patriarch. In the same year Truman set up the World Council of Churches as a Pan-Protestant propaganda tool. The Local Orthodox Churches in capitalist countries were humiliatingly forced to join it. In 1961 the Ukrainian tyrant and atheist Khushchov forced the Russian Church and other Local Churches in socialist countries to join it, thinking that he could both finally finish off the Churches by 1980 and at the same time undermine the Americans.
In reply, the US State Department soon organized the Second Vatican Council and successfully protestantized the Vatican’s worldwide operation, their greatest following success being to enable the CIA to have the Polish Cardinal Wojtyla elected in order to undermine the Soviet Empire. When that Empire did duly collapse and its countries became the vassals of the ‘Truman Doctrine’, Washington declared itself the victor, briefly assuming world hegemony and ‘the end of history’. Of course, such nonsense did not match reality. The attempt to secularize and so enslave the Orthodox Church could never succeed, as it had with the Protestant and Catholic denominations. The Body of Christ cannot be enslaved by the world, because the Holy Spirit inhabits Her and transfigures Her.
Of course, the devil had tried to enslave the Church. In the 1920s he used his slave, the British freemason Patriarch Meletios Metaksakis (elected with £100,000 of Anglican money channelled through the British State), to set up a ‘Pan-Orthodox Conference’. In 1923 this imposed the Western calendar on its slaves. However, this was not enough. In 1961 Patriarch Athenagoras reactivized this ‘Conciliar’ process and in 1977 Patriarch Dimitrios nearly concluded it, but was sabotaged by St Justin (Popovich). It took nearly another forty years for the next apostate puppet in the Phanar, a graduate of the Gregorian University in Rome, to set up a ‘Council’ in Crete in 2016. However, the free Orthodox world boycotted it, as just another attempt to secularize the Church, ignoring its dogmas and canons.
Conclusion
Now that the Church is free from the apostatic deadwood of the Truman Doctrine of US world supremacy, including over the Church of God, we can at last move forward. Ignoring the arrogant ignorance of primitive Muscovite nationalists, the Russian Church and State can now assume the burden of the Third Rome, for none now can doubt that the Second Rome is well and truly fallen and that ‘a fourth Rome there will not be’. Let us forget the expensive mascarades of diplomacy, for they have utterly failed. Only the Russian Orthodox Church, supported by Russian Orthodox statesmen, can hold the world back from its end, whither it rushes like a suicidal lemming. The Third Rome, the Patriarchate of Holy Rus, stands Risen from the Crucifixion of Atheism and we await its saving words of the Resurrection.
Now we have to be an example to all those who seek salvation, but do not know how to get there. Russia was destined to be an ark of salvation for the many peoples and has no other meaning. If it does not do this beneath the standard of Christ – no other standard will do – it will disappear from the face of the earth and then the whole world will end. Noah’s Ark is here, ready for the flood of fire that hangs over the planet. We await only its captain, the coming Tsar, who will take up the mantle of the Tsar-Martyr, the great benefactor of World Orthodoxy, reformer and builder of churches from New York to Nice, Patron of all the Local Churches. Then all the apostates and traitors will have the opportunity to repent, even at this eleventh hour. We await the Council of New Jerusalem, outside Moscow, to enlighten the world according to the Light of Christ and not to the darkness of men.
How the US prepared the split of the Orthodox Churches. Horsemen of the Apocalypse for Ukraine
Now we can observe in some way unique events. The last time this happened was in the Middle Ages. When the power of one country is blackmailing the representatives of the Church to obtain a certain political effect, not particularly considering that this dramatically leads to a large split in the Church itself and unpredictable cultural and social consequences.
The question of faith is very delicate. This matter is not a fashion, not a hobby. Faith affects such deep structures of consciousness and subconsciousness that it is much easier to spoil than to create something new and sustainable.
Now the US, not particularly reflecting, with rough boots trample on the territory which they do not understand.
The harm they methodically inflict on Orthodox Christianity can ultimately be reflected in both Catholicism and Islam.
In order to obtain the necessary results in Ukraine and to sever the cultural and religious ties between the Southeast of the Ukraine and Russia as much as possible, the US began to use the Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople in the same way as they usually work with drug traffickers or minor politicians in Third World countries.
Washington using blackmail actively pressures the ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo coordinates this activity.
When the Americans noticed that the Patriarchate of Constantinople was too sluggish about the demands of Filaret Denisenko and President Petro Poroshenko, they decided to remind Bartholomew of a number of points.
In the last days of July 2018, Mike Pompeo held a meeting with the head of the American-Ukrainian Diocese of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Dimitri Trakatellis. At the meeting, Mike Pompeo reported that Washington is aware of the theft in 2017-2018 of a large amount of money (about 10 million US dollars) from the budget for the construction of the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas in New York. Mike Pompeo noted separately for the Patriarchate of Constantinople that the US Attorney’s Office has documentary evidence confirming the withdrawal of these funds abroad on the orders of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. Mike Pompeo suggested to the Patriarchate of Constantinople that he would “close his eyes” to this theft in exchange for the realization on the part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople of the idea of providing the Ukrainian Church with autocephaly. After this “American kindness” and “closing eyes”, the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew acted in the accelerated mode in the interests of Filaret Denisenko. The Patriarchate of Constantinople sent two exarchs to “… help with the construction of a local independent church. The two exarchs are called to pave the way for autocephaly. It should be noted that in this case the process is no less important than the goal. In fact, thanks to this process, the various branches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church can be brought together, “said Metropolitan Emmanuel of Gaul, the Locum Tenens of the Western European Exarchate of Constantinople.
According to Metropolitan Emmanuel, Patriarch Bartholomew intends to defend the Ukrainian Church, for which he “is responsible, since the Metropolitan of Kiev canonically depends on the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, despite the fact that in 1686 the Moscow Patriarchate was granted the right to ordain the Metropolitan of Kiev.”
But the most interesting are the personalities of the exarchs. Archbishop Daniel of Pamphylia from the United States and Bishop Hilarion of Edmonton from Canada.
First, both Archbishop Daniel of Pamphylia (Vladimir Zelinsky) and Bishop Hilarion of Edmonton (Roman Nikolayevich Rudnik) were born in Western Ukraine, in the very center of veneration of Bandera, Dontsova and Shukhevych.
Bishop Hilarion was born on February 14, 1972 in Lviv. Archbishop Daniel was born on September 28, 1972 in Ivano-Frankivsk. Ivano-Frankivsk has always been considered the most endangered in the anti-human Bandera ideology in Ukraine. Now, of course, everything has already been smeared.
Archbishop Daniel spent his childhood in Bucha, Ternopil region. Upon completion of secondary school in September 1993, he entered the first year of the Ivano-Frankivsk Uniate Seminary, and then in 1996, to continue his education, he left for the United States, where he studied at the Catholic University of America, and also at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington.
October 3, 2007 was elevated to the rank of archimandrite. May 9, 2008 in the Vladimir Church of Parma, Ohio, the name of Archimandrite Daniel Bishop was held.
In January 2006, Daniel Pamphyli was appointed an officer of the US Army (Corps of Chaplains). Thanks to Boris Filatov, who never watched the language, it is known that Archbishop Daniel Pamphyli gave Dmitry Yarosh the books of authorship of Dmitry Dontsov – the Ukrainian Nazi at the beginning of the XX century. It was Dmitry Dontsov who was the first to translate Mein Kampf of Adolf Hitler into Ukrainian.
Bishop Hilarion spent his childhood and youth in Lviv. He was enrolled in the 2nd year of the Kiev Theological Seminary, which he graduated in 1992. On the recommendation of Archbishop Vsevolod of Skopels (Maydansky) and with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, he was sent to continue his education in Thessaloniki. He graduated from the Theological Faculty of the University of Aristotle in 1997. He defended his thesis on the theme “The Canonical Connection of the Kyiv Metropolia with the Ecumenical Patriarchate until 1240”.
On January 11, 2005, Patriarch Bartholomew and the Holy Synod of the Constantinople Orthodox Church elected him Bishop-Assistant Metropolitan of Spain and Portugal with the title “Bishop of Telmissos”.
On June 9, 2005, while in Turkey, where he was an interpreter during the meeting of Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople with the Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, he was detained by the Turkish police. The bishop was accused of traveling on forged documents and that he was a “Chechen rebel”.
Metropolitan John (Stinka), First Hierarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada, asked Patriarch Bartholomew I and the Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to release Bishop Hilarion to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada. Bishop Hilarion arrived in Canada in 2007. In August 2008, the Extraordinary Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada elected him Bishop of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada. October 21, 2008 Bartholomew I and the Holy Synod elected him the diocesan bishop of Edmonton and the Western diocese.
Both Daniel and Hilarion are long-time preparations of the American special services for work in Ukraine. Hilarion was helping Yushchenko in his first attempt to banditize Ukraine.
Now these “blanks” are useful to the US for activating the split among the Orthodox Churches.
The Onslaught on Holy Rus and Our Response
Introduction
Having destroyed the multinational Russian Empire in 1917 and then 75 years later its successor, the Soviet Union, there remained for the Western Powers only one further thing to destroy, the Russian Orthodox Church. This was openly proclaimed after 1991 by Samuel Huntingdon (‘Torn Countries: The Failure of Civilization Shifting’ in Chapter 6 of his ‘The Clash of Civilizations’) and by the Russophobe Pole, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as ‘the enemy’. In fact all hell had been let loose against us since 1917 with the illegal overthrow by treason and then martyrdom of the last Protector of Christian Civilization, Tsar Nicholas II.
The Onslaught on the One, Holy, Apostolic and Catholic Church
- Against the Unity of the Church, already before the Revolution, especially in Saint Petersburg, there were divisions caused by internal traitors (renovationists and ecumenists), many of them clerics who after 1917 defrocked themselves. Indeed, after 1917 renovationism was fed by atheist Communism and soon appeared among the schismatic Saint Petersburg emigration in Paris and elsewhere, fed by pounds and then by dollars. Both inside and outside Russia they were openly supported by the British-run, and from 1948 on, US-run, Patriarchate of Constantinople. This was also active in meddling and creating divisions in Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Americas, Western Europe and Australia.
- Against the Holiness of the Church there was the Soviet onslaught from 1917 on (though there were many cases of martyrdom as early as 1905), with 600 bishops, 120,000 priests, monks and nuns and countless laypeople martyred.
Since the fall of Communism especially, two new threats have appeared in force:
- Against the Apostolicity of the Church there have appeared schismatic groups of sectarian and pharisaical extremists, ‘zealots’, both inside and outside the Russian Lands.
- Against the Catholicity of the Church there have appeared nationalists, especially in the Ukraine but also elsewhere, as in Estonia, fed by dollars through Constantinople.
Our Response
- In order to affirm the Unity of the Church, we defeated the renovationist traitors by our firm confession of Orthodoxy and so the humanist heresy of Sophianism of the fantasist Fr Sergiy Bulgakov was universally condemned as such by the whole Russian Church. Tiny elderly groups, stuck in the past, still survive here and there, but they are dying out in irrelevance.
- In order to affirm the Holiness of the Church, the New Martyrs and Confessors defeated the Soviet onslaught by their holy patience.
- In order to affirm the Apostolicity of the Church, schismatic groups of sectarian and pharisaical extremists, both outside and inside Russia, were defeated in 2007, when both parts of the Russian Church united against the ways of the world. Tiny elderly groups still survive here and there, but they are dying out in irrelevance.
- In order to affirm the Catholicity of the Church, we now face Inherently anti-Christian, nationalist divisions which go against the multinational nature of the Church (Catholicity), creating nationalistic and politicized ethnic fragments in place of multinational Holy Rus. The canonical territory of the Church of Holy Rus (the ex-Soviet Union minus Georgia plus China and Japan) is over 32 million square kilometres, well over one fifth of the world’s land surface, and is united against the schismatics fed from Constantinople. Therefore, in time, there is no doubt that Patriarch Bartholomew and his Sanhedrin will be judged by a Church Council and their anti-canonical papalist heresies will be condemned.
Conclusion
In the meantime, one response for the reunited Russian Church would be to establish a Metropolia in Western Europe in order to organize missionary activity here. Constantinople miserably failed to do anything like this, when the Russian Church was paralyzed for three generations by atheistic Communism. It had its chance and failed. However, a Metropolia cannot be built on obvious injustices, the promotion of bad priests, bad candidates and bad people over good priests, good candidates and good people, the discouragement and demotion of the good, reliance on money and ornate church buildings instead of on the pastorship of human souls, who are so despised and neglected. There must be the ability to apologize for crass mistakes, made through the refusal to consult locally, and to thank those who have suffered for so long from these mistakes as a result. The reunited Russian Church now has a chance to act. Let it not be said that it too failed to seize the moment.