Category Archives: Ecumenism

Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again

This anthology of 100 essays, first published in 1995 and now with a new foreword, is at last available again from:

frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. 3rd Edition A5 495 pp.

Price: £15.00 + £2.80 p & p in the UK. Unfortunately, Air Mail to the USA is now £12.85 (surface post, which can take up to two months, is £8.00). Please make payments by Paypal button from the website: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk

From the Back Cover

Today many search for an Undivided Christendom and the traditional teachings of the Early Church, which go beyond the latter-day divisions and disputes of Roman-Catholic, Anglican and Protestant. And amid the chaos of recent years many have discovered the Orthodox Church and Her Faith, drawn from the first millennium of Christianity. In this book the author, an English Orthodox priest, looks at the authentic Orthodox Faith, beyond the historical and cultural vicissitudes surrounding it, and pinpoints its relevance to us. He writes: Orthodox Christianity is the Faith revealed to the repentant in their quest for the Holy Spirit. Should we accept it, we would thus accept the struggle for the Holy Spirit; and in so doing we would accept the struggle to build Jerusalem here, ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Foreword to the Third Edition

For we hope that the Lord will deliver Russia and the Russian people from the dread years of evil which have now lasted for 70 years. Russia can be reborn only through the repentance of the Russian people, through faith in God, through living the Divine commandments. Therefore the rebirth of the Russian people – the rebirth of personal, social and national life – must be founded on the Holy Orthodox Faith and their life must be built on this. And then once more, as of old, Russia will be Holy Rus, the House of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Prophecy of the Ever-Memorable Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Laurus (1987)

All my life I have been haunted by the European world that was lost by the consequences of the tragic events and sacrifices of August 1914, now exactly 100 years ago. Growing up with nineteenth-century grandparents and great-uncles who had fought in the First European War and with tragic maiden great-aunts, I knew that all of us had to live with those consequences. There has been no peace in the world since then, since the profound injustice of the victory so cruelly and ironically snatched from the Russian Empire in 1917 by Allied treachery and then the German treachery that made the slaying of the Russian Royal Family inevitable. And that, in turn, made the destruction of Germany in the Second European War inevitable, with Russian troops taking Vienna and Berlin. And that, in its turn, made the Cold War inevitable.

That War dragged on until 1991. Then the Slav, Romanian, Georgian and Albanian Churches all lived beneath the yoke of atheism and had virtually no free voices. As for the smaller and weaker Greek Churches, they were compromised by US control. Thus, the impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, at one time financed by Anglicanism, had come under US control in 1948, when Patriarch Maximos was deposed by the CIA with threats to his life and despatched into a generation of exile in Switzerland, uttering as he went the words, ‘The City is lost’.

Those were dark days of the betrayal of the Church and, virtually alone, the Church Outside Russia spoke on behalf of us all. For during the Cold War proud anti-Incarnational modernism and ecumenism (heresies, like sects and cults which are created by heresies, are always based on pride), in either their crass, pseudo-intellectual, humanist Protestant/Catholic form, as often in the US, or in their subtle, pseudo-spiritual, personalist Buddhist/Hindu form, as often in Europe, were everywhere. ‘Orthodox’ academic theology was then dominated by that spiritual decadence which may be called ‘captivity theology’. In its intellectualism that ‘theology’, ignorant of the Lives of the Saints, utterly failed to see that Orthodoxy is a striving for holiness, which is simply a life lived with prayer in conformity with the Tradition

This was the academic theology of ‘Orthodox’ intellectuals, who had studied either in Protestant centres (Oxford, Cambridge, Strasbourg, centres in Germany etc) or else in Roman Catholic centres (especially the Gregorian University in Rome, but also Paris, Louvain, Jesuit Fordham etc). The academics infected naturally reflected the proud cultural prejudices of those establishments where they had studied, resulting not in an Orthodox, but a ‘Halfodox’ vision of the world. An associated mixture of ecumenists, liberals and modernists, those intellectuals wished to reduce the Church to a mere religion, a theory and an institution, just like the Western denominations. This was, consciously or unconsciously, spiritual treachery.

Their ‘theology’, in fact philosophy, reflected the humanistic personalism and spiritually empty symbolism of that age. Most of those intellectuals have now died, if not, they are very elderly. The generation of disciple-imitators that succeeded them has even less conviction or talent. It is hardly surprising – modernism is incredibly old-fashioned in a post-modern world. With the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, that age of decadence seems increasingly distant. I remember at that time, and I mean nearly 40 years ago, being told by an ‘Orthodox’ academic at one of those above-mentioned universities that if I was not satisfied with their food that did not satisfy my soul, I should ‘go and live in Russia’. During the Cold War that was not possible; therefore I took the next best option, to frequent the last emigres of the first generation of the White emigration in Paris and the Church Outside Russia.

This anthology of essays was written between 1974 and 1995, precisely at that time when the Church Outside Russia was isolated, indeed virtually besieged, under attack from all sides and from inside, by the extremes of modernism and ‘traditionalism’ alike. Indeed, as I came to realize, the Church Outside Russia was then one of the few points of freedom anywhere in the Orthodox Church. Figures in it expressed words of truth similar only to those of the lone Serbian theologian St Justin of Chelije, canonized in 2010, and other figures on the Holy Mountain and in the monasteries of the Carpathians.

Rejoicing in the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in New York in 1981, when the Orthodoxy hierarchy was still paralysed in the homelands, at that time we also tried to reclaim for the Church the ancient holiness of Western Europe. We knew that all holiness can only come from the Church, as we daily confess in the Creed. Our task was to help gather together the remaining living spiritual and cultural forces of the dying West and to call it back to its roots in its ancient holiness that it had for the most part renounced. This desire is very much reflected in this book. Sadly, since that time we have seen the final death-throes of once Christian-based Western civilization, witnessing the disappearance of the old culture.

For after 1991, and with great speed, the demons that had operated in the atheist Soviet Union migrated to the atheist European Union, whose spiritual deadweight has been reinforced by the atheism of North America. Only a few years ago President Putin of the Russian Federation, made wise by the failure and defeat of atheism, warned the then Prime Minister Blair that demon-inspired atheism was literally a dead end; naturally, he was ignored, for deluded arrogance never listens to wisdom. Indeed, ever since 1988 the Church that President Putin belongs to, the multicultural and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church of God, has been reviving, re-opening or building three churches every day somewhere on the planet.

Together with it there is reviving the social, political and economic life of the Russian Federation, the Russian Lands (Rus) and even other parts of the Orthosphere. In 2007 in Moscow we witnessed the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the re-establishment of canonical communion, a long-awaited miracle of our times. Our great hope of 20-40 years ago for the messianic restoration of Holy Rus, so great that it was a belief, has been coming true through repentance. We have no illusions that we may not see our hopes for the full restoration of the Sovereignty of the Tsar realized, or, much less likely, Europe liberated from its self-imposed ideological yoke, but at least we know that we are on the way. There is much to do, very far to go, but the direction is the right one.

Nearly twenty years on now since the first edition, this book is here reprinted, a few typographical errors corrected, spelling updated, long paragraphs divided and a few minor precisions and corrections made. May this third edition of these essays be a help to all those who seek. May it guide them to the spiritual awareness of the Church and Civilization of Holy Rus and that Orthodoxy is Christianity and that all else, whatever its legacy from ancient Orthodox times, is ultimately but an ism, a distortion and a compromise. ‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith’ (1 Jn. 5, 4).

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

August 2014
St John’s Orthodox Church
Colchester, Essex, England

St Andrew’s Work

Introduction

A spectre haunts Europe. It is the spectre of freedom. From north-west Europe to south-east Europe, professional politicians of the Establishment elites are quaking: they may lose their jobs and with them all their opportunistic careerism and self-seeking will have been for nothing.

Scotland

Perhaps on orders from a worried Washington, today three English public schoolboys (in fact one a Polish Jew who attended an elite State school, but his manner is still that of an English public schoolboy) have hurried to Scotland in panic. They fear freedom and the people who may vote for freedom. Washington is worried about a new country that, initially at least, will be free of both its political and economic arm, the EU, and of its military arm, NATO. No doubt the CIA, through its poodles in England, is listening in on nationalist conversations, in the hope that it can discredit Scottish leaders. Certainly, the sight of three English public schoolboys in Scotland will bring in a great many votes for the Scottish National cause.

Together with them, all European Establishments are worried. If Scotland does opt for freedom, Wales, Northern Ireland and then at last England will also free themselves, but France, Spain and Italy, at the very least, are also directly concerned, for they too have minorities, from Brittany to Catalonia, from Lombardy to Corsica. All artificial unions are doomed to collapse, whether the Soviet Union, the British Union (UK), the European Union or the American Union (USA). The implications of freedom for Scotland are enormous; little wonder that the Westminster Establishment has scurried to Scotland. However, the more intelligent among them must realize that, whether their last-minute delaying-tactic bribes work or not, Scotland’s departure from the Union imposed on it over 300 years ago is sooner or later inevitable. The game is up.

If a yes for freedom vote is recorded, the UK will no longer exist and the British flag will seem an anachronism. But if the UK no longer exists, then we shall all be free of the EU. The absurdly-named United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP, will have to call itself what it is, the Independence Party. As for the three other political parties in England, they can then at last coalesce into one and rename themselves the single party for EU-appointed careerists and opportunists – which is what they have long been. As for a place on the UN Security Council, perhaps that absurdly biased organization can at last be restructured and places given to the countries that really matter and represent the real world: China, India, USA, Russia, Germany, Brazil and South Africa.

The Ukraine

Kiev’s rag bag ‘army’, composed for 50% of western Uniats and schismatics, and then of Nazis, criminals and US, UK and Polish mercenaries, supported by US and Mossad advisors and rockets, has failed to impose its tyranny on the eastern Ukraine. Having shot down a Boeing airliner, Kiev’s army and air force have been totally discredited. Over 3,000, mainly civilians, are dead, killed by the CIA puppet, the corrupt arms-dealing oligarch Poroshenko, now a war criminal. Even the cream of US PR men could not get him more than 25% of the vote, similar to that obtained by various other US puppets in Latin American banana republics and South Vietnam over the last 65 years. Even the EU, largely responsible for the original fiasco, is realizing that the Ukraine is just another artificial union, a conglomerate formed by the Russophobic Communist Party some 90 years ago, and now ardently defended by the West (which also founded Communism in Russia).

Novorossiya, New Russia, the southern and eastern half of the ‘Ukraine’ (in fact western Russia), the object of these terrifying Western-organized atrocities in 2014, is heading for freedom as part of the Russian Federation. So too are many in central and northern Malorossiya, though in Kiev neo-Nazi bands are still terrorizing the population who seek refuge in the Russian Federation. Carpatho-Russia, miscalled by Kiev ‘Zakarpat’e’, also wants freedom; if it does not join the Russian Federation, perhaps it will return to Slovakia or even Hungary, leaving Ukrainian persecution behind it. This leaves only Galicia, or eastern Poland, where all the troublemaking Uniats and schismatics are. It seems that President Putin would be happy for it to return to Poland, since most Galicians have nothing in common with Orthodox culture.

Moreover, Uniat persecution of the Church in the Ukraine has at last brought realism to the last few remaining ecumenist fantasists and naifs in Russia and also to those in Romania. In neighbouring Moldova the Church has taken a firm stand against the EU and its Satanism, despite the bribed pro-EU politicians there. What an example to Romania. And the EU is not having its way in Serbia and Montenegro either. Despite the presence of CIA-funded Protestant sects in the Ukraine, Moldova and Romania, the people have resisted. It may be that by the end of 2014, we shall see great political changes in Europe, both north-west and south-east.

Conclusion

Both Scotland and the Ukraine, not to mention Romania, are close to St Andrew. Let us pray to the first-called apostle that, come his feast in the secular month of December, we shall have good news in all the countries where he is venerated. Freedom is in the air and sooner or later we shall have it.

The Mystery of Archbishop Averky

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Triumph of Orthodoxy

Today, on this the Sunday of Orthodoxy 2014, we pray to the saint of Little Russia who conquered the world, St John of Shanghai, Western Europe and San Francisco, for the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

The Meeting

The meeting of many, but not all, leaders of the Local Orthodox Churches in Istanbul, so inconveniently-timed in the first week of the Great Fast, has ended. The absence of all Orthodox leaders, notably of the Patriarch of Antioch and Metropolitan Rostislav of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, is much to be regretted. If the meeting heeds the words of the Russian Church, it will hopefully lead to a radical revision of the proposed, secularist agenda, which sounds like a provincial version of the now much discredited, fifty-year old Second Vatican Council.

As Patriarch Kyrill underlined, old-fashioned ecumenism is at an end – except perhaps in US-funded Constantinople, whose representatives are referred to as ‘our transatlantic colleagues’ by Russians, who see it as an American colony. The intervention of Patriarch Kyrill and others also explained to Constantinople that no decision can be rammed through by a small group of foreign-funded modernists; all decisions must be agreed on by consensus, by all bishops of every Local Church, and not just by a few of some Local Churches, if those decisions are to be ‘received’ by the Orthodox faithful.

Nationalism

Archbishop Chrysostom II of Cyprus, one of the smallest Orthodox Churches, rightly mentioned the problem of nationalism as the major problem of mononational Local Churches. For example, we only have to think of Mt Athos and the recent ‘shock’ meeting of a racist (‘phyletist’) Greek minister with a Chinese Orthodox monk on Athos, which led to the proposal by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to limit the number of Non-Greek monks there to 10%!

Another example of this is the Greek nationalist philosophy of Metr John Zizioulas, which was largely shaped by the disincarnate and intellectualist ideology of semi-Orthodox Paris Russian thinkers. Other examples are the ownership of the Russian church in Budapest, disputed by Constantinople despite Hungarian law, or the situation of the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, whose canonically-elected leader is not recognised by Constantinople.

The Ukraine

The meeting in Istanbul came against the background of the recent Western-financed and orchestrated overthrow of the democratically-elected government in Kiev. This was supported by an estimated 3,000 to 5,500 Western mercenaries, mainly flown in and armed from the USA. The non-representative junta, come to power in an Orthodox country through violence and intimidation, has a President who is a Baptist pastor, a Prime Minister who is a scientologist and a homosexual Minister of Internal Affairs! The spontaneous reaction and decision by most of the inhabitants of the Ukraine, 83% of whom are Russian-speaking, to attach themselves to Russia, bringing about the possible break-up of the Ukraine in its present and temporary form, was inevitable.

The present anti-democratic Western aggression, led by President Obama and his ill-informed ideologue-advisors, is backfiring. Brought about by a deeply spiritually deficient West, the birthplace of the two most genocidal and atheist ideologies in history, Communism and Nazism, it is bringing Russian liberals, previously pro-Western, to revise their erroneous views and is encouraging oligarchs to return to Russia, repatriating their assets. They ask themselves: Whose side are we on? On the side of the bankrupt Galician junta and their regional language, representing scarcely 15% of the Ukraine, or of the real Little Russia and sorely persecuted Carpatho-Russia, whose leader has just been sentenced by the Neo-Nazis in Kiev to three years in prison against European law? In other words, on the side of the atheist West or the Christian East?

Today Orthodox Rus prays to the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas for the Triumph of Orthodoxy, both in Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia, as well as in Istanbul and in the rest of the weaker Orthodox world.

Freedom from the Galician Junta

One of the first acts of the self-appointed Galician Junta currently in power in Kiev was to ban the language used in everyday life by 83% of the citizens of the Ukraine – Russian. The Junta, put in place by US and EU meddlers is upheld by gangs of NATO-trained and dollar-paid Uniat and nationalist bat-wielding thugs (http://ruskline.ru/opp/2014/02/25/ kak_nato_gotovilo_ukrainskih_boevikov dlya_cvetnyh_gosperevorotov obshirnye_ fotomaterialy/). Roaming the streets and intimidating peaceful citizens, they have been seen as far south as Lugansk, offering piles of US dollars to any who support them. So much for Euroterrorism and Eurofascism, the new Western Crusade with its new Teutonic Knights, sent by the US-controlled Berlin and the Berlin-controlled EU.

The only good thing about this Crusade is that it is going to make people think whose side they are on, whether they are in the OCA, the Paris Jurisdiction, the US-funded Patriarchate of Constantinople, or simply stray ecumenists, freemasons and careerists elsewhere. In the Ukraine the filioquist EU project can now be seen by all for what it is. There are no more excuses. As Orthodox people gather in the Orthodox Ukraine to protect the great monasteries in Kiev and Pochaev, just as they gathered before to protect them in Communist times, so now in Capitalist times, and Orthodox troops gather on the borders of the Ukraine, listening to the people of the Ukraine who call on them to liberate them from the Galician Uniat Junta in Kiev, we all get down on our knees to pray.

A Council?

How well we recall the letter of Fr (now St) Justin (Popovich) of 7 May 1977, ‘On the Summoning of a ‘Great Council’ of the Orthodox Church’. In fact, we still have translations of it in Russian, French and English. In it he stated that there could be no Council of the Orthodox Church because most of the Orthodox Churches were not free and those that were, (he cited the Russian Church Outside Russia, the Church in America and the Japanese Orthodox Church), were not being invited. Instead, the seats were to be filled by a host of titular bishops from the Patriarch of Constantinople and KGB-vetted bishops from, as it was then called, the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’. The Saint’s plea was heard, perhaps not in the courts of men, but by the angels above, and the Council never took place. Now again, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is pushing forward for yet another ‘Pre-Conciliar Meeting’ in March this year and for the Council to take place next year.

It seems to us that although the situation of the Local Churches in Eastern Europe has radically changed since the fall of atheistic Communism, since when freedom has come to them, in other respects little has changed. The Patriarchate of Constantinople has, if anything, even more become a colony of the US Department of State. The latter has misused it ever since they installed their own US Patriarch in 1948 and exiled the legitimate Patriarch Maximos to Switzerland (who said on his ejection ‘The City is lost’) in order to undermine the Russian Orthodox Church by setting up schisms, for example, in France, Finland, Estonia, England and the Ukraine. In no way can there be a formal meeting of the Orthodox Churches, while the Patriarch of Constantinople and its allies are enslaved by the CIA (and also the Turkish government).

The US Administration appears to think that it can deal with the Orthodox Churches as it dealt with the Vatican, which accepted US Protestantisation in its Second Council fifty years ago and then saw imposed on it an anti-Communist Polish Pope for the 1980s Reaganite Crusade against Communism. Significantly, Roman Catholic sources, like the papist AsiaNews, are pushing Constantinople to arrange this so-called Council so that it will become a modernist Orthodox (therefore pseudo-Orthodox) Second Vatican Council. This would make the Orthodox Church into a mere Uniat department of the Vatican and, in that way, of the US Department of State. This is not going to happen. (In any case a meeting of bishops is not a Council; to become a Council the meeting must first be ‘received’ by clergy, monks and people; paradoxically, Church Orthodox Christians are a lot more democratic than the Non-Church Protestants and Roman Catholics, and always have been).

Thus, the attempts by Constantinople to make the recently set up Regional Inter-Orthodox (called ‘Pan-Orthodox’ by enemies of the Tradition) Assemblies of Bishops in the Diaspora into bridgeheads for their conquest of the Diaspora have failed miserably. Thus, for North and Central America, Archbishop Kyrill of San Francisco has eloquently voiced the opposition of all free Orthodox to such attempts (http://www.synod.com/synod/eng2014/ 20140115_ensynodletterarchbpdemetrios.html). Indeed, in some places the Assemblies have virtually closed ‘for lack of things to talk about’. Much more than this, the agenda proposed for a future Inter-Orthodox Meeting (illogically called a ‘Council’) is looking increasingly tired, a leftover washed up from 1960s liberalism, denounced at the time, even more so now. Let us remind ourselves what the ten items on the agenda are – or were: The Orthodox diaspora; The granting of autocephaly; The granting of autonomy; The diptychs; The Church calendar; Marriage; Fasting; Relations with Heterodox; Ecumenism; Peace, Brotherhood and Freedom. (See our article of several years ago: http://orthodoxengland. org.uk/panorth.htm).

The last six questions are absurd, because the canons are clear and of course unchangeable; the tenth is in particular a piece of masonic nonsense from the 1960s. As regards the fourth issue, the diptychs, if people want to argue about what place they should have on an irrelevant, artificial and anachronistic list, then we say they should first read Mark 10, 37-45. In fact, only the first three issues are discussable – and there will be no agreement on them because they have already been discussed, and with Constantinople in the pocket of the US State Department, a former senior representative of which (Brzezinski) has already declared that the Russian Orthodox Church is its greatest enemy, what point is there in discussing them?

Thirty-three years ago a saint prophetically wrote: ‘Should this Council, God forbid, actually come to pass, only one sort of result can be expected from it: schisms, heresies and the loss of many souls. Considering the question from the point of view of the apostolic, patristic and historical experience of the Church, such a Council will, instead of healing, open only up new wounds in the body of the Church and inflict on Her new difficulties and new misfortunes’. We will not contradict the voice of a Saint.

Why are there still Ecumenists?

Many Russian Orthodox, both inside and outside Russia, are puzzled by the fact that there still exist a very small number of ecumenists, mainly clergy, belonging to the Church inside Russia. (There are none in the Church Outside Russia). How can we explain this curious phenomenon, that there are still people who actually believe in something as old-fashioned as ecumenism? Their most senior representative has today declared that Catholicism is not a heresy!!! We can perhaps give four reasons, two more excusable than the others, which are definitely not excusable:

1. Eastern European Pseudo-Catholicism

First of all, we have to recognise that in Eastern European countries like Belarus or Lithuania, ‘Catholics’ are almost all Orthodox in most respects. With the neighbouring influence of real Orthodoxy, they, unlike Catholics in the rest of the world, are faithful to Christian morality, would not dream of not having confession before communion, fast from midnight before their mass, venerate icons and relics, and their clergy, many of whom are married, dress as clergy. For Orthodox who have only ever met such Catholics (many of whom have Orthodox ancestors) and know nothing of the semi-Protestant liberal Catholicism in the rest of the world, such Catholics are of course not heretics. It is important that Orthodox who live in the West and do not know Eastern European Catholicism understand this.

2. Naivety, Inexperience

There are younger people in Russia who are fascinated by the West and find everything there of interest, including the Catholic/Protestant world. It is sad that they do not listen to us Russian Orthodox who live here, know the heterodox world far better than they ever will and long ago saw through all the illusions that they still suffer from through their naivety and inexperience.

3. Politics, Careerism

There was a time when in the old Soviet Union any ecclesiastic who wished for a career had to show ecumenist tendencies to his masters in the KGB. There is an older generation who still have such reflexes and still swim with the tide. After all, Catholicism especially has lots of money and its Gregorian University in Rome has degrees to give out to anyone whom obeys them, as certain people in the Patriarchate of Constantinople know.

4. Homosexuality

Sadly, we must also mention the homosexual aspect of this question. Under Communism Patriarchal bishops and parish clergy outside Russia were often homosexual and the scandals and names, especially in Western Europe and North America, are so well known that we will not unedifyingly repeat them here. Sadly, this continues today, and we know it, which is one of the reasons why so many people of integrity have over the decades fled to the far better disciplined Church Outside Russia. Whatever our faults, we do not tolerate such vice. Sadly, on the Catholic side there are also homosexual ecumenists. Birds of a feather flock together…

Whatever the motive, we must admit that ecumenists in the Russian Orthodox Church are very, very few in number and they are opposed by the whole Church Outside Russia and 99.999% of the clergy and people inside Russia. We should therefore keep our calm whenever someone in Russia makes an absurd utterance.

Cardinal Koch and the Vatican’s current anti-Orthodox Crusade

‘I am the Patriarch of all the Russias. I am not the Patriarch of the Russian Federation, nor the Patriarch of the Ukraine, nor of Moldova…and for me there is no difference between a citizen of the Russian Federation, a citizen of Moldova or any other. The Russian Church exists in 62 different countries’.

His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, Moldova, 2013

Cardinal Koch, Chairman of the Papal Council for ‘Christian Unity’, has today met Patriarch Daniel of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Bucharest. Speaking of this meeting on Radio Vatican, he once more expressed the hope that Roman Catholics may one day be allowed to take the Body and Blood of Christ in the Orthodox Church (the concept that any Churched Orthodox would wish to accept Roman Catholic hosts is so alien as to be absurd).

For this to happen, as Cardinal Koch still does not understand, though he has been told many times already, Roman Catholics will first have to renounce the heresies of Roman Catholicism – something that happens regularly, though on an individual basis. The main Roman Catholic heresy is their renunciation of the Holy Trinity through their filioque heresy, followed by its result, the centralising ecclesiological heresy of papism. However, the implications of these heresies are enormous and we need no look no further than the streets of Kiev today to see them.

The Western Powers, with full Vatican, German and Polish government support, are at present intent on attempting to snatch the Ukrainian people from the Orthodox Church, to which they have belonged for 1,025 years. This attempt to steal the ‘Ukraine’, as it is now called, the birthplace of Russia, by setting up there a US-funded, anti-Christian junta, is directly parallel to the played-out rehearsal by the Western Powers (the USA with its pawn the colonialist EU) to steal Kosovo, the birthplace of Serbia, by setting up there an Islamist cartel of people-traffickers, gun-runners and drug-dealers. Thus, Uniat and schismatic Ukrainian nationalist demonstrators have been bused in to Kiev from Poland and the borderlands around L’viv by their highly-organised, paramilitary EU backers to demonstrate against history.

It may now be after over 20 years of tension that the Ukraine is going to split apart; the Galician-based western 20% of the ‘Ukraine’, the only actual borderlands (‘ukraina’ in the Slav languages), will rejoin Poland, which their people seem to want. So much the better. They can then integrate their atheist European Union, that is, they will see their young people flee to German and Polish factories for low-paid drudgery, their sovereignty lost and their government bankrupted, as in Greece, Cyprus, the Baltic States and countless other countries that so naively fell for the EU bait. In their spiritual suicide they will also see their anti-Orthodox Uniat and schismatic churches empty and close down one by one, as Eurosodom destroys them, as is happening to Catholic and Protestant all over the EU.

The Orthodox minority in this new Polish colony will then be able to join the Polish Orthodox Church and continue as a minority, as elsewhere in Poland and throughout the geriatric EU, defying the EU tide of secularism by surviving and witnessing to Christ. The rest, the 80% of the country that will remain free, probably reverting to its historic native name of Little Russia, will be able to get on with its inevitable and prosperous destiny in the Eurasian Union, thus joining authentic (i.e. non-EU) Europe and Asia.

What is the connection with Cardinal Koch? Like Uniatism, the Ukraine was an anti-Orthodox invention of the Vatican. In 1900 virtually no-one had heard the word applied with its new nationalistic meaning. The Galician far west of the Ukraine is precisely the place where in the last two decades Orthodox have been viciously persecuted (some have been martyred) by Uniats. Their property has been massively stolen by fanatical, Vatican-supported, Ukrainian nationalists, our priests and faithful beaten up by racist, anti-Semitic thugs, whose grandfathers fought in the SS.

The present attack on our Russian Orthodox Church, on our international ideal of Holy Rus and on the Orthodox people of the Ukraine, as it is now called, is nothing new. The Vatican has throughout history mounted crusade after crusade against the Church of God. Today’s Vatican attack, exploiting violent nationalism (‘the aim justifies the ends’, as the Jesuits say) is only just another repeat of the Vatican’s 13th century crusade against the Church of Christ, when the Vatican was defeated by St Alexander Nevsky, or that of their Polish 17th century crusade, of that of the secularised Catholic Napoleon in the 19th century and the paganised Catholic Hitler in the 20th century, which were all against Moscow and which all failed.

This is the real reason why, Cardinal Koch, you cannot take the Body and Blood of Christ in the Orthodox Church; because you have not repented for your inherently secularist sins against Christ’s Church. Only when you have repented for your crimes and anti-Christian crusades, will your eyes be opened, will your spiritual blindness be overcome and your heresies fall away from you, as the millennial delusions that they are. If you, like the hopelessly divided Ukrainian Uniats, with all their nationalistic schisms and renunciation of their historic heritage and identity, wish to support the bankrupt Eurosodom rabble against United, Multinational, Worldwide Holy Russia, to support the materialistic against the spiritual, that is your choice. But do not say that you were not warned.

On Being in Communion and Ecumenism

Question:

Thank you dear father for the quick response.

What do you think, is it time to leave communion with Constantinople because of the heresy of ecumenism? This is my personal opinion, but I admit I may be wrong… I am looking for answers to my questions about the consequences of communion with bishops who consider ecumenism as a path to the union of all Non-Orthodox with Orthodox.
Look at Patriarch Bartholomew’s meeting with a New York rabbi:

http://www.patriarchate.org/documents/2009-parkeastsynagogue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN5TFb9fzvo (Preview)

…But the Jews still do not confess Christ!

I have also been a little bit confused when I saw a video with the then Metropolitan Kyrill in Canberra at the WCC in 1991:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTq7u0CEj6U (Preview)

“The World Council of Churches is the cradle of the One Church of the future… it is our common home”, he said, “and we bear a special responsibility for its destiny.”

Could you help me to understand these things?

X

Answer:

Dear X,

I now understand your confusion. There are two points to make here:

1. We do not leave a whole Patriarchate just because a few individuals in it speak heresy. Can you imagine falling out of communion with the fathers of Mt Athos and the many excellent and faithful laypeople and clergy in Constantinople just because of a few heretical, politically-appointed individuals? Fr Paisios on Mt Athos stayed in communion with that Patriarchate. So should we too.

Forgive me, here I think you do not understand what the phrase ‘to be in communion with’ means. What does it mean to be in communion? For example, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is in communion with ROCOR, but I have never celebrated on the new calendar and no heretic has ever celebrated in my Church. This is because when new calendar priests come to our churches to concelebrate, they immediately have to change to the old calendar (though the new calendar is not a heresy, just a mistake) and if ever a heretic came to our church, I would not invite him to celebrate. This is something I practise, since we know a nearby priest who is a heretic, giving communion to heterodox. (Of course he is not part of the Russian Church (or of Constantinople) and is totally isolated from all other Orthodox – basically because he has excommunicated himself). To be in communion does not mean that we concelebrate with heretics and they concelebrate with us. To be in communion means that we are in communion with other Orthodox, who can be found in abundance in every Local Church, and that they are in communion with us. In any case, heretical individuals do not come to our churches and we do not go to their churches to concelebrate and they do not invite us. So in fact those individuals have already cut themselves off from communion with us and the rest of the Church. They have already excommunicated themselves.

2. 22 years ago, in 1991, the hierarchy of the Patriarchal part of the Russian Church was still under the control of the Communist Party which had imposed ecumenism on it in the 1960s. Its hierarchy was therefore not in communion with the free ROCOR. It is true that the then Metr Kyrill did make this statement about the WCC in Canberra. Since then, however, he has become free and he has renounced this heretical teaching several times, for example, in 2000 when he accepted the statement called the Social Concept of the Church at the first free Council of the Patriarchal Church, again in, I think, 2004, when the Patriarchal hierarchy repented publicly before ROCOR for falling under the influence of Communism and making invalid political statements, and again in 2008 when Metr Kyrill openly called Non-Orthodox ‘heretics’ at a speech at the Trinity St Sergius Lavra. The Patriarchal administration today publicly rejects all prayers with heretics, in tune with the masses of bishops, priests and people, and Patriarch Kyrill today is a free man who is openly Orthodox, without any of the old compromises of the past.

In other words, we must allow for repentance. Since God allows for repentance, so must we, especially since we too are imperfect sinners, needing repentance ourselves. It is no good quoting statements from 22 years ago made by people who were then slaves of an atheist State, in order to try and incriminate them, if they have repented since then. And this is exactly the case. We do not live in the past, but in the present and we look forward to the future.

Similarly, it is useless quoting Patriarch Bartholomew, since he is the slave of the Turkish State (an American puppet) and of the American State Department. This took over the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1948, deposing the last legitimate Patriarch, Patr Maximos, flying in their American puppet on the US Presidential jet to replace him, and funding it ever since. Simply, Patr Bartholomew is not free, so of course he makes heretical statements as a political appointee. What he actually believes we do not know, he is not free – and that is why we pray for him, just as we pray for all, including all our enemies. Indeed, this is how we recognise sects – they refuse to pray for the people they see as their enemies, which is against the Gospel. After all we all pray for the government authorities which rule the country where we live, whether we agree with them or not, for they may be atheist, homosexual or Muslim. This is because we want God to influence them so that they avoid making mistakes and acting against the Faith.

May God keep you in His Church!

Fr Andrew