Category Archives: Diaspora

Peace for the Ukraine – and for the Orthodox Church?

US Disengagement?

Even before Trump had been elected, the US elite had realised that it had to disengage from its Ukraine project. Russia had not been weakened, regime-changed, dismembered and destroyed, as had been the US plan all along. Instead its economy was booming, becoming the fourth biggest in the world, President Putin was more popular than ever and BRICS had taken off. As for the illegal Western sanctions, they were ignored by 90% of the world and damaged only the West. The US puppet, Zelensky, in his bunker in Kiev is clearly delusional, taking, they say, cocaine and desperately threatening invasions of Russia, without troops, arms and munitions, and even nuclear war, without nuclear weapons.

The claim by President-elect Trump during his campaign that he would achieve peace in the Ukraine within 24 hours, even before he entered the Oval Office was all presupposition and hubris. How could he end a war which the US had already lost. and Russian victory is ending anyway? Peace does not depend on him, even if the tragedy began as a US proxy war. Peace depends on the actions of the Russian military and President Putin. Indeed, peace may come through Russian military victory and Ukrainian military collapse even before Trump assumes office. That would probably be very welcome to Trump, enabling him to begin as President unburdened of the curse of the Ukraine, which has ruined everything.

The fact is that the President-elect does not want to solve the conflict in the Ukraine, what he wants is to disengage from it, so that the US can save money and at last ‘pivot to Asia’. The Ukraine is now a distraction from US strategic interests. Trump wants to run away from Kiev, just as the US ran away from its failed wars in Saigon and Kabul. Trump can do this very easily, if Kiev collapses before Trump’s inauguration. He can simply blame Biden for everything. This will be his ’exit strategy’. The puppet-master has changed and so the puppets must change too. After all, Trump has from the outset stated that the war would never have begun, if he had been President at the time. And that may well be true.

Peace Talks?

But who can Russia talk too? The Russians cannot talk to the Ukrainians, as their President is illegitimate and talks with Russia were literally outlawed by Kiev in 2022. The Russians cannot talk to Europeans, as they have shown themselves to be delusional liars and treaty-breaking traitors ever since 2014. This can be seen from their refusal to implement the so-called Minsk Accords, which they openly confessed were simply delaying tactics. In any case, the narcissistic and so delusional European ruling class is discredited and hated by the peoples of Europe and represents only the past and its own selfish interests. That ruling class is unable to talk to Russia because it is incapable of dealing with reality – its defeat.

In any case, Russia will certainly not sit down and talk now, when it is on the brink of victory. Would the Allies have stopped in January 1945 to talk to Hitler? Russia will not stop now, victory is in sight. Anyway, as we said, Kiev has literally outlawed talks with Russia and its President is illegal, as his term of service ended earlier this year, like that of his Parliament. The war has continued for so long only because of Biden’s support and EU and UK backing. And bankrupt Europe cannot replace the US, as Europe has run out of money and arms and cannot let its own troops die there. And it is troops that the Ukraine needs, for it has lost nearly a million soldiers, 517,000 of them in the unfinished year of 2024 alone.

As a result, with no-one to talk to, the Russians are taking back more and more territory from the Ukraine, 100 years after it was illegally handed over to the Ukraine by the anti-Russian Bolsheviks. There will be no ‘frozen conflict’ or ‘stalemate’ here, just Russian victory. ‘Frozen conflict’ was possible two years ago. The only people the Russians could talk to now are the Americans – but under Trump. Trump is a businessman and wants to disengage from a loss-making business and must sack Zelensky. As the Americans no longer have any diplomats, the hope is that Trump will appoint the only European politician left – Victor Orban – to talk not only to the Russian President, but also to the Russian Patriarch.

The Russian President

The Russian President could express the following terms to Trump’s representative, perhaps Orban: Firstly, drop all 16,000 illegal anti-Russian sanctions and absurd criminal charges. Then, recognise as Russian the four Russian provinces which have already joined Russia, and, if they have been taken by Russia by then, the next four once Russian provinces of the south and east, including Nikolaev and Odessa on the Black Sea coast, and the three more once Russian provinces to the north-east (Chernigov, Sumy, Poltava). The Russian President would leave the rest to become again the real Ukraine, perhaps to be called ‘Kievan Rus’ (Kiyivska Rus’), more or less mirroring Belarus to the north.

Such a nationally homogenous, Ukrainian-speaking Kievan Rus would consist of 14 administrative areas, just over half of the original 27 (including the two that were in the Russian Crimea), its new easternmost provinces being Kiev, Cherkasy and Kirovohrad. This would represent an area of about 260,000 square kilometres and a pre-war population of about 16 million. This would draw Ukrainian refugees back from Europe. Kievan Rus would be a neutral, sovereign and independent nation, that is, demilitarised (free of NATO) and denazified (free of the EU) which are racist, anti-sovereignty organisations. Agreement could then be reached and Russia would by treaty guarantee the territorial integrity of all European nations.

Of course, they would have to make a condition that Moldova should carry out referenda for any groups among its border population, such as those in Transdniestria and Gagauzia, who may wish to join Russia. Similarly, referenda must be held for Romanian and Hungarian minorities on the borders of Kievan Rus who may wish to ‘go home’. If the three tiny Baltic statelets were at last obliged to grant human rights to their Russian minorities, there would be no threat from Russia to them. With such an agreement, the Western half of Europe would be secure and could slash its military spending. Then Trump would see his dream come true and abandon NATO, which could be dissolved, just like the EU.

The Russian Patriarch

The Russian Orthodox Patriarch also has to be involved in these talks. Leader of by far the largest Local Orthodox Church, the whole Orthodox Church of 200 million has been in chaos ever since the British-orchestrated palace revolt or ‘Russian Revolution’ of February 1917. Without the Russian Church, several key Local Orthodox Churches were taken over through political interference by Great Britain and, after the Second World War, specifically in 1948 with the forced removal by the CIA of Patriarch Maximos V of Constantinople, by the USA. Freedom for the Orthodox Church, the end of Western interference in its internal affairs, is essential for peace in the Ukraine and for justice in Church affairs.

There would have to be an agreement with the Russian Church, which has also suffered as a result of American policy in the Ukraine and elsewhere. This is principally because of the Zionist neocon ideology, implemented by Nuland, Pompeo, Blinken, Biden etc. This established a fake Church in the Ukraine, permitted the open persecution of the real Church there and also sanctioned the Russian Patriarch personally. What could the terms of the Patriarch be and what concessions could he grant in return? Here there has to be mutuality, as there have been excesses on both sides. Here are Russian Orthodox terms to be imposed on the Greek Churches by the USA, with compensation from the USA:

  1. Closure of the fake Church in the Ukraine, the OCU, with Constantinople withdrawing its absurd Tomos, which justified it. All stolen property is to be returned to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (see Concessions 1, 2 and 3 below).
  2. Release of all Orthodox in Finland, Estonia and Lithuania from the uncanonical jurisdiction of Constantinople, introduced from the 1920s on, on condition that all Orthodox there be granted a new Autocephalous Baltic Orthodox Church (see Concession 5 below).
  3. No more interference by Constantinople in the affairs of the Polish Orthodox Church and, especially, in those of the Church of the Czechia and Slovakia.
  4. Granting to the Russian Church of jurisdiction over all Africa, except for Egypt, which has its own historic Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, based in Alexandria (thus returning to the pre-1920s situation). This is on condition that Moscow establishes an Autocephalous African Orthodox Church there by 2050.

Russian Concessions:

  1. Immediate resumption by Moscow of communion and concelebration with the Churches of Constantinople, Alexandria and other Greek Orthodox Churches.
  2. Immediate rescinding of all ‘suspensions’ and ‘defrockings’ of clergy in Russia, the Ukraine, Moldova, Lithuania, Western Europe and elsewhere, which were carried out for political reasons because of clergy disagreements with political, nationalist or uncanonical sectarian ideologies, imposed by certain Russian bishops.
  3. Autocephaly for the Kievan Rus Orthodox Church within twelve months.
  4. Autocephaly for the Moldovan Orthodox Church on the remaining national territory of Moldova within twelve months, in concert with the Romanian Orthodox Church, in order to reunite all Moldovan Orthodox in one Church. The Moldovan Diaspora in Western countries would come under the care of the Romanian Orthodox Church.
  5. Autocephaly for all Orthodox (about 500,000 in number) in the three Baltic States and Finland, forming an autocephalous Baltic Orthodox Church within twelve months.
  6. All Russian Orthodox in the Diasporas in Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania are to be instructed, under threat of excommunication, to merge by negotiation into new Local Churches, to be founded on those territories by 2050. This would be conditional on all other Local Churches which have Diaspora jurisdictions issuing the same instructions to their Diasporas.

 

Questions and Answers on the Third Day of Pentecost 2023 After the Ukraine: Religion, Faith, the Orthodox Church and the Diaspora

Religion and Faith

Q: What is the point of religion?

A: Religion is pointless.

Q: What do you mean? You are a priest!

A: Religion is manmade and man-inspired. It is an invention, an institution, devised for use by States in order to manipulate their populations. This is the opposite of Faith, which is God-made and God-inspired. Unlike Religion, Faith is not devised by men, but revealed by God. The point of Faith is to know and acquire God, Who is Love. All words and phrases such as ‘salvation, going to church, praying, acquiring the Holy Spirit, repentance, redemption, overcoming sin, defeating death, venerating the saints, grace, the sacraments, understanding the Scriptures’, mean precisely this – knowing and acquiring Love.

Faith is then the opposite of religion, whose aim all too often becomes knowing and acquiring hatred. We can see this very clearly in the institutional Religion of the anti-Faith pharisees in the New Testament, who hated and then murdered Christ, the Son of God/Love – they murdered Love. And the modern pharisees, full of the same old hatred, just go on doing this today, as we have seen very recently! If Christ came back, they would most certainly crucify Him again, as the Greek author Kazantsakis wrote 75 years ago.

Q: Why then are there different faiths?

A: All faiths agree that humanity and all creation are at the bottom of the mountain and God/Love is at the top of the mountain. Faith is to help us climb the mountain, resisting all the temptations against Love. We all start at the bottom and inevitably take different paths up the mountain. At the bottom we can find many paths that lead upwards, but how far do they go and how will we best fight off the attacks from the demons who sit along those paths? What is the best and easiest path? Many paths seem to peter out quite soon or end in insurmountable heights and obstacles. And do they all lead upwards anyway? Or do they just go round and round the mountain? Do the other paths join the Orthodox Christian paths at a certain level?

Personally, I have no need to condemn others for taking other paths, as others inevitably do. All I have is my own spiritual experience, that the Orthodox saints have got to the top of the mountain on their paths, despite the enemy of humanity, the devil and his minions. Therefore, I try to follow those paths. As for those who take other paths, it is none of my business. I am not an insecure neophyte who needs to condemn others in order to justify himself.

The Ukraine

Q: Do you support the Russian side in the war in the Ukraine?

A: As a priest, I am on the side of all the suffering and on the side of peace. I cannot be anywhere else. I cannot support killing by anyone. This conflict was begun by the USA through its puppet government which it installed by violence in Kiev in 2014 with the support of its EU/NATO vassals. It is tragic and unnecessary. And sadly, as they say, those who sowed the wind are reaping the whirlwind. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died so far, then there are the hundreds of thousands of maimed, psychologically crippled and bereaved. Let alone the millions of Ukrainian refugees (2 million in Russia) and millions of others in Europe, especially in Poland. And then there are the Russian dead (see below).

Q: Some American converts to ROCOR say that they support the Russian side against the Ukraine because that conflict is a battle for Holy Rus. What would you say?

A: The phrase ‘Holy Rus’ refers to the ancient past. After the ravages of Soviet atheism, it no longer exists – it has not been reconstituted. Today Russia still  has twice the abortion rate of the West and very high rates of divorce and alcoholism. Today, instead of ‘Holy Rus’, we use expressions like the Orthodox Christian world, Orthodox Civilisation, the Orthosphere. And if you kill others, you do not belong to the Orthodox world.

Q: What will happen to the ‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’, the OCU, so recently set up by Constantinople with US money?

A: It will die out and disappear because it is a temporary passing phenomenon, born out of the US State Department’s plotting imagination and the refusal by Moscow to give the Ukrainian Church autocephaly – which it almost did in the 1990s. The UOC was only ever a purely political organisation, born of the US-controlled Ukrainian State and the US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Q: If you are neutral in this war, why are you convinced that Russia will defeat the Western-backed government in Kiev?

A: Quite simply, because I am a political realist, have sources in the Ukraine, and do not listen to tabloid/BBC/CNN type propaganda, which simply repeats the lies of the Kiev Department of Propaganda, which itself is run by American PR companies.  Look at the facts:

First of all, Russia will win, perhaps even in several months’ time, because this conflict is existential for it, but not at all for the Western elite. In other words, it is everything for Russia. It cannot lose. It has military, economic and diplomatic superiority, the backing of most of the world. It is not repeating the mistakes made by the Russian Empire in 1914, which naively thought that Britain and France were on its side, when in fact they fomented both the German attack and the overthrow of the Tsar, using internal traitors, lack of censorship and malcontents. Russia has learned from its mistakes then, it has at last lost its illusions.

Secondly, so far this is not even a war from the Russian viewpoint, let alone an ‘unprovoked full-scale invasion’, as the propagandists call it. The Russian Army has not yet even fought directly in it. The ‘Russian’ side is composed of the pro-Russian Ukrainian people’s militias from Lugansk and Donetsk (the Donbass), who are fighting for their freedom, Chechen volunteers and the 50,000-strong Wagner Company, which is composed of about 75% ex-convicts and about 25% of professional volunteers, the latter often officers recruited from the Russian Army. It is backed by vastly superior drone-guided Russian artillery, missiles and units from the Russian Air Force and the Black Sea Fleet. The always weak Kiev Navy no longer exists, its last ship was sunk last week, and the always weak Kiev Air Force has been virtually wiped out. Now, in modern warfare, the winner is always the one who has air superiority and can mount a naval blockade.

So far, since February 2022, it seems that some 20,000 pro-Russian Ukrainians and Chechens, 13,000 ex-convict volunteers and 4,000 Russian volunteers have died on the Russian side. Total casualties on the Russian side are therefore about 37,000. However, it appears that the Kiev Army has lost at least 300,000 dead, not including wounded. The ratio is 1:8 or even 1:10. Why? Because of the superiority of modern Russian technology (the Kiev forces have mainly used old Soviet arms or old NATO arms) and its vast quantity. The greatest Kiev defeat so far, greater even than Mariupol, was in Bakhmut, which fell on 20 May 2023 (this defeat was censored by the Western media, like so much else) after nine months of fighting in this horrible war of attrition. The town of Bakhmut, where some 70,000 people once lived, is in ruins. Whole blocks of flats were dynamited by the fleeing Kiev forces, just as they did in Mariupol.

The first NATO-trained Kiev Army was defeated in March 2022 and the war could have ended then. However, the second Kiev Army, rearmed with equipment from the former Soviet, now NATO, bloc in order to prolong the conflict, was defeated in the autumn of 2022. Now the third Kiev Army, armed to the teeth and trained by the US/NATO, is also being defeated. I would give it a maximum of another eleven months, simply because this is a war between Washington and Moscow, being fought on the battlefields of the Ukraine till the last Ukrainian cannon fodder is dead.

Since February 2022, the pro-Russian forces (and even Russia itself, in minor and suicidal incursions by Kiev forces, carried out for propaganda purposes) are being attacked from ever deeper inside Kiev-controlled territory. This means that pro-Russian forces, and probably eventually the million-strong Russian Army itself, will in turn be forced to penetrate ever deeper into Kiev-controlled territory and possibly (and unwillingly) even go as far as the Polish border. After it has set up a government in the New Ukraine, centred in a Kiev independent of the USA, it will withdraw.

Small parts of the old Soviet-established Ukraine (yes, the West is defending a purely Soviet creation in the Ukraine, 32 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union) may be transferred to Poland, Hungary and Romania. There persecuted minorities have long laboured under Kiev’s dreaded secret police, the CIA-trained SBU. As for the south and east of the Ukraine, whose unhistoric borders were set by the USSR, probably including Odessa and as far as Transdnistria, they will go to Russia. An independent Ukraine, free of the US, will exist. Russia has no desire at all to occupy it, just to neutralise it as a threat to itself and free the Russian areas, part of Russia until 1954 or 1922.

Thirdly, the vast majority of the world either supports Russia (e.g. China, Iran etc) in this operation, or is neutral (e.g. India, Africa, Latin America etc) and does not support the West, which is only 12.5% of world population and whose GDP is quite outmatched by BRICS, even without the rest of the world, which is also dedollarising. Dedollarisation has been caused directly by sanctions against Russia, which have undermined all confidence in the dollar. The debt-ridden West is isolated in its G7 ghetto, its only weapons are boomeranging sanctions, which have caused huge inflation in their own countries, and plots to overthrow popular governments, as recently in the now chaotic Pakistan. The EU head of diplomacy, the unelected Josep Borrell, has admitted twice that the whole conflict in the Ukraine could end in days if the West stopped arming Kiev. By arming the Kiev forces against their own people, the West is simply prolonging the agony. Every death should be on the conscience of the Western elite.

The huge error of the Western elite in all this is its hubris in believing its own delusional propaganda. Russia is a Superpower, with advanced arms the USA simply does not have.

The West has yet to learn to respect different civilisations, which it has not been doing for exactly a millennium, when it definitively began to reconstitute the incredibly cruel pagan Roman Empire and adopted its techniques of ruthless organised violence to conquer and exploit the world (See Note 1 at the end). That organised violence began with its Crusades in the 1030s in Iberia, Sicily, England (in 1066), then in the Middle East and later in southern France, then developed into colonialism and imperialism, continuing to this day. This is clearly not Christian, but pagan.

Even today, what was once called Orthodox Christian Civilisation, however far it is from the actual practice of Orthodoxy – and it is far from it – is radically different from Western-Secularist Civilisation through its cultural values alone. And the fault-line between Orthodox Christian Civilisation and Western-Secularist Civilisation passes through the extreme west of today’s Ukraine, the part that used to belong to Catholic Poland and before that to Catholic Habsburg Austria and, frankly, it should return there.

The Future of the Russian Church

Q: So, after what you see as a Russian military and political victory, do you see the Moscow Patriarchate taking over the whole of the Church in the Ukraine?

A: No, not at all! Whatever the outcome, and regardless of whether I am right or wrong in my view that the Russian State will win against Washington’s war in the Ukraine, the great loser in this whole affair is the Moscow Patriarchate. It is a catastrophe for it, though it still does not seem to realise this.

First of all, the Russian State and the Orthodox Faith (unlike the Moscow Patriarchate) are two very different things. The Russian State wants to destroy anti-Russian Nazism in the Ukraine, so it will gain national security and US bases, biolabs and missiles aimed at Moscow will not exist on its borders. The Russian State wants a militarily and politically neutral Ukraine, like Austria and Finland used to be, before they were forced to join NATO. As regards the Orthodox Faith, it is obvious that the still largely atheist Russian State has no ability or desire to enforce churchgoing in the Ukraine in the future. People in the New Ukraine that may take shape a year from now, perhaps with a population of 10-20 million, will be free to go to any church they want. For most of them that will mean not going to any church at all (as in Russia, where also only about 2-3% go to church regularly).

However, churchgoing Ukrainians will certainly not go to Moscow Patriarchate churches after the conflict in the Ukraine is over, as they see in it an anti-Ukrainian Russian nationalist organisation. For example, just two weeks ago we were in Bari, where we concelebrated at the Liturgy for St Nicholas Day. It was interrupted by about 10 Ukrainians, including a Constantinople OCU priest, who shouted ‘Satanist’ at us. They were shouting not at us Romanians, Moldovans and English, but against the bishop who was from the Moscow Patriarchate. That is how they feel. The level of hatred is that great.

I think that Churched Ukrainians will only attend a future de facto and de jure autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metr Onufry. In other words, Moscow will have to give autocephaly. The present de facto autocephaly may even get recognised by other Local Churches before Moscow actually gives it, exactly as happened with the Polish Orthodox Church in the 1920s (2). The UOC already gets great sympathy from other Local Churches, which see the Moscow Patriarchate as enslaved to the Russian State. The same is true for Russian churches in many other countries, where the Moscow Patriarchate, as a Soviet-era institution, is still in the grip of Soviet centralisation and, as a post-Soviet institution, is in the grip of oligarchic Business. Most Russian Orthodox churches outside Russia also want freedom, autocephaly, from the now nationalist Moscow Patriarchate, not just those in the Ukraine.

All those that received autocephaly from Moscow in the last century, in Poland and in Czechoslovakia and in the OCA in North America (even if the last case is disputed), are pleased to be outside Moscow’s control. So are most Orthodox in Latvia now, even if its autocephaly was uncanonically given it by the Latvian government (again, exactly as in Poland in the 1920s (2))! In Lithuania and Estonia, Orthodox are in great difficulty, as both have schisms, and, as in the Ukraine, this is because Moscow refused to give autocephaly in time, in the 1990s. One post-Revolutionary émigré fragment of the Moscow Patriarchate, the very Moscow-critical, very independent and very Western Archdiocese of Western Europe is also in great difficulty, because it does not have autocephaly and is at present trying to get another three bishops consecrated, but it needs Moscow’s approval. It may not get it.

Another post-Revolutionary emigre fragment, ROCOR, in New York, has done exactly the opposite to the above Archdiocese group, in quite suicidal fashion. Between 1927 and 2007 it had total independence, de facto autocephaly, from Moscow and canonised the New Martyrs and New Confessors. That was an act of spiritual courage and of independence, though it was not strictly canonical, as Moscow had not granted it permission to be autocephalous and canonise saints on its territory.

However, in 2007 an act of canonical unity between Moscow and ROCOR was agreed and signed. I was there. That was good, because it legitimised ROCOR independence and its acts, which previously had been disputed. However, tragically and dramatically, instead of using that de facto and de jure independence and freedom, ROCOR renounced it and came to enslave itself to Moscow. After exactly a decade of missed golden opportunities, since precisely 2017, the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, that spiritual unity has become a purely political union with the Moscow Patriarchate, exactly as Patriarch Kyrill quite specifically described it to a Russian Metropolitan friend in 2018.

As a result of this spiritual surrender six years ago, ROCOR decided to agree to anything that Soviet Centralising Moscow and post-Soviet oligarchic Business Moscow wants. The dollar above Christ. ROCOR has been bought out by money. The more gifts that were accepted, the less freedom it had. Even more tragically, it was not forced into this sell-out by Moscow, it was its own voluntary choice after ten years. What happened? Sadly, seeing how luxuriously the bishops lived in Moscow, they wanted the same. So they sold themselves. At one time ROCOR bishops lived as poor and humble monks. They, all gone now, must be spinning in their graves. How are the once (spiritually) mighty fallen….

Thus, ROCOR has lost its heritage of spiritual freedom and independence. And therefore it will not last much longer, for God is not mocked. Its sectarian extremism and nationalism, that is, the exclusion of all other Orthodox, including Ukrainians, will not last long where it is, outside Russia, in the Diaspora. The Diaspora is unkind to inward-looking, racially exclusive and extremist ghettos. The old humble ROCOR of saintly confessors has been replaced by the ethos of a right-wing American missionary sect, remarkably similar to the Mormons. This is completely alien to others and to all normal Orthodox, Serbian, Bulgarian, Moldovan, Romanian, Greek, who simply ignore it, which is not difficult, as ROCOR is so small. Byzantine-rite Mormonism only attracts the few, the wrong sort, the right-wing sectarian, the negative, not the many, the positive, on whom you can build. Such sectarianism does not export to territories outside the USA, where ROCOR is dying out in one suicidal act after another, from France to South America, from Indonesia to England.

Q: You sacrificed fifty years of your life for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, so how do you feel now that you are outside it and it is falling apart?

A: Well, that is not true. I am not outside it. I am in spiritual unity with the suffering Russian Church of the Saints and the New Martyrs and Confessors. I am only outside the Soviet-style administration, which, by the way, has always admired the immensely rich Vatican, like the Statist Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, whom we remember dying in the arms of the Pope in 1978. This is because it has always admired the mentality of the State-Church or rather the Church-State. Power and riches. Such a view of the Church as a mere political administration based on power and riches does not have any canonical authority, just as forced episcopal signatures have no canonical authority.

As regards sacrificing my life, more exactly I have given fifty years of my life for the Orthodox Church in the Diaspora. In the 1970s and early 1980s I saw the Church of Constantinople reject a future for Orthodoxy by preferring nationalism and politics to transmitting the Tradition to others and to future generations. Now I have seen the Russian Church do the same, with its nationalism and politics, and so it is falling apart. If it continues, the only clergy that will be left are money-minded careerists who have little or no faith. Too bad for them. You cannot impose freedom on those who prefer tyranny, as we know from Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. There are those who do not want the Truth to set them free….

However, the Russian Church can fall apart positively, in the sense that it can unburden itself of its Soviet-style centralist administration and instead become a Family or Confederation of free Churches. Fortunately, there are other Orthodox, those of the spirit of the persecuted St Seraphim of Sarov, of the persecuted St Nectarios of Pentapolis, of the persecuted St John of Shanghai, of the persecuted Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), of the New Martyrs and Confessors. Long ago we committed ourselves to them and we will not renounce them and their spirit. We belong to the Persecuted Church, not to the Persecuting Church.

Q: But aren’t you frightened of what those Russians have tried to do to you?

A: St Paisios the Athonite, whom I met on Athos in 1979, said: ‘Believe in God and fear nothing’ (Πίστη στο Θεό και να μην φοβάστε τίποτα). That is what I have always done, come grasping greed, secret atheists, nationalist bureaucrats, modernists, ecumenists, freemasons, covid lockdown enforcers, perverts, spies and schismatic right-wing neophytes. We have seen all these enemies of the Church in power in Her administration from Judas until this very day, but the Church has always triumphed and will always triumph against all these extremists. Fear not!

Q: So does the Moscow Patriarchate have any future?

A: No, as such it does not. It has become a straitjacket and several conscientious priests are leaving it. As I said, the great loser in the conflict in the Ukraine is undoubtedly the Moscow Patriarchate, regardless of who wins militarily. It has lost credit and those clergy who have backed war have lost face. They are seen as militant nationalists, whose spirit is that of that very strange, nationalist, khaki-painted Cathedral of the Armed Forces of Russia, near Moscow (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/20/orthodox-cathedral-of-the-armed-force-russian-national-identity-military-disneyland).

The Moscow Patriarchate has already lost a range of territories, the Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and is now losing Moldova and its Western Diaspora, and in a few years’ time most probably Belarus and Central Asia too, all through politics. It has not followed the Gospel. If you do not follow the Gospel, you will die spiritually. That is the spiritual law. It happens to them all. I have seen it so often over the last fifty years and recently here too. It is spiritual suicide not to follow the Gospel and to attack those in the Church who have integrity.

However, here we have to distinguish carefully between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church. The former is a purely Soviet and post-Soviet institution, like the émigré fragments in Paris and in New York, whose existence was also shaped by the Soviet Union, though by reaction. It is a historical blip, a temporary administrative arrangement that began in 1925 after the death (by poisoning?) of the holy Patriarch Tikhon, whose signatures were also forced. In 50 years’ time, the Moscow Patriarchate will no longer exist. In fact, I do not think any of these three fragments will exist even in 25 years’ time. In fact, I sometimes wonder if they will still exist even in two years’ time, in 2025. On the other hand, the Russian Orthodox Church with its thousand-year history of saints most certainly does have a future. It will continue to be by far the largest of the to-be-extended family of Local Orthodox Churches, even though autocephaly must go to its parts in the Ukraine, Central Asia (based in Kazakhstan), Moldova (if it is not too late – see below) and the Baltics, at the very least. The number of Local Orthodox Churches could then hit 20.

The Diaspora

Q: If they happened, how would such a series of new autocephalies affect the Diaspora?

A: We can already see the effect. The UOC has opened over 40 parishes in Western Europe and will open more. Why? Because Ukrainian refugees refuse to attend churches where Patriarch Kyrill is commemorated. Those Ukrainians who cannot go to their church in London come to us, as we are politically independent, unlike the Moscow Patriarchate and its ROCOR branch. If the Ukraine becomes autocephalous, Orthodox from Moldova and the Baltics will surely also open their own Diaspora churches.

On the one hand, this fragmentation is negative, because it further fragments the Diaspora, destroying the once multinational but now nationalist Moscow Patriarchate Exarchate of Western Europe, based in Paris (whose members are mainly Moldovan, Baltic or Ukrainian anyway). On the other hand, once the Diaspora is cleansed of the US-driven politics of Constantinople and the politics of the old-fashioned Soviet Centralist Moscow and post-Soviet oligarchic Business Moscow, some kind of Diaspora unity can be achieved, a unity which could never have been seen before. Diaspora disunity only ever existed because of politics. Diaspora unity will only ever exist because it will be free of politics.

Both the Greek and Russian Patriarchs are elderly. We await the new generation. God willing, there will be a reversal of policies and a great cleansing from the corruption and perversions which come from power and the love of money, with that taste for luxury products and big black cars.

Q: As you have so many Moldovan parishioners and clergy, how would the existence of an autocephalous Moldovan Church outside Moldova affect you?

A: Politically, Romanian-speaking Moldovans do not want to join Romania, despite the very unpopular US puppet government there. If it joins the EU (as long as the EU still exists), it will join it as an independent country. However, I think it is much more likely that Moldova, together with Turkiye, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and Montenegro, followed by Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus once freed from the EU, will join BRICS, the Planetary Alliance of Sovereign States (PASS), or whatever it will be called by then.

This would make a south-east European bloc within BRICS, reuniting that group of countries economically. This will pave the way for the other European countries to leave the doomed and collapsing EU, a temporary post-1945 organisation, and also enter BRICS. We have to go towards the future, not the past. This means economic integration and so political co-operation between Europe and Asia, Eurasia, led by Russia, China, Iran and India, which is inevitable.

However, whatever the politics, given that the Moscow Patriarchate refuses outright to give the Moldovan Church autocephaly, ever more Moldovan parishes are now leaving the Moldovan Church of the Moscow Patriarchate for the Moldovan Church of the Romanian Patriarchate. This latter group, for now called the ‘Metropolia of Bessarabia’, carefully observes all Moldovan customs and keeps the old calendar. It now has some 25% of all Moldovan Orthodox in Moldova. Its bishops are monks.

The movement to it is accelerating rapidly because of the conflict in the Ukraine, because of Moscow’s centralisation, because of corruption, and because of the mistreatment of Moldovans in the Diaspora under the ever more Russian nationalist Moscow Patriarchate. Nobody wants to be treated as a second-class citizen, neither Moldovans, nor English.

The only areas of Moldova where there is loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate is the almost wholly Soviet Transdnistria and the autonomous pro-Russian Gagauz region (the total population of both regions is about 500,000, with an area similar to a large English county). These will join the Russian Federation anyway.

What is possible is that the many Moldovan parishes and their clergy (70 in Italy alone) in Western Europe may leave the Moscow Patriarchate and open some kind of autonomous Moldovan/Bessarabian Archdiocese under the Romanian Church in the Diaspora. The Romanian Orthodox Church outside Romania is now the largest Diaspora Church, with well over five million people, nearly 1500 parishes and over 70 monasteries and convents. Whatever its weaknesses, it dwarves the Russian and the Greek Diasporas, let alone the other Diasporas, which are relatively very small. The Romanian Diaspora is not dying out like them, but is full of young people and children. If the Moldovans join this Diaspora, as an autonomous old calendar Archdiocese under the Romanian Church in the Diaspora, it will grow even bigger.

However, a word of warning. In my lifetime I have already seen two Churches die out. The first was ROCOR in England. I remember how 40 years ago its large London Cathedral (it now has a very small church instead) was full, with 400 people every Sunday; however, the average age was about 80. They have all gone. Today, apart from a few strange converts, ROCOR is populated by those from the ex-Soviet Union who have no ROCOR tradition, the old emigres have all gone. It died out because the old emigres totally failed to hand on their faith to their descendants.

Now, 40 years on, I see the same in the Greek Church. One parish in London that used to get at least 800 people every Sunday even 30 years ago is now down to 30. The average age is also 80. The same problem. Almost the only children in Greek churches in London are Romanian/Moldovan. However, what will happen in 40 years’ time to the Romanians and Moldovans? Will their children and grandchildren fill their churches or will they too be virtually empty?

The Romanian language does have two advantages:  It is a Latin language and it uses the Latin alphabet. As such it is much closer to Western languages in terms of vocabulary and alphabet than Greek and Russian. But that is not enough. The faith has to be transmitted to the next generations. I already do baptisms completely in English for the children of Romanians and Moldovans who came here as children twenty years ago. I have spoken to our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, about this reality, but as a pastor he is already well aware. For the moment in England there are only four Non-Romanian priests, those of our group. In France and Belgium, however, he has in his Autonomous Metropolia one French bishop and 15 French priests. So there is hope.

 

Notes:

  1. Below are quotations from an account of the history of the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago. Do they sound familiar? The contemporary oligarchic American Empire comes immediately to mind…..

Might is right and military power is the only international law. The …… had no problem demolishing whatever stood in their way.

Those who opposed ……. domination, and who tried to defend the traditional values of their own people, faced a double enemy: the one without and the one within.

Robber, slaughter and plunder they misname ‘Empire’; they make a wilderness and call it peace.

They were offered …. citizenship, so long as they had enough money and an urban residence.

The unsuspecting Non- ….. spoke of these new habits as civilisation, when in fact they were only a feature of enslavement.

In this way, the 10% of ….. who lived in the cities exploited the 90% who lived outside.

The name of …… citizens, at one time not only greatly valued but dearly bought, is now repudiated and fled from, and it is almost considered not only base but even deserving of abhorrence.

When it came to institutionalised cruelty on an industrial scale, the ……. could teach the others a thing or two.

He makes it quite clear that ………’s objective was the enslavement of the world.

The ideology of that Empire was an ideology of power and world dominance.

….. established its Empire by destroying other civilisations.

……. lived behind frontiers, and what lay beyond was dangerous. That applied as much to their mental world as to their geography.

The Empire was, by this time, an economic basket-case. The machine had to keep feeding itself with plunder.

It’s surprsing his name is not better known in the West. But then, in the West it is only the ….. version of events that counts, and that does not include successful enemies.

….. needed to build an ideology that encouraged people to see their rulers not just as overlords, but as the defenders of civilised values, and they knew a thing or two about propaganda.

…… emphasised its transcendent magisterial authority, its right to judge the living and the dead and to determine people’s fate for all eternity.

  1. https://www.rocorstudies.org/2023/05/30/autocephaly-and-principles-of-its-application-with-reference-to-the-church-of-poland/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=demo-newsletter_1

 

 

 

 

 

Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Part One: The Three Temptations of Roman Imperialism

The Temptation of the First Rome

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

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

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

The Temptation of the Second Rome

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

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

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

The Temptation of the Third Rome

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

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

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

Part Two: The People’s Orthodoxy

The Third Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part Three: Survival and Victory

The Orthodox Way

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

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

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

‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy Survives in England

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

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

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

Our Parish and the Future

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

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

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

Part Four: The Future

Rejecting the Temptation of the Romes

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

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

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

Thou Hast Conquered, O Galilean

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

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

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

Towards a Local Church

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

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

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

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester, England,

Eastertide 2023

(The above is available as a printed brochure)

The Tragedy of the Russian Emigration: The Land of Lost Opportunity

Since the reunion or reconciliation of the Russian emigration and the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) in recent years, many voices, both in Russia and also abroad, have asked: ‘Why continue a separate existence? Since the fall of the USSR, the 100-year old Russian emigration has no more reason to exist separately, it is an anachronism, it should fully integrate the MP’. The answers given by Russian emigration bishops said: ‘But we are distinctive. They wear black vestments during Lent, we wear violet; they wear red vestments for Easter, we wear white; after our bishops wash their hands before the Great Entrance, they shake the drops of water onto the people, MP bishops do not’. Other self-justifying and equally minor ritual variations were also quoted, most of the emigration variations wrong anyway! Some readers may think we are inventing these absurd justifications for separation. We are not. We can quote times, places and names.

We always took another line. That the Russian emigration could and should continue its distinctive traditions. Not the ritual ones, but the real ones:

  1. Instead of behaving like pre-Revolutionary (carriages with black horses) Soviet (luxury black Chayka and Zil cars) and post-Soviet (black Mercedes or SUVs) bishops and living in palaces in the lap of luxury, all emigration bishops could have continued to live humbly and modestly like the émigré bishops who had dominated the Russian emigration until about the Year 2000 when they died out, their model being St John of Shanghai. Instead: Often a purely voluntary imitation of the worst Soviet-style examples.
  2. Instead of having churches like railway stations, people going in and out just to light candles, giving the impression that few are praying, the Russian emigration could have continued as it used until about 2000, with real parishes, parishes as communities, where people knew one another and helped one another. Instead: Generally, an imitation in order to take more money for effeminate luxury and gain more power and impunity.
  3. Instead of doing whatever the post-Soviet State told it to do, the Russian emigration could have continued with politically independent views on issues such as the martyred Tsar and those close to him, the two 1917 Revolutions, the New Martyrs, the Soviet Union and, more recently, the Ukraine. Instead: Generally, political dependence, sounding brass and lack of Love.
  4. Instead of pursuing a policy of Russian nationalism, the Russian emigration could have continued with its old internationalism and multilingualism, actively helping to create and contribute to new Local Churches in all the Diasporas where it used to operate and so opening new parishes, boldly defying the MP wherever there were issues of principle. Instead: Fear and trembling.

As self-governing, virtually autocephalous parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian emigration was in an excellent position to be independent. It could have used that independence fearlessly to co-operate with other Local Churches, not least in Northern America with the Russian-founded OCA, and to help set up new Local Churches elsewhere. They chose not to and rather to be frightened of Soviet-style reflexes, punitive effeminacy, and protocols of bureaucracy of the worst parts of the MP and indeed to imitate them! Nobody forced them to do this. One of the reasons for it was that so many people of faith left the Diaspora Church because they feared compromises of the faith. Sadly, they joined schismatic, old calendarist groups.

Their departure created an imbalance, giving an opportunity to careerists, in love with power, money and above all with themselves, to take over. Thus, they chose the suicidal path of being inward-looking, polemical, aggressive, bullying, moralistic, right-wing, sectarian and turning into isolated ghettos, with a love of power and money. Little wonder that most Russians refuse to attend their churches. The result is that the Russian emigration is imploding. New Local Churches will be formed largely without the Russian emigration. The train has left the station. You missed it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Double Suicide in Lithuania

Foreword

For those of us who were brought up in faithfulness to the values of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church, the politicised captivity of any Local Orthodox Church is lamentable. Moreover, the shameful weaponisation of the canons for political, monetary or proprietary reasons not only betrays the witness of those Martyrs and Confessors, who had no love of power, money or property, but also plainly discredits those who undertake that weaponisation. We render to God what is God’s and to Caesar only what is Caesar’s.

The New Martyrs and Confessors are those Russians who were fearless and did not agree to become serfs, or obediently line up to go to Bolshevik concentration camps, or see their churches closed by today’s renegade foreign bishops, just like they now do in the Ukraine and in England, they offered resistance to Antichrist. Indeed, Canon XV of the First and Second Council, held in the year 861 under St Photius and 317 other Fathers, is quite clear that those who ‘have been diligent to rescue the Church from schisms and divisions’….’shall be deemed worthy to enjoy the honour which befits them among Orthodox Christians’. The world loves its own, but God loves His own.

Introduction: Lithuania is Now in the Diaspora

The news that the Patriarchate of Constantinople is setting up an Exarchate in Lithuania under Lithuanian (in other words, US) government sponsorship (https://d367rzjs5oyeba.cloudfront.net/_mobile_/ru/312734/) elicits sorrow in Moscow. This means that after Estonia nearly thirty years ago, then after the Ukraine nearly five years ago, and after Africa two years ago (1), Lithuania has now become yet another multi-jurisdictional Orthodox area region Moscow has lost its jurisdictional monopoly there too. However, Lithuania only joins the whole of Western Europe west of Poland, the Czech Lands, Romania and Slovenia, not to mention the Americas, Australia and Africa too, in becoming multi-jurisdictional.

Sadly then, there is nothing new in this. The real question is why Lithuania, or all the Baltic countries together, like many other countries, regions or continents, cannot simply belong to one administratively united Local Church. This would be the only canonical alternative (the principle of one bishop per city) to belonging to different jurisdictions, all moreover dependent on the ebb and flow of the political tides of foreign capitals and foreign politics. In none of this multiplicity of jurisdictions is there any intention to do missionary work, there are only vulgar and petty disputes about nationalistic power, and already existing income and property. As this is not how Christians behave, our only conclusion can only be that those who take part in it are not Christians. Can we imagine the apostles disputing in this way like children in the playground about jurisdiction over the Orthodox in Rome or Corinth or Ephesus or anywhere else? ‘This is my church, not yours’. No, it isn’t. Yes, it is’. Childishness among adults.

Politics

In Lithuania the appeal by Constantinople to Ukrainian and even Belarussian ‘refugees’ to join their new Church is clearly a political manipulation by the local US ambassador, in obedience to his employers in the US State Department. It is very likely that, as in Estonia and in the Ukraine, very few in Lithuania (where there are fewer than 100,000 nominal Orthodox anyway) will leave Moscow for Constantinople. What premises could the new jurisdiction use? Or will the Lithuanian State set about ejecting Orthodox from their churches by violence in order to establish a property portfolio of empty church buildings, as the US-backed Kiev regime does in the Ukraine? That is, few, apart from the original five priests who have left Moscow for Constantinople and were then defrocked by Moscow for purely political reasons, as Constantinople has recognised (2). It is Moscow’s suicidal tragedy which created this second suicidal tragedy on the part of Constantinople. Moscow must now be regretting its original injustice. As the proverb says, you reap what you sow. However, what will happen to all these Constantinople creations in Lithuania, the Ukraine and Estonia after the Russian military victory in the Ukraine?

Indeed, what will happen to the Ukraine, the Baltic States and indeed all of strike-bound and riot-torn Europe, Eastern and Western, including insurrectional France and its watch-loving President, after the US has to cut its losses in Europe, as it did in Kabul, and run away in order to face the war that it has been fomenting with China? Inevitably, once abandoned by its feudal US master, these countries like all the others in Europe will have to make up with Russia. However, the political and military victory of the Russian Federation will be no victory for the Moscow Patriarchate. People only go to church if it is not money-driven and if it is politically free, and that means neither to a careerist, money-driven and politically-subservient Moscow Patriarchate and its, nor to the clearly US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople. Through their politicking, both the largest (Moscow), and the most prestigious (Constantinople), Local Churches for now have disqualified themselves from spiritual leadership and the moral high ground of the Orthodox world. A double suicide. The result, after the conflict in the Ukraine is over, will surely be several new Local Churches, freed from the jurisdictions of either of the above. Notably, neither Constantinople nor Moscow with their Church structures in Lithuania ever mentions doing missionary work among Lithuanians! Only about stealing already existing flocks! What claim can either have to Lithuania?

Two Questions

Two questions arise. Firstly: Why is it that since 1900 – a long time ago now – no new, all-encompassing Local Church has been set up in any of the countries and continents where there is an Orthodox Diaspora, in Western Europe, the Americas or Australia? Then, there is a second question: Just over fifty years ago, there was a valiant attempt to do something towards building a Local Church for Northern America (the USA and Canada) with the OCA, the Orthodox Church in America, but that was a failure. Why? After all, according to the latest survey, 77% of all Orthodox parish clergy in the USA support the creation of a Local Church, either autocephalous or autonomous.

Of course, that above survey is of parish clergy, not of the episcopate or of laypeople. However, we suspect that most laypeople think the same as parish clergy. Those of the old emigration, of 50-100 years ago, especially in Western Europe, always had the intention of returning to the countries from which they had been expelled, either by Communist oppression or else by Capitalist poverty. This is no longer the case. Today’s emigrants, parish clergy and people, are here to stay. They want a better future for themselves, for their children and their grandchildren. They are establishing Local Orthodox Churches, as never before. However, their episcopate is another story.

More Politics: The Episcopate

The problem here is that the episcopate, those who have power, is often very closely attached, either for political or monetary or for ideological reasons, to a Mother-Church in Eastern Europe or the Middle East. For example, the Patriarchate of Antioch clearly allows no Non-Arab bishops. But the situation in other jurisdictions in North America, apart from in the OCA, is very similar. Clearly, only some sort of rejection of foreign candidates by the people could change that situation. But then there is the problem of candidates. It is all very well to declare that there should be more American-born bishops, but are there any suitable American-born candidates? And they must be suitable candidates, because crazy convert sectarian candidates, who live in a fantasy world, only lead to the destruction of the Church, as all have seen. The same goes for Western Europe and Australia.

On the other hand, in the recent Antiochian scandal, it was revealed to naïve Americans that most Arab bishops are in fact married. Thus, what the former Metropolitan was doing was not so unusual in the old country. We have known this for decades. It is common knowledge in Europe. There are plenty of (unofficially) married Orthodox bishops of all nationalities, we will not tire readers with a list. The first case we came across was that of a Greek bishop over forty years ago (3). And Orthodox parish clergy much prefer dealing with such married bishops to dealing with repressed homosexuals, who pretend that they are not what they are. The latter can be sadistic on account of their jealousy of married clergy, who have everything that they have chosen not to have, in order to further their power-driven careers.

On Being Broad-Based

Now we come to the oner attempt to set up a Local Church, the question of the failure of the OCA, the Orthodox Church in America. Why has it not achieved unity in Northern America after over fifty years? It was after all set up as autocephalous. Here, those of us who met and knew the pragmatic Fr Alexander Schmemann, the main inspiration behind the OCA, and remember the events of the 1970s will recall how the newly autocephalous but very controversial OCA episcopate immediately tried to impose a new calendarist ideology on all. This was suicidal. Immediately, the they failed to recruit anyone who was faithful to the old calendar and lost many who wanted to continue in that faithfulness. Secondly, its equally aggressive policy of nationalistic Americanisation discouraged anyone who was not US-born and had an attachment to another culture from joining it or even staying with it. It led to many a rather harsh quip at the time about ‘the Coca-Cola Church’.

In other words, our suggestion is that a Local Church in any part of the Western world must not be narrow and intolerant, but broad-based, inclusive of all Orthodox, ignoring political and nationalistic ideologies, accepting all, whatever their ethnic origin, and accepting both the calendars that Orthodox use. It is notable that the least broad-based, least tolerant and so smallest jurisdictions in Northern America, are those who do not want to belong to a Local Church, as they have a suicidal policy of sectarian isolationism. Its error is the opposite of the OCA’s. The first went to the new calendarist extreme of ‘almost anything goes’ and ‘we’re as American as apple pie’. On the other hand, smaller groups go to the old calendarist extreme of ‘hardly anything goes’ and experiencing an attack of sectarian ‘One True Churchism’.

Conclusion: The Answers to Two Questions

Extraordinarily, although their practising flock numbers fewer than one million out of perhaps five million nominal Orthodox, there are now 55 Orthodox bishops in Northern America. This is far more than in all Local Churches, except for Moscow (419 bishops for a nominal 144 million), Constantinople (much over-bishoped with 128 bishops for a nominal three million), Greece (over-bishoped with 100 bishops for a nominal 10 million) and Romania (59 bishops for a nominal 19 million). It can be said that Northern America is over-bishoped. Something similar can be said about Western Europe.
If you are interested in prostitutes of Bishkek, you can find in bipopka.

Here there are probably about one million practising Orthodox out of about seven million nominal, but over 30 bishops. The above number of bishops is again greater than in many Local Churches. But there is still no Local Church. Indeed, the only Western European Metropolia which even has autonomy is the Romanian, though that does have most of the faithful in Western Europe. Why is there no all-encompassing, autocephalous Local Church anywhere? We repeat: Any Local Church in the Western world must be broad-based, inclusive of all Orthodox, ignoring political and nationalistic ideologies, accepting all, whatever their ethnic origin, and accepting both the calendars that Orthodox use.

 

Notes:

  1. In 2021 Moscow received parishes in Africa into its jurisdiction as a result of the betrayal of Moscow by the Patriarchate of Alexandria (a US gun was being held in its back) on the issue of jurisdiction in the Ukraine. Since Moscow opened its Exarchate in Africa, the flock there has been divided between US-backed Greek Alexandria and Moscow. However, all this is against the background of the huge political, economic and military struggle between the US and Russia-China to dominate the African Continent. In other words, the whole affair is highly political.
  2. The canons are quite clear about defrocking. The cases in Lithuania have nothing to do with the personal morality of the priests defrocked, only about the twisting of the interpretation of the canons for purely political ends. In another case, a bishop uncanonically received several priests from the Patriarchate of Constantinople and yet objected when other Patriarchates received and canonically protected those whom he had unjustly treated. Like St Nectarios, who formed a Trust to protect the Convent he had founded, they also formed a Trust to protect the Church property they had founded and did not hand over the keys to those who wanted to destroy the parishes that had carefully been built up over the decades.

Those events certainly sounded like hypocrisy to all observers, including to onlooking bishops. The mass reception by Constantinople of bishops and priests in the Ukraine and the mass reception by Moscow of priests from Alexandria in Africa has done nothing to alleviate this impression of hypocrisy and once more undermines the authority of the episcopates concerned. It is clear that once this new Cold War is over, all these absurd decisions will be rescinded, just as those taken during the old Cold War were also rescinded by a mere stroke of the pen in the recent past.

  1. The open and well-known existence of married bishops sounds like one rule for the rulers and another rule for the ruled. In any case, once again it does nothing to give the bishops in question any authority or credit.

 

 

Autocephaly, Autonomy, Exarchates and Missions

Introduction

There are surely many suggestions as to how the Orthodox Church can move forward out of its present state of crisis. We recall that this crisis is essentially one of disputed and also discredited authority, especially of the post-Cretan Patriarchate of Constantinople and of the post-Ukrainian Operation Patriarchate of Moscow. So many of their acts that have been ostensibly justified by the ‘canons’ have in fact been purely political acts and thus are anti-canonical. Therefore, this is a crisis of division. I have little confidence that the following suggestions will be heard, let alone acted on. But still I dare to make them, if only for the record, as one set of solutions among others put forward from the grassroots.

Three Recent Autocephalous Churches

The post-1917 Russian Orthodox Church gradually recognised that the fall of the Russian Empire, the consequent reconstruction of Poland and the inability to care for the pre-Revolutionary mission in North America, meant that new Autocephalous Churches would have to be established there. Thus, there came into being the Polish Orthodox Church (1924 and 1948) and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) (1970). As a result of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, there also came into being the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia (1951). The first and the last of these Churches, though quite small, have undisputed territories and have been revitalised by the recent arrival of many Ukrainian refugees.

However, the vaguely-named ‘OCA’ (where is America?), founded in 1970, has had many difficulties which have undermined its authority, both moral and financial. Moreover, although it is heir to the original and undivided Church in Northern America, it exists today on a shared territory and the much larger Archdiocese of the Church of Constantinople does not recognise it. As a result, the OCA has remained smaller than the Church of Poland and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia. Perhaps it could be revitalised by the Mother-Church in Moscow which could add to its Moscow’s now bishopless parishes in Northern America? And perhaps it could be renamed more accurately as the ‘Northern American Orthodox Church’ (NAOC)? (The term Northern America means the USA, Canada and Greenland and a couple of islands, so that Mexico and the Caribbean are excluded from its territory). The NAOC should move towards having Greek, Serbian and native-born bishops, who are therefore truly representative of the new Local Church. Only in this way could the flocks of other Local Orthodox Churches be drawn to take part.

Four Future Autocephalous Churches

Over thirty years after the fall of the Soviet Union and its division into fifteen separate States, and following the conflict between the Russian Federation and the Ukraine and the refusal of many to commemorate the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, it is clear that a new wave of Autocephalies needs to take place. The parallel between the fall of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union should be clear to all. Ecclesiastical decentralisation must follow on from political decentralisation.

We suggest that four new Autocephalous Churches may need to be founded by the Mother-Church in countries where there are large numbers of Orthodox, but where the main language is not Russian. As all of these areas have at least four bishops (the minimum number for Autocephaly), this is quite realistic. This would bring the total number of Local Orthodox Churches, counting those of North Macedonia and the above NAOC, from sixteen to twenty. In order of size, these would be:

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church. 18 million? This would look after all Orthodox within the borders of the future Ukraine, even though the precise, permanent borders of that war-torn country are yet to be established for the moment. A genuinely Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church could at last put an end to all those nationalist Church divisions that have taken place there since 1917, including in 2018, both inside the Ukraine and in the Diaspora.

The Moldovan Orthodox Church. 4 million? This would look after all Orthodox within Moldova. An Autocephalous Church, on good terms with both the Russian and Romanian Churches, which might grant it Autocephaly together, its birth could overcome the present division there between the Russian and Romanian Patriarchates, the two largest Local Churches.

The Baltic Orthodox Church. 500,000? This would look after all Orthodox who keep the canonical date of Pascha within Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland. In Lithuania clergy, defrocked for purely political reasons to the scandal of many, will need to be reinstated. As in the Ukraine and Moldova, the Baltic countries should move towards having native-born bishops, who are therefore truly representative of the new Local Church. A genuinely Autocephalous Baltic Orthodox Church could at last put an end to all those nationalist Church divisions that have taken place in all these countries since 1917, as well as the Phanariot-provoked situations in Finland and Estonia.

The Western European Orthodox Church (WEOC). 400,000? Covering the 22 ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant countries of Western, Central, Northern and Southern Europe, which have no Local Church of their own (Andorra
Austria, Belgium, British Isles, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland). This Church is based on the present Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Western Europe, but includes Germany, Scandinavia (a bishop is required here) and Austria-Hungary. New bishops are also required for France, Benelux and the British Isles and Ireland and to resolve the pastoral problems in the latter. The Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate would surely wish to take part in such an Autocephalous Church. As in the Ukraine and Moldova, the WEOC should move towards having native-born bishops, who are therefore truly representative of the new Local Church. Only in this way could the flocks of other Local Orthodox Churches wish to take part.

Two Recent Autonomous Orthodox Churches

Rather than full independence (Autocephaly), there are smaller Churches in other countries which are dependent on their Mother-Church for their episcopate. Such Churches are known as Autonomous. The pre-Revolutionary missions in China (Autonomy granted in 1957) and Japan (Autonomy granted in 1970) are both such, although the latter hardly exists today on account of Chinese State persecution over the last 75 years.

Two Future Autonomous Orthodox Churches

The present Russian Orthodox Exarchate of South East Asia could become an Autonomous Church (SEAOC). True, for the moment it covers a huge territory. If its mission is successful, it could eventually form several Autocephalous Churches. However, before it can even become Autocephalous, it must first obtain native bishops.

The present Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Africa could become an Autonomous Church (AOC). Before it can become Autocephalous, it must obtain native bishops – and also resolve the territorial dispute with the Patriarchate of Alexandria. This could be overcome if, for example, the jurisdiction of Alexandria returned to its traditional territory of Egypt.

A Recent Exarchate

There are other regions which for various reasons do not wish or are unable to become either Autocephalous or Autonomous and may be particularly dependent on the Mother-Church. These are known as Exarchates. Thus, Belarus is established as an Exarchate within the Russian Orthodox Church.

Two Future Exarchates

There will soon need to be a Central Asian Exarchate for the ‘Five Stans’, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

There will soon need to be a Latin American Exarchate to cover South and Central America, as well as Mexico and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

Two Future Missions

Missions and infrastructure for them need to be opened for two other areas of the world. These are:

Oceania – the whole, albeit sparsely-populated Continent of Australia and all the Pacific islands, where there is already some Orthodox presence. The opening of an Exarchate here would depend on the desire of local Orthodox to become a Local Church.

South Asia (The Indian Subcontinent and Indian Ocean islands), which has nearly a quarter of the world’s population, but hardly any Orthodox.

Conclusion

There can be no new Churches if they are not Autocephalous, that is, if they are not quite separate from and politically free of Mother-Churches. Otherwise, they are compromised and discredited. History bears this out quite clearly, both in the twentieth century and well before. Of course, all are free to take part or not in the life of new Autocephalous Churches which are located on shared territories. Some, still attached to Mother-Churches will not wish to do so. Time is all that is lacking for them. Others, with a schismatic or sectarian ‘OneTrueChurch’ Pharisee mentality, inspired by the spiritual impurity of the CIA and US-Protestant nationalist politics and not on the canons of the Orthodox Church, will not take part. But such are a tiny minority and can be ignored. The future is in new Autocephalous Churches.

 

 

An Interview on the Turmoil in the Church

The Past Local Turmoil

Q: You spent nearly four decades serving as a clergyman, and were a layman for ten years before that, in the Russian Church, but in February 2022 you left, together with many others. Why the mass exodus?

A: The irony is that we did not leave, we were forced to leave. Why? Well, they know better than us why they acted in their bizarre and suicidal way and forced us out! Perhaps they do not want Non-Russians in the Russian Church? Perhaps they want to become as small as possible? I don’t know. But here is what happened to us:

At the end of our tethers after three years of persecution, at the beginning of May 2021 we alerted the authorities to the grabbing, alienisation, sectarianisation, papalisation, politicisation and so self-destruction of that part of the Russian Church. As we were whistle-blowers, we were persecuted and punished. Nobody wanted to know the Truth which we were clearly telling them. They preferred to brush the reality under the carpet. The problem is, and I have observed this so many times in my life, for example in the case of Metr Antony (Bloom) in the 1970s, which led straight to the Sourozh break-up in 2006, or in the case of Metr Vitaly (Ustinov) in the 1990s, which led straight to his deposition by the other bishops in 2001, that if you brush reality under the carpet, it will come back and hit you in the face with much greater force later on. This is exactly what happened to them when they tried to punish us for telling the Truth. As Christ says: ‘The Truth will set you free’. This means that telling untruths will enslave you. And that is exactly what has happened to them.

Part of the Russian Church fell into a top-down, colonial, sectarian and cultish schism, without any understanding of the Tradition of the Church or the need for missionary-work among local people, both Orthodox and Non-Orthodox, who live in this country and to whose language you must adapt, rather than try to impose on them a foreign jargon. This situation had obviously been carefully prepared for it as an entrapment by the infiltrators all through the Russian Church, including their agents in Moscow itself, but we acted canonically and tried to join one of the two other parts of the Russian Church. This was not allowed by one part since they too had been entrapped, and although the other part received us, they were not allowed by the powers behind them to keep us for more than six months. Both rejections were clearly 100% political acts.

In this way, ironically, they all condemned themselves as ‘Sergianists’, that is, people who put loyalty to their political masters above loyalty to Christ. In this, they simply showed their hypocrisy, for they had always condemned Sergianism in others who were forced to be Sergianists when they were political hostages, and yet when they themselves were politically free, they made themselves into Sergianists! The attempts to persecute the faithful and close our churches here differ in no way from what the Soviet State tried to do inside the USSR generations ago, or what the US-created Kiev government is doing against Metr Onuphry today. It suggests that they are all Trostkyists. Their underlying anti-Christian and ultimately Satanic ideology, whatever the various masks it may wear, is the same.

Q: So what did you do after you were forced out of the Russian Church?

A: If the Russian Church were to reject its own despite our loyalty to it, our Plan B had always been to join the Patriarchate of Romania. Discussion and consultation in mid-February 2022 only confirmed that Plan. So, having been released from the Moscow Patriarchate, this is exactly what we did. Indeed, our old family friend, going back nearly 50 years, Metropolitan Jean of the Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, who had been forced to release us by certain individuals (we know their names), actually told us, after we had informed him that we had joined the Romanian Church: ‘That is exactly what I thought you would do and I actually told the Patriarchate that that is what you would probably do, to their loss. To which they had replied: ‘Too bad’’. He laughed ironically at the suicidal action of the Moscow Patriarchate. It had lost, discrediting itself, showing that it put careerist State politics first, spiritual integrity second. This act will go down in the history books as an act of self-destruction. Will the Russian Church here ever recover? Will it now only ever be an Embassy Church?

Q: Why had your Plan B always been the Romanian Church?

A: As soon as 2001, when Romanian immigration started, we had had Romanian parishioners, later a deacon and a priest, and by 2021 six of the twelve clergy and three-quarters of the people in our group of parishes were Romanian-speaking, that is Romanians or Moldovans. We were received into the Romanian Patriarchate on 16 February, within exactly four hours of applying, though we did not receive our signed antimensia until 27 February 2022. We had found canonicity and no longer feared having our property taken or being in a colonial and schismatic sect and alien, politicised cult, which is what that part of the Russian Church had become. Since then we have been in weekly contact with our Metropolitan Joseph, whom members of our family have known since the 90s, when he first moved to Paris.

When they tried to deny and complain about our reception in April, His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel rejected their nonsense, though they had actually dared to contact him in Bucharest personally not once, but twice! Since then all has been plain sailing, we soon opened two new parishes, receiving more antimensia from Metr Joseph. That had been on hold until then, and now other clergy and people are joining us, with a nice surprise coming in October, God willing. Every day we thank God for bringing us to the safe and canonical haven of the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate. Glory to God for all things!

Q: So for your group, firmly entrenched inside the Romanian Metropolia, and consisting of six parishes, 5,000 faithful and 12 clergy, the turmoil has been over since 16 February, but for the rest of the Church, it started on 24 February.

A: Yes, and what an irony that was. We had found a safe and quiet canonical haven out of the awful political mess of the Russian Church, but for others the mess had only just begun. Actually, at the beginning of March, a priest from the MP Sourozh Diocese contacted us and told us he was jealous! Our situation shows Divine Providence towards us in getting us out of the Russian mess a few days before the Ukraine tragedy unfolded. We thank God.

Q: What is the situation of the Romanian Church in the Western European Diaspora?

A: As regards the Diaspora situation in Western Europe today there are just over 4 million Romanian speakers (Romanians and Moldovans) in Western Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_diaspora). This is by far the largest Orthodox group in Western Europe. They are everywhere, though half of them live in Spain and Italy. As one Londoner who frequents the ageing Cypriots in their emptying churches there told me: ‘When you see children in a Greek church, you know they are Romanians’. (Sadly, the Greek-Cypriots have repeated exactly the same error as the Russians two generations before them, that is, they have completely failed to pass on the Faith to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren etc. And just like the post-1917 Russians, they are now dying out).

The Western European Metropolia of the Patriarchate of Romania, which is Autonomous, has six bishops, one of whom is French, several Non-Romanian clergy and it uses both calendars. Our Metropolitan Joseph, who is an engineer by education and a real monk, comes from the north of Romania near the Ukrainian border – Metr Onuphry comes from just across the border on the other side, where Ukrainians and Romanians live side by side and there are many bilingual churches. Metr Joseph is very active in promoting the use of local languages, especially French, as he realises that the children born in Western Europe need them. One of our parishioners is his distant cousin, from the same village as him. Metr Joseph has been active in helping Ukrainian refugees, who, quite naturally, refuse to attend any Russian churches.

The Present Universal Turmoil

Q: Leaving aside the actions of Divine Providence in your case, what would you say about the general turmoil that the Orthodox Church finds itself in today?

A: Well, first of all, at least the turmoil proves that the Church is living. We are not dead. On the other hand, there is good turmoil and bad turmoil. This is bad, though God can always bring good out of bad.

The turmoil was initially caused by the catastrophic and deliberate failure of the ideology-bound Western elites to recognise the human rights of the large Russian minority in the Ukraine. This was Russophobia. However, for the Ukrainian majority, even if compromised and manipulated by the West for its own political advantages and by the theft of Ukrainian land and resources by US corporations like Monsanto and that of Hunter Biden etc, this was no solution. We support the Romanian-speaking Metropolitan Onuphry and have prayed for him and his suffering flock at the Great Entrance at every Liturgy since 2018. We cannot support war. His line is ours. They tried to take our churches and failed; they are taking his churches and succeeding. So we understand and suffer with him.

For a long time, the Orthodox Church was seen as either Greek or Russian. The ‘Greek’ Church was seen as basically Greek-speaking – Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Greece, Romania, Cyprus and Albania on one side. The ‘Russian’ was seen as basically Slav – Moscow, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia and the OCA on the other side.

In fact, that was never true, as, for example, Romanians, Georgians, Arabs and Albanians are neither Greeks nor Slavs. Today, it has become quite untrue, because both certain Greek and Russian bishops have played politics – and lost the sympathy of their own Greek-speakers and Slavs alike. In reality, the Church is like a see-saw, with Greek extremists at one end and Russian extremists at the other end. The balance is maintained by those inbetween, including non-political Greeks and Russians. At the centre of the whole contemporary storm is the provincial Ukraine, which is only a plaything in the hands of the geopoliticians. Make no mistake, this is a war of the USA and its vassals against Russia and China. The Ukraine is just a location, a battlefield. This is not a war between Russians and Ukrainians, this is not a racial or a religious war, but a political and economic war for the future of the world.

As you know, in 2018 Constantinople agreed, under the bribery of American ‘pressure’, to set up a pro-American, pro–LGBT etc, pseudo-‘Church’ in the Ukraine. This was a scandalous act, as it meant that it had accepted the morally fallen and Neo-Nazi nationalists, thugs and criminals and proclaimed that they were Orthodox clergy and laity! In a word, the ‘Greeks’ had sided with the persecutors of the Church for a mess of American pottage. They had lost any moral high ground that remained to them. At once they found that they had not only caused a schism in the Ukraine, but that the ‘Russians’ refused to concelebrate with them, that they had virtually caused schisms inside the Churches of Greece and Cyprus, that the Churches of Romania, Antioch and Albania did not support them and that the Church of Alexandria had lost half its clergy and people to the new Russian Exarchate in Africa. Constantinople had lost all down the line, isolating itself from the Orthodox world in its own self-made schism.

A Russian victory? No!

As you know, from February 2022 Moscow began persecuting its own, first us in England, then others, in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, and now Latvia and, above all, in the tragic Ukraine. The ‘Russians’ had stabbed their own most loyal supporters in the back, also for a mess of political pottage! They too had lost any moral high ground that remained to them. At once they found that they had not only isolated themselves from their own Church in the Ukraine, but that the world had seen that the ‘Russians’ were quite capable of betraying their own all over Western Europe and creating a division on the canonical territory of another Patriarchate (Alexandria), in exactly the same way as the ‘Greeks’ had done on the canonical territory of another Patriarchate (Moscow). Their natural supporters in the Churches of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia and the OCA stood aside in silence and either failed to support the Russian Church or else outright opposed it. Moscow had lost all down the line, it too had isolated itself from the Orthodox world.

Holy Rus is a fine ideal, but you will never spread it with missiles and shelling. We had warned about the danger of this temptation continually for fifteen years! Go back to your Sergianism at your peril! Or else prefer the freedom that God has given you. All was possible, we said, one or the other. Well, they chose the other, the rejection of mass repentance.

As we have already said, for a long time the Orthodox Church was seen as either Greek or Russian. Today, both Constantinople and Moscow have disqualified themselves from the moral leadership of the Church. Both have shown themselves to be victims of their own nationalist and racial politics, the ‘Greek world’ and the ‘Russian world’. Neither talked about the Orthodox world! Non-Russians are not interested in the Russian world. Non-Greeks are not interested in the Greek world. We need the Orthodox world. This means that both Constantinople and Moscow have lost the moral high ground, including the chance to lead the cause of unity in the Diaspora. Neither Greek nor Russian is now the future, precisely because of Greek and Russian misbehaviour. It is now up to all the other Local Churches to lead the way.

A Council

Q: Do you see any end to this turmoil between the Greeks and the Russians?

A:  Only a Church Council can resolve all the Inter-Orthodox problems. Not the political manipulation of a Council of Moscow in 1948 or of a Council of Crete in 2016, but a real Council of all the Churches, a Council that is politically free of both Washington and Moscow. Sadly, for the moment, that is not going to happen. Constantinople is enslaved to its US-backed and quite absurd project of universal domination. Everyone must become a Greek! Moscow is enslaved to supporting the Russian State, come what may – regardless of whether the Russian State even wants its support! It is a catastrophe and plunges the Church into a new period of paralysis.

However, there is hope. The Greek Patriarch is in his 80s, the Russian in his 70s. Great changes lie ahead, as US hegemony falls after the routs of the US and its NATO vassals in Iraq, Afghanistan and now in the Ukraine. It is yet another disastrously lost war for the overweening and now bankrupt West, which through its military incompetence and immense hubris has not won a single war since 1945.

However, when the ‘Greeks’ lose their US backers, that does not at all mean that the Russians will have won. The Russian State can win the war in the Ukraine, but how will it win the peace? That is quite another matter. The Moscow Patriarchate has betrayed its multinational vocation through backing narrow Russian nationalism, just as the Patriarchate of Constantinople backed provincial Greek nationalism before it and lost the broad, imperial vision of the old Constantinople. The only hope for Constantinople is a generation of bishops who were not bishops in the ‘US’ period of Constantinople, and for the Russian Church a generation of bishops who were not bishops in the Soviet period and so do not have that State mentality.

Q: What should be on the agenda of a free Council?

A: It hardly depends on me! But there are some problems which everyone can see and which have been crying out for solutions for generations.

Firstly, in order of size, the Churches of Romania, Ukraine (which, like it or not, is now de facto, though not de jure, an Autocephalous Church under Metr Onuphry), Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, North Macedonia (presumably all recognise it), Poland, Cyprus, Alexandria, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Jerusalem, all the universally-recognised Local Churches, except for Constantinople and Moscow, will have to meet initially and discuss something like the following:

  1. The canons must no longer be weaponised for political, racial and territorial reasons. For example, let us drop the nonsense of the deliberate Greek misinterpretation of Canon 28 of Chalcedon, which was introduced 100 years ago. Let us drop the gagging, sacking and even ‘defrocking’ of clergy, as in Lithuania, because they do not vote for the same political party as their bishops! This was not in the Gospels!
  2. You cannot go back on autocephalies and territories recognised by the whole Church as granted to Local Churches in the past. Canonical territories must be respected. Stop the Greek nonsense in Estonia, the Ukraine and elsewhere. Stop the Russian nonsense in Africa or at least, divide the African territory into two, North Africa for the Greeks and Black Africa for the Russians, for example, or something like it was 100 years ago, so that there are no overlaps.
  3. There must be four new Autocephalous Churches for the Diasporas, in Western Europe, North America (which would solve the OCA problem), Latin America and Oceania. New, multinational Local Church structures are the only way the Church can exist long-term outside the old homelands. This is a problem that should have been solved 100 years ago, but instead we have had 60 years of hot air and the loss of generations of Orthodox who were assimilated because they could not understand anything in their parents’ churches. If the Church authorities had put pastoral care first and not political and racial ideologies first, this problem would have been solved long ago.
  4. The great crisis in the Church, arguably for centuries, has been the lack of leadership. The essence of this crisis is that the authorities have not for the most part appointed genuine monks to the episcopate, but only single men, ‘monks’ in name only. Thus, they have appointed careerist bureaucrats and scandalous homosexuals (‘the lavender mafia’, as is so often the case with the Greeks), not to mention secular failures, alcoholics, freemasons, womanisers and ‘secretly’ married men (as is so often the case with the Russians), to the episcopate. A Council should proclaim and enforce a canon that all candidates for the episcopate should be monks who have spent at least ten years in a genuine, working monastery, or else that married bishops should be allowed. It must be one or the other – or both.

Once these matters have been discussed by all the other Local Churches, Constantinople and Moscow could be invited to a full Council to take them further, provided that they show that they are at last politically free, have repented for their past and so are worthy of taking part in a non-political Council.

 

Six Months On: The Completely Avoidable Tragedy of the Ukraine and the Curse of Nationalism

‘Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity, but I’m not so sure about the universe’.

Words Attributed to Albert Einstein

 

Foreword

We have never had any doubt that the Russian Federation would win militarily in the conflict in the Ukraine, for which eventuality it had carefully prepared for eight long years. (I stress the word ‘militarily’). During that time the West continually poked the bear and then was surprised when the bear’s patience ran out – on 24 February 2022. That does not mean that I approve of anything that has happened in the Ukraine since 2014. I visited different parts of the Ukraine six times between 2014 and 2021 and my many parishioners from all over the Ukraine only confirmed what I had seen.

I could see only too well its immense problems, the corruption which led to an infrastructure, far worse even than that in the oligarch-dominated UK, and the poverty of the masses, making it poorer than many African countries. In this article I take no sides. All wars are huge human tragedies and cannot be approved of. However, I am interested in the truth, not in propaganda, whichever side it comes from. And here, as everywhere and always on this site, without the burden of any careerism I am free to be interested only in the truth and its causes and consequences for Church life.

Introduction: The Tragedy: 2014-2022

After the 2014 US-organised coup d’etat (cost to the US taxpayer = $5 billion, as officially admitted by the US politician Victoria Nuland), one thing was at once obvious. This was that the new Kiev government needed to carry out internationally-observed referenda. Then they could let the various peoples in the Ukraine, with its purely artificial, Soviet-made borders, assigned to it by the atheist monsters Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, freely decide which country they wanted to belong to. Any enforcement of the old atheist centralisation from Kiev would, as in Yugoslavia, lead to exactly the same tragedy and war as in Yugoslavia. Both amalgams, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, were hangovers from the Communist period with their absurd borders, jamming together peoples who had little in common and no desire to live in the same country as one another.

Sadly, the reality is that this current completely avoidable tragedy in the Ukraine is ‘Yugoslavia II’, that is, it the same thing again, only on a far greater and more serious scale. And here, unlike in Serbia, NATO cannot use its air force, for it will be shot down by superior Russian technology, and its army and navy are shut out.  In 2014 an internationally-observed referendum was held in the Crimea, and all went well, with a clear 97% majority choosing to return to Russia, after 60 years of enforced separation from it. However, Kiev itself refused to allow referenda anywhere, including in the Crimea. Therefore, the Kiev government, or rather those behind them who would not allow referenda, are responsible for today’s catastrophic consequences and tens and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths. They have blood, a lot of it, on their hands. What are those consequences?

The Catastrophe: 2022-

  1. Local Consequences: The Human Cost

In 2014 war broke out in the Ukraine, specifically in the Russian-speaking Donbass, whose language and culture were oppressed and mocked by the racist centralisers in Kiev. Up to 14,000 people, including 400 children, were massacred by the Kiev authorities and the other 6 million were told to leave the Ukraine, if they did not like Kiev’s new ‘democracy’. This year, there has been much worse. Six months of conflict have now passed, though it was clear from the beginning, like it or not, that the small Russian expeditionary force had already won in the first few weeks. Their feint to the North, as if to take Kiev, locked up the Kiev military there (the same tactic as the US used in Iraq with a feint from the sea), enabling Russian forces to achieve their aims of conquering much of the Russian-speaking East and take the Russian-speaking South as far as Kherson, where they were greeted by many as liberators. This was what the Russians had openly stated that they intended doing all along, but they had been disbelieved.

Like it or not, the ensuing decision by the USA/West/NATO to send billions of dollars of their weapons, disarming their own troops, to be destroyed by Russian missiles, sometimes before they can even be unpacked (as on 24 February at Borispol Airport), is only prolonging the inevitable defeat and making the bloodshed far worse. So far the Russians and their Allies have lost over 6,000 troops dead, although over the last two months since they took strategic Mariupol, casualties have been very low, as this has largely become a war of satellites, drones, artillery and precision missiles. On the other hand, the Kiev Army has lost some 250,000, at least 60,000 of them killed, and continues to lose many hundreds of ill-trained, ill-equipped and often very young or very old troops almost every day, whether killed, wounded, or by surrender and desertion.

You should not be fighting a modern war when you do not have air superiority. Kiev does not, as most of its air force was destroyed in the first few days. It is a catastrophe and leaves widows and orphans everywhere. Every son killed had a mother and a father, a brother and a sister. The whole country is in bitter mourning. Its population is now down to 30 million. Of 6 million refugees, Russia is the European country that has taken the most, with 2 million fleeing the bankrupt Ukraine. However, 4 million others have left futureless bankruptcy for various countries in Western Europe, over half going to Poland and Germany. It costs the US taxpayer $5 billion every month just to keep the Kiev government afloat, let alone the billions of dollars of destroyed US military equipment.

Unless the 13% of the world, which is all the Western world/G7/NATO is, really wants a nuclear war to annihilate humanity, as Mrs Truss says she does, the West will just have to accept that Russia has taken back the Russian Lands within the former Ukraine. People like Mrs Truss, with her extraordinary ignorance of the basic history and geography of the Ukraine, simply do not realise that this is an existential war for Russia on its doorstep, even though V. Putin explained this quite clearly. Russians will die to win this war to free their brothers and sisters in the East and South of the Ukraine.

However, despite what Mr Johnson has recently proclaimed, no-one in the UK has chosen to pay 400% more for fuel bills, let alone die for the Ukraine, of which country few in the UK had even heard until six months ago. The result of the UK government’s refusal to buy Russian gas and other commodities and to arm the Ukraine, without consulting the electorate, which is not even allowed to elect the next Prime Minister, is soaring inflation, social disruption, strikes and grinding poverty, which will probably topple the UK government in the near future. Here is the difference with Russia. Nobody in the UK wants to suffer, let alone die, for an unknown country.

Local Consequences: What Does the Future Ukraine Look Like?

It looks something like the following – something that could have happened without any bloodshed, had democratic referenda been allowed back in 2014:

The Real Ukraine of Ukrainian speakers, the ‘Kyiv Protectorate’, or whatever it will come to be called, may take 11 demilitarised central and western provinces of the former Soviet Ukraine: Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil. Population: 11.2 million. This will be a landlocked nation, in effect a Second Belarus, with a population of just over a quarter of the 1991 Soviet Ukraine.

Russia may take the 9 Russian-speaking eastern and southern provinces: Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe, Kherson, Crimea (Crimea of course already rejoined Russia in 2014), Nikolaev, Odessa. Population: 14.2 million.

Poland may, with Russia’s permission, take back the 3 far western ‘Habsburg’ provinces: Volyn (though a small number in the north of Volyn might want to join Belarus), Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk. Population: 3.2 million. This is the historic ‘Ukraina’ – the word that simply means the borderlands (that are next to Poland). Clearly, this real Ukraine would have to receive some sort of autonomy within the NATO-ruled Polish Republic as a demilitarised buffer-zone.

Hungary may take 1 province: Zakarpattia. Population: 0.85 million. This is providing that its mainly Carpatho-Russian people vote for this by referendum, though, true, many have already accepted Hungarian passports. This region would also have to receive some sort of autonomy within Hungary.

Romania may take 1 province: Chernivtsy. Population: 0.6 million. This is providing that its largely Romanian-speaking people vote for it by referendum, which seems highly likely.

  1. Global Consequences: Western Sanctions Cause Chaos in Western Europe

Why is the Russian campaign taking so long, why did Russia not use 25% or even 50% of its armed forces and take the whole of the Ukraine within a few weeks? Because that is not its strategy. By its own admission Russia has never had any intention of occupying the whole of the Ukraine and its capital Kiev. Therefore, only 5%-10% of the highly professional Russian Armed Forces have been engaged in order to take back the Russian-speaking areas, which were separated from it by Marxist diktat exactly 100 years ago. In any case, most of the fighting is being done by the local anti-Kiev Eastern Ukrainians and Chechen allies, who have suffered most of the casualties.

Then there is no hurry – the Russians want to conserve the lives of their own troops and of Ukrainian civilians and to conserve infrastructure. Time in any case is on the Russian side: their greatest ally is, as is usual in Russia, General Winter. By deliberately stretching the conflict out by agreeing to provide arms ‘until the last Ukrainian is dead’, Western European governments have foolishly fallen into the trap of extending the war into the winter. In this way they will have to suffer a winter with little fuel and face national emergencies, probable popular uprisings and riots and the fall of governments. The West has been completely outwitted – by its own stupidity.

Nowhere in Western Europe is the situation as grim as in the UK. With its privatised utilities, which are in reality unregulated, the law of the jungle prevails. For example the energy price cap imposed by the French government on its State energy monopolies is 4%. In the deregulated UK, prices by January will probably have increased by 400%. This is unsustainable. Expect a universal bill boycott, already started, and food riots. In the UK, Johnson’s words of 25 August, ‘You (note, ‘you’ not ‘we’) must endure to defeat Putin’ do not work. Nobody in the UK voted for this. Moreover, in the ‘democratic’ UK, 160,000 mainly elderly, wealthier people are taking two months just to choose the next Prime Minister, the fourth in six years. The UK used to mock political instability in Italy; it had better look at itself.

Global Consequences: Sanctions and Dedollarisation

Europe’s own anti-Russian sanctions, even though forced on it by the USA, are suicidal. Bankruptcy stares it in the face. The rouble has stabilised at a very healthy 60 to the dollar (before the conflict it was over 90 and briefly went up to 120) and money is flooding into Russian coffers as the whole Non-Western world wants its oil, gas, grain, fertilisers, rare earth metals, not to mention its highly effective arms. They are available to anyone in Western Europe who does not sanction them, as long as they pay for them in the Russian currency. On the other hand, the euro has sunk to parity with, or is even below, the dollar. The conspiracy theorists are even saying that the whole conflict was created by the USA to destroy, not Russia or even the Ukraine, but the EU, notably the German economy. Probably crazy, but actually quite logical.

China, India and indeed over 85% of the world have no sanctions against Russia, indeed they basically support Russia. The West is isolated, with its manufacturing dependent on China, which will soon claim back Taiwan. And Russia and other countries are now insisting on payment for their essential commodities in roubles or in their own currencies. The world economy is being dedollarised – that is a disaster for the USA.

  1. Church Consequences

Now we come to the second half of this article, what interests us most. What are the Church consequences of the conflict in the Ukraine, especially, what is happening to the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox Church? Here the situation is grim indeed. On 25 August the Russian Church was forced to abandon plans for its Patriarch Kyrill, already sanctioned and banned from visiting the UK and Canada, to meet the Pope of Rome in Kazakhstan in September. Centralised Church authorities in Moscow had totally misread the public mood and the proposition had led to a huge scandal.

However, the misreading, or just plain non-understanding of the views of the local Orthodox grassroots, is far more generalised than this mere detail. The authorities of the formerly multinational Russian Orthodox Church has tried to impose the political views of Russia on its multinational flock. The result? Its Non-Russian flock has largely left it. This is a repeat of what happened in the 1920s when the leader of the Church then, Metropolitan Sergius, tried to enforce loyalty to the atheist Soviet State on his flock outside Russia. Result? He lost his flock outside the Soviet Union. We can see exactly the same result, all over again, in many regions of the world. For instance:

a) The Ukraine.

Few can describe the hatred felt by Ukrainians, mostly from central and western Ukraine, for Russia and Russians. They are simply boycotting the churches where the name of Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned. I speak from what I have seen. Even here, for example, Ukrainian refugees come to us and ask who our Patriarch is. When I reply that last February we were issued with letters of leave to quit the Moscow Patriarchate (its Western European Archdiocese) for Patriarch Daniel of Romania because of political persecution, they smile and say they will return to us. They feel at home with us; we are neutral. However, wherever the name Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned in church services, Ukrainian refugees, like many other Ukrainians who have already been here for some time, vote with their feet and leave. Understandably so.

Even Autonomy for the only canonical Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, that which is led by Metropolitan Onufry, is now no longer enough. It is too late. Moscow has totally lost control. It is Autocephaly that has to be granted, exactly as the saintly Serbian Patriarch Porfiry recently granted to the Church of North Macedonia. This simple message has yet to get through to Moscow, but it is a fact. Otherwise, the Ukrainian Church will simply be an empty shell. This need for Autocephaly is not a top-down case of political manoeuvrings by a nationalistic elite who want their ‘own’ National Church to command and control, as was the case of the Protestant Churches in Western Europe (e.g. the Church of England or those in Scandinavia) or the purely political group founded in the Ukraine in 2018 under the Church of Constantinople.  This is a case of the people demanding Autocephaly, it is a ‘down-top’ movement.

b. The Baltic States

Russophobia here is virulent. There are already two Churches in Estonia and there are about to be two in Lithuania because of nationalism and hatred for Russia. The US-sponsored Patriarchate of Constantinople stands behind both breakaway groups in Estonia and Lithuania. It seems to me that at the very least the three Baltic States must have their own Local, Autonomous, if not Autocephalous, Orthodox Church. Only that will stop the schisms. Again the message is clear to everyone, except to Moscow. Does Moscow really think it can weather the storms and hold on?

The situation in Lithuania is especially disastrous, where priests have been defrocked for a purely political disagreement with Moscow. This is an abuse of the canons. As our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, said to us in a recent conversation, defrocking happens to clergy for moral, financial or criminal reasons, not because the clergy disagree with their bishop about politics or, as missionaries, are defending their churches from predatory and anti-missionary bishops. Nobody in the free Orthodox world recognises political defrockings. They are not only uncanonical, they are anti-canonical. They are particularly ironical, when those who should be defrocked for molesting women parishioners or stealing money from parish funds are not only not defrocked, but receive all manner of awards!

c. Moldova

Already 20% of churches in Moldova have left the Russian Church for the Patriarchate of Romania. The conflict in the Ukraine is making Moldovans shudder. Will we be next? The tiny Russian Transdnestria was of course long ago lost to Moldova, but what about Moldova itself? It seems inevitable that Moscow will lose the remaining 80% of its parishes there to the Romanian Church. Large parts of the Russian Diaspora are also composed of Moldovans, for example some 70 of the 72 Moscow Patriarchate parishes in Italy are Moldovan. Surely they too will leave for the Romanian Church?

Already in England most Moldovans have had to leave the Russian Church because of Slav nationalism and, sadly, a certain corruption. Here too, Russian nationalism appears to have destroyed the Russian Church’s once multinational character, as everywhere in the Western world. One nationalist bishop of the Russian Church in the Diaspora actually said in public: ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. That seemed to amuse him: it did not amuse the Romanians and Moldovans, or any of the Non-Russians, present. Here there is cause for the suspension of the bishop, if not for his actual defrocking. As far as I know, Christ never commanded us to hate other races.

d. The Western European Exarchate

In 2018 Moscow at last set up a Western European Exarchate, its centre in its brand-new, purpose-built Cathedral and centre in the most prestigious part of Paris, rumoured to have cost 50 million euros. Today, the Exarchate too is shattered, seemingly destroyed by Russian nationalism. Its first head lived in the Cathedral with his wife and child, and had another vice. He was duly sent away. (Though not sent so far as their Bishop Gury in the 1990s, who did something so serious that he ‘had to go’ and freeze in Magadan, opposite the Sea of Japan). The second head, a very politically-minded and very ecumenically-minded and very young man, who has not spent any time in a monastery and who speaks no French and poor English, now lives in Moscow and does administrative things.

Meanwhile, the Moscow Patriarchate Diocese in the UK no longer has a bishop, he is in Moscow. Few even remember who was the last Englishman to be ordained to the Russian Orthodox clergy in the UK. And the Moscow Patriarchate bishop in the Netherlands also seems to have disappeared. He got into great trouble with the Dutch government for threatening the clergy of his huge church in Amsterdam with ‘the Russian Embassy’, because, as Non-Russians, they had expressed purely political disagreement with the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the parish and about 70% of the people transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as did a parish in Italy and another in Germany. Frankly, it appears as if the Western European Exarchate had its chance and failed. Does it have any future after the events in the Ukraine? That it might become the foundation to set up a future Western European Orthodox Church, as Patriarch Alexiy II wanted twenty years ago, now sounds like a bad joke. Hopes have been dashed by those who have betrayed their pastoral duties.

e. North America and ROCOR

In the USA the Moscow Patriarchate has also lost its bishop. Its forty or so parishes are left without a leader and, it seems perhaps without any possibility of even survival through new ordinations, let alone expansion. However, in general, all parts of the Orthodox Church in North America are in chaos. The largest group by far, the Greek Archdiocese, is facing scandal and disorder with the probable deposition of its new, highly political and secularising Archbishop Elpidiphoros. The second largest group, the OCA, which has Russian origins, is facing many difficulties, mot least the behaviour of its administration in over-zealously closing churches and persecuting clergy during lockdowns. The third largest group, Antioch, sometimes called ‘The Church of the Four Families’, faces a scandal involving allegations against its Metropolitan Joseph.

The fourth largest group, quite small in fact, a Russian group, ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), faces very embarrassing accusations of defamation, precisely from a Ukrainian priest, Fr Alexander Belya. The US courts will clearly favour him, though they must first justify his allegations to find out if they are true. Several other scandals in the USA involving properties and Russian clergy who have fled it for the Greek Church are also left unanswered. On top of all this, questions have been raised about the use of the electronic signature of the late Metropolitan Hilarion of ROCOR. He was clearly very ill for quite some time, at least for a year, if not for several years, before his death in May 2022, and yet all manner of very serious documents were being issued in his name by others. His death also leaves his Western Rite group, already dissolved in England, all at sea.

Moreover, ROCOR faces huge difficulties outside the USA. In Western Europe it lost half its English Diocese, 12 clergy, 5,000 people and two million pounds worth of Church buildings, ultimately to the Church of Romania, which canonically received them all, with the blessing of Patriarch Daniel himself. In 2007 they had already lost their only two monasteries in England to an Old Calendarist Church only because their analysis of the degree of the deSovietisation of the Church inside Russia varied with that of their bishop. On top of that, that English diocese then lost another four clergy to various other jurisdictions. Although still (!!) in complete denial of this reality, ROCOR here has now largely become an internet presence. The churches that left it for the Romanian Church are full and growing in clergy and people. Its very few remaining churches are very small. Meanwhile, in Geneva it also faces yet another court case on internal matters concerning administration and very embarrassing sackings, allegedly illegal, involving its appointment of freemasons.

From 1917-1991 ROCOR existed as the free and unpersecuted branch of the Russian Church outside the Soviet Union. After the atheist Soviet Union fell in 1991, and even more after ROCOR’s long-awaited reconciliation with the post-Soviet Russian Church in 2007, many began to question the reason for its continued existence. Some felt that Providence had given it a chance to justify its continued existence as the missionary part of the Russian Church outside Russia. It had the chance to prove itself as such from 2007 to 2017. Then all was still possible. Sadly, it failed to realise its potential and openly abandoned missionary work in whole areas of the world, such as Latin America, Indonesia and most of Western Europe, and instead concentrated on trying to amass money and striving to obtain impossible-to-obtain properties gained by previous unsupported missionary work. It seems as though the once persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church.

At the same time, some of its members turned inwards and selected Trumpism, and not Christ, as their ideology. It was clear that some in ROCOR had lost their way. Having chosen not faith, but a political ideology, and one which fails to work outside narrow US Republican ghettos, and lost most of itself outside North America, ROCOR may now be obliged to retreat to North America and lick its wounds. A well-known Russian Orthodox Metropolitan wrote to me only last week and told me that he does not think that it can survive at all; ROCOR risks becoming an embarrassment to the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia. This is a Church Titanic, of which Fr Alexander Belya is only the tip of the iceberg.

Conclusion: Lose-Lose?

The curse of nationalism has been lose-lose for all who have taken that particular acid bath. The Kiev government has lost by persecuting its own people and playing with several different nationalist and schismatic ‘Glory to the Ukraine churches’ and persecuting its only canonical Glory to God Church. Its false ‘churches’ have not only not created unity, but they have destroyed all remaining unity by persecuting and striving to seize the properties of the canonical Church (more parallels with the situation in the Diaspora). The Church of Constantinople has lost by playing with Greek and then Ukrainian nationalism. Western Europe has lost by playing with European nationalism (its ‘freedom and democracy’ myths) and enforcing Russophobic sanctions to cut off its nose to spite its face. ROCOR has lost by playing with American nationalism, exactly as the much persecuted St John of Shanghai prophesied. And the once multinational Russian Church has lost most of all by betraying its multinational vocation, that very vocation set by Tsar Nicholas II, with Russian nationalism, thus wrecking its multinational reputation. It will not recover from that for at least a generation.

Everyone is a loser. However, Divine Providence can and does make good out of bad. You will see and are already seeing it. Here is the possible end of schisms in the Ukraine and its opportunity, shorn of its Russian territories, to find its true identity and unite around a liberated and demilitarised Kiev. Here is the opportunity for scandal-ridden Constantinople to become a missionary Church, having understood that nobody is interested in a secular-minded, political and racist Church. Here is the opportunity for Europe, including the UK, to make peace with Russia after nearly 1,000 years of hatred based on jealousy and intolerance. Here is the opportunity for the two parts of the Russian Church in North America, the OCA and ROCOR, together with the bishopless Moscow parishes, to unite and love one another, instead of hating one another. (The apparently still unknown commandment of loving one another is to be found in the Gospels). It is all so simple. Here is the opportunity for the Russian Church, having for now lost Europe, to turn to serious missionary work in Asia and in Africa. God always gives opportunities. Sadly, men do not always take them.

 

The Diaspora Again

The new Macedonian Orthodox Church, granted autocephaly by the Serbian Mother-Church, was allowed to keep its Diaspora by the Serbian Church. However on this Sunday of Pentecost it was denied this right by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Here there could be a problem, though it is true that Constantinople does not admit the right of any Local Church to have a Diaspora.

The new Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metr Onufry, with perhaps 15 million faithful after the defection of so many dioceses to the Russian Orthodox Church, has also set up a Diaspora, notably opening a church in Denmark, but apparently also in nine other countries in Western Europe, among them in Portugal and Germany. It seems that there will be more to come.

Here there is definitely a problem, for the Mother-Church in Moscow has not even granted autocephaly to Metr Onufry’s Church, let alone allowed it a Diaspora. The Russian Orthodox Diaspora is already split into three jurisdictions, in order of size: churches of the Moscow Patriarchate, churches of ROCOR and churches of the Archdiocese of Western Europe. And this does not include Ukrainian churches under various groups. And now it seems there is yet another jurisdiction.

Whatever sympathy we may have with any exiled group, we feel a certain regret at the fragmentation of the Orthodox Church in the Diaspora. It means that there are now nine canonical Orthodox jurisdictions in the Diasporas in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia: Greek, Romanian, Russian (in several parts), Serbian, Antiochian, Bulgarian, Georgian, Macedonian and Ukrainian.

The problem of such a nationalisation of the Diaspora is that it is in fact a secularisation and politicisation of the Diaspora. It goes against multinationalisation. This we believe to be an error, for the emphasis on ultimately political identities automatically means division, rather than a coming together under the local umbrella of any particular nation, region or language within the Diaspora.

We already have a situation In the USA where the head of one large jurisdiction commands his flock to vote Democrat and another jurisdiction is not just overtly Republican, but Trumpist, and imposes these purely political views on its members internationally and punishes them if they do not agree! (Just as the old Soviet Moscow Patriarchate tried to impose loyalty to the atheist Soviet Union internationally on Russian Orthodox outside Russia – and we know how that ended up). Then we have a jurisdiction in Germany which supports its government’s sending of arms to the Ukraine.

We have always struggled to unite all and our enemy has always been narrowness, whether racial or political, because that is always secular and always divisive. We are concerned.

 

 

 

On the Possible Reconfiguration of the Russian Orthodox Church

Foreword: Russia and the Ukraine in Conflict

The possible military, economic and geopolitical consequences of the conflict in the Ukraine are much discussed. But what can we say of the ecclesiastical consequences? Both Russia and the Ukraine are ethnically more or less identical, both have majorities which are nominally Russian Orthodox Christians, so that both are dependent on the same Russian Orthodox Church, centred in Moscow. And yet a military conflict is under way between the two countries and there are many in the Ukraine who now do not want to recognise any administration in Moscow, even stating that the Russian Orthodox Patriarch should be tried for war crimes. Let us look at the general background to this situation.

Introduction: The Orthodox Church and Geopolitics

The Orthodox Church is a Confederation or family of 14 universally recognised Autocephalous (= fully independent) Local Churches, with some 200 million adherents in all. Each Local Church is led by a Patriarch, Metropolitan or Archbishop, depending on its size. With 142 million members, over 70% of the total, the Russian Orthodox Church is by far the largest of these Local Churches, followed by the Romanian (19 million), the Greek (10 million) and the Serbian (8 million). The remaining 19 million Orthodox belong to the other 10 very small Local Churches, each numbering on average about 2 million members. Although these Churches are based in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, several of them have ‘diasporas’, that is, emigrant minorities and missions, often going back several generations, in Western Europe, North America, Australia and outside their Eurasian homelands. These diasporas number millions.

Most of these smaller Local Churches are precisely that – local, that is, national. Thus, it is extremely rare, for example, to find a Non-Albanian member of the Albanian Orthodox Church or a Non-Georgian member of the Georgian Orthodox Church. The largest exception is the Russian Orthodox Church, which is multinational, with over sixty nationalities inside and outside the Russian Federation. Indeed, well over a quarter of all Russian Orthodox churches and clergy are to be found in the Ukraine, even though the Russian Orthodox administrative centre is in Moscow. That administration, known as ‘The Moscow Patriarchate’, is led by its Patriarch, whose title is ‘of Moscow and All Rus’ (‘Rus’ meaning the East Slav lands).

For well over a century, the Western Powers, with their State-controlled religions, have been trying to control the Orthodox Church. This has followed the well-worn model of how the USA came to control Roman Catholicism after the Second World War, protestantising or secularising it at the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. Then, in 1978 it helped appoint the Polish Pope Woytila (‘John-Paul II’) to undermine the Soviet Union and in 2013 Jorge Bergoglio (‘Francis I’) to impose its post-Christian agenda. As for the Orthodox world, in 1948 the US State Department took over the small, politically weak but ancient Church of Constantinople in Istanbul, and has ever since tried to use it to manipulate the internal affairs of the whole Orthodox Church and ‘vaticanise’ it too.

It is in this context that the multinational nature of the Russian Orthodox Church is not only a strength, but also a weakness. For some Russian Orthodox living outside the Russian Federation and Belarus, ‘the Moscow Patriarchate’ administration, appears to be simply a department of the Russian State. This is nothing new. It happened during the pre-Soviet period and notably the Soviet period, when anti-Soviet Russian Orthodox immigrant groups, now variously called ROCOR, the OCA, the Paris Archdiocese, as well as Ukrainian and Belarusian jurisdictions, broke away from the enslaved Church administration held hostage in Moscow.

The pressure to split from the Mother-Church came and comes not only from the people, but also from political pressures from States under which Russian Orthodox have lived. We can see this very clearly in the USA, where émigré groups have been infiltrated, creating bishops, in fact CIA assets. In the UK, Germany and France a similar pattern can be observed. This movement is spreading to the hostage Russian Orthodox episcopate in the Russophobic Baltic States, Moldova and above all in the Ukraine, where several, large-scale splits have occurred, with millions leaving the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church. How can such nationalist splintering effects be avoided by Moscow?

Against Splintering

Unlike the Church of Constantinople in Turkey, which is financially dependent on politicised Greek Americans, the Russian Church is free of systematic US interference. However, as we have said, it does have its own internal traitors and they are US assets. Moreover, the Russian Church also has its own issues, all of which go back to the westernisation of Russia which began intensively 300 years ago, though all these issues have much worsened since 1917. These issues are: Russian nationalism (which undermines the ethos of a multinational Church), centralisation, bureaucracy and corruption.

As we have said, on top of these we now have the conflict in the Ukraine. This has caused division in the Russian Orthodox Church, not only among westernised fringe members of the Church, some of whom belong to an American-based marginal group called ‘Public Orthodoxy’, but above all in the Ukraine itself, as well as in the Baltics, Moldova and Western Europe. Although some of these divisions may be nationalistic or of the spiritually feeble politically correct variety, they are nevertheless very real and above all long-term, sometimes going back well over a century.

For instance, in the Ukraine itself a third of the canonical (let alone uncanonical) episcopate today refuses to commemorate the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kyrill at services, seeing in him an enemy of the Ukrainian people. For their people, even the word ‘Moscow’ in the title ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ is a dirty word and they see the Patriarch not as a representative multinational figure, but as a corrupt nationalist stooge of an enemy Russian government. Below we make suggestions which might be of use in finding solutions to these critical problems.

First of all, there is the very name ‘the Moscow Patriarchate’. Given how Western aggression has pushed the Russian Federation to embrace Asia and sometimes made the Russian Church favour relations with traditional Islam (and traditional Non-Christian religions in general) over relations with non-traditional secularist Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, some have suggested that the Russian capital itself could be moved from the megalopolis of Moscow. The new capital would be the Urals city of Ekaterinburg, on the very frontier of Europe and Asia. This city is also marked by the historic events surrounding the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II and his Family in 1918.

If that happened, the present ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ would have to be renamed ‘The Patriarchate of Ekaterinburg and All Rus’. However, this is for the moment a purely imaginary discussion. It is our suggestion that the administration of the Patriarchate of Moscow might rather be moved some thirty miles to the north-west of Moscow, to the historic, seventeenth-century monastery complex and patriarchal residence of New Jerusalem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jerusalem_Monastery#:~:text=History%20The%20New%20Jerusalem%20Monastery%20was%20founded%20in,its%20name%20from%20the%20concept%20of%20New%20Jerusalem). This would give the Patriarchate the new title of ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’. This would avoid any Soviet connotations of the title ‘Patriarchate of Moscow’. Also totally unrealistic? Perhaps. However, we also have a solution other than renaming or ‘rebranding’.

The Solution of Autonomisation

At present the Russian Church is divided administratively into Autonomous (self-governing, but not fully independent) Churches, Exarchates and Metropolias. The difference between these administrative terms is the level of independence from the Centre, with an Autonomous Church being much more independent than an Exarchate and an Exarchate much more independent than a Metropolia. Each of these administrative divisions is composed of a number of dioceses, each of which is in turn headed by an archbishop (more senior) or a bishop (more junior), under each of whom there is a network of parish and monasteries.

In order to overcome the fourfold problems we mentioned above, Russian nationalism, centralisation and hence bureaucracy and hence corruption, we suggest that the whole multinational structure of the Russian Church be decentralised into regional Autonomous Churches. This would do away with the intermediate ‘Exarchates’ and keep Metropolias as structures only inside the Russian Church and inside each new Autonomous Church. Two such Autonomous Churches already exist – the Russian-founded Japanese and Chinese Orthodox Churches. These two are and must be autonomous because they are in the territories of different states. Why not be consistently logical and do the same elsewhere?

What we are suggesting is that this principle of Autonomous Churches be extended to replace the present Exarchates and Metropolias in Non-Russian territories. Only the heads of Autonomous Orthodox Churches, although still part of the Russian Orthodox Church, would actually commemorate the Russian Orthodox Patriarch. (This would avoid the present political tensions and conflicts about his commemoration). Thus, the following new Autonomous Orthodox Churches could be founded:

  1. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Replacing the present ‘Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate’, this would cover the territory of the new Ukraine. True, the latter’s borders are yet to be established, but it would surely include at least the nine central provinces of the present, Communist-created Ukraine. The seven provinces of the west of the present Ukraine, in Galicia and Transcarpathia (eastern Carpatho-Russia), might join, or rather return to, other countries politically, such as Belarus, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Ecclesiastically, local Orthodox there might join the Belarussian (see below), Polish, Czechoslovak and Romanian Local Orthodox Churches. Church autonomy in the new Ukraine would surely help lead to the collapse of present anti-Moscow nationalist and schismatic groups there.

  1. The Belarusian Orthodox Church

This would replace the present Exarchate of Belarus and cover the territory of Belarus.

  1. The Moldovan Orthodox Church

This would replace the present local structure and cover the territory of Moldova, minus Transdnestria, added to it by Stalin, which would certainly choose to become part of the Russian Federation.

  1. The Baltic Orthodox Church

This would group all Orthodox in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Autonomy here might well be the end of the present sectarian grouping in Estonia under the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople, as well as quelling pressures from Russophobic Baltic State politicians for the local Orthodox to be more independent of Moscow. In Lithuania they are even attempting to ban the Moscow Patriarchate wholesale and a schism is already in progress.

  1. The Central Asian Orthodox Church.

This would group the five million or so Orthodox in the five ‘stans’ of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

  1. The North American Orthodox Church

This would cover the territories of the USA, for the moment including Alaska and Hawaii, and Canada. It could finally regroup the three present groups of Russian origin, as well as of other Orthodox origins, in English-speaking North America. By ending the old structures of the ‘Orthodox Church in America’ or ‘OCA’ (after over 50 years still not accepted as canonically autocephalous, or fully independent, by most Local Orthodox Churches) and of the rather sectarian American Synod called ‘ROCOR’, combining them with the parishes under the present Moscow Patriarchate in North America, a long-awaited move towards unity would take place.

  1. The Western European Orthodox Church

This would replace the present Western European Exarchate, which includes Russian Orthodox in many countries in Western Europe, but would be extended to include Russian Orthodox in Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Scandinavian countries and Finland. It would also provide the structure to integrate the canonical elements of the Western European churches of the American ROCOR (see above) and of the Paris Archdiocese. The latter two organisations are both left over from the post-1917 period and perhaps lost their relevance after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is time to recognise this and for them to become parts of an Autonomous Local Church here.

  1. The South-East Asian Orthodox Church

This would replace the present South-East Asian Exarchate, which includes countries as diverse as Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines.

Now we come to even more adventurous possibilities – perhaps to come in the more distant future:

  1. The African Orthodox Church

This would replace the present Exarchate of Africa – if that controversial Exarchate is to be continued.

  1. The Orthodox Church of Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean

Based in Mexico City, this new structure would provide an opportunity to unite all present missions in this area.

  1. The South American Orthodox Church

Based in Brazil, this new structure would provide an opportunity to unite all present missions on this Continent.

  1. The Orthodox Church of Oceania

Based in Sydney, this new structure would provide an opportunity to unite all present missions in Australia, New Zealand and the islands of Oceania.

  1. The South Asian Orthodox Church

This would provide such a new structure to unite all present missions in India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan.

Conclusion

Such decentralisation would bring the total number of Autonomous Orthodox Churches within the Russian Orthodox Church to fifteen, up from the present two. It is our thought that if some such decentralisation is not allowed, then various groups will break off from the Russian Church altogether. It is in order to avoid any further divisions or splintering, promoted either by nationalism or by geopolitics, that we put forward this suggestion of decentralisation, that is, the right to diversity within Russian Orthodox unity.

Of course, perhaps none of the above will happen and it will be up to other Local Churches to carry out missionary work. As we have said many, many times before over the decades, all is conditional. Suicidal and anti-missionary tendencies are clearly present in the Russian Church and maybe others will have to take up the beacon of missionary Orthodox work outside the Russian Federation, Belarus and the south-eastern Ukraine. Some, like the Patriarchates of Constantinople (especially in North America and Australia), Bucharest (especially in Western Europe) and Antioch (especially in South America), are already doing so. The future of the now highly politicised Russian Orthodox Church will remain in the balance, as long as it continues to place raison d’etat above the canons. Time will show us.