Category Archives: Decivilisation

Paris: Violent Extremism Breeds Violent Extremism

In the eleventh century, the Western world, then meaning only some parts of Western Europe, finally rejected any kind of spiritual centre outside itself and made itself into its own spiritual centre. Thus, having become ethnocentric, it started to view all other civilizations as cannon fodder for its wholly unprincipled and egoistic purposes. All other civilizations became ‘good’ if they supported the exploitative and genocidal egoism of the West, but ‘barbaric’, ‘backward’, ‘primitive’ and ‘anti-democratic’ if they did not.

For example, the Jewish elite was useful to finance its tribal wars at various points in the Middle Ages, or to finance the Reformation and the wars that followed it (like Cromwell’s in Britain and Ireland), or to finance its twentieth-century ‘world’ (in fact Western) wars, but when ordinary Jews were not needed for this purpose they could be massacred.

For example, the Muslim world could be massacred, as in the eleventh century in the Iberian Peninsula, as in the Crusades, as today in the Gaza Strip, because Muslims are ‘in the way’. However, when it suited and suits the unprincipled purposes of the West, the Muslim world could and can become its closest ally, as in the anti-Christian Crimean War and in Bulgaria in the 19th century when the West supported anti-Christian massacres by Muslims, as in the West’s contemporary support of barbaric anti-Christian dictatorships in Saudi Arabia (whose Muslim fanatics were responsible for 9/11 but which was not invaded), in Qatar and Bahrein, as in Chechnia, Kosovo and Bosnia, where the West supported the establishment of anti-Christian Muslim criminal mafia governments, as in Afghanistan, where the CIA set up Al-Qaida, as in Iraq, where the CIA-imposed dictator Hussein was then betrayed by the West once he had outlived his usefulness and lived to see his country pillaged and over a million of his people massacred and exiled, as in Libya, where Britain and France bombed the legitimate regime to pieces and ensured that its armouries were pillaged by Muslim fanatics, as in Syria, where the West financed and trained fanatical Muslim terrorists and encouraged their own Western-born jihadis to fight there – until they started carrying their jihad into Iraq and now into France, or as in the Crimea where it supports the Muslim Tartar minority against the Christian Russian majority.

Thus, modern ‘radical Islam’ is a Western invention. Arms for the never to be justified barbaric atrocity of the outrage in Paris came from the arms-dealing mafia in Kosovo and from Libya. Sow the wind and you will reap the whirlwind. Government elites in Western Europe (as also in the USA, Canada and Australia) have over the last sixty years brought into their countries tens of millions of Muslims, to be exploited by their industrialists in low-paid jobs. The elites never consulted their peoples they dictate to about their immigration policies – the elites live in wealthy, white-skinned areas and do not see what they have done. Now they face the backlash. This began with the sadistic terrorist Breivik in Norway. Now it is clearly visible in Germany and France.

In one sense the extremist and totally unjustifiable atrocity in Paris is successive French governments’ own fault. Having committed atrocities in the Muslim world for centuries (not least by slaughtering two million in its colonial war in Algeria fifty and sixty years ago or in Libya a score of months ago), the French now see Muslims bringing atrocities to France. Having in the French Revolution officially renounced its own Christian roots and opened the door to freedom for blasphemy, French governments have created all the conditions for a spiritual vacuum, for unprincipled and cynical belieflessness. But nature abhors a vacuum and the devil always fills it. The renunciation of Christian spirituality in the West has led to a vacuum which has been filled by the satanic spirituality of terrorism. The totally unjustifiable atrocity in Paris is but a consequence of the West’s own spiritual crisis of unbelief and faithlessness.

Western violent extremism in the Muslim world has bred Muslim violent extremism in the Western world. To our great sorrow, the atrocity in Paris will be repeated elsewhere in the Western world by Western-born and Western-bred Muslim terrorists. And these will in turn bring a violent backlash for Muslims living in the West. The terrorist atrocities that the West has committed with bombs, uranium-tipped shells, bullets and drones in Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria are now spreading to the West, exactly as predicted. He who sows the wind shall indeed reap the whirlwind. The Western world has brought this atrocity on itself.

Russian Orthodox are Pro-European, Pro-Greek and Pro-American because we are Pro-Christian

Although the revolution in the values expressed and lived by the Russian Federation over the last generation is far from complete, nevertheless it is not an exaggeration to call that transformation in question a revolution. From a consistently militant atheist ideology, that which produced the horrors of the Gulag and lasted for seventy-five years, it has passed in twenty-five years to an ever more Christian stance, one which shames the modern West. Little wonder that today’s militant atheist Western governments, whether in the US, Western Europe or among their nationalist puppets in Eastern Europe and Istanbul, are annoyed. This revolution in values has taken place through mass baptism and the return of many Russian Orthodox to uncompromised Christian values, known as Russian Orthodox values.

This means that we sympathize with all who confess those values or values close to them, whatever their label. As the Western ruling class has ever more quickly abandoned those Christian values in recent decades and reverted to the pagan values of Ancient Rome, it has distanced itself and isolated itself from its own faithful people, the patriotic Christian minorities of Western Europe and North America. Moreover, at the same time that ruling class has distanced itself from the faithful in countries which are at least formally still respectful of Christianity, whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or in still free, non-EU Eastern Europe, in Serbia, Montenegro, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, the Ukraine and, above all, the Russian Federation, which stands apart because of its size and importance.

Here we speak not only of the apostasy of the Western ruling class by its imposition by force and intimidation of State-run abortion and euthanasia, ‘gay parades’ and ‘homosexual marriage’ or of the establishment of satanic organizations. Here we speak not only of the moral and cultural imperialism which ends the freedom of other countries to live by their traditional values. Here we speak not only of political correctness, that intolerant, neo-puritan ideology just as Spirit-less as the materialism of the old Soviet Union. We also speak of imposing sanctions on other countries for their Christian behaviour and fomenting civil wars in them, supplying arms, indebting them, supporting genocide in them and invading them either militarily or economically in order to exploit their natural resources and markets.

These Russian Orthodox, or uncompromised Christian, values tie in not only with traditional Western Christian, but also to a surprising extent with traditional Islamic, Judaic, Hindu and Buddhist values. The Russian Orthodox support for Tradition is all the more striking when we look at certain smaller Local Orthodox Churches, members of whose elites have under political pressure shown tendencies to abandon the integrity of the Faith, despite the Universal Orthodox Tradition dating back nearly 2,000 years and the views of their own faithful. Having lived and worked in Greece for one year, learned Greek, loved Greece and made pilgrimages to Mt Athos and in 1979 met there Fr Ephraim (now in the USA), I have in recent days been warmed by the support of the Greek faithful for the Tradition.

Thus, the current petition against the ‘new’ pro-Vatican ecclesiology of the Phanar (in fact an ecclesiology that was evolved in the 1920s) with its neo-imperialist, eastern papist interpretation of Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon, is spreading through Greece and Cyprus and the Greek Diaspora. Although an internal petition addressed to the Greek faithful, it has the full support of Russian Orthodox faithful and the faithful of many other Local Churches whose hierarchies are free and have not been subjected to foreign political and financial pressure. For just as the Russian faithful are pro-European inasmuch as we support the True West, the Orthodox West of the first millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church cannot be anything but pro-Greek Orthodox, for She received the faith from Greek Orthodox.

And just as the Russian faithful support True Greece, Orthodox Greece, the Athonite elders, not the fake, masonic Greece that the Western elites are trying to foist on Greeks, so also we support True America, not the warmongering, anti-Christian America that we see today. Thus, the present visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) to the Russian Church is symbolic of the Russian Church’s love for all who confess Orthodoxy. After years and even decades of internal troubles, the OCA may at last be returning to the confession of Orthodoxy as her new relations with the Russian Orthodox Mother Church show. For the OCA, the time of decision is here – to reintegrate the Russian Orthodox Tradition by giving up the fantasies of the decadent past or else to remain outside the mainstream on a compromised limb.

From Further Correspondence and Conversations

Following the questions and answers published on 23 November, we now publish further questions and answers resulting from them.

Q: Does anyone try and stop you from writing?

A: Oh yes, two or three anonymous individuals, probably from both extreme left and extreme right (interestingly, their views are identical – the extremes always meet) try censorship. The fact that, aggressively and dictatorially, they try to impose their censorship on free expression means that they are wrong. If they wish to read what they agree with, they can turn to any of the conformist, secularist media; why do they try and censor those who are Orthodox Christians and so think otherwise?

As they say of those on the extreme left: ‘There is no-one as intolerant as a liberal’. As regards those on the extreme right, they are by definition illiberal. I ignore extremists, especially anonymous ones, because they are motivated not by love but by hatred. Interestingly, earlier this month I met in London one who had not been anonymous and had tried to silence me some years ago. He has completely changed his life and apologized for what he had asked me to do six years ago. People change, people mature with experience. Give them time for repentance. We do not repeat their intolerance, but show patience.

Q: You said in the first questions and answers that some old calendarists are concerned by the possible 2016 All-Orthodox meeting. But when you compare the piety of old calendarists to new calendarists, can’t you support the former?

A: An example. Last month a Greek woman (dressed in jeans and of course without any head covering) came from London to visit our Church. The first question she asked me was: ‘Why aren’t there any pews?’ (!). Such is the result of decades of modernism in the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the diaspora. But why would I compare an unchurched person from a new calendar Church with an old calendarist convert? You cannot justify your schism by comparing yourself with someone who is unChurched and whose Church attendance consists of 20 minutes per year on Easter night.

I can remember in 1977 meeting an unChurched old calendarist from an old calendarist village in northern Greece. I was not impressed. Let us compare like with like. There are devout people who live on the new calendar (because they are forced to, definitely not new calendarists) and devout people who live on the old calendar (freely, but definitely not old calendarists). And there are non-devout people who live on both calendars too.

On the subject of that possible 2016 meeting, I should also have mentioned that, apart from the dispute between Constantinople with the Czechs and Slovaks, the dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem may also prevent it from taking place. And not only that. This week the US politician Joe Biden, whose son Hunter son has conveniently landed a very well-paid job in the energy sector in the Ukraine, was again in Istanbul, discussing the Ukraine – with a Patriarchate which has no jurisdiction whatsoever there. All the notorious CIA mouthpieces of the Phanar were present at the meeting, ready to take their orders from an organization that has a history of mass murder.

Q: What could happen as a result?

A: If Biden bribes the Phanar into setting up a pro-CIA schism in the Ukraine, as the Phanar did in Estonia, then there will be a major schism, with the elite of Constantinople falling away from the Church altogether, maybe its Patriarch becoming the irrelevant departmental head of the Uniats in an obscure bureau in the Vatican. However, if such a schism occurred, only the elite would fall away, as at the Council of Florence, a few faithful bishops, new St Marks of Ephesus, most monks, parish clergy and people would remain in the Church, perhaps going under the Church of Greece. As the proverb says; ‘A fish rots from the head’.

Q: Is bribery a realistic option?

A: Yes. Remember that the former US ambassador in Kiev, John Herbst, already set up the Agathangel schism in Odessa. Divide and rule is Washington’s motto and even if it costs a few tens of millions of dollars, they don’t care. They just print the money off in Washington and call it ‘quantitative easing’. Remember that it cost them $5 billion, as Victoria Nuland admitted, just to set up the current lame duck regime in Kiev. With $17 trillion dollars of debt (and that is how the Soviet Union was defeated – the US could go into massive debt, but the USSR could not), that is a drop in the ocean.

Q: What could happen if Constantinople fell away?

A: In such a case the remaining faithful Local Churches could hold a real and free Council in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. This Monastery is almost ready for this. I have been there. From there the Orthodox Truth could be proclaimed in its integrity to the whole world, which would then see the essential, underlying unity of the Church, free of CIA manipulations. In such a case we could expect the Local Churches concerned to drop their compromises, such as the new calendar, and return to the fullness of Orthodoxy. Possibly the Patriarchate of Moscow could, as three-quarters of the Orthodox Church, become the first Patriarchate in the diptychs. That would be a necessary update to the reality of the Church today. Certainly, that would completely change the state of several Local Churches from CIA control and nationalist stagnation to missionary dynamism.

Q: How will Antichrist come to power?

A: There are two techniques for establishing Antichrist’s New World Order, that is, for obtaining the Global Dictatorship of the One World Government.

First of all, you can bribe naïve leaders and organize paid mobs of the unemployed and criminals to create riots in order to overthrow the legitimate government (called a ‘regime’ by the US-run Western media which duly demonize the legitimate government). This is politely known as ‘regime-change’, which is also the aim of Western sanctions. This is what has been tried unsuccessfully in Moscow and more recently in Hong Kong, but successfully in Kiev – a technique that had been well-practised in what the CIA-paid media dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’, a series of catastrophes which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives so far.

I think Washington may soon try the same technique of ‘regime-change’ in Kishinev (where it has banned all parties except pro-EU ones – the Kiev scenario again), Belgrade, Prague and Budapest – capitals of three countries whose leaders are now valiantly resisting US and EU bribery, bullying and threats for being independent. Of course, this does not happen in Tokyo, Berlin, Paris and London, because there the regimes (often elected with less than 30% of the popular vote) are only vassals, heads of US vassal states. Where the selected elite (who call us ‘plebs’) are already in your pocket, you do not have to unseat it – you already control the country

The second technique is to use the media, including the social media, to demonize a government and then to bomb its country back to the Stone Age. This is the Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya scenario. Once you have bombed the country to smithereens and unleashed interminable tribal infighting, you are then free to plunder its natural resources, so dividing and ruling, because, again, you already control the country.

Q: In the first questions and answers you mentioned the fact that there was support in the Russian Church for Kerensky after the 1917 Revolution. How do you explain that?

A: Apart from the naïve, ignorant and deluded, there were treacherous renovationists. They had been infiltrating the Russian Church since the early 1900s. Think of the twice married Fr George Gapon who led the 1905 protest and soon after hanged himself. These people wanted a socialist Orthodoxy! The 1920s renovationist schism under heretics like the renovationist Vvedensky and the Paris schism in the emigration did not come from nowhere – the highly politicized elements responsible for these schisms had long ago infiltrated the Church. Such self-deluded individuals call the Patriarch Antichrist or Judas and still dare to take communion. Such blasphemy burns them alive, as it did the Old Ritualists. Believe me, I have seen it happen. Such individuals always end up outside the Church, embittered through their self-delusion and hatred and often commit suicide.

Q: Are there still renovationists in the Russian Church?

A: There are still a few here and there, but very, very few and they are dying out. Most have left the Church, though some have joined Constantinople.

Q: You seem to overlook the role of Catholicism. Surely it, and not Orthodoxy, could save the West?

A: The West has categorically rejected Catholicism. And here I do not only mean the Protestant West, which has directly become atheist. I also mean the once Catholic countries of Europe. In Europe Catholicism is in freefall, even in a country like Poland, where the number of those practising Catholicism has halved in the last 25 years. Why?

It is because Catholicism is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Catholicism is the father of Protestantism, which is the father of the modern atheist West. No new pope, even if he is a master of PR, is thoroughly anti-Orthodox and pro-Uniat, was voted in by Washington and has the CIA-backed Western media behind him, can change anything. It is 1,000 years too late.

Q: What do you mean by Catholicism as part of the problem?

A: Historically, the West has degenerated from Christ (Orthodoxy) to Feudalism (Catholicism), then to Democracy (Protestantism) and so to Antichrist (Post-Protestantism). We can see this in many examples. For example, feudalism appeared in England very suddenly, in 1066. It simply did not exist here before. In other words, feudalism is the socio-political and economic result of Catholicism. Or, to take another example from today, the present genocide in Catholic Mexico (100,000 dead in the last twelve months, it is said) is being caused by feudal drug-traffickers, who are holed up on their castle-ranches, and pay serfs to work for them. (Of course, the drug-traffickers only exist because a section of the US population takes drugs. Otherwise they would go out of business).

As regards Russia, serfdom, that is feudalism, was only introduced in the 18th century by Western and Westernized rulers like Peter I and Catherine II. Significantly, they are praised to the skies and called ‘the Great’ by both Western and Soviet historians. Why? Because they both represented feudal empires. The West used feudalism to maintain its colonial empires and the Soviets reintroduced feudalism to maintain their empire. For what was Stalinist collectivization if not refeudalization? Take the land from the people and slaughter those who resist, that is refeudalization.

The West hates the fact that Western-introduced serfdom was abolished only after a century and a half in Russia, whereas in the West it lasted for centuries. In Russia, Orthodoxy defeated serfdom and Russian Orthodox have always opposed and destroyed slavery, freeing slaves. However, in the West the ruling Catholic ideology was inherently feudal so it could not be defeated, it could only degenerate into Protestantism, the next step to Antichrist.

Similarly, we can see the example of Western democracy in Russia, which only lasted for seven months in 1917. Why? Because for Western democracy, as it is called, to exist, you must have a Protestant mentality. This why it never worked elsewhere and cannot be imposed elsewhere, where it is always accompanied by massive corruption, as in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latin America, South Vietnam, Japan, Thailand – or the Ukraine. From Western democracy in Russia, it was only one step to Antichrist, that is, to Bolshevism. True, this so-called Western democracy has lasted much longer in the West, where Protestantism existed, but even here we can see that today it too is degenerating, as Protestantism has been rejected. Even in the Estonian capital they are now selling off the main Lutheran church because it has gone bankrupt.

Western democracy has outlived its purpose, which was to overthrow Christian monarchs. With that done, Antichrist has been readying himself to take over from the secular presidents, prime ministers and chancellors who replaced the Christian monarchs. We saw this with Napoleon and Hitler, who replaced Christian leaders and were both prefigurations of Antichrist and both invaded Russia, just as the US is trying to invade Russia today.

We can see this today in the replacement of democracy and its degeneration in Western countries, which are quite freely introducing ever more Fascist legislation, with selective assassinations by the secret services, censorship of the media, militarization of the police, arrest without charge, deprivation of citizens of their passports, refusing them the right to live where they want, surveillance of their every movement through camera networks and State spying on e-mails and phone calls etc.

Q: Does Orthodox Russia have friends in the West?

A: Yes. Apart from the local Russian Orthodox and Orthodox allies of other nationalities, there are still minorities in the West who have a sense of national tradition, sovereignty and identity. All of them support Russia in some way. The enemy is the cosmopolitan Brussels/Berlin bureaucrat who takes his orders from Washington and has only contempt for real Europeans and our patriotism. There is in preparation an alliance between Orthodox Russia and healthy ‘sovereignist’ forces in at present enslaved Western Europe.

Q: What chance is there of the return of an Orthodox Emperor, a Tsar, who could protect all Orthodox worldwide from Western bullying and so delay the rule of Antichrist?

A: The Church can work in any political system and survive, as history proves, but our ideal is a Christian State, which incarnates the values of the Church, creating a Christian Civilization. If that exists, Antichrist cannot come. Our situation since 1917 has been abnormal; there has been no Christian Emperor, no Tsar, and so the Local Churches have been swayed this way and that way by secular political forces, whether Communist or Capitalist, Atheist or Mammonist, however the end has not yet come. The question is whether we are to return to normality, the Christian Empire, or whether we are to continue on the path towards Antichrist.

Thus, the last nearly 100 years have been quite exceptional, all should have ended in 1917, but we have been granted further time by the mercy of God. Nevertheless, it is still a stark case of the path to the Apocalypse or the path to the Restoration. But there are reasons for thinking that Restoration is still possible because of the sacrifices of the New Martyrs and Confessors during the first generation after 1917, on which the whole rebirth of the Russian Church has been founded.

Since the long and slow process of overthrowing Antichrist in Russia, which effectively began in 1941 with the first Nazi invasion (the second Nazi invasion being in the Ukraine in 2014) and the revival of the Church inside Russia, we have begun to see the three different stages in the restoration of the Church. These are: Orthodoxy; the People; Sovereignty. They come in the opposite order to what we would expect, Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People, because we are putting history into reverse.

First of all, we have seen the process of restoration of Orthodoxy, with the end of outward persecution by Communism and the end of inward persecution by renovationism. This first stage in this process is ongoing, but is almost at an end now. The outward persecution by the Communists has ended. And both the renovationists who were supported by the Phanar and the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and who were still active in the Diaspora until recently, and the neo-renovationists who came to prominence inside Russia in the 1990s and 2000s (with the support of the old Diaspora renovationists), have literally been dying out. The latter were rejected outright by Patriarch Alexei II and elders like Fr John Krestyankin and have been defeated. That is why the last ones are so aggressive. The re-establishment and reassertion of Orthodoxy inside the Russian Orthodox Church is clear. Only a few treacherous individuals inside Russia and in the Diaspora are still resisting – but they are living in the past, irrelevant.

The second stage in the process is the revival of the People as a believing force. This stage is ongoing, but has very far to go. The missionary witness of the Church to the masses has scarcely begun, but at least it has begun. Only when the Church has been allowed to go out into the whole world by Divine Providence and preach the authentic Gospel, which has been so compromised by Catholicism, Protestantism and Modernism, can we move on to the third stage. Already, however, there has been the first political emigration after 1917, which brought Orthodoxy to countries which previously knew nothing of it, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a second economic emigration, far larger than before. All this is the Providential opportunity to witness.

Only when people have been Churched, when they are ready for the new Orthodox Emperor, the Tsar, can that restoration occur. In other words, there can be no restoration of the Sovereign Christian Empire until the baptized masses want it, until they have repented in preparation for it. Only repentance can bring restoration. And we are still far from this – though I must say we are much closer than even five years ago, let alone twenty-five years ago, when all this was still only a dream.

For Russia has now begun to play the role of the country which restrains or withholds the movement towards Antichrist. That is why the forces of this world are so aggressively attacking Russia at the moment, trying through so-called sanctions to punish Her. The most ruthlessly logical and consistently anti-Christian Western elitists like Brzezinski in the US and Bildt in Sweden have publicly declared that the West must destroy the Russian Orthodox Church (in order to hasten the arrival of Antichrist – though they are so delusional that they do not even believe in Antichrist).

Q: If that repentance or process of Churching happens, who will the new Emperor be?

A: We do not and cannot know. That is in God’s hands or rather in the hands of the Mother of God, for since the forced and forged abdication of 1917 the Empire has been in the hands of the Sovereign Mother of God. Our task is to repent, not to argue about possible candidates. God will choose the right candidate for us and it will be plain to all Churched Orthodox that this is the right choice.

Resisting and Delaying Antichrist: The Prophetic Vision of the Russian Orthodox Church Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence and Conversations

Q: What do you think from an Orthodox viewpoint of the recent G-20 meeting in Brisbane, where much was made of the war in the Ukraine.

A: In Brisbane Western politicians – not world leaders, as they pretentiously call themselves – made much of the civil war in the Ukraine. This was because they caused it and are continuing it. At Brisbane a clear message was given to the Western bullies by the free world, led by Russia: If the West continues to destabilize, overthrow democracy by bribing mobs and destroy the sovereignty of the Ukraine, then Russia will extend its sanctions against the Western world, possibly closing Russian air space to it. The Obamas, Bidens, Camerons, Hollandes and Merkels of the West face self-imposed isolation.

The Russian Federation, the Eurasian Economic Union, China, India, much of Latin America, nearly one half of the world, are working towards a new world order and will not tolerate arrogant Western bullying. That has already caused so much bloodshed and chaos in genocidal bombing, invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan and in CIA-organized ‘coloured revolutions’ in Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. Libya was the last straw, but even now there are aggressive individuals in the US, whose minds are so power-crazed that they openly talk of starting a Third World War against Russia and China.

Q: Do you think there is any hope that heads of some countries in the European Union will speak out against this US-centred bullying?

A: The EU has more or less become an island off the western coast of the USA, in other words, a US colony or ‘protectorate’, in effect its next state, and is governed by puppets and economic thugs, as we saw in Greece and Spain. The US has isolated Europe from its own roots and its own interests. Until the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is restored, as in the early 1900s, there is no hope for Europe. Remarkably, however, the leaders of some small countries in the EU have protested, notably the leaders of Hungary and the Czech Republic. They have of course been condemned for that by the US-run EU media.

Q: What about the leaders of once Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and Non-EU Serbia and Montenegro?

A: Apart from Serbia, where Orthodoxy is still to some extent a political force, the elites of all those countries have betrayed the Orthodox Faith and their own peoples. We can expect nothing of such elites. They can only think of payments from Brussels into their Swiss bank accounts.

Q: When you say ‘the US has isolated Europe’, what do you mean by the US?

A: The US means the plutocratic financiers, industrialists and arms-merchants who saw their opportunity and immigrated to the US from Europe, from where they had already financed slavery, over 200 years ago and now run the US. I do not of course mean the American people. Until the end of the 1950s there was still among many ordinary Americans a small-town, Bible-based culture, however deficient and partial. That has been more or less destroyed by the plutocrats and is lamented by such popular American singers as Don McClean and Johnny Cash in nostalgic songs like American Pie and Family Bible. Americans were the first victims of the plutocrats, the first victims of the ‘US’, as we saw already in the US Civil War. There is nothing that Satan loves more than wars where brother kills brother, whether in the US or the Ukraine.

Q: Has not Russia suffered from the Western sanctions imposed because of the Ukraine?

A: There are naturally problems resulting from them, but the main result of Western bullying because of Russia’s protection of the Ukraine, so-called ‘sanctions’, has been for Russians to refind their identity. Providentially, the Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy, is preparing Russia for the future, preparing it to overcome the confusion and decadent westernization of the last 25 years, to realize that Russia has its own identity, path and role. If the Western elite really wants to start a Third World War, it must now realize that Russians will no longer simply lie down and agree to lose that War, their country and, above all, their Christian Faith to Mammon.

This is the same situation as in the thirteenth century when the Mongols invaded Russia. Until then Russians had been divided; everything changed afterwards as they found unity against the common enemy and petty squabbles were forgotten. So today Russia was divided before the Western invasion of the Ukraine, now it is finding unity once more. Today’s extraordinary consensus of national unity around President Putin has not existed in Russia for exactly 100 years, since the First World War, when Russia also united against aggressive Western enemies.

Q: To move on, there has been talk recently of the forthcoming All-Orthodox Council in 2016 and much worry has been expressed about it. Do you share in those worries?

A: No. To worry about this is really to show a lack of faith in Divine Providence and in the Church, which is not a mere human institution, but a Divino-human organism. First of all, nobody knows if there will be a Council, let alone whether one is forthcoming; remember that ‘man proposes but God disposes’. True, a meeting of several Orthodox bishops is planned in two years’ time, but a meeting is not in itself a Council. And no-one knows with the situation between Constantinople and the Czechs and Slovaks if even that meeting will take place. And who knows who the Patriarch of Constantinople will be in two years’ time.

Even if a meeting does take place and politics takes over, it will remain an ineffectual without any consensus. However, if a ‘Council’ takes place, why should that be bad? Surely a Council – rather than a mere meeting – will proclaim the Church and our Orthodox Faith to the whole world, anathematizing all isms, atheism, consumerism, ecumenism, globalism etc. How can that be bad? Remember that only canonical Orthodox will attend, those of disputed canonicity like the OCA, those in schisms, as in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia, those in sects like the old calendarists, as well as heterodox, will not take part.

Q: So why do some worry?

A: I think that those who are worried, for example old calendarists, have a psychological and not theological motivation. They are really just seeking to justify their schisms. For example, they point to the decadence inside the Patriarchate of Constantinople but then forget that Mt Athos and many faithful clergy and people outside the convert fringes are under that Patriarchate. The old calendarists want a Pharisee-like, black and white world, in which they are white and everyone else is black. Such a world does not exist and has never existed. The wheat has always grown alongside the tares. Look at the twelve apostles: most of them betrayed Christ, one did not even repent, but still eleven of them became saints. Old calendarist criticisms are psychologically-motivated self-justification.

Q: But we know there are many real problems between the Local Churches, for example there is the problem of the new calendar.

A: I can recall reading the words of St Justin (Popovich) in the 1970s who denounced the concept of a Council then because the vast majority of Orthodox were living under the yoke of Communism. Then he was right of course, but now the situation is quite different. Today most Orthodox, some 85% of all, are free. True there are some 15% who are not free, who live under what may be called ‘CIA Churches’, but they are a small minority.
Who knows, if this meeting does take place and does become a Council, this may mean that the new calendar hierarchies will repent and return to the Orthodox calendar, giving up the Roman Catholic calendar. Mt Athos gave up that calendar decades ago and now the Polish Church has done so. Others will surely follow. And remember too that the CIA Churches, subject to all manner of Uniatizing and Protestantizing manipulations, are mainly small and their senior representatives elderly. Most of the free Local Churches are young and follow the Tradition. Time is on our side.

Q: What do you mean by ‘CIA Churches’?

A: Those whose leaders are appointed by the CIA, or bribed by the EU and masonic circles, which amounts to the same thing.

Q: What is the role of the Russian Church among the other Local Churches?

A: As three-quarters of the whole Church, we have a special responsibility: our vision, mission and task are prophetic. Our vision, mission and task are resistance and delaying tactics in order to oppose the coming of Antichrist, towards whom the world has been hurtling for the last hundred years and especially for the last fifty years. You remember how Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’? Well, where did the demons who had entered the Russian Empire by 1917, tipped the balance against it and created that evil empire go? They did not disappear back to hell, but, seeing their battle largely lost in Russia, they went to infest the West, where, tragedy of tragedies, they were shown no resistance and even made welcome.

Here is the message of Russia to the West: After 1917 demons took over in Russia but we eventually fought them off because of the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors, because of the strength of the Orthodox Faith and Orthodox culture. Russia says to the West: Follow our example, return to the Orthodox Christ and you too can shake off the demons. But of course the West is so blinded by its towering racial and nationalistic pride that it cannot even see that is being tormented by demons. Indeed, it does not even believe in demons and it rejects the sweetness of the Resurrection of Christ, Whom it considers to be an ‘uneducated Asiatic’.

Q: To say that the Russian Church’s role is to oppose the coming of Antichrist is a very serious statement, with many implications.

A: Yes, it is very serious because it means that the Russian Orthodox Church is a sort of litmus test. The world can be divided into two parts, on the one hand those who are with us, our friends, those who are also resisting and delaying the coming of Antichrist, and, on the other hand, those who resist the Russian Church and, consciously or, more usually, unconsciously, are working for Antichrist’s coming. Those who unconscious and naively think they are working for ‘freedom, democracy and humanity’ etc are pawns in Antichrist’s game. They would be shocked if they realized it and then they would repent.

In that respect the Pussy Riot incident, so completely and so obviously stage-managed by the West, was highly symbolic. There we clearly saw who is for Antichrist and who is against. Those who supported Pussy Riot, words which are simple code for the sex and violence of modern Western ‘culture’, including fifth columnist, nominally Orthodox intellectuals, some of them even clergy, modernist heterodox, the Western media and so-called human rights activists, are all working for Antichrist.

Q: You say that to resist and delay Antichrist is the task of the Russian Church. But what practically can the Russian Church do that the other Local Churches cannot?

A: The Russian Church alone is able, when the time is ripe, to set up the infrastructure for Metropolias in the Americas, Asia, Australasia and Western Europe and also help the Patriarchate of Alexandria to become the true Church of Africa and stop being a Greek colony run by the EU-controlled Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens. The other Local Churches are too small, too weak, too nationalistic and, in the cases of the CIA Churches, too unfree, to do this.

Q: This sounds like papism, setting up a worldwide Church?

A: Not at all. Papism is about empire-building and centralization, which, true, has become the ethos of many in the modern Patriarchate of Constantinople and also in its time affected careerist, nationalistic State appointees in the Russian Church before the Revolution. Today the Russian Church is about setting up Metropolias as foundations for new Local Churches, as has already happened in Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and as is under way in Japan and China. These countries are parts of its canonical territory, but will remain so only for as long as the Churches there are too small to gain autocephaly.

The aim is not empire-building, which is centralization, but decentralization, through laying the foundations for and then establishing new autocephalous Local Churches, as His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II said in 2003 when speaking of a future Metropolia in Western Europe. We have as our model not the manmade, papist, unionist, filioquist, rationalist god of Western philosophers, but the real Christian God of the Holy Trinity revealed in all Power and Glory in the New Testament, unity in diversity.

Q: Do you think that other territories will be added to the canonical territory of Rus apart from China and Japan?

A: Certainly. I think that eventually in Europe Hungary may be added, and outside Europe in South-East Asia, with the Russian Orthodox missions already there, Thailand and Laos, and I think perhaps one day Iran too.

Q: So the rest of the world, except for Africa and the other territories in the jurisdiction of the other 13 canonical Local Churches, can be covered by the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)?

A: Yes. The Church Outside Russia actually means the Church Outside Rus, outside the Russian lands. And Rus at present only covers lands of the former Soviet Union – except for Georgia – including the Ukraine, Estonia and so on, and, as we have said, China and Japan. ROCOR can cover the rest, except those countries that form the canonical territories of other Local Churches.

Q: But those countries ‘outside Rus’ often have Orthodox populations which are under other Local Churches. So how can they come under ROCOR?

A: They cannot ‘come under’ ROCOR, I said, ‘can be covered by ROCOR’, not ‘come under’. ROCOR is the Church Outside Rus. Unlike the Church inside Rus, which has a canonical territory, the Church Outside Rus has no canonical territory. However, we do have a shared territory, a territory which we can cover, and where we can have a canonical flock.

Q: What do you mean by canonical flock?

A: All those of all nationalities who live outside the canonical territory of Rus and freely belong to and confess the Russian Orthodox Church and Tradition. And at present nobody, including the US and EU elite, can stop us from belonging to ROCOR.

Q: With such a definition, where does the ‘Orthodox Church in America’, the OCA, come? That after all is in North America, on a territory covered by ROCOR, and the OCA was founded through the Russian Church.

A: I don’t know where the OCA comes. You must ask its members. The OCA was a temporary Cold War creation of Soviet times, largely made up not of descendants of subjects of the Russian Empire, but of descendants of subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For nearly 45 years now its canonicity has been disputed and it has been torn by internal dissensions. Like all conglomerates, its different parts are torn in different directions.

I think that instead of sitting between two (and sometimes more than two) chairs, one day it will split apart, with a small majority, especially but not only in Alaska, ‘Russian America’, returning to the Russian Church and spiritual freedom and integrity, and a large minority, under the influence of sectarian American nationalism and possibly under the direct influence of the US administration, going off to liberal, ecumenistic convert groups, the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople and some to the Uniats.

Q: And what about the Paris Jurisdiction? It claims to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’. Where does that fit into such a definition?

A: It too left the Russian Church and therefore our affairs do not concern it. As regards its claim, as someone in Paris said to me earlier this year, although the Paris Jurisdiction may claim to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’, the Russian Tradition has not even ‘stayed overnight’ in most of its communities. When you live, as some do, on the Roman Catholic calendar, want the Roman Catholic Easter, have no iconostasis, wear Greek vestments, abbreviate the Liturgy, give communion to Roman Catholics, write against and condemn the Russian Church, refuse to venerate Her martyrs and belong to Her, what sort of ‘Russian Tradition’ is that? That is Uniatism, not Orthodoxy. Apart from in a few last outposts, that claim is a fiction.

Thus, it is very interesting to think back before 2007, before ROCOR and the Church inside Russia entered into canonical communion with one another. Then the Paris Jurisdiction – and its members who colonized the OCA in North America – used to condemn ROCOR as ‘a sect’ for not concelebrating with the Church inside Russia because ROCOR considered that the bishops of the Church inside Russia were not free and therefore could not act canonically. However, as soon as freedom came and ROCOR and the Church inside Russia did start concelebrating, the masonic ethos of the propaganda of the Paris swung around 180 degrees. Then representatives of the Paris Jurisdiction started condemning ROCOR precisely for concelebrating with the Church inside Russia, which they then said was not free!

So they went from criticizing ROCOR for being anti-Moscow to criticizing ROCOR for being pro-Moscow, never recognizing the transformation and liberation of Moscow. It is clear that the point of view of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction is mere self-justification, which is the same psychology for all extremists, whether for the Paris new calendarists or for the Greek old calendarists. In other words, their views are a political manipulation, conditioned by anti-Russian Western political propaganda, whether sent out to manipulate weak hearts and irrational minds by the CIA or by the Vatican, and has nothing to do with spiritual values.

Q: What was it that brought ROCOR and the Church inside Russia into canonical communion?

A: The August 2000 Jubilee Council of the Church inside Russia, which met all three conditions of ROCOR, the canonization of the New Martyrs, the condemnation of collusion with the atheist State, known as sergianism, and the complete rejection of the branch theory, known as ecumenism.

Q: In that case why did ROCOR not enter into communion with the Church inside Russia straightaway in 2000?

A: Very simply because it is one thing to proclaim something at a Council, but quite another to put it into practice. For example, even after the Jubilee Council, at the London Cathedral belonging to the Church inside Russia they still refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs, on the pretext that they had no space on their bare white walls! They also forbade the sale of books written by Fr Seraphim Rose, which were at that time so popular inside Russia. In England ROCOR had to wait for the death of one individual in 2004 and then the departure of other modernists in 2006 to the Paris Jurisdiction before a new Orthodox bishop could be sent from Russia, a bishop chosen on ROCOR’s recommendation, and so we could have local unity.

Many representatives of the Church inside Russia but who lived in the West had been betraying the Russian Church and Tradition for decades, they were compromised. This is partly why ROCOR was so popular. I can remember nearly forty years ago when on a Sunday 600 Russian emigres would be standing in the ROCOR Cathedral in London and at the Patriarchal Cathedral there would be perhaps 200, over half of whom were naïve Non-Russians and visitors who knew no better. In Brussels and Paris the Patriarchal churches were also no more than house chapels. Russians and those who knew the Tradition did not go there.

Remember how, just before the Church Outside Russia and the Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, in 2006 a small convert part of the foreign representation of the Church inside Russia in England and France abandoned Her. Why did this betrayal of the Church which, ironically, was just about to be reunited, take place? Because of two local personality cults, mainly among unintegrated converts, who placed those peculiar cults above the Russian Church and unity with Her. The individualistic mantra of cults and cultishness came before the Church of Christ.

The manipulative leaders of the naïve and misinformed who left had been doing a disservice to the Church inside Russia for decades while Moscow, paralysed by an illegitimate, militant atheist regime, had been able to do nothing about it. The lesson we learn from this is that those who are not integrated into Church life, but have their own agendas, always disintegrate. Interestingly, those who left in England were ardently supported by a rabidly Russophobic British press and, naturally, the State-run BBC.

In other words, locally, it took years for the decisions of the Jubilee Council to be implemented. There were similar situations in other parts of the Church inside Russia, where Soviet-minded individuals and their followers had to leave the scene for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. That is why fundamentally it took seven years for us to progress.

Q: But that was not the only reason for seven years’ delay. ROCOR too had committed faults on its part too, didn’t it?

A: Of course, individuals in ROCOR and in the ROCOR hierarchy had made their mistakes too. This mistake was the confusion between the Soviet Union and Russia. Emigres who had been mere children before the Revolution or who had been born outside Russia or who had been born inside the Soviet Union before 1945 and been cruelly persecuted for the Faith, often could not tell the difference between the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and Russia. In reality, despite the anti-Russian Bolshevik ideology, imported from the West, the Soviet Union had kept much of Orthodox culture.

1917 was not a light switch when the light went off – there was continuity. The victory over Fascism in the Second World War, the education and medical system, the reflexes of justice for the poor and for the Third World, the qualities of generosity, hospitality and mercifulness – they were not Soviet, they are Russian, and come from the Orthodox world view and Orthodox reflexes. On the other hand, the materialistic philosophy of the Soviet Union, the vicious persecution of the Church, the Gulag, all that was of course profoundly evil, satanic. Communism was Orthodoxy without God, just as Mammonism is Protestantism without God.

The mistakes made by some in ROCOR were why the ROCOR hierarchs and those of the Church inside Russia asked each other forgiveness before 2007. Being human, we all make mistakes. No-one is perfect. As a result of mutually asking one another for forgiveness, since 2007 the Church inside Russia has become ever more ‘de-Sovietized’ and ROCOR has become ever more ‘de-ghettoized’, more open and more international. Both parts have benefited enormously, making great strides forward. To ask for forgiveness is always beneficial, creative and dynamic. God gave us all grace for repentance.

The failure of the Paris Jurisdiction to admit its mistakes, unlike the two parts of the Russian Church inside and outside Russia which admitted theirs, is precisely the essential problem of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction. This is due to the unrepentant arrogance usual for intellectuals. In Paris the heirs of those who caused the Revolution through treachery in 1917 are still justifying themselves and their ancestors. For those who are in control in Paris are the heirs of the degradation of the Westernized Russian intelligentsia before the Revolution and their mercilessness. For example, the sins of individual representatives in the Church inside Russia were the sins of political hostages, not of free men. And if you refuse to recognize the repentance of such, you make yourself like the elder brother of the prodigal son, a merciless mountain of towering pride, refusing to take part in the banquet of the loving Father.

Q: So you distinguish between those who ‘control the Paris Jurisdiction’ and its members?

A: Of course. I have been an eyewitness of the process of return of many from the Paris Jurisdiction to both parts of the Russian Church since the 1980s. Sadly, the process of Uniatization that began there, above all from 1981 on, and which I personally tried to combat, has gone much further since then. I personally know of eight priests and deacons and four parishes which have returned from the Paris Jurisdiction since the late 1980s, when they saw through the betrayal of those in control and understood their underlying lack of love for the Russian Church.

Q: Why did Uniatization speed up there from 1981 on?

A: The disintegration of the Paris Jurisdiction began in 1981 after the repose of the ever-memorable Archbishop George (Tarasov), the last Archbishop who had been an adult before the Revolution, indeed a Russian pilot on the Western Front in the First World War. Those who returned after that to the Russian Church in order to keep their integrity, despite the slander that they faced, had realized that the Paris Jurisdiction would not return en masse as a group to the Russian Church, understanding that there were forces in it which were profoundly politicized and Russophobic, the very forces which proudly claim to be ‘apolitical!’ In fact, they are not apolitical, but simply disincarnate, ‘useful’ only to the enemies of the Church, such as the Vatican and Western spy agencies. Indeed, one of those who was in control in the Paris Jurisdiction in the 1980s has recently been proved to have been a senior agent of the French Secret Services. The exodus from there has been such that there are now only two ageing priests left in the Paris Jurisdiction who were brought up in ROCOR and so have a sense of the Tradition

Those of the Paris Jurisdiction who have now departed this life, Metr Evlogy and Vladimir, Archbishops George (Tarasov) and Sergiy (Konovalov), Bishops Methodius (Kulmann), Roman (Zolotov) and Alexander (Tian-Shansky), Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, Archpriests Alexander Rehbinder and Igor Vernik and a mass of others, clergy and people, would have returned to the Russian Church, if they were now alive. Some of these people I knew personally and I am convinced that they would be outraged by the attitude of those who refuse to return to the Russian Church today, 25 years on after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Q: Why?

A: Constantinople had for them only ever been a temporary refuge. It had always been their intention to return to the Russian Church, once She was free, just like us in ROCOR. Today there is no spiritual justification for staying in what is largely not just a Non-Russian, but an anti-Russian jurisdiction. And what is left of that jurisdiction? By and large, apart from a few unintegrated converts in each of a few dozen temporary premises and tiny chapels scattered across France and in neighbouring countries, there are only Rue Daru, mainly populated by those from the ex-Soviet Union, a tragically bankrupt St Sergius Institute, some four small Russian chapels in Paris, two convert groups in Paris, the crumbling church in Biarritz, which undemocratically has not been allowed to return to the Russian Church, and the convent in Bussy. Perhaps 5,000 people in all, and most of them arrivals from the former Soviet Union who have nowhere else to go. Since the 1980s the vital forces have left the Paris Jurisdiction. One priest who left, dear Fr Nikolai Soldatenkov, even took out Russian nationality, partly in order to be able to leave.

Q: Can you give other examples of those you mentioned above who you think would have returned to the Russian Church by now?

A: Yes. Take Metr Evlogy – he himself repented and returned, on paper, to the Russian Church twice, in 1934 and 1945, but was prevented by the freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction from actually doing so. In the 1960s and 1970s both Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev actively tried to return to the Russian Church and suffered for their efforts. As for Bishop Roman (Zolotov), he was a Cossack by family – we had no doubts about him. As for dear Fr Igor Vernik I remember how he used to support the Russian football team against the French football team! And Archpriest Alexander Rehbinder refused to move to the USA in the 1950s because he knew that his many children would lose the Faith in the land of mammon. Archbishop Sergiy (Konovalov), whom I knew when he was a priest, was about to persuade the whole Paris Jurisdiction to move to the Church inside Russia when he died. His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II had hoped that his jurisdiction would become the foundation stone of an autonomous Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe.

Q: Let us get back to ROCOR. Why did only 95% of ROCOR enter into communion with the Church inside Russia in 2007? What about the other 5%?

A: When I left Moscow after my second visit to Soviet Russia in 1976, I promised myself as a Russian Orthodox layman that I would not return until the Russian Church was free from an atheist leader and regime. And indeed when I did return, thirty-one years later, in 2007, it was to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where I concelebrated as a priest of the Church Outside Russia, together with a great many others, with his Holiness Patriarch Alexei II and in the presence of the Orthodox President of the Russian Federation. When in 2007 some 95% of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the by then free Patriarchal Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, true, some 5% of ROCOR did not follow precisely because they were in denial of the huge changes in Russia between 1976 and 2007. Some simply abandoned the Church, but others fell away into pro-CIA, schismatic sects based in the Ukraine, Russia and Greece. Why?

Firstly, there were the naïve idealists and the good-hearted but misinformed who were hoodwinked and have mainly since returned. Secondly, there were those who put personal grudges against individual ROCOR bishops, who had misunderstood their non-integrated convert ideas, above their own salvation. Thirdly, there were those who were on an ego trip, seeking a career. And finally, there was most of the 5% or so who left and have not since returned, who did so because they were politically-minded, as they were anti-Communist rather than pro-Orthodox. Among them were some extremists who had consciously and freely sided with Hitler in the 1940s.

It must be said that many of the ringleaders here were actually employees of the CIA or the Canadian Secret Service, just as there was at least one case of an employee of the French Secret Services in the Paris Jurisdiction. So politics and salaries paid by Western spy services, presented by the ringleaders as ‘freedom’ and an ‘apolitical stance’, were the real reason for their schisms. When Communism fell, such people had no further reason to frequent the Church, as for them the Church had mainly been only an expression of nationalistic anti-Communism. They ended up being anti-Russian, as they had not understood that anti-Soviet could also mean anti-Russian. They were unable to discern the Russian through the fog of the Soviet.

This was because fundamentally they had little loyalty to the real Russian Orthodox Church and her international ideal of Holy Rus, but rather to narrow-minded political nationalism. Their behaviour had always been the greatest discouragement to Non-Russians joining the Church. Many of us who came to the Church seeking bread were indeed actually told to go away by them and in no uncertain terms, in other words, we were given stones. As one ROCOR bishop, speaking of one well-known to me ROCOR parish in the 1980s, told me recently, ‘those people were not Christians’. As is usual, their lack of love towards others ended up by driving them themselves to leave the Church in 2007 and even before, starting in the 1990s. Today we are still here in the Church; they are the ones who have abandoned Her.

Q: To come back to the idea of a Metropolia for Western Europe that you mentioned above, how important is that concept for Western Europe itself?

A: It is vital. I know that I am about to give an absurd example because it touches such a tiny detail, but I have to tell you it because it is symbolic of the degeneration of Europe. Two weeks a Russian woman in Germany wrote to me and told me that for many Germans a woman wearing a skirt is seen either as a Russian or else as a prostitute. What I am saying through this perhaps ridiculous symbol is that even the culture of Christian vestiges that was alive in Europe 50 years ago in the normal way that people dressed then is now dead.

Young Western people whose souls are at least still alive today turn to strange subcultures or even Islam and even fight for Islamic State, since that counters the spiritually empty West of today. Their disaffection and alienation are so great that even such bizarre and lethal choices seem more logical to them than the deathly conformist consumerism, hellish vampires, aliens, monsters, drugs, drink, sex, obesity, depression, mental illness and suicide that is the modern West. Europe has zombified and infantilized itself by accepting Americanization, it has been robbed and stripped naked of its own culture and is on the point of spiritual death. Europe is the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho was robbed and left for dead. Only a Good Samaritan, one from outside the West but still linked with its roots and understanding it, can save Europe; no false priests can do anything for it, for they pass by on the other side.

How can Europe be regenerated without the Church and Her prophetic vision? It is not possible. Europe desperately needs to be raised up from the deathly spiritual filth of its vulgar, fleshly, bread and circuses consumerism, the tyranny of its Babylonian culture of death, the fruit of its thousand-year apostasy, to the vision of spiritual beauty, to spiritual purity and the culture of the soul, to the nobility of human destiny, to the heavenly Jerusalem, which are offered by the Russian Orthodox Church. We are talking here about salvation, about life and death.

Now I am reminded here of the events of 200 years ago, on 11 April 1814. This was when liberating Russian Orthodox troops celebrated Easter Night on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where a field church had been set up. Having defeated Napoleon, who had taken a burned-out Moscow only some 18 months before, Tsar Alexander I stood in that great square, where the King of France had been beheaded less than a generation before, in 1792, and where the crowned Napoleon had stood in 1804 in front of a five-pointed red star, and heard thousands of Russian troops answering the priests’ ‘Christ is Risen!’ with the words ‘Truly He is Risen!’ This was the spiritual victory over the degenerate heart of atheist Europe which followed the physical victory over atheist Europe. This spiritual victory needs to be repeated in today’s atheist Europe. Otherwise geriatric Europe will go under completely, swept away by its own atheism and the tide of Islamic immigration.

Q: Why instead of subcultures and Islam do Western young people not choose Orthodoxy, when Orthodoxy is at the roots of the West, in its first millennium?

A: Firstly, because modern Western people have been cut off from those roots, their own history has been concealed from them, they can often mentally go no further back than 1945, let alone 1,000 years. And secondly because it is so difficult to find authentic Orthodoxy in Western Europe.

Q: Which countries would a Metropolia in Europe consist of?

A: Only those in Western Europe. Slovenia and Croatia already come under the Serbian Church. The Baltic States already come under the Russian Church. Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia already have their own autocephalous Churches. As for Hungary, given the fact that its first faith came in the tenth century from the East and not from Rome, then to my mind it too should one day have its own Local Church, just like Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, which also originally received their faith from the East. Even today Hungarian Catholicism, as in certain neighbouring countries, is coloured by Orthodox values and, for example, the veneration of icons.

Twenty Western European countries are left, all post-Roman Catholic or post-Protestant, and where the Russian Church, in one or both its parts, is already present. They are: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland; Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria; Portugal, Spain, France, Italy. They, together with the tiny Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino, would form the territory of this Metropolia.

A: Why can’t those countries have individual Local Churches?

Q: That is a hopelessly insular, narrow and nationalistic idea. It is the sort of thing that narrow, nationalistic ex-Anglicans dream of. Western Europe is a whole and individual countries in it are far too small to have their own Local Churches. Western Europe was the territory of a single Orthodox Patriarchate. We will never divide it. A Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe is the foundation for the restoration of the single, historic Local Church on this territory. We wish to keep that historic unity. Here in Sweden, for instance, you have two great saints, St Olaf and St Anna, and they are precisely part of the whole history of Europe, not narrow, nationalistic symbols, cut off from the rest, but linked in their cases with England and Russia

Q: What is the realistic hope for the foundation of such a Metropolia?

A: Officially today there are said to be 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox in Western Europe. That is far more than the four ancient Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem combined, more than the Georgian, Polish, Cypriot and Czechoslovak Orthodox Churches put together, let alone the 30,000-100,000 who make up the OCA. Yet the infrastructure for us is pathetic. We still do not have the new Cathedral in Paris and we really need a large, purpose-built Cathedral in central London.

Altogether in Western Europe I doubt whether there are even 200 church buildings and 200 priests for these 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox. That is scandalous; at most one church and one priest for every 35,000 people! As I have said many times before, we need a huge church-building and infrastructure programme across a network of at least 500 cities and towns in Western Europe. Today, wherever you go in Western Europe, even in small towns, the flood of immigration has been such that you will meet at least one Russian Orthodox. Provision has to be made. Let every Western European town and city of over 100,000 have its own full-time bilingual Russian Orthodox church and let there be at least chapels elsewhere, so that nobody, whatever their origin and native language, is more than 50 kilometres from their own bilingual Russian Orthodox church and centre.

Q: Who is to blame for the present situation?

A: First and foremost, we are ourselves to blame for this situation. We have to make our own Church. The Church works from the grassroots. We should never blame others for this. However, it is true that if we can first show that we are motivated, then we can attract the attention of the hierarchy. Then we can attract help from above and, in terms of our Russian Orthodox world, that means help from Moscow. Economic refugees and their children, who make up the bulk of the 7,000,000, are by definition not the wealthiest people in the world. And how are Western Europeans, already Russian Orthodox or potentially Russian Orthodox, to be integrated into the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe, if there are so few churches, so few centres of Church culture?

Q: How do you see such a Metropolia?

A: For nearly a decade now I have belonged to an informal group of Russian Orthodox priests in some major towns and cities in Western Europe. We look at Western Europe as a whole, we want to draw the Orthodox Cross over Europe. We have a love of and an attachment to the Russian Orthodox Tradition but also a knowledge of local languages and local heterodox culture. We want to create bilingual oases of a Russian Orthodox Europe, where all can feel at home.

This is the opposite of the policy of the Paris Jurisdiction, which suffers from a lack of love of and a lack of knowledge of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, but instead an attachment to local languages and local heterodox culture. However, you cannot be Orthodox and at the same time have an attachment to heterodox culture. This is not Local Orthodoxy. Local Orthodoxy is created by integration into the Orthodox Faith, not by integration into heterodox culture, which disintegrates. The latter is salt that has lost its savour. Local Orthodoxy cannot grow by being attached to heterodoxy.

Q: What does this mean in practical terms?

A: All my adult life I have fought for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, Who is a mother gathering her chicks, like Jerusalem. I see a time, though it may still be far off, when there will be a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe, whose church buildings and infrastructure will initially be financed from Russia, but whose clergy will be paid entirely locally by the faithful, thus remaining free and independent. But we need to form a grassroots Europe-wide Russian Orthodox Brotherhood or Russian Orthodox Union, blessed by our local bishops, to advance this process.

Q: You still have not answered my question: what is the realistic hope for such a Metropolia?

A: I have answered it, but here is my answer more directly. It is in a new consciousness, both here Europe-wide and in Moscow, at the grassroots and at the level of the hierarchy, a consciousness of the international calling of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here our Europe-wide unity is vital. And what is that unity based on? Our unity is based on our love for the Russian Church, just as disunity is in a lack of love for Her. We should have a patriotism for the Church, which by principle of the Incarnation spreads to every country inasmuch as that country is part of the Church.

In other words, Holy Rus is to be made global. For this we need spiritual purity, the pre-revolutionary Church purified – we must not forget that the pre-revolutionary Church had careerist traitors in Her who supported Kerensky. We must not forget that disunity is always caused by narrowness, whether sectarian or nationalist, as today in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia. Disunity is caused by the primacy of fallen, human, political concerns instead of the primacy of the Faith and the lack of a coherent Russian Orthodox world view. We need unity around the Church.

Q: Who are you grateful to for this vision of Europe-wide Russian Orthodox unity that you have?

A: Four people in particular have inspired me and to them I will always be grateful. Firstly, to the ever-memorable Archpriest Lev Lebedev, whom I first met in Krasnodar in Russia in 1976, and, despite his later illness and tragedy, was one of the finest thinkers in the Russian Church; secondly to the ever-memorable Baroness Maria Rehbinder (Cattoire) of the Paris Jurisdiction, a young woman before the Revolution, a daughter of a New Martyr and a fine Russian European, whom I first met in her little flat in Passy in Paris in 1983; thirdly to the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, born in Kiev, a Belgrade disciple of the great Metr Antony of Kiev, once a priest of the Patriarchate and whom I first met in 1986 and who ordained me. And finally, to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, whom I met in Moscow in 2012 and who strengthened in me the understanding of the need for this Metropolia. Thank you to them all.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Representative of the ROCOR Missionary Department for Western Europe,
Halland, Sweden, November 2014

The Suicide of a Civilization

Пусть кто-то от Общей-Европы,
А я – от Всея Руси!

Нина Карташева, Порфира и Виссон

There may be some from a Common Europe,
But I am from All Rus!

Nina Kartasheva, the contemporary Russian poetess

Some speak of the contemporary crisis in Western countries as ‘the death of a culture’. It is worse than this; it is the suicide of a civilization. I have personally lived through the last 50 years in England and seen this tragedy with my own eyes and the eyes of my parents, grandparents and whole family, lived it and deeply felt it. My grandparents’ generation, born in Victorian times and dying between the 1960s and 1980s, was able to tell me of the first phase of the suicide in the First European and then World War; my parents’ generation, born just after that War and dying over the last 25 years, was able to tell me of the second phase of the suicide in the Second European and then World War. Both those wars were phases of the suicide, the killing not of a mere culture, but of the Christian roots of that culture, that is, of Western civilization.

However, the third and final phase of the suicide, which made it ‘successful’, has come in the last 50 years, without a World War, but with a spiritual war, resulting in the massive loss of Faith in the West since the 1960s. This began with the apostasy of Catholic and Protestant clergy, who publicly declared that they had lost their faith in the Holy Trinity, in the Divinity and Resurrection of Christ, in the Ever-Virgin, in the Saints and in the moral commandments of the Scriptures, which they saw as a mere literary work. And, worst of all, they justified this loss of Faith, replacing the Divine with the belief that fallen humanity should have the ‘sacred’ freedom to mutilate and destroy the image of God in itself and mutilate and destroy the world around it. Having destroyed the Fatherhood of God, they destroyed the Brotherhood of mankind. Having rejected Christian belief, which is at the root of Western civilization, they killed that civilization and so committed suicide.

What remains today of Western civilization is ‘sights’, monuments for tourists, museums, a ‘heritage industry’; what was vibrant and living has gone from this huge cemetery of Western civilization, which the curious flock to see from all over the world as a historical theme park. With the Christian faith that underpinned that civilization gone, the centre has gone and two tendencies have come to dominate Western countries in the last two generations. These are tasteless vulgarity and boorishness, with the suicidal obesity and mutilating tattoos that go with them, or else the love of money and mammonism, with the futile vanity and snobbish pride that go with them. These two tendencies can be seen everywhere in the Western world, from North America to Western Europe to Australia. Little wonder that a Christian world leader, perhaps the only one left, Vladimir Putin, has said that ‘the West has replaced God with Satan’.

Some point to contemporary Russia, the rejection of militant atheism there and the return to the Faith and ask: ‘Why could the same return to the Faith not happen in the West?’ It could not happen in the West, because in Russia there was vicious persecution of the Faith by an alien ideology, whereas in the West there has been no persecution, only voluntary self-liquidation by a home-grown ideology. An attempt to kill a civilization, as happened under the foreign ideology of militant atheism, imported from Switzerland (Lenin) and the USA (Trotsky) and financed from overseas, is not at all the same thing as a voluntary suicide. Suicide was sooner or later inevitable in the West, as the seeds of destruction were all along contained in the compromised Halfodoxy of the Catholic/Protestant mindset. This long ago began adapting and reducing the original Orthodoxy of the first Christianity to a mere humanistic ideology, centred first in Rome and then in a multitude of places all over the Western world.

As Orthodox in the West, it has always been our task to go in the opposite direction to the contemporary West and its chosen path of spiritual catastrophe. Instead of rejecting the roots of Western civilization in the original Christian Faith, preached and lived by the first martyrs and saints of the Western Lands in the first millennium, it has been our task to be radical, to call the West back to those roots. In other words, it has been our task to call for the restoration of Orthodoxy, the return in repentance to Orthodoxy, to the original Christian Faith at the roots of the West in the first millennium, which is identical in spirit to the Orthodoxy of Holy Rus. It has been our task to try and save what is valid in Western civilization, the precious fragments and vestiges which have survived in the remoter parts of the West and which relate to its Christian roots. This is a struggle against all the odds, a struggle for the Orthodox Faith against the prince of this world.

Unlike in the West, whenever there have been temptations to renounce the Faith in Russia, there have always come outsiders to call back to repentance. No matter whether it was the Tartars and the Teutonic Knights, the Poles and the Lithuanians, Napoleon and Hitler, or now the American elite and their European puppets in their futile attempt to take over the Ukraine. This latter attempt has only served to strengthen the peoples of Rus against the temptations of the corrupt, Western-sponsored oligarchs and the other contemporary Westernisers. The peoples of Rus have not lost the fear of God – unlike in the West, where they are even preparing to legalize incest, the marriage of father and daughter, mother and son, to die in self-inflicted deformity, sterility, dementia and euthanasia. In the West the old paganism has been reborn as the new paganism, as all the old demons come back from hell.

The difference between the peoples of Rus and the West is that no-one in Rus justifies atheist apostasy, whereas the West not only does justify it, but also aggressively tries to foist it onto the rest of the world, denying any other civilization the right to exist. We are reminded of the words of the philosopher: ‘He whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes mad’. Only this can explain the insanity and self-destruction of the contemporary Western world. As for us, we shall continue regardless, in faithfulness to the Church of All Rus and the commandments of the saints and martyrs new and old. It may be that the present Western apostasy, which is now proceeding at breakneck speed, can be halted for a time. But it may be that we shall come to be persecuted by the atheist Western authorities, which will first stop us from baptizing. Then the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa will come true and ships of people will sail to St Petersburg to be baptized. And then we shall either face martyrdom in the West or refuge in Russia. In any case we shall be ready, for we have no illusions.

Double Standards

The beheading of an American journalist by a British Muslim should surprise no-one. For over two years now hundreds of British Muslims, let alone French, Belgian, German and other European Muslims, have been slaughtering the innocent in the interventionist war in Syria, which has been encouraged by the Western Powers and their subservient media. That is not so much a civil war as a war between Syrians and hordes of foreign mercenaries paid for by Saudi and Qatari Sunnis and well supported by Western ‘Special Forces’ in training camps in the Jordan and Turkey.

Indeed, it is only a year since Western governments were prepared to bomb Syria back into the Stone Age over the poison gas / ’red line’ affair, thus probably bringing Muslim fanatics to power there and replacing the popular government. When it was discovered that the poison gas (invented and used by the West for the first time nearly 100 years ago) had been used by the terrorists and not by the government, the Western hypocrites fell silent.

Now that the terrorists are victorious in eastern Syria, they have tried to take over Iraq (which the West did bomb back into the Stone Age), the West is alarmed and is beginning to realize that it should have been supporting the Syrian government of President Assad all along and not trying to annihilate it, as they did to the governments in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The West was wrong all the way down the line. (It is almost as if after its fifty years of self-imposed cultural nihilism which began in the 1960s that the West wants to annihilate the cultures of all other countries).

Therefore, today the British government is worried that its self-created (by immigration) Muslim ghettoes have produced jihadists. However, the problem of the radicalization of young British Muslims has only two basic self-created two real causes. The first cause is the fact that British ‘governments’ (more correctly ‘regimes’), have, without popular consent, invaded, occupied and committed genocide in several Muslim countries, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The second cause is that British regimes have consistently supported the genocide of native Palestinian Muslims by Zionist Israel, not least over the last month. The outrage of young British Muslims is actually understandable; their violence, however, is only to be condemned, as is the whole Muslim (and Zionist) anti-New Testament eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth ideology.

The hypocrisy of the British Establishment at the terrible beheading is also blatant. However barbaric it is, beheading is at least instant death. On the other hand, to be slowly slaughtered or grossly maimed by NATO uranium-tipped shells in Serbia or by NATO cluster bombs and shells in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya is, if anything, even more barbaric. And to be victims of the Atomic Bombs which the ‘high-minded’ West dropped on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is even more barbaric.

The hypocrisy is even worse, when one considers that at this very moment the Western world is supporting a civil war in Europe, unleashed by the Western-backed regime in Kiev, planned by the CIA and other US ‘military advisors’ and executed mainly by Western mercenaries. Well over a thousand have been slaughtered, often burned to death (as earlier in Odessa) in the Western-sponsored genocide against freedom-fighters and civilians in the Ukraine in the last two months, and refugees (no support from the New York-based UN here) number over 150,000. The fact, as we now know from German sources, that the Malaysian Airlines plane was brought down by the Western-backed Ukrainian junta is also irrelevant, conveniently buried with another invented ‘red line’. The Ukrainian train of death is to be forgotten.

Apparently, genocide in the Ukraine, as in Gaza, does not matter, because those who are committing the genocide are pro-Western and are equipped with Western bombs and bullets to do it. There is one standard for the vast majority not so barbaric Non-Western world and quite another for the minority barbaric Western world. How the Western world will deal with this genocide in the Ukraine when the Ukrainian junta goes bankrupt and the gas runs out in the approaching winter, we shall see.

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

A Decisive Moment in History

In order to wipe out the Russians, we must not only destroy their army, wreck their towns and liquidate their State, but it is also vital to kill their culture, deprive them of moral direction, belittle their heroes and force them to forget all their achievements. Only then can this people finally be defeated.

Josef Goebbels

If people lose faith in God, it is a tragedy, and if they do not repent, they die and disappear off the face of the earth. Many peoples have disappeared, but Russia exists and will continue to exist. Pray, entreat and repent! Then the Lord will not leave you; He will save the whole Earth!

Blessed Matrona of Moscow

We live at a decisive moment in history, at an exceptional time, when prophecies are taking flesh before our very eyes. When the Washington puppeteers sent their junta on its blitzkrieg against the people of the eastern Ukraine, it thought that if it used carpet bombing against an intimidated population and destroyed their infrastructure, then they would rise up against the ‘separatists and terrorists’.

This plan did not work. Poroshenko’s (Waltzman’s) American advisors grossly miscalculated when they thought that they knew his subjects’ psychology – they thought that the people would settle for the mess of pottage of comfortable consumerism, for bread and circuses, like Western people. They will not. Like the Mongols, the Swedes, the Poles, Napoleon and Hitler before them, the CIA are wrong again.

Every day the war in the Ukraine takes the lives of civilians, including children. Spilled blood is marking out the future borders. However, although the régime continues to massacre the people in its occupied territories, it has failed to stamp out resistance. In captured Slavyansk and Kramatorsk they have staged mass shootings of residents and of the mothers of Home Guardsmen. Already the angel of vengeance has erased the names of the executioners from the Book of Life.

From a spiritual perspective, a pathological hatred of Russia is understandable. Stating a commitment to ‘traditional values’, in fact to Orthodoxy and Christ, Russia has made Satan gnash his teeth. For more than twenty years he believed that Russia was his. Then, after nearly a generation, at the State level we have seen spiritually informed decisions. Satan wanted Orthodox to continue to bow down before his golden calf, to have no other god but it. He decided to punish Russia with sanctions until it changed its mind.

In the eastern Ukraine we are seeing the Resurrection of Orthodox Rus, a new social system, that which the Tsar-Martyr had tried to introduce before the Revolution, that is, before the Western-organized coup d’etat of February 1917. As then the aristocrats resisted that social system, so today the oligarchs resist it. The oligarchs now face a new generation brought up on the Orthodox White Idea – and that generation is the future Orthodox political élite of Russia. People in the Ukraine long endured economic slavery under the oligarchs without a murmur, but they rebelled against spiritual slavery, against the bloodthirsty Nazi idol erected on the independence of the Ukrainian nation. For idols collapse onto the heads of their devotees.

The thesis of the Russian Orthodox thinker and prophet Ivan Ilyin was that after the collapse of the USSR twenty quasi-states would exist on the sacred sites of Holy Rus, but then ‘a new Russian union would implement a policy based on religious contemplation and spiritual freedom, on justice and fraternal patriotic feelings, and on the dignity of the government, on its power, strength, and universal trust’. He was right. The plans of the global hegemonists are coming to naught.

The Nazi bandits sent by Washington through Kiev are only victims of their own ignorance; the time will come when they will realize who and what drew them to the slaughter. The world’s grandmasters calculated that President Putin would play by the rules of this world. He has not. According to the law of Russian Orthodoxy, when the country is in danger, God chooses to bring the things of this world to naught, the commoner trumps the powerbroker, and those who calculate according to the rules of digital culture the consequences of disobeying the golden calf are proved wrong.

The Poles and the French walked around the Kremlin, then, the fickleness of fate struck them – they had to eat horse-feed. When Napoleon sat in the Kremlin, the French desecrated the holy places, ravaged Russia, but the scales on the eyes of the Russian elite, the allure of the West, fell away. In 1941, the Germans admired the Kremlin through their binoculars. In 1942, Ivan Ilyin wrote the article ‘Why We Believe in Russia’. In 1943, anyone could have written it, but in 1942, in defeat, only Ilyin did. That is, faith saves.

Orthodoxy is not only a gift; it is also a cross. Some people drink the cup of suffering in the name of Russian Orthodox faith, while at the same time others blithely lead carefree lives, wasting their time, not knowing why they are Orthodox. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? (Lk. 13, 4). The Lord warns us. God judges people. His Judgement comes about at the time of our actions, but He does not execute His sentence immediately, God gives people time to repent.

Political frontiers reflect human truths, but often they do not coincide with the frontiers of spiritual civilization. Between Galicia and the rest of the Ukraine there is a frontier, it is a spiritual frontier, that between apostasy and faith. Satan deceives nations with the spirit of national pride. This is symbolized by the Ukrainian Army, most of which refuses to fight or simply joins those whom it is supposed to be fighting. Another 300 have now joined the side of freedom against their CIA paymasters. The worst thing for the hopelessly provincialist nationalist Uniat Galicians is that they still do not realize that they have been judged by God.

War often gives a nation a painful shock. Such a painful shock stopped the Vietnam War. When burial crosses dot the Western and Central Ukraine, serving to subsequent generations as a reminder of how dear the cost of the Nazi hallucination was to the people, then, the mothers of the dead and maimed soldiers will stop the war. Hubris and blind hatred led them to reject federalism, which alone would have allowed people to live within a shared common frontier, as heirs of Kievan Rus.

Feelings overrode reason. Hatred destroys, and only love can create. Thus, Nero hated the Christians, he wanted to immortalize himself in grand architectural monuments and wipe Christians off the face of the Earth, but the persecution only strengthened Christianity in a phenomenal way, while there is nothing left of Nero’s grandiose buildings. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous: but the way of the wicked will perish (Psalm 1, 6).

Adapted from an article by Sergey Moiseev.

Western Peoples, Awake!

We see crucifixions in Syria and decapitations in Iraq, where the Iraqi-Syrian caliphate has been created by Western meddling – for the only ever weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were those taken there by the genocidal Western forces sent by Bush and Blair. In Israel the US-subsidized genocide of the Palestinians – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – continues, only Nazi-style, with 100 eyes for one eye, 100 teeth for one tooth.
Then there is the Taliban restoration in Afghanistan, made inevitable by the departure of Soviet forces a generation ago, then there are the murderous Islamist fanatics in Nigeria, the bombing of ancient Nubian Christians in Sudan, the Western-sponsored caliphates in Libya and Saudi Arabia and the persecution of Christians in Malaysia and Indonesia….

All these events are little reported and even deliberately ignored by the Western media and the sodomized Western world as a whole. For they have nothing but contempt for Christians and are in any case too frightened of their self-created Islamic minorities, 5%-10% of Western Europe now, and of their oil-rich paymasters in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

However, even less reported and indeed deliberately ignored by the Western media, is the use of poison gas and phosphorus bombs in the Ukraine, as criminals are released from prisons and employed by the CIA-installed Nazi junta in Kiev to murder their own civilian population during and since their recent pseudo-ceasefire.

Armed and financed by the US and Galician Uniats, the criminals sent from Kiev, together with Western mercenaries and Western ‘Special Forces’ (i.e. trained killers) have slaughtered thousands, creating the worst refugee problem in Europe since 1945. And all this in order to implement the ‘plan’ of the Californian ‘think tank’ RAND Corporation for the destruction and then colonization of the third-worldized Ukraine, sowing it with GM crops and using it as a dumping-ground for Western nuclear waste and unwanted immigrants.

Above all, what the Western world does not want to admit is that all the present troubles are the beginning of Armageddon, of World War III, and that this War, just like the previous two World Wars, has been started by the sheer imperialist greed of the Western world. Only this time, unlike the previous two times, the whole of the West is united, not divided as before, against Christian civilization, and is fighting on the side of Antichrist.

100 years ago it was the Germanic world that began the First World War and again 75 years ago it was that same world. But today it is the whole Western world that has joined the Nazis. Some will say that peace-loving Russia is at fault. If in the 1990s it had stood up to the Western invasion and genocide in Yugoslavia, then today there would have been peace in a Non-Yugoslavized Ukraine. But in the 1990s decadent Russia was under the jackboot of a pro-Western regime and not free.

The time may be coming when we, the last Christians in the West, all of us Orthodox, whatever our nationality, will have to make plans to take refuge in our only earthly spiritual homeland, in Orthodox Russia, from the Western Antichrist. We now ask the Russian authorities to prepare to issue us with Russian passports. Only the prayers of us, the people of God, for our own repentance and for the restoration of Russia as the Orthodox Sovereign Power, the last bastion of Christianity left in the world, can now delay the coming of Antichrist, Who is so eagerly supported by all the Western elites. Western peoples, awake – it is now or never!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Holy Apostles Peter and Paul 2014

The Mystery of Archbishop Averky

The future Archbishop Averky (Taushev) was born in 1906 in Kazan. Due to the nature of his father’s work, in his youth he travelled all over Russia and grew to love its monasteries, reading deeply. In 1920 the Taushev family fled Russia for the Bulgarian city of Varna. Here, while still at high school, the young man met the exiled Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, who further inspired his love of monastic life. After leaving school the future Archbishop enrolled at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Sofia.

On graduating he accepted a position as assistant secretary in the Carpatho-Russian Diocese in what was then Czechoslovakia. There, in 1931, he was tonsured monk with the name Averky, ordained deacon and in 1932 ordained priest, serving in local parishes. After carrying out various tasks for the diocese, in 1940 Fr Averky was forced to leave Carpatho-Russia. He moved to Belgrade where he taught Pastoral Theology and Homiletics, but in 1945, moving out in front of the advancing Red Army, he arrived in Munich together with the Synod of Bishops of the Church Outside Russia. Here he continued teaching.

In 1951 Fr. Averky was assigned to teaching at Holy Trinity Seminary at Jordanville in New York State. Fr Averky was soon consecrated bishop and in 1960 he was chosen by the monastery to be their Abbot. As Abbot, Archbishop Averky, as he had become, led the curriculum, teaching New Testament and Homilectics, writing and preaching. He also actively participated in publishing the Russian periodical ‘Orthodox Rus’. He reposed in 1976, known for his Orthodox writings and sermons calling to repentance, his saintly life, adherence to the Tradition against ecumenism and extremism, and his conviction that the end of the world was rapidly approaching amid contemporary apostasy.

The mystery that concerns us is why the Archbishop was so convinced that the end was near. After all, forty years on, we are still here. The answer, however, is not complex. Already, over 1950 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote similarly of the end of the world. Is it possible then that saints can be wrong? In reality, the saints are not wrong. The end of the world has been near on several occasions. Saints and the saintly have intuitions of this and this is precisely why they are sent by God to warn us and to call to repentance. This is what the Apostle Paul did and it is also what Archbishop Averky did. And people did listen to him and others.

In 1981, five years after Archbishop Averky’s repose, the Synod of Bishops canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Thanks to their prayers, persecution ceased in the Russian Lands and there began the process of the Rebaptism of Rus. With this act of repentance for the overthrow of Old Russia and its Orthodox foundations three generations before in 1917, the world changed. God gave an extension to the world and the end that had indeed been near in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the holy Archbishop had said, drew back.

Today, with the world situation on a knife edge, with the Western world gripped by the Satanic urge for global military and economic control and seeking to destroy the last vestiges of spiritual life everywhere, with many Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria compromised by Western propaganda, with many of the last strongholds of Orthodox piety, including Serbia, Georgia, Moldova and now the Ukraine, under threat, and with Russia only half-way to repentance, it is clear that the end is approaching once more. Now only the Mother of God can extend history and grant us another period for repentance. Now we should turn again to the prophecies and warnings of Archbishop Averky.

Orthodox England

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