Category Archives: Dewesternisation

On Recovering the Lost Provinces of Western Europe

In the fifth century the westernmost provinces of Europe were lost by the Christian Empire to barbarian Germanic invaders. However, in the sixth century St Justinian the Great was Emperor in the Christian capital in New Rome from 527 to 565. The last Roman Emperor to speak Latin as a first language, Justinian sought ‘renovatio imperii’ or the restoration of the Empire by recovering the lost western provinces. This ambition was expressed by reconquering the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa as well as the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy and Rome to the Empire after more than half a century of barbarian control. His forces then reclaimed most of southern Iberia, establishing the province of Spania. Unfortunately, this recovery was to be all too short-lived

At the end of the sixth century, seeing that physical recovery was impossible, in Old Rome, itself provincialised, Pope Gregory the Great set about the spiritual recovery of the provinces, starting with Britain. This recovery succeeded and spread, but was fragile. Already towards the end of the eighth century the Germanic leader Charlemagne had changed the Creed and fallen into iconoclasm. Although he soon died, in the mid-eleventh century the Germanic iconoclasts not only returned to power, but took over the Roman see, creating the definitive Schism of 1054. No help could come from those who had remained faithful in New Rome, so oppressed were they, and indeed in 1204 the Christian capital was sacked by the barbarians, finally falling in 1453, its leaders having compromised themselves with the barbarians.

At this, the task of the spiritual recovery of the lost Western provinces fell to small and oppressed Russia as the only free country in the still Christian world. It, however, was faced with the hostility of the rulers of Western Europe and it was not until the nineteenth century that Russia was able to begin to preach the Christian Faith to the captive peoples of the Western provinces. However, the leaders of Western Europe became even more aggressive and invaded Russia in 1812, 1854 and again in 1914. This last invasion led to the fall of Christianity there in 1917, which came about through the treachery of the westernised upper classes, who betrayed their own ruler. In 1941 Western countries again invaded now fallen Russia, but with the sobering result that it began a fifty-year process of return to Christianity.

It is since 1991 then that Russia has been undergoing a long period of regeneration, painfully striving to re-establish at least something of Christianity. Although this process is far from complete, it provides hope that the spiritually sensitive in the lost Western provinces can return to the Church of Christ, especially if Russia is regenerated in full. This return can neither be on the basis of an uninteresting nationalistic form of Russian Christianity, nor on the basis of a minimal and opportunistically compromised form of Russian Christianity, as among some in North America, Paris, Finland and Estonia. It can only be on the basis of the maximal Christianity, the fullness of Orthodoxy. In this way, the lost provinces of Western Europe, including our own East of England province, can reintegrate the Church of God.

On the Importance of Sobriety (2)

Edited E-mail Correspondence Following the Questions and Answers of 17 September

Q: In your answers in the correspondence in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ (17 September) you seemed to be defending ROCOR as a Church of moderation, which is why the extreme Greek and convert old calendarists left it between 1986 and 2007. But surely there were extremists among the Russians in ROCOR, for example, people who actually seriously believed that there was no grace in the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church? And they did not leave in 1986.

A: On the ROCOR side I knew of only two Russians (admittedly very senior figures) who asserted that the Patriarchal part of the Russian Orthodox Church had no grace. But I met hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary ROCOR clergy and laity who believed otherwise, freely gave the sacraments to anyone from Russia and indeed were scandalised by such an absurd thought of gracelessness. So let us look at all this in proportion. You will always find a few extremists in any group of human-beings, but that does not mean that the vast majority are extremists. By definition they are not.

However, it is also true that a few members of ROCOR at that time (I am speaking about the Cold War period before 1991) appeared to be more interested in anti-Communism than in Christianity. However, the members of that generation have either died out or else have left ROCOR since 1991. The problem for them after the fall of Communism was that they no longer had any motivation to be active in Church life. You cannot be anti-Communist when Communism is no more. They had lost their raison d’etre, and so they gradually disappeared from Church life. This was most regrettable for them, but on a human level it was a great relief to us because they had put us ordinary ROCOR laity and clergy under pressure, trying to politicise the Church, which we resisted.

And I would like to add to all this very important qualification. Those few who previously claimed that there was no grace in the Patriarchate after 1991 received several clergy from it without ordaining them, let alone baptising them! And they gave the sacraments to Patriarchal laypeople without dreaming of baptising them. So it had all been empty words, rhetoric, political propaganda and not actions. In reality, they full well knew that the Patriarchate preserved apostolic succession. They rejected their own absurdity, which had only ever been a purely political ploy. I seriously think that the ludicrous concept of a graceless Church inside Russia may even have been invented by the CIA. It is simply not theological, but purely secular.

Q: You have said before and also in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ that all Russian Orthodox parishes outside Russia will eventually come under ROCOR administration. But why should not all, including ROCOR ones, come under the administration of the Church inside Russia instead?

A: There are three reasons why not. First of all, the agreement of 2007 was crystal clear: all parishes outside Russia will come under ROCOR, all parishes inside Russia will come under the Church inside Russia. Secondly, there is the name, ROCOR. It is only logical: only ROCOR is the Church Outside Russia, it is absurd to have parishes outside Russia that belong to the Church inside Russia. It is literally inside out or, if you prefer, outside in.

However, there is a third and moral reason. During the Cold War period (I mean, after 1945 and until well after 1991) the Church inside Russia was under KGB administration and there appeared outside Russia very many unworthy representatives of the Patriarchal Church, at best Soviet bureaucrats, at worst liars and renovationists, politically or morally compromised or just plain corrupt. (The notable exception was Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels). And I am afraid that the Church inside Russia lost all the trust of the world outside Russia at that time. In a word, it shot itself in the foot and ever since it has had to pay the price for the distrust that it created.

As a result, even today, I cannot think of a single person in ROCOR who would go under the Patriarchal administration outside Russia. Even today, virtually the only people under the Patriarchate outside Russia are those who have come out of the former Soviet Union over the last 20 years

I mentioned Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels as an exception, but it must also be said that his integrity was wasted, as that of other sincere people. He had the nominal title of Archbishop, but his diocese consisted of little more than two priests, two deacons and about a dozen laypeople. And in general, until 1991, the Patriarchate only had tiny churches outside Russia. Russian Orthodox outside Russia would have nothing to do with a KGB-sponsored organisation. That is not a secret and not a theory. It is simply a fact of history.

An example of such corruption is the case of the late Archbp George (Wagner), who was a victim of it. A priest of the Patriarchate in 1950s Berlin, he was asked by it to become a Soviet spy. To his credit he refused and left for the Paris Jurisdiction. He was just one in a very long series of sincere people who left the Patriarchate because of its corruption. Another even more striking example is the present Metr Hilarion of ROCOR, who was brought up in the Patriarchate in Canada and left it when he realised that it was not free.

And that was all a great loss of talent for the Patriarchate. But it was their own fault; they did it to themselves. In general, the Patriarchate, whether in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London or New York, lost many people, the best friends of Orthodox Russia in the West, because of its unworthy representatives, with their political and moral compromises and corrupt personality cults. It lost the best friends of Orthodox Russia precisely because its representatives were not the best friends of Orthodox Russia. This is why ROCOR is an autonomous part of the Russian Church. If ever, things go badly in Russia again – as they could, the situation is still relatively fragile – ROCOR will retain its independence. That is very important.

Fortunately, virtually all such unworthy representatives had died out before the reconciliation of 2007, sometimes well before. Now we are waiting for a new generation. The Patriarchate outside Russia has been expanding with the new emigration. We believe that the majority of the new representatives are and will be more worthy, will at least be up to the standard of ROCOR and so prepare the Patriarchal churches outside Russia for their transfer to ROCOR.

Q: Do you feel bitter about this waste during the Cold War due to the captivity of the Patriarchate at that time?

A: Of course not! A Christian cannot feel bitter because he believes in Divine Providence, the ever-present, intervening love of God. This makes all mistakes into opportunities, all negatives into positives.

Q: What is your view of the murder of Fr Pavel Adelheim in Pskov last August

A: On average one priest a year is murdered in Russia and every murder is a tragedy and a crime, including that of Fr Pavel. I saw a Russian programme about the murder. His matushka appeared and spoke of the tragedy with great dignity.

However, Fr Pavel Adelheim himself was a well-known dissident and controversialist, a marginal figure and in that sense a bit like the late Fr Alexander Men, who is believed by many to have been a Catholic. The latter is a hero to all those who are anti-Orthodox, especially since he asserted that ‘it is better to be a Hare Krishna than to be like Fr Seraphim Rose’. (By the way, under the old regime the London Patriarchal Cathedral on Ennismore Gardens refused to sell his books, just as they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs; that has changed now). Murder is a tragedy, but it is does not absolve anti-Church views. I am not saying that Fr Pavel was like Fr Alexander Men, he was not pro-Catholic, but nevertheless he was very much a fringe personality. It is very interesting that although deaths like that of the late Orthodox priest Fr Daniel Sisoev are hardly mentioned in the West, Fr Pavel’s was widely reported and by two groups.

The first group was the freemasons of the Russophobic Rue Daru with their Western supporters and the second was the equally Russophobic old calendarists. It is disgraceful that such anti-Russian-Church groups opportunistically and self-justifyingly try and make capital of a tragic murder, which was carried out by a satanist. You cannot justify schism. What such sectarian groups as Rue Daru and old calendarists, two sides of the same coin, do not understand is that the Church is not an exclusive club for those with eccentric views, but it is for all who believe in Christ. The fact that Fr Pavel had peculiar views and was then tragically murdered does not for one moment mean that those views are justified.

Q: Russophobia has been in the international spotlight recently. What would you say about the civil war in Syria and President Putin’s recent intervention that averted US missile attacks?

A: First of all, this is not a civil war. The original legitimate protests against the dictatorial Syrian government were hijacked by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey (all Israeli-backed). 1200 murderers, rapists and bandits were released from Saudi prisons, armed and trained by Western Special Services in camps in the Jordan and Turkey and paid over $1000 dollars a month to murder, maim and cannibalise innocent Syrians. Together with them there are tens of thousands of fanatical foreign mercenaries, Chechens, Tunisians, Libyans and many Muslims from Western countries like Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. (These terrorists, who use chemical weapons in Syria, are the same people who prepare chemical weapons in Somalia). The war in Syria is a war between Syrian patriots on the one hand and foreign-financed traitors and foreign mercenaries on the other hand.

As regards the intervention of President Putin, the man who is so hated by Rue Daru and the old calendarists, what is remarkable is that for the first time, someone has stood up to resist the New World Order, that will lead to the enthronement of Antichrist in the rebuilt Temple on Zion. (Speaking of Russia, called the ‘Heartland’ in geopolitical science, Zbigniew Brzezinski said that the ‘New World Order’ would be built on its ruins). President Putin may even have averted a Third World War and certainly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike President Obama who should be stripped of his.

It was not a billion-peopled China or India or Africa, representing half the population of the planet between them, but Russia that stood up to the New World Order. President Putin has played the role of the Orthodox Tsar, of ‘him who restrains’ (2 Thessalonians 2, 6). This is remarkable on the part of a mere politician. Moreover on 19 September the President went on in his Valdai Speech to explain that the role of Russia is in Orthodoxy and that this is her Christian civilisational role against the secularist and suicidal West which has opted for Sodom.

The West has two great enemies in Russia today. The first is President Putin, the second is Patriarch Kyrill. It will do its utmost to bring them both down, as it has already done.

Q: Why?

A: Because the secularist West knows that if either of them is successful or both of them are successful, they will with time be replaced by even more powerful Orthodox figures in Russia. They will not only resist the New World Order even more successfully, but will actually reverse it, restoring the Russian Orthodox Empire in Eurasia and worldwide Orthodox unity. That will be the end of the Antichristic, unipolar global project, of Orthodox countries eternally indebted and enslaved to the European Union, the end of absurd new calendarism and masonic puppet Orthodox bishops, the beginning of freedom for Orthodoxy in China, financial support for the Orthodox missions in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the building of tens of thousands of churches there and, if God wills and the world lasts long enough, the foundation of new autocephalous Churches. In a word, this will be the great gathering of all Orthodox Christianity before the end.

Q: It is 20 years since the attempted coup of October 1993 in Moscow, with the bombardment of the White House and the Yeltsin era. What are your thoughts?

A: The 1990s were a disgraceful period, when Russia went from Communism to Consumerism, from lies to theft. Russian public assets were stolen by those whom we now call oligarchs through so-called ‘privatisation’. These oligarchs, international criminals, now live in asylum under British government protection in London and elsewhere in the Western world that so adored their stolen billions that so impoverished Russia. This was massive, State-sponsored theft. In the 1990s the West tried to dismember and destroy the Russian Lands, just as it had tried to do under the seven months of the Provisional Government of 1917. It is said that these new Kerenskys, Harvard-educated privatisers, the cowboys of the ‘Wild East’, actually rigged the election of 1996 so that the drunkard Yeltsin could win. It is possible. The CIA has plenty of experience in rigging elections all round the world. In 1917 the decadence lasted seven months; in the 1990s it lasted seven years until the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonisation of the New Martyrs in Moscow.

Q: Some conservative convert Orthodox, especially under the Patriarchate of Antioch in the USA, would perhaps be shocked by your words. They think that privatisation is good. What would you say to them?

A: Conservatism is not the same as the Tradition. To use American vocabulary, neoconservatives or ‘neocons’ (unprincipled Money Tories or economic liberals in Britishspeak) worship God and Mammon against the Gospel. Indeed, monetarism is just another word for Mammon. And even the so-called Paleoconservatives (High Tories, UKIP, noblesse oblige, the Patriarchal) are not the same as Orthodox. Firstly, paleoconservatives have a tendency to racism. Secondly, unlike Orthodox, they have little sense of social justice. (If socialism exists, there are reasons). And thirdly, the paleoconservatives tend to attract a lunatic fringe, people who are obsessed with conspiracy theories, hate the Jews, admire Hitler and other such nonsense

Q: What are your hopes and fears for the revival of the Russian Church in Russia today?

A: We must understand that the revival of the last 25 years, although spectacular, has only just begun. As Patriarch Kyrill said last week, at the present rate it will take 100 years just to build enough churches to catch up with the number of churches that existed in the Russian Empire before the Revolution. Instead of building 1,000 churches a year, over the next ten years 14,000 churches need to be built every year. That is what would be happening if Russia were not nominally Orthodox, but actually Orthodox. Another example: at the Synod in Moscow on 5 October seven new bishops were nominated. That is very good and it should bring the total to more or less 300 bishops. But if Russia and the Church’s canonical territories were actually and not nominally Orthodox, there would be 200 times more bishosp being nominated – 1,400 new bishops. Then any future Inter-Orthodox Conference (falsely called a Pan-Orthodox Council by the Phanariots) would be Orthodox

Q: One last question. Earlier you mentioned Fr Seraphim (Rose). Do you think he will one day be canonised?

A: God makes saints, not men. It may be that one day God will reveal Fr Seraphim to have been a saint. It is quite possible, judging from his life. But, before this, the monastery at Platina will first have to return to ROCOR. That is what Fr Seraphim would have wanted. That would be justice correcting the historic injustice of Platina leaving ROCOR, something carried out after Fr Seraphim’s repose. I would even say that the main impediment to Fr Seraphim’s canonisation is precisely the fact that Platina has not yet returned to ROCOR. Then everything will fall into place.

Q: Would Fr Seraphim have agreed with the reconciliation between ROCOR and the Church inside Russia?

A: Of course, he would. He was a deeply anti-sectarian person, as you can see by the way in which the proud ‘super-correct’ persecuted him in the 1970s. He was a genuine monk who had no pathological complexes, like many of the super-correct converts at that time. He suffered greatly from them, especially when they insisted on being photographed with him – photographs that they now display in their self-justification! ‘Look at me, I’m standing next to Fr Seraphim, I’m a saint’. That is what they proclaim and yet in his lifetime they were his worst enemies. It was the same with St John of Shanghai. Some of his worst persecutors during his lifetime, those who put him on trial, proclaimed after his canonisation how much they had supported him!

Q: When you see what is being introduced in the Western world, what has been called ‘Eurosodom’, are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future

A: It is a strange fact that all empires end in sodomy because they lose faith, they no longer have any self-belief and so they commit suicide. It happened in Ancient Greece and Rome. And today we are seeing not the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but the decline and fall of the Western Empire. It is a tragedy. And it is the duty of Orthodox to try and save the best of Western culture before it disappears altogether under the tidal wave of atheism.

Am I pessimistic or optimistic? True, it is quite possible that only very little of my above hopes for the future restoration of Orthodox Russia will be realised. I have no illusions. But even so, even despite all this, I remain optimistic because, although man proposes, God disposes, and God has already won, ‘trampling down death by death’. The worst that can happen is that we die. And if, I repeat if, we die repentant, and I underline repentant, we will go to Paradise! Who can be a pessimist? Fear not, little flock!

Neo-Hesychasm and the Struggle for Authentic Orthodoxy

Already before the First World War, British Establishment freemasonry in Cyprus, then 65 years ago, in 1948, the US State Department in Constantinople, and then 32 years ago, in 1981, the EEC (now called the EU) in Greece, have all taken part in their conscious Crusade to enslave the Church. They have wanted to create an artificial, politically correct Orthodoxy, acceptable to the secular powerbrokers of this world. This pseudo-Orthodoxy, a lightweight ‘Diet Orthodoxy’, persecuting of piety, Cross-less, fasting-less, comfortable, consumerist and anti-ascetic, is sterilised, diluted, degutted, neutered, castrated and disincarnate.

It is therefore new-calendarised, uniatised, anglicanised, protestantised, modernised, liberalised, finlandised, often beardless and homosexualised, confessionless and repentance-free because of its self-admiring pride, the sense of the sacred and mystery removed together with the iconostasis, and replaced by plastic, steel and chrome, salt that has lost its savour. The Neo-Frankish neo-colonialist process has so far affected some 20% of the Orthodox world, but not the vast majority of the Russian, Serbian and Georgian Churches, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, or parts of the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches and others.

There is conscious resistance to such humanistic modernism and renovationism. The latter have manipulated shallow, spiritually weak, uprooted and so disincarnate, nominally Orthodox intellectuals in the Diaspora in particular, victims of their own pride of mind and vanity. The ascetic alternative to the above Westernised and Western-supported and financed ‘Orthodoxy’, this alternative for which we have fought for most of our lives, comes in the form of the ever-renewed Tradition of the authentic Orthodox Faith – which we may call Neo-Hesychasm. This means the Trinitarian opposition to all of the above, implying:

The continuing recognition of the Fatherhood of authentic monasticism in Church and society; the Sonhood of conscious commitment to the Incarnational, Orthodox civilisational world view and ethos, with its sense of supra-national Orthodox unity (the Patriarch of Moscow taking on the unifying role of the Tsar until the election of the new and coming Tsar, the Patriarch of Constantinople having lost this role in 1453); the Spirithood of an unshakeable commitment to authentic Orthodoxy worldwide, with, implicit in this, the understanding and openness to heterodox to make missionary work among them possible.

Modernism, Post-Modernism and Post-Postmodernism

Modernism is a very old-fashioned concept, dating back to the nineteenth century. The concept passed through artists like Matisse, Gauguin and then Picasso and a whole school of thinkers. However, its culminating point – and also death – came only some fifty years ago in the 1960s, which itself culminated in the youth revolutions of 1968. ‘Modern’ meant anti-Victorian, the rejection of any kind of ‘old’ value, of anything ‘old-fashioned’, regardless of whether it was worthwhile or not. Typical of this culmination of Modernism were the Second Vatican Council, liberalism, feminism, divorce, drug-taking, alcoholism, pornography, abortion, and the collapse of marriage and stable family life. Most of its revolutionary and rebellious advocates have died from a way of life that was full of vice.

A decade later, after the culmination of Modernism, the rejection of any sort of tradition, good or bad, inevitably came the culmination of ‘Post-Modernism’, that is, cynicism, scepticism, disbelief and nihilistic ‘deconstruction’. Although Post-Modernism is also an old concept, its culminating-point could only come after the 1960s in the cynical destructiveness of the period between the 1970s and 1990s. Typical of Post-Modernism are the lack of belief in anything constructive, spiritual emptiness, depression, nothingness, ‘anything goes’, the mocking of heartfelt belief, irony, throwaway products, shallowness, cheapness, passing fads and fashions and superficiality. Most of its faithless and often bitter, disbelieving advocates are now ageing or else are already dead.

The question is, if Post-Modernism comes after Modernism, what comes after Post-Modernism? This is a question that intellectuals have debated for well over a decade and about which they still have not come to any conclusion. This is because of the faithless and spiritually empty nature of Post-Modernism. After a vacuum, anything is possible. And consensus on what makes an epoch cannot be achieved while that epoch is still in its early stages. On the one hand, it is possibly to continue to wallow in the negativism of Post-Modernism and make a cult or delusional consciousness out of it. On the other hand, it is equally possible to reject something as primitive and negative as Post-Modernism with something positive and constructive.

‘Something positive and constructive’. These are words which have little meaning in Western society, which alone has generated both Modernism and Post-Modernism. Interestingly, it may therefore be that the Western world will have to stop being ethnocentric and look outside its self-absorbed culture to find the qualities to regenerate itself. The fact is that ‘something positive and constructive’ can only be built on Faith, which is the very baby that was thrown out together with the bathwater in the Western Modernist 60s and Post-Modernist 70s and after. ‘Post-Postmodernism’ is an awkward name. ‘Metamodernism’ and ‘Trans-Modernism’ have been suggested. They too seem very awkward. Perhaps a single syllable, ‘Faith’, is what is really needed by this disbelieving Western world.

Praying for the Resurrection of Europe

Already in the nineteenth century prophetic Russian writers and thinkers like Khomyakov and Dostoyevsky described Europe as a cemetery, its gardens well-kept, its lawns manicured, its trees pruned, its cleaned tombs and monuments of great artistic beauty, but still a cemetery, where lie the dead of past history. A cemetery, in Latin languages, cimetière, cimitero, cementerio, (from the Greek for ‘to sleep’), in German Friedhof, in Dutch Begraafplaats, in Swedish Kyrkogard, is, literally, a place of sleep, rest and burial, a churchyard. This is the place where are buried dear ancestors, friends and family, whom we visit and pray for. For the only life in a cemetery is that which we bring there.

A cemetery is the image which conveyed the fact that European culture was already in the nineteenth century dying out because it was rejecting the roots of its culture, and cultural roots are always spiritual. In other words, by rejecting the founding spirituality of its civilisation, Orthodox Christianity, whether actively by fighting against it or passively by not resisting its loss, Europe reduces itself to a land of historic monuments and museums, remarkable, outstanding, but not living. Europe, the historically admirable, far Western corner of Eurasia, is to be visited by becameraed tourists and even pilgrims for its past, but it is incapable of generating new culture in the present and future for lack of spiritual roots.

As the decades have passed, we have found the above prophetic image growing ever truer. The culture of death and the death of culture, whether through wars and concentration camps, whether through abortion and euthanasia, have taken over a secularised but also increasingly Islamised, thus polarised Europe, which is intent on its spiritual and so physical suicide. Our Orthodox churches in Europe are ever more like oases amid the contemporary Western culture of death. They are like cemetery chapels, where, as we pray for the resurrection of Europe’s Orthodox past, we bring the only spiritual life. Today, Europe seems no longer to have any self-belief, any fire in its soul – only ashes where once a fire so keenly burned.

Europe had from the outset the choice between Christ and death. At first Europe chose Christ and many centuries ago before the Great Misfortune, the best of Europe in its hermits prayed to Christ, whether from their lonely rock fastnesses in the wild North Atlantic, from Mediterranean islands or Alpen pastures, or from many other lonely places in Europe. But then Europe replaced the Risen One with a single mortal man, a new Ceasar (‘we have no king but Caesar’, they said), and then replaced Him with all mortal men, thus choosing death over life. Thus, the God of Europe was killed and put to sleep in the great European cemetery. Without God, Europe no longer believes in itself and so is intent on self-abolition

After Europe had killed God, it created a vacuum of faith. And where there is a vacuum, the demons rush in, and so, having pronounced its God dead, Europe then began to kill His creation, man, in the tens of millions. But we do not despair, for one day the hermits will return to the North Atlantic, to the Hebrides, to the whole Kingdom of the Isles, and all over Europe, and they will pray again to Christ for resurrection, just as the hermits of Russia in their forest monasteries and caves pray for resurrection. But this will happen only when the Orthodox Christian Empire is restored. For the restoration of the Christian Emperor in Russia will be the restoration of the Christian Empire, even to the uttermost ends of Europe.

Orthodox Unity and the March of Western Decivilisation

Western Civilisation? An excellent idea.

Gandhi

Today in Russia, tomorrow in America.

Hieromonk Seraphim Rose

Introduction

At the Fourth All-Diaspora Russian Orthodox Council in San Francisco in 2006 the Church Outside Russia took the near-unanimous decision to enter into canonical communion with the Church inside Russia. Thus would be ended some eighty years of parallel existence for the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been separated by the interfering atheist persecution by the Soviet State of the Church inside Russia. The reason for the decision was the long-prayed for liberation of the Church inside Russia from atheism, as began to be manifested at the miraculous Jubilee Council in 2000. Since 2006, both parts of the Church have co-operated together as a common bastion against the forces of this world. And since 2006 the need for this bastion has become ever more obvious and important, as we can see from the example below.

Decivilisation

Even as recently as 2006 no-one foresaw that the Western world would in 2013 be legitimising homosexual ‘marriage’. Countries that only a few years ago decriminalised homosexuality now proclaim that marriage, a Latin word which means ‘taking a husband’, is possible between two men or two women, between people of the same sex. Not only have fourteen countries now instituted same-sex ‘marriage’, so redefining marriage, but they are also bullying other countries into doing the same. Insulting intolerance and arrogance is such that Western secularism is attempting to blackmail, intimidate and humiliate other cultures, especially those of the Russian Federation, Eastern Europe and Africa, into accepting its policies. These in fact censor free speech and decivilise spiritually superior civilisations, cultures with more Christian content than secularist Western culture.

The Orthodox attitude to homosexuality is defined, like everything else, by the words of the Gospel: ‘For there are some eunuchs, who were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, who were made eunuchs by men: and there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake’ (Matt. 19, 12). In other words there are those very few who through genetic accident are (homosexual and so) called to be celibate, those who through psychological conditioning by others or by Western social conditioning and fashion since the 1960s are (homosexual and so) called to be celibate, and those who through monastic vocation are celibate. It is clear that homosexuality is an illness or handicap that deserves compassion, not propaganda. Here the popular law of the Russian Federation against propaganda in favour of homosexuality among minors merely reflects the Gospel.

Homosexuals who seek salvation and so strive to be celibate against all temptations are welcomed in the Church, just as heterosexuals who also seek salvation and so strive to be celibate against all temptations. Knowing the power of human sexual energy and its potential destructiveness, the Church has from the beginning been constructive and tried to channel heterosexuality into family life, thus creating marriage, and tried to channel homosexuality into friendship, thus creating community. It is most significant that ever since the 1960s, collapsing Western societies have denigrated and destroyed both family life and friendship, suicidally creating broken homes and enmity. Until that period, 99.9% of people lived without homosexual temptations and with friendship. The collapse of family life, marriage, friendship and community are the consequences of Western Decivilisation.

The root of the problem is in the abnormal and deChristianising social changes accepted by Western societies over the last fifty years. Today countries that were protected from that period’s suicidal follies do not suffer as collapsing Western societies do. The Western world is now trying to spread the self-justifying propaganda that results from its illness and infect others with it, forcing spiritually healthier cultures to accept its contaminating disease. This is like the decivilising Western disease of drug-taking or abortion (3,000 killed per day in the USA, 500 killed per day in the UK), which also began in the same period. Today’s phase of aggressive Decivilisation was unforeseen even in 2006, in the same way as no-one foresaw then that the Western world was about to support Islamist terrorists and destabilise Iraq, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, the Lebanon and Egypt, with millions of victims.

Conclusion

In 2006 no-one foresaw that Western secularism would embark on a campaign of further destabilisation of marriage, spreading aggressive propaganda in favour of homosexuality. If we had foreseen this, the urge for Russian Orthodox unity would have been even stronger then. Given the increasing tempo of Western Decivilisation, it is now clear that if Orthodox Christians are to keep their integrity in the Western world, and that world now includes weaker Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria bribed into joining the homosexualised EU, as well as the long ago Westernised Patriarchates of Constantinople and Antioch, we Orthodox of all nationalities, not just Russian, Serbian and Georgian, have to work together with the moral, political and spiritual protection offered by the Russian Federation and its Orthodox Civilisation in order to counter Western Decivilisation.

The Chance of Redemption for Western Europeans

One thousand years of error and injustice will be made right. There will be a new Tsar in Russia and a new repentant culture in Europe, as it rediscovers its forgotten soul which it had busied itself burying for a thousand years beneath the ingenious but unnecessary.

Foreword: Faith on Earth

In 1914, nigh on one hundred years ago, Western Europe destroyed itself and all those whom it dragged into its great suicidal war. This was the fruit of the evils which its elites had wrought among their exploited peasantry, working classes and colonies. Little wonder that the country which suffered most in the Great War was Belgium, whose king had wrought so much evil in Central Africa, where perhaps 10,000,000 had perished. However, Great Britain everywhere, especially in the Indian subcontinent and in South Africa, France in Northern Africa and Indo-China, Austro-Hungary (Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud all lived in Vienna at the same time) in Central and Eastern Europe and Germany wherever it could, were all guilty. The catastrophe of 1914 had been heralded by the rebirth of European paganism, in Music by Stravinsky in the pagan dissonances of his Firebird and The Rite of Spring, in Art by the Futurists, as well as in Theatre by Strindberg, in Sculpture and Literature.

Indeed, it was ultimately in Alexander Blok’s poem ‘The Twelve’, in which the author saw Antichrist, pretending to be Christ, leading the Russian Revolution, that Europe could have seen its fate for non-repentance. Although the Great War would have left a great scar, the flower of much of its youth dead, it could have been reversed. Russia tried to reverse it, taking the brunt of the attacks in the East. However, it stopped being reversible in 1918 with the permanent installation in the Russian Empire, encouraged by the Western Powers, of a Western-inspired materialist regime and the martyrdom of the Russian Royal Family. The War could have ended in 1917, with Russian troops peacefully triumphant in Berlin and Vienna led by Tsar Nicholas II, as they had been by Tsar Alexander I in Paris in 1814, freeing Central and Eastern Europe from tyranny and restoring Poland and Finland. Instead of this, the War dragged on for another eighteen months and countless more young men died.

And as a result of this apostasy, today we ask the question: When the Saviour returns, will He find faith on earth? Fifty years ago, we thought this impossible – then there was still faith. Today this is not so, for over the last fifty years yet another chapter of the Book of Revelation has been enacted. At the present time we see the gradual development of a global surveillance society, controlled by what is becoming a world mafia-state, the fruit of the intolerance of the new Puritanism. On various false pretexts, freedom in the post-Protestant West is fast vanishing. With miniature cameras, drones, Google Glass, debit cards without which food cannot be bought, that world is fast heading for spiritual endarkenment. And yet over the last fifty years the Russian Church has offered spiritual enlightenment to the souls of this post-Protestant world, especially in the USA and the UK. At first slowly and cautiously and then more openly, Her witness to salvation in the Church of God has become ever more apparent.

Enlightening the Endarkened Post-Protestant World

Although this post-Protestant world is on the very fringes of Church consciousness, of authentic Christianity, the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, then still captive to Communism, did witness here, showing great patience. Thinking that in its spiritual weakness the post-Protestant world, especially ex-Protestants, would find it difficult to adopt the Orthodox calendar, She allowed it by generosity, that is, by economy, the secular calendar; thinking that because of its Western political prejudices and lack of understanding the post-Protestant world might not be able to venerate the Tsar and the other Royal Martyrs, by generous economy She did not insist on this; thinking that in its narrowness, the post-Protestant world might suffer from phyletist nationalism, She translated the Orthodox services wholly into its languages. Over the last fifty years what was once inaccessible has become accessible – there are no more excuses.

It must be said that success has been limited, especially among those who had been practising Protestants, less among those who were blank sheets, starting from nothing. Even among those who have accepted the invitation, there are those who refuse to enter the Arena, and do not become integrated Orthodox, even after fifty years. Also, some ex-Protestants, having joined the Church, then abandoned Her to go off and found their own sectarian ‘churches’, chapels, ‘sketes’ or even deaneries, whether to the left extreme or to the right extreme. Both in the post-Protestant cultures of North America and the United Kingdom, the Church inside Russia suffered many setbacks in its missions, until quite recently politically unable to heed the local experience of the Church Outside Russia. Using less economy, the latter has sometimes had more success (though with disappointments also), because of its local understanding of the ex-Protestant culture.

Here, there are those who have agreed to enter the Arena even after only a few months and so become grounded Orthodox. There is even one Archbishop of the Church Outside Russia who is from such a background, not to mention many other clergy and laity. Why have the spiritually sensitive been able to do this, whereas others have brought first moral scandal and then Protestant-style schism, as in England, or else first moral and financial scandal and then Protestant-style modernism, as in North America? The reason is to be found in psychological motivation. Those who join the Church from a self-serving need, even pathology, do not bear fruit and leave for self-made sects and cults, according to their ‘old man’, their old Protestant culture. However, those who enter the Church because they wish to save their souls and so serve others, do bear fruit. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’. Therefore, ‘Wretched are the impure in heart for they shall not see God’.

Enlightening the Endarkened Post-Roman Catholic World

Today, having reached the limits of what is possible in enlightening the post-Protestant world, the now reunited Russian Orthodox Church is turning to the far vaster post-Roman Catholic world. This world had long been closed to the Church because of its illusion that it is itself the Church, so cultivated by its purposeful deformation of the call to the West to repent made by the Mother of God to Portuguese children at Fatima in 1917. However, its recent wave of moral and financial scandals has revealed the corruption that has existed inside it for centuries and brought at least some to humility. Now the Russian Orthodox Church must battle for the souls of this post-Roman Catholic world. Fifty years ago that world began to fall into the desacralisation and infantilism of secularist Protestantisation and yet, traditionally it had conserved from Orthodoxy the sense of the Mother of God, the communion of the saints and the sacramental sense. There is cause for hope somewhere here.

Unfortunately, Roman Catholicism in the Western world has almost wholly lost its way. According to the design of evil forces, which had long planned its ultimate downfall, and the horror and scandal of its rejected faithful, since the Second Vatican Council two generations ago it has adopted the desacralised sentimentalism of secularist Protestantisation. Whether in North America, the UK, France, the Netherlands or in the Germanic and Scandinavian world, Protestantised Roman Catholicism is in a state of almost total apostasy, its liturgical heritage dumbed down, infantilised and all but destroyed. Western Europe has largely kept only the relics of the Faith. Quite literally, the relics. Western Europe resembles a huge treasure chest of relics, to which modernist Roman Catholicism has thrown away the key. However, a new key is being rehammered and reforged on the anvil of Tradition by the smiths of Orthodoxy. This is the key to the best of the West, the literal relics of its former piety.

Fortunately, there is hope of redemption among the simple faithful, often Orthodox in all but name, in Black Africa, in Latin America, in remoter parts of Southern Europe, in Eastern Europe, in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary and elsewhere, where piety and the veneration of icons have survived and not all are very aged. Here interest in Orthodoxy comes from the faithful of the mainstream, not from extremes, whether of left or right. It is this mainstream that has been rejected by its clerical elite. Thus, pro-Protestant modernists in Poland who seek self-destruction, have no interest in authentic Orthodoxy, at best only in a fake and sanitised Orthodoxy; nor do Roman Catholics in the extreme west of the Ukraine who have joined the Lefevrist group, unable to accept the Second Vatican Council’s Protestant-style, clericalist modernism. However, their extreme right-wing politics, Russophobic and pro-Hitler, prevents them like the rest of the Lefevrist movement from joining the Orthodox Church.

Today it is little wonder that various refugees from the spiritual desert of the Western world, whether post-Protestant or post-Roman Catholic, from the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden to the French actor Gerard Depardieu, look, consciously or unconsciously, to Russia for hope. Since the glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981, confirmed in 2000, the Church has been renewed, a process which continues as more New Martyrs are canonised. Only a few weeks ago in Paris thousands of demonstrators at mass rallies against ‘homosexual marriage’ and the adoption of children by same-sex couples, chanted ‘Russia, save us’, knowing that such perversions are forbidden here. For fifty years and more the Russian Church has tried to redeem the post-Protestant world, suffering with limited success. It is now our turn to try to redeem the post-Roman Catholic world, a more serious proposition, revealing to it, to its astonishment, its long forgotten roots in Orthodoxy.

Afterword: Redemption by Suffering

In 1917 the West was warned of the evil it was exporting to Russia by the Revelation of the Mother of God in Fatima. ‘Until you stop spreading the evil that you are spreading to Russia and consecrate yourself to Orthodoxy, the Holy Father (the Patriarch) will suffer and all will go worse’. It refused to listen and deformed the message of the Mother of God into self-justification. Then, in 1919, as prophesied, it guaranteed a Second Great War by afflicting the German and Austrian peoples, and not their elites, with an unjust peace. Thus, Russian troops would be triumphant in Berlin and Vienna – but only in 1945 and after the most barbaric of wars, with its camps and genocides, the greatest of which was that of 30 million Slavs, imposed by racist Germany. And even after all this Western Europe still refused to repent and so has gone on with its abortion holocaust beginning in 1964, and in 1989 its destruction of an unfree Eastern Europe, which it had itself created in 1917 and 1945.

However, God gives many opportunities for repentance, up unto seventy times seven. Every generation has its chance. The chances were refused in August 1914, in September 1939, in October 1964 and in November 1989. In December 2014 there is coming yet another chance. Four horrible scars will be left, but there is still time. Since 1914 the old Protestant culture has fallen, its decadence becoming apparent after two generations in the 1960s. Since 1964 the old Roman Catholic culture has fallen, its decadence becoming apparent after two generations today. Once blinded by arrogant hubris, its delusion of self-belief, the old Protestant culture has over the last fifty years disintegrated. It is now the turn of the old Roman Catholic culture. If it understands its error of hubris, it will have the chance to listen to the real message of Fatima, the call to the West to repent of its pride and its poisonous materialist ideology and accept the restoration of Church Orthodoxy in its integrity.

It is by no means certain that this will happen. The post-Protestant world is still offered Orthodoxy, but few accept it. It may be the same with the post-Roman Catholic world. It may be that no restoration of Orthodoxy in the Western world, however partial, will be possible until there is the example of full restoration in Russia. It may be that until the House of Romanov, through the son of a Romanov mother, is restored, even until another War, the fallen Western world will not be ready to listen, understanding at last that its own propaganda about Russia before the Revolution was merely lies. It may be that the Merciful Mother of God must yet appear again, as She did in her Myrrh-Giving Iviron Icon in the 1980s, again witnessing to the New Martyrs and Confessors and confirming her words of Fatima. Only then will the Western world start to repent of the materialist ideology which it has spread and return to the clean Gospel of Christ and His Holy Church in the purity of Orthodoxy.

Law protecting the religious feelings of believers must be passed, says Nikolai Valuev

When a country returns to the faith, it inevitably begins to protect in law the religious feelings of its citizens. This is one of the stages on the way to a country becoming Christian again, a process that ends with the restoration of the Monarchy. We are especially aware of this fact in this year when we commemorate the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan. When, on the other hand, a country deChristianises, then it stops protecting the religious feelings of the faithful. The article below is then significant. Once more it suggests that contemporary Russia is heading towards reChristianisation and dewesternisation, whereas the contemporary West is heading towards deChristianisation – two trains heading in opposite directions.

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/61583.htm