Category Archives: England

Two Saints of Huntingdonshire

St Neot

This future saint was born in the west of England in the first half of the ninth century. In early life he came under pressure from his father, Ethelwulf, to become a soldier, but instead he became a novice at the monastery in Glastonbury. He was probably helped in this refusal by the fact that physically he was very short. Neot must originally have had an English name. However, as at that time the word ‘neophyte’ was commonly used for monastic novices, this was shortened to ‘neot’, giving the future saint his name.

Neot was admired for his zeal with humility and would get up in the middle of the night to go to the church and pray. In time, pilgrims from all over started going to Glastonbury to listen to Neot’s wisdom. However, he desired to live as a hermit in a quieter spot. Therefore, he travelled westwards, like many English people at the time, to settle near a remote place in central eastern Cornwall, then known as Hamstoke. The location Neot chose was surrounded by thick woodland and hills. In time Hamstoke became known as Neotstoke, for Neot lived here, as if he were a novice, a ‘neot’, mortifying his body by fasting, vigil and prayer.

Later a monastery formed around him and Neot was made Abbot. King Alfred became a visitor and the King’s miraculous healing here came as a result of the holiness of Abbot Neot. In 877 the Abbot fell ill and sensing his earthly end, he took communion. He addressed his flock as a faithful shepherd, instructing all to live in peace and stretching forth his hands towards heaven, he breathed out his spirit. It was 31 July. His relics were kept at the monastery and they attracted considerable numbers of pilgrims.

A century later, and very far from Cornwall in the west, in about 975 a monastery was founded in the east of England, close to the River Great Ouse in Eynesbury. This is in what was until 1974 Huntingdonshire, though now called part of Cambridgeshire. A local nobleman and landowner, usually known by the name of Leofric and his Lady Leofleda, set up a monastery on their land and chose a notable holy person as their patron.

This was St Neot, as he had become famous through his healing of the English King Alfred and many miracles. This choice may also have been influenced by the Celtic blood and speech of many in the local population (see below). An Englishman from Celtic Cornwall would have made this a wise choice. With the support of King Alfred’s great-grandson, King Edgar (+ 975), who was encouraging monastic life, and despite some opposition in Cornwall, St Neot’s relics, apart from one arm, were brought from Cornwall to Eynesbury.

Here they were placed in a shrine at the monastery and Eynesbury came to be renamed Neotsbury, now St Neots. The church at the monastery was consecrated in the presence of the monastic founder Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester (+ 984), Æscwin, Bishop of Lincoln, Brithnoth, Abbot of Ely, and many other notables. Leofric and Lady Leofleda asked Abbot Brithnoth and Bishop Æscwin for their protection and that they would send more monks there from the nearby monasteries in Ely and Thorney.

Although the monastery of Neotsbury, that is, St Neots, was attacked by the Danes in 1010, the buildings were repaired and rebuilt, and it is recorded that the relics of St Neot, which had been saved, had been restored to the monastery by 1020. Although 31 July is St Neot’s Day, locally in St Neots in Cambridgeshire, his feast was kept on 28 October, the day of the translation of his relics from Cornwall. St Neot’s relics disappeared at the Protestant Reformation, but may still be concealed in the town of St Neot’s today and protecting it.

St Ives

St Ives (also known as Ivo) was a bishop, originally from Celtic Cornwall. His relics were uncovered in about 1001 when a peasant found his coffin with an intact body and three other bodies while ploughing at a place then called Slepe, later renamed St Ives, in Huntingdonshire. St Ives appeared to the ploughman in several visions, obliging him to tell a monk at the large monastery at nearby Ramsey, one of the five great Fenland monasteries, of his discovery. The latter did not take this seriously at first, whereon St Ives also appeared to him in visions.

When the monastic community learned of this, they rejoiced at the discovery. Abbot Ednoth of Ramsey set about building a church in St Ives’ honour near the site of the discovery and this settlement was given the right to hold a market and renamed St Ives. On 24 April 1002 Abbot Ednoth translated St Ives’ body and a small monastery was founded in Slepe. His feast was assigned precisely to 24 April. Later there was some confusion and some claimed that St Ives was a Persian saint. This is untrue.

Some non-believers have suggested that St Ives was a pure invention in order to attract pilgrims and so generate income in competition with the nearby town of Eynesbury/St Neots, sixteen miles further down the river. A generation earlier it had obtained the relics of the English St Neot from Cornwall. However, St Neot’s relics were physically brought to St Neots, whereas those of St Ives and his companions were miraculously found. This coincidence and both Cornish connections can perhaps be explained by the fact that the local population in the isolated fenlands, including around St Ives and Ramsey, was, as in other isolated pockets in England, Celtic (‘British’).

Even in the eleventh century Celtic/Brythonic speech could still be heard in the area, notably around nearby Ramsey, where some of the relics found were kept. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FHRTpEhaAs). This indicates that in the fifth and sixth centuries, before the settlement of the English, there may have been a small monastery here, set up from Cornwall to serve local remaining Celtic Christians and then centuries later a ploughman had found the relics of the monastic founders. Although the present location of the relics of St Ives is unknown, the town of St Ives still has a special atmosphere today.

Holy Neot and Ives, Pray to God for us!

Holy Rus in High Suffolk: An Interview with a Russian Count

Over the last fourteen years I have got to know particularly well a couple who are spiritual children and whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. Nobles of Russian extraction, they have made their home in England and chosen to live in the mystical heart of our local East Anglian Orthodox Church and Kingdom. Count (Earl in the English system) Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, agreed to this extensive conversation after I interviewed his wife over a month ago. With his permission we have slightly edited his words, though his English is excellent.

On the table in the oak-beamed living room, where we conduct the interview, stands a golden samovar, bought in St Audrey’s Ely, alongside a portrait of the Tsar’s Family. Nearby stands a lovely vase with a bouquet of fragrant roses, which the Countess has picked from the garden of their thatched farmhouse in High Suffolk, near the Norfolk border. The Countess has served us tea from her favourite Royal Albert service, the doors to the garden wide open before us. Such is the setting for this second conversation, the recording of which stretched on into the lengthening shadows of the English summer evening.

 

Q: Can you please tell us something about your family?

A: In 1775 the Benckendorff family was awarded an estate of 8,000 acres in Sosnovka in the Tambov province of Russia for services to the Crown. After the Revolution most branches of the family, like ours, remained inside the USSR, but we had to change our name for fear of being murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, one priestly ancestor is a New Martyr. At first, we remained in Russia, but after 1945 we moved to what had by then become the eastern Ukraine, though that region is now back in Russia again after 100 years of Soviet-imposed exile.

After 1917 one branch settled in England. This was the family of Count Alexander Benckendorff, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain between 1903 and 1917. His family found itself stranded in the White Russian emigration, as Alexander had passed away in January 1917. Unlike his brother Paul, who was very close to Tsar Nicholas in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander was never Orthodox. He had become a Catholic by conviction from Lutheranism and is buried in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral in London.

Q: Where did you meet the Countess?

A: In the Ukraine. There I, a Benckendorff, met and married another Benckendorff, though the Countess was previously quite unknown to me and her branch of the family had also assumed another name. Some time ago I worked out that we are eighth cousins. The way we met was quite extraordinary, neither knowing that the other was of Benckendorff descent and yet feeling that we were kindred souls. Both of us were divorced, having made bad marriages when we were far too young, like so many who were brought up in the Soviet Union. The marriages did not last very long and there were no children. Some years after we met, in 2008, we left Russia and settled in the West.

Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?

A: No, we did not know anything about the ‘English’ branch of the family until five years ago. To our surprise, we discovered that they had lived in south-east Suffolk, very close to where we first lived before we moved here. Their choice was because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Ransomes farm machinery, made in Ipswich, was used on our estate and there were also contacts with the Suffolk Fisons fertiliser company, which later came to own a very large property called Harvest House in Felixstowe.

And so the family story turned full circle. In any case, Suffolk is where we have made our home and we in no way regret it. This is the land of St Edmund, the patron saint of Suffolk and of England, and we fly his flag here. You introduced us to him and to the other local saints. We respect the Local Church and honour the local saints. That is our Orthodox duty. We had thought of calling our Suffolk home ‘Sosnovka’ from the name of our estate, but we agreed that we must be local and so we named it ‘St Edmund’s House’.

Q: What did you study as a young man?

A: In the 90s I studied history at the University of Kiev and then some years later theology at St Tikhon’s University of the Humanities in Moscow. However, I never taught history, because in the 1990s we had to practise commerce in order to survive. We were fortunate in business because of my knowledge of English and French and my wife’s knowledge of German. We did very well. That is how I came to study as a mature student at St Tikhon’s in Moscow and then we moved to the West in 2008 and England in 2010. Nearly six years ago we bought this old farmhouse. Now I still study theology and the history of the Russian Church and I have also written a novel in Russian under a pseudonym. We also breed roses which involves travel to many places, including to Germany. Financially we have been helped by the investments we made in the past.

Q: As you know, I come from the Suffolk-Essex border where the dry and sunny climate and the soil are ideal for seed growing, which was my father’s profession. He was a sweet pea expert and even has a sweet pea named after him. How did you come to breed roses and not, for example, sweet peas?

A: Like you, Fr Andrew, we love sweet peas, also lilac and many other flowers and shrubs, but both of us have always loved roses more, already in the Ukraine, where in the east the black earth is so fertile and the climate is so good. Some twenty years ago my wife fell in love with roses in a monastery there, where she had the obedience from her spiritual father of maintaining the monastery rose garden. A huge variety of roses is available in Russia and the Ukraine with sturdier stems than in England, even though you have David Austen roses. One of our favourite roses is ‘Zephyr’ from Turchinov. We also love lilacs and again there is a Russian lilac called ‘Beauty of Moscow’. We are introducing Russian roses, lilacs and others into England. This seems to be our mission!

Strangely enough, we discovered that my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, the ambassador Alexander Konstantinovich, and his wife, Sofia Petrovna, who was a Tolstoy, also grew roses. Then their grand-daughter, Natalia Konstantinovna, who passed away only in 2018, grew them. Her husband, Thomas Humphrey Brooke, who was a friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, became an internationally acknowledged expert on roses. He was a close friend of the rosarian Peter Beales at his gardens in Attleborough in Norfolk. Humphrey cultivated over 500 varieties of rose. I know Peter Beales’ son, who has just retired. Roses must be in the Benckendorff genes.

Q: Let us turn to Church matters now. As you follow Church affairs very closely, you know much about the schism between Moscow and Constantinople on account of the Ukraine. Do you see a way out of this?

A: There is always a way out. It is called repentance, the antidote to despair, the antidote that Judas did not take. Beware, he did not take the antidote and hanged himself. What must be done to undo this schism is to work in reverse. This means going back to what caused the schism and reversing it. This means that Constantinople must abandon its pretensions to the territory of the Russian Church in the ex-Soviet Union. These pretensions were formed because the Patriarchate of Moscow refused to grant anyone outside the Russian Federation autocephaly and because Washington paid Constantinople to commit the crime of setting up a fake Church in the Ukraine. Still, if Moscow had given the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly years ago, creating a national Church there, Constantinople would never have meddled, because the Ukrainians would have been satisfied already.

Next, or preferably before that, Moscow must immediately stop its schism with Constantinople, start concelebrating and abandon its excommunications and defrockings, freeing people to act according to their conscience. The schism was quite unnecessary and just brought Moscow into exactly the same isolation and disrepute as Constantinople, losing it all sympathy. Two wrongs do not make a right. How do you say that in English, when both are equally guilty? There is an expression with six and six in it.

Q: Six of one and half a dozen of the other?

A: Yes, that’s it. Anyway, Moscow must also negotiate a canonical solution to the African problem. Either Africa belongs canonically to the Patriarchate of Alexandria or to Moscow, or else the territory must be divided and different geographical regions will belong to one or the other. For example, Egypt, or even all Muslim North Africa, could remain under Alexandria and Moscow could take Black Africa, where it has a lot of political support, though only if it is prepared to set up a real, local, independent African Orthodox Church. You cannot have overlapping jurisdictions on the same territory. We must support the canonical order of the Church internationally.

Q: Is this realistic? Look at the Diasporas, where we have had overlapping jurisdictions for over a century.

A: Things are changing. Look, the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine will be over soon. The Kiev regime is collapsing. Some even say it will all be over for the Dormition, on 28th August. Perhaps not so soon. In any case, the USA is giving up on its Fascist friends in the Ukraine, who have failed. Americans hate failure. What is the way out? One way is if Trump, who is already the real President – some even say that Biden is literally, not just metaphorically, dead – could perhaps denounce the whole Ukraine project. He could say that it was all a fantasy of Biden, ‘Genocide Joe’, as they call him.

Trump must abandon the fake OCU Church that Constantinople set up in the Ukraine with US dollars, denouncing it as created by those who deceived him in Washington in 2018. President Putin will make the freedom of the Church a condition for peace anyway. The Church must be free from the persecution of the OCU, which must return the thousands of churches it has stolen. Trump must give up the illegal sanctions against Russia, release frozen Russian assets and return the stolen interest on those assets.

In this way President Trump can get a photo opportunity of the Two Presidents. He will be shaking hands with President Putin in Moscow (Trump loves having his photo taken) as the great hero, peacemaker and dealmaker, unlike Biden the warmaker and failure. Why, Trump could get a Nobel Prize – those prizes are funded by the CIA anyway, as we saw with Solzhenitsyn. Trump and Moscow can sign an agreement, stating that Washington has no claims to the Ukraine and that Moscow has no claims to the Baltics, Finland, Poland, Romania, or anywhere else west of the Ukraine. This will be historic, but should all have been done 33 years ago in 1991.

Q: What about Moldova?

A: This agreement would include Moldova, unless some minorities who live there along the border with the New Ukraine or Russia vote by democratic referendum to transfer, for example, the Transdnistrians and the Gagauzians. Most of Moldova will eventually go back to Romania. It is historically inevitable. The Patriarchate in Moscow has lost the loyalty of most Moldovans through its centralising racism and many there are already joining the Romanian Church.

Such a deal of the Two Presidents would give both Russia and Western Europe security, making NATO entirely redundant, which is what both President Trump and President Putin want. Such a new security agreement for Europe could be presented as a triumph for Trump (the Americans are experts at PR) and Moscow will be fully satisfied. Russia will set up the third Union State in the New Ukraine, which will be a second Belarus, perhaps also landlocked, as all the south and east of the old Ukraine, which are Russian, as I know, may well rejoin Russia. The Ukraine will be demilitarised and denazified, as Moscow needs. With such a deal both sides will save money and, above all, both will save lives.

Q: Do you think the New Ukraine will retain the western borders of Stalin’s Ukraine?

A: Moscow may well give some extreme western parts of Stalin’s Ukraine, for Stalin’s borders are what Biden and the EU Commissars have been fighting for, back to Poland, Romania and especially to Hungary, our ally. This would be seen as a great victory for the USA and as a great victory for Russia, though it would not be a victory for the Western European elite. But that elite does not count for anything internationally and can be ignored. Moscow negotiates only with Trump, neither with the sick old man before Trump, nor with the Western European puppies who lie and cheat.

With peace in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate in Moscow will also have to negotiate a new relationship with the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev, under which I began my Orthodox life. And probably also a new relationship with other parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. Otherwise, Moscow will lose everything there too. A wave of autocephalies must follow. The age of Soviet central planning is over. It was over with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, only the Church authorities did not keep up with changing times.

Q: Why do you say that this will not be a victory for the Western European elite?

A: The Western European political elite, its ruling class, has for eighty years been living off the USA, licking its heels and barking when told to. It has become dependent on the USA, not only a drug-addict enslaved to the USA, but also a vampire that sucks its blood. As in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, that elite does not want freedom. But Western Europe is a very expensive slave to keep and the now bankrupt USA can no longer afford it, just as one day it will no longer be able to afford to keep its other vassals, Israel, Japan and South Korea.

The American Empire is like the Roman Empire which in the early fifth century could not afford to keep Britain and had to abandon it. Western Europe will have to find its own way, control its own destiny, defend itself. Actually, it will be able to slash its futile military spending once the new security agreement or non-aggression pact with Russia has been signed. That is also what Russia wants. It is tired of being invaded by the West.

Today the USA is letting go of Western Europe. This means the UK and the EU, minus Hungary, Slovakia, others like Serbia and maybe later many more like Romania, Greece, and perhaps even Italy. The first three have already more or less negotiated their way out of the EU into BRICS. Freedom from the USA will undermine the parasitic globalist Western European elite of puppies and puppets, banksters and gangsters, unprincipled and hypocritical pawns all of them. They backed the Kiev Nazis even to their own detriment, allowing prices for their peoples to double and letting the Americans blow up the Nordstream pipeline.

That ruling class of perverts will have to resign, if they are not first voted out, or better arrested, because they no longer have the protection of Trump’s Washington. The Western European swamp will be drained. That is why they and their globalist media propagandists like the BBC feel betrayed and hate Trump. As a result of all this, we shall at last see new Western European rulers, hopefully far more respectful of the wishes of the native peoples of Western Europe. Then can be abandoned those satanic and blasphemous pagan festivals like Eurovision and the 33rd Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which openly mocked Christ, Who was crucified when He was 33. No wonder French cathedrals burn down. If that is Western Civilisation, then there is nothing left to defend.

All these countries can then be at peace with the eastern half of Europe, comprised of Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus. Importantly, this eastern half stretches on into North Asia, to the Chinese border and the Pacific Ocean. Russia is the gateway to Asia, the future, where three of the world’s four largest economies thrive. We are at last seeing the Gaullist vision of a natural unity which stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Western Europe will no longer be unnaturally cut off, but will rejoin the whole of Asia, of which it is only a north-western peninsula.

All this is possible, though if and when it happens is another story. It may all take many years and I trust more in Vance than in Trump. These are just my thoughts and hopes. We shall see.

Q: Will England take part in this New Western Europe, which will at last become a real part of Eurasia, which geographically it always has been?

A: Ah, dear old England. A good question. I really hope so. If the USA rejects England, it will have to leave the USA. It will not be the fifty-first State of the USA. And with the very fragile, violent and divisive situation in the present fifty States with their 35 trillion dollars of debt, that is not an enviable position to be in. I think England should ally itself with the new, post-American, Eurasian Europe of the BRICS Alliance. Ireland, Scotland and Wales surely will. May St Edmund and the English saints guide England towards this.

But for England to become sovereign again, the oppressive British Establishment ruling class will first have to be removed, with its private elite schools, Oxbridge, Westminster, BBC, Financial Times, Economist, tabloid press like the Guardian, the Telegraph, all those other Daily State propaganda mouthpieces, and the Blairs, Camerons, Sunaks and Starmers. As you have very often written, Father, that elite is alien, not Norman by blood, but Norman by mentality, spiritually Norman, made up of spiritual invaders.

Q: We have got into political affairs. To come back to our question, what in your view was the essential error behind the Greek-Russian schism?

A: Lack of communion. It is vital to remain in communion with everyone. It is a great, great sin to break communion, because if you do this, you cause division in the Church. And the Moscow bureaucrats who surround the Patriarch committed this sin, weaponising communion. And look where they are now: isolated, feared, unloved and scandal-ridden. It is all so Soviet. They have lost all their best friends – they even lost you, Father, who spent all your life fighting for communion and the reintegration of the Russian Church.

Q: Why do bishops break communion?

A: It is always because they want more power. And what do they do once they have power? They introduce novelties in order to justify themselves. This was exactly the case of Rome in the eleventh century. All the innovations they introduced after they had broken off communion from the Church were self-justification for breaking communion. And self-justification is the opposite of repentance.

A thousand years on and the Popes of Rome and the Vatican machine have still not repented, still claiming to be rulers of the Christian world, and so they are still out of communion with us, who follow the principle of the Local, which is the principle of Catholicity. They instead imposed the Centre, that is, Rome. Can you imagine, they tried to impose their barbarous Latin on the descendants of the Civilisations of the Incas, Maya and Aztecs! No respect for the Local!

We must be very strict about keeping in communion. The way back, the return, is in respecting the canonical territories of each Local Church. That is what Rome did not do and instead tried to impose itself by the sword on Orthodox territories, with their crusades, inquisitions and so on. Now Constantinople is trying to do the same, imposing centralisation in imitation of Papism. And Moscow Church bureaucrats tried to do the same, but God has intervened, its Soviet Empire over Non-Russians is crumbling.

Q: I would like to come back to my original question, which we did not answer. Do these considerations give us a solution to the divisions in the Diasporas, where there have been several overlapping jurisdictions for over a century?

A: In the Diasporas, where there are mixed Orthodox populations, responsibility for organising new Local Churches lies with the majority ethnic group, but that majority must respect all the customs of the minorities. This is what Bishop Tikhon, the future Russian Patriarch and Saint, did when he headed the multinational Northern American Orthodox Church before the Revolution. Then Carpatho-Russians and Russian-converted Alaskans were the majority, but minorities like the Syrians, Serbs and others were together with them.

Today the Greeks are the Orthodox majority there, as also in Australia, but unity is blocked because of the political and imperialist style of the Greeks. As long as they have that Hellenist style, unity will be impossible. Only when the Greeks have a Non-Greek Patriarch, will they be taken seriously. As regards Western Europe the Romanians are the majority. Here I am hopeful, because respect is what our Romanian Metropolitan Joseph gave our Russian and Moldovan parishes with our calendar, languages and customs, when we had to flee to his canonical protection from pseudo-Russian episcopal persecution. And we in turn greatly respect and love the Romanians. I love their singing and their simplicity! Mutual respect is vital.

Q: One well-known Russian Metropolitan said that the Moscow-Constantinople schism is as big and as permanent as the 1054 Western Schism. What do you think?

A: That was nonsense. This schism is all about personalities and they are temporary. Here today, gone tomorrow, as you say in English. Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople has renounced or changed the Creed, unlike Rome in 1054. So this schism is not at all on the same level as 1054, it is not a dogmatic issue, but a vulgar issue of territory and personalities. And personalities change and are replaced. In any case, the Metropolitan-oligarch who said that, the bureaucrat was in part responsible for the whole fiasco, is now suspended and completely discredited. Nobody is listening to him any more. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Can other Local Churches play a role in healing the Moscow-Constantinople schism?

A: Of course, and a vital role. The Churches of Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland and perhaps others like Antioch, Czechoslovakia and America, and of course the canonical Church of Metropolitan Onufry in the Ukraine, will play a vital role. Even some bishops in Greece and Cyprus are sufficiently non-racist to understand the reality. Some Local Churches are already playing that role, stressing the Conciliar principle, the principle of Sobornost, that is, Catholicity, which, by the way, is the exact opposite of Catholicism and it is precisely the spirit of Catholicism, that is Papism, which caused the schism. Read the interview with the new Bulgarian Patriarch, who was elected after the American candidate lost and was humiliated and the Greeks had to go home like whipped dogs. His words are inspired.

Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?

A: Not personally, only by sight, but I do know Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa and Archbishop Diodor quite well and they have the same spirit. The further you are from Moscow, the more you find that spirit.

Q: You mention that the essence of the schism is the lust for power on the part of bishops and the spirit of Catholicism or Papism which lies behind it. Can you expand on this?

A: We are all waiting for the restoration of canonical order in the Russian Church, but this cannot happen until the end of what some Russians call ‘Philocatholicism’. This means the fawning admiration by some Russian bishops of the Vatican power-structure, which is the concept of a Church-State, a Church which is a State, or is even more powerful than a State, as history saw at Canossa. However, I am completely against this word because I respect ordinary Catholics, who are Catholics only because they were born in a certain country and I would never insult or disrespect them. The disease inside the Russian Church is not Philocatholicism, the disease is ‘Philopapism’. That is the real heart of the issue, And, by the way, it has nothing to do with ecumenism. Some of the worst Philopapists are anti-ecumenist.

Q: In that case, can you define ‘Philopapism’ for us?

A: Yes, but first understand that Philopapism is not just a Russian disease, it has long infected Constantinople, where it is called ‘Eastern Papism’, and before that it infected Rome, where it has always been called Papism. In Rome the problem was and is Western nationalism, in Constantinople it is Greek nationalism and in Moscow it is Russian nationalism. In Russia, it is not at all a recent Soviet disease, ‘Sergianism’, unlike as some very politicised, anti-Communist emigres used to imagine, it goes back centuries in Russia too, long before Communism.

It existed, for example, just before the Revolution in the awful persecution of the so-called ‘Name of God’ monks on Mt Athos. It was Tsar Nicholas who stopped that persecution, which had been instigated by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), who later became the first leader of the émigré ROCOR. The persecution was carried out by bureaucrats who were more or less atheists. The First World War followed it. And most of those very same bishops who had persecuted simple piety, then abandoned Tsar Nicholas at the Revolution and even rejoiced at his overthrow. Later they had to repent, redeeming themselves at the price of martyrdom or of exile. They had to pay the price for their earlier vile persecution.

Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?

A: The post-Revolutionary bout of Philopapism goes back to Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Sergius, who wanted to ‘save the Church’, just like the Popes and the recent Patriarchs of Constantinople. How can you ‘save the Church’? Christ is the Saviour! The Church does not need saving, it is we, including bishops and patriarchs, who need saving. Who do they think they are? The problem is that the Philopapists see the Church as a purely worldly organisation, just like the Popes of Rome, who used to lead armies in order to defend their Church. In order to defeat the barbarians, they themselves became barbarians! Who then was the gentleman?! From Patriarch Sergius this infection spread down to personalities like Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who characteristically died in the arms of the Pope. Some say that he was a secret cardinal. Maybe. That is not the point. From him the disease has contaminated further to this day.

This disease is the mentality that bishops are ‘princes of the Church’, in fact they are perverted oligarchs, just like the Borgias in Renaissance Rome. This is poisonous. It is why I refused to go to many churches when I lived in the Ukraine and Russia. They were an immoral business operation and many bishops there are immoral, chosen only because they know how to make money, not because they believe in God, pray, or are monks. I think many of these new Russian Borgias should go to prison. The current Metropolitan Hilarion affair is only the tip of the iceberg. Others must be trembling now too. The truth is coming out and judgement is coming to them all.

Q: You said that Philopapism goes back centuries in Russia. When did Philopapism begin?

A: It came in after the fall of Constantinople, the Second Rome, in 1453. So began the idea of the Third Rome. Fighting against St Nil of Sora and the hesychast Non-Possessors – St Sergius of Radonezh had been one of them earlier on – the situation came to a head at the so-called ‘Raskol’, that is, the Old Ritualist schism 200 years later. Then the administrative centre of the Russian Church in Moscow was contaminated by Philopapism, which was also encouraged by the idea of the Third Rome, which maintains that Russia has a messianic mission. Russia does have a mission, but it takes place within the multilateral Alliance of Civilisations, which is what BRICS is about.

In other words, Philopapists think that Russia is exceptional, indispensable to the world and therefore anything its rulers do is justified. The antidote to this was in the concept of Moscow as a Second Jerusalem, but that option was cruelly rejected by the Moscow bureaucrats. It is not that I am in favour of Old Ritualism, which was a form of ignorant nationalism, but I am against persecution. What difference is there between the State persecution of the Old Ritualists in the seventeenth century and the State persecution of Orthodox in the twentieth century?

The Philopapist mentality creates pharisees and ‘high priests’, as Christ called them in the Gospel, those who like ‘the first places at table’. Philopapists consider that they are the chosen people and so above the law, above the canons, ‘exceptional’. But this mentality is why the pharisees crucified Christ, Who called them to order, what we call canonical order, and told them that our Kingdom is not of this world. He overturned the tables of these new moneychangers, which is what you did, Fr Andrew, when you chased out the new pharisees who were threatening you and screaming at you in 2021 and 2022. All those who persecuted you are one by one being removed. Bishops are not above the canons.

It is the Holy Spirit Who chooses us for mission, not pharisees. Pharisees think only in worldly terms of money and power, and camouflage themselves with messianism as self-justification for their lusts. It is simply lust for money and power that contaminates these people. Once they have money, they want power. It is always the same old sordid story of corruption and perversion. That is Philopapism.

Q: But Phariseeism itself is universal, isn’t it?

A: Yes, of course. It was this same missionary, messianic mentality which inspired the atheist Jew Bronstein-Trotsky, who wanted to spread the Communism of the Third International (which replaced the Third Rome) worldwide. He also persecuted, leading the Red Army and causing the deaths of millions. But it is not only Jewish, it can be Frankish, Norman, Venetian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, Soviet, American, or anything else.

For instance, Soviet messianism strangely resembles American messianism. This is because the struggle between Washington and Moscow is in fact the struggle between the First Rome and the Third Rome, for the USA is the heir to the infallible Popes of the First Rome. ‘We are the exceptional people, the indispensable nation’, the infallible US have been saying of themselves ever since the collapse of the SU (Soviet Union), though its collapse had nothing to do with the Americans. (See how even the initials US and SU and their symbols, the white star and the red star, are the same, just the other way round).

Communism collapsed because it is unrealisable and went bankrupt. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union went to the heads of the US elite. They claimed absurdly: ‘This is the end of history and we have won. As the victors, we can set up a World Empire, called Globalism, we have exceptional authority, therefore no laws apply to us, we can carry out genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Libya and Syria, in the Donbass and Gaza, we can ignore the International Criminal Court. We can do whatever we want’. In reality, this is just the same vulgar old imperialism, absolutism, immorality, cloaked in their smug Protestant self-righteousness and infallibility. It is Philopapism.

In reality only God is exceptional. No human being or country is exceptional.

Q: What do you think of what some call the ‘liberal opposition’ in the Russian Church, clergymen like Protodeacon Andrey Kuraev and the popular pastor Fr Alexei Usminsky? They are also opposed to these Vatican-adoring, ‘money and power’ Russian bishops, the pharisaic Philopapists, as you are.

A: The dissident liberals are opposed to the Philopapists, but not for the same reasons as I am. The liberals are opposed to such bishops because the liberals are in reality rationalistic and modernistic Protestants. Like all Protestants, they are naturally anti-Catholic, anti-Papist. However, like all Protestants they are also generally pro-Western and some are traitors to Russia, just like their corrupt enemies whom they fight and are also traitors to Russia (I make exceptions for some who are just extremely naïve and not very intelligent). We disagree with the liberals because we are not Protestants and we follow the historic Orthodox Faith.

We are not traitors, we are patriots of Russia, that is, of the real Russia, of Orthodox Rus. President Putin is preparing the way for that, for the coming Emperor. He took on not just Paris and Berlin, but the whole West and won. We hope that God gives him time to help cleanse the Church next.

However, I do disagree with the appalling way that the liberals have been treated, with their so-called ‘defrockings’ by the selfsame corrupt bishops. You cannot defrock a clergyman because he has different political views from his bishop under the absurd pretext that he is being ‘disobedient’. The threat of defrocking forced them and many others, in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Spain, USA and in Russia into joining Constantinople – they had no alternative. This is yet another example of the Moscow bureaucracy weaponising a sacrament, this time not the eucharist, but the priesthood. But grace is given by the Holy Spirit, not by pieces of paper signed by jealous or wicked bishops. Thank God, Patriarch Kyrill is beginning to remove them, suspend them or retire them. He has  a lot of work to do.

Q: How is authentic Orthodox missionary work different from American missionary work?

A: If you have a missionary message to spread to others, the message of Christ, then you do not spread it by violence and threats. This is what the ‘Roman Union’ of the Vatican did. This is what the ‘Soviet Union’ did. Now this is what the ‘American Union’ (which is USA and NATO – basically the ‘European Union’) does. They have all used violence and threats. This has guaranteed the downfall of all of them. It is what is happening now.

The American Union, usually called ‘The West’, is collapsing, it too has gone bankrupt. They have done it to themselves, just like the Soviet Union. As someone from the Soviet Union, I can see very clearly how the European Union has become the same. The commissars, mentality and lies of its politicians and journalists are exactly the same. But the Godless are always defeated because they are all from Babylon. Their Tower always collapses.

Authentic Orthodox missionary work does not use violence and threats. I have recently discovered the Russian saint, German of Alaska as an example. What a great monk! And how he has been ignored by Church authorities and was resisted by Russian State authorities (long before ‘Sergianism’!). He is unknown in Russia. St German lived among the Inuit people ‘as one of them’. Not even a priest, he did not impose his language or customs by violence or threats against the people. He did not try and steal their property. He was their servant and defender, not their persecutor or a ‘prince of the Church’. He was the real Apostle of Alaska. He was able to convert people, because he was Christlike.

In this he was just like Sts Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, St Stephen of Perm, Apostle of the Zyrians, St Nicholas, Apostle of Japan, or St Macarius, Apostle of the Altai, he respected others. That is the problem of the Moscow Patriarchal bureaucrats today, lack of respect for others, for the Local. And that is why they are losing everything, they put politics above the Church. If I may paraphrase St Matthew’s Gospel: Seek ye first the kingdom of man, and all these things will be taken from you’. They do not deserve to keep it. God will take it away from them because they are unworthy, just as He took Constantinople away from the Greeks in 1453 because of their racism. St German of Alaska’s way is the only way that Russia could convert the world and in no other way. Any other way is Philopapist.

Q: Whenever we talk, I feel nostalgic, as though I am talking to one of the old Russian emigres I knew in the 1970s, like my godfather, Nikolai Zernov. I would sit in his apartment in Northmoor Road in Oxford and look at the huge picture, almost fresco, he had of the Kremlin ‘before the deluge’, as he called it. Then there were Princess Kutaissova, Elizabeth Lopukhina, Dimitri Obolensky, Nadezhda Gorodetskaja or Lydia Slater, Boris Pasternak’s sister. They all had the same mentality. Why is this?

A: This is because we are Russian emigres like them! But I take your remark as a compliment. All I can say is that though we lived in the Soviet Union, we always kept our family traditions from before. Above all, we never, never accepted any Sovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has increased this Philopapist corruption and perversion today. This has made it and those who are too closely allied with it, like those crazy ROCOR Protestant converts in New York, into pariahs. It is so sad and so unnecessary. They have painted themselves into the corner with their notorious scandals, as you say. Now they are complaining because the rest of the Church at best ignores them and at worst openly mocks them. But how else are you going to treat psychopaths?

Q: Do you have any words of hope for our readers?

A: Yes, there is one thing. You know, I never used to like Trump. I thought he was a clown as well as a criminal and a narcissist. He was also a Russophobe and armed the Neo-Nazis against us and sanctioned us. But recently, he said something very Orthodox, no doubt for the first time in his life and without knowing it. He said: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! I even wanted to buy a picture of this moment, but my wife stopped me. She has no interest in politics and says it is all a waste of time. She prefers gardening and our two cats to politics. She says cats are far more intelligent than politicians.

She may be right, she so often is. But I still maintain that the concept of ‘Never surrender’ is Orthodox, because Christ never surrendered. If He had surrendered, there would never have been the Resurrection. So I say that Trump was saved for a purpose by the grace of God, the bullet missed him, but hit Biden instead and stopped World War III, and we should all repeat: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! Another American said something like: ‘Only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world do change the world’. This is in fact the definition of our fools for Christ. They change the world, corrupt and perverted bishops do not. Why, they cannot even change themselves.

July 2024

 

 

An Interview with a Russian Countess

Countess Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, has kindly agreed to be interviewed about the contemporary situation in Russia. We have recorded her answers, slightly edited, below.

 

Q: Can you tell us something about the Benckendorff family? I presume it is a German name.

A: The Benckendorffs were Saxons, not Germans. The Germans persecuted us. We were first recorded in 1240 in the village of Benckendorff in Saxony in eastern Germany, from where we became known as von Benckendorff. 300 years later some of our family settled further east in the Baltics, at first in Riga, then near Tallinn. After the Baltics had been absorbed into the Russian Empire, many of the family settled in the Morshansk area of the Tambov province, where in 1775 we were awarded the Sosnovka estate of 8,000 acres. In the early 19th century we were made counts in gratitude for service to the Tsar.

After 1917, part of the family, including a cousin Alexander, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain, emigrated. He passed away in 1917, but belonged to the Germanised Lutheran-Catholic side of the family and did not even speak Russian very well. He was allowed to write his reports as ambassador in French, which everyone in Saint Petersburg spoke fluently at that time. However, his family, who were Orthodox, came to live in Suffolk because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Suffolk farm machinery was used in Sosnovka.

Thus, our branch of the family had been Russianised in the late eighteenth century and became Orthodox. After 1917 we remained in Russia, still living in Morshansk in the Tambov province. Obviously, we lost everything and we had to hide our identity, changing our surname in the 1920s, but we always remained faithful to the Orthodox Faith, the Tsar and Rus, to all our traditions. We were always different from others and members of our branch of the family never became members of the Party. We did not want to be Sovietised.

Q: What happened to your family inside the Soviet Union?

A: Our family suffered. In 1937 one of our family, who had been sent to the camps, was shot for being an Orthodox priest and is venerated as a New Martyr.  We have his icon. He is our family saint.

We lived all over the European part of the USSR and there are still Benckendorffs in the Ukraine (including a famous film-maker), Belarus and the Baltics, as well as Russia. Since the fall of the USSR, as you say in English, we have been scattered to the four winds. Some of us now live in England, Denmark and the USA. In England we attend the Romanian church, in the USA the OCA. We are the new White emigration, though we still use our 1920s name. It is just too complicated to change our name back for the moment. But that will come. I and my husband are talking about doing this at this very moment.

Q: You mention the Ukraine. What is your view of the conflict there today?

A: The Ukraine? First of all, people must understand that the war there is nothing to do with the Ukraine. It is between Western imperialism with its wealthy oligarchs who control the USA, and the rest of humanity with its poor people who are represented by Russia. The war is between the globalist rich like Soros and Schwab against humanity, between the elite minority with its media dictatorship, arms merchants, global warming, artificial covid and transgenderism, and the vast majority of the world with its ordinary people who just love their homelands and their families. The naïve Ukrainians are being used as paid mercenaries by the rich West as cannon fodder. As the Western elite said, they will fight till the last Ukrainian. They will not die themselves because they do not believe in anything, except in themselves. They are all narcissists, so others die in their name.

The origin of the Ukrainian tragedy is in the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. He was the one person who linked us all together, the central point. After he was overthrown, what could you expect? There was no unity left, nothing to fight for. Through weakness and lack of principle, willingness to sell themselves for money, first the western Ukrainians allowed themselves to be conquered by the Nazis and then by the Americans. They always go wherever they imagine they have an advantage. Nazis and Americans are the same thing, those so-called Ukrainians are Nazis.

Until all the peoples of the former USSR have truly repented for their ancestors’ sin in 1917, there will be conflict among its former peoples. I just hope that the conflict in the Ukraine is the last post-Soviet conflict, with the other conflicts of the traitors in the Caucasus, in Georgia and Armenia, and elsewhere. Then there can at last be the restoration of the real Rus and all the other countries will be free.

Q: What do you think of the old White Russian emigration?

A: They had to emigrate. It was that or be killed by the Bolsheviks. But most of them were also against the Tsar, they overthrew him, they were just right-wing atheists like the Bolsheviks, who were left-wing atheists. Many of the so-called Whites entirely lacked patriotism. Some of them supported Hitler invade Russia during the war and today their descendants support the Americans, which is the same thing. Nazism is an inherently Western colonial ideology, German or American, French or British, Belgian or Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, Austrian or Dutch. It was all about killing and exploiting others who are considered to be inferior subhumans, Untermenschen, as the Germans called them. What is this forced imposition of transgenderism, if not Nazism? The name NATO, which was staffed by German Nazis from the outset, even sounds like the word Nazi.

Q: Should all Russian Orthodox be under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: How is that possible? That is absurd! The Moscow Patriarchate is a house divided because it still has to be cleansed of Sovietism and post-Sovietism. It is very, very corrupt and many of the bishops are just capitalist oligarchs, interested only in money and luxury and they defrock good priests for disagreeing with their Sovietism and denouncing them for their corruption and immorality. The fools-for-Christ tell the truth, not the bishops. If the bishops told the truth, we would not need fools-for-Christ. Some of the bishops are atheists or moral perverts, just as they were in the Soviet period. Look at Filaret with his palace in Kiev. It is shameful.

Most of the Russian bishops should be sent to monasteries to repent for the rest of their lives. Only, if they were sent there, you would see that most of them would run away and defrock themselves. Anything except repent! Like that awful Bishop Maxim in London, who ran away because he was running a drugs factory in Saint Petersburg with his boyfriend. That is the level of so many Russian bishops today, here or in Russia. They are on the same level as the Greeks from Istanbul. There is no difference between them.

True, after 1991 the Patriarchate made the first leap – from the theory of Soviet ideology. But it failed to make the second leap – from the practice of Soviet corruption. Nowadays you can be an atheist in the Church, all you need to do is decide which Church group you as an atheist want to join.

Here in England, for example, I have been horrified by ROCOR. It is full of American agents, it is an anti-Russian organisation, just a Fascistic branch of the CIA, right-wing atheists. Little wonder so many in ROCOR sided with the Nazis against Russia then. Now they are doing it again. ROCOR refuses to be nice or negotiate and thinks that by being nasty and punishing, it wins. In fact, it punishes itself and loses, just like the US government in its dealings with other countries. Treachery is everywhere. As someone said, the persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church. The greatness of the Russian Church is when it is persecuted. It is not in its bishops, with rare exceptions. And certainly not in today’s bishops.

Q: How do you see Western Europe?

A: It is so sad. Old Europe is dying. I think present Europe, which has already become very decadent, will have to hit rock bottom before it can be reformed. Only then will the various nations of Europe be able to negotiate with Russia and return individually to having normal relations with Russia, the wider world and with each other. Probably Europe is not far off rock-bottom now. My husband fears the situation in France especially. He says there could be a revolution there, if a military coup does not take place first.

Q: You have lived in England for 14 years and speak English fluently now. How do you see England?

A: When we first came here, we knew nothing. I had studied German at school and my husband French. We just came to work, to survive, like everyone else. But now we have come to appreciate and love Old England, the countryside, the thatched cottages, the traditions. For example, we go regularly to Ely to venerate St Audrey, whose hand is still venerated there, still making the sign of the cross over the city through all these centuries. Her presence is there. But we also see how Americanised modern England has become, like the rest of Western Europe in general, even the Catholic countries in the south.

For example, a few days ago when I had a day off, we were sitting in the lovely Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, another city of a saint. Two schoolgirls, aged perhaps 9 or 10, walked by in their lovely uniforms. So sweet and innocent. And we thought this is the real England. And then a very badly-dressed young man, his face covered in tattoos and pieces of metal, walked by, wearing a ragged T-shirt with the logo of an American baseball team. My husband said that he must have many psychological problems to do that to himself. I mean you can remove psychological complexes, but how can you remove tattoos on your face? He had come from another planet, as far as I am concerned. Two different worlds.

Of the real England, there are still some beautiful fragments left. We have recently been on holiday in Shropshire. How lovely it is there. But I fear that England has fallen too far and cannot now be restored. Though there are still many English people who are very kind. As for the government and British politicians, I have no time for any of them. They are all liars and have made the lives of ordinary English people much worse. Nowadays you cannot find a dentist in England. Why? Because the politicians gave all our money to that atheist and murderer Zelensky.

Q: What do you think of the Royal Family?

A: There is not one any more. Queen Elizabeth was the last who still had something. We watched her funeral on television. That was the funeral of Old England. When England is free again, you will need to find an English noble family to replace all those ‘royals’. You need a new Royal Family for England. You need an Alfred II, a Patriot-King, not a false one paid by those behind the government to do and say whatever they order him to do.

Q: You have had British citizenship for four years now. Will you vote in the elections in the UK?

Only for a party that promises to stop arming the Kiev regime and help end the war there. Is there such a party? All over Western Europe the US-chosen elites are just hanging on to power, but they will be swept away by their peoples. They are war criminals, responsible for the deaths of all those poor Ukrainians, who would have been happy to live in peace with Russia years ago, if the elite had not wanted them to make war against Russia.

Q: Do you think you will return to Russia one day?

A: We have friends who have already returned, but we are attached to East Anglia. Tsar Nicholas came here, to Sandringham and Kings Lynn. We would like to open a memorial church in Kings Lynn, dedicated to the Imperial Martyrs. As regards returning to Russia, we both prefer to wait until the new Tsar. We want to be in Russia for his enthronement. Then we shall see.

Q: The new Tsar?

A: Yes. After President Putin, who does not yet love Tsar Nicholas, there will be a Tsar.

Q: Are you sure?

A: Of course, the saints and elders have said so. See how already the best of the Tsar’s Russia is being restored and reconstituted even now. Everything that was good about the Tsar’s Russia – policies like free medicine and education, including higher education for women, were kept by the USSR – is being restored. Look at how North Korea is now allied with Russia, as it was until 1904 when the Japanese treacherously attacked Russia and went on to destroy Korea.

Recently Russia became the fourth largest economy in the world, as it was in 1914. It will overtake the USA eventually. And then see how Russia is forming a mighty coalition with countries which wanted to be with Russia or were supported by Russia before 1917, with India, South Africa, Iran, Ethiopia, Thailand and many other countries like Vietnam and Algeria, Afghanistan and Cuba, Indonesia and Turkey. The whole of Eurasia and Africa are allying.

Q: But who will the candidate for the new Tsar be? A Romanov from the emigration?

A: The Romanovs were nearly all traitors to the Tsar, even before the Revolution. The émigré Romanovs definitely cannot provide any serious candidate. That is laughable. Most of them cannot even speak Russian and many are not Orthodox! The new Tsar must come from inside Rus, as his ancestors went through the Soviet period. Only such a man can understand the peoples of Rus today. Once you emigrate forever, you become irrelevant to the Motherland. We live in the present, emigres live in the past. I do not know who the next Tsar will be, but there are many people of Romanov descent inside Rus. The prophecies say that the future Tsar’s mother will be a Romanov. God will provide. You will see.

Q: Thank you. Is there anything you would like to say to our readers in conclusion?

A: Yes, those same words again: God will provide. He always does. Do not be afraid. Everything will fall back into place.

On the Identity of England and East Anglia

Pre-Celts and Celts in the British Isles and Ireland

Like the rest of Western Europe, the British Isles and, from there, Ireland, have been inhabited for thousands of years. Originally, this population spread here from Asia. Possibly, the only representatives of this population in Europe today are the Basques. Some call the original people here ‘Ancient Britons’. This is wrong, as they were pre-Celts and ‘Briton’ is a Celtic name. In fact, we know little about them, though they built Stonehenge and their DNA still exists among the modern inhabitants of these isles. After them came new settlers from Western Europe, who had also ultimately come from Western Asia. These were the Celts (pronounced Kelts) and they left their name all over Europe and West Asia, from Galatia (now in Turkiye), Galicia (now in the Ukraine and Portugal), Vlachia, Wallachia, Gaul, Calais, Wallonia, Wales, Caledonia, Galloway and Galway.

They also left the name of their language, Gaelic and Welsh, or in France, Gallo.  Many Celts had settled in these isles only a few centuries before the Romans arrived in the first century AD. For the Celts too were ‘invaders’. When the Roman Army conquered what came to be called England and Wales, famously building walls to separate themselves from the Celts in what is now Scotland and not occupying but only visiting Ireland, it took control of what it called ‘Britain’. Although their numerical presence was tiny, like the British elite in India in the 19th century, the Roman elite exercised total control and exploitation and had an enormous influence on national infrastructure and later history. Indeed, the word ‘Britain’ was later used by, and the Roman project imitated by, Normans, Stuarts, Georgians and Victorians alike for their own imperialist projects.

The Coming of the English

In the third century AD, if not even earlier, the Romans in Britain began to recruit Germanic soldiers, above all from the Saxons. They settled especially on the eastern and southern coast of what is now England and manned the nine Roman fortresses there, on what came to be known ‘The Saxon Shore’. Local Celtic women called these foreign Saxon mercenaries ‘Sassenachs’ and intermarried with them. After the Roman presence grew ever weaker in the fourth century and then ceased with their withdrawal from Britain in 410, the Saxons were in the fifth and sixth centuries gradually absorbed by new and kindred Germanic settlers, notably Jutes, Frisians and above all Angles. The Angles settled all over the eastern half of what became England, from the north down as far as Essex, and into the interior in ‘the Midlands’. The Saxons remained in the south, in Essex, Sussex and Wessex. However, the other Germanic tribes were outnumbered and absorbed by the Angles, so the country came to be called ‘Angle-kin’ (that is, those who are related to the Angles), or ‘Angleland’, which became England.

The ‘Englisc’ (pronounced ENG-lish, unlike the modern French pronunciation of English as ‘ING-lish’) were so predominant that they imposed their language over the area which they had settled, whereas the Romans had utterly failed to impose Latin on the Celts. After the English, came Vikings. These were Danes and Norwegians, who settled mainly on the coasts of eastern England from the present Scottish border down through Newcastle, Yorkshire (the Geordie and Yorkshire dialects and accents are fundamentally Viking) and Lincolnshire to Norfolk and north-east Suffolk. Although the Vikings considerably modified and simplified the English language, they too were absorbed and their DNA accounts for only 6% of modern DNA in England. As for the Normans (French Vikings) who occupied England from 1066 on, their DNA is almost invisible except among the aristocracy. It may perhaps be only 0.1%. However, as the near-millennial Establishment, their cultural and linguistic influence is still felt today.

East to West: Angles and Celts

The English then settled densely only the eastern half of what we now call England. The further east the greater the English DNA, the further west the greater the Celtic DNA and the greater the Celtic population and influence. England itself is then divided between a mainly English eastern half and a mainly Celtic western half. Thus, the British Isles and Ireland are genetically an Anglo-Celtic community. Just as in France, one can see the distribution of DNA by what people drink – the Germanic north near Belgium drinks beer, the Celtic north-west drinks cider, but the vast bulk of Latinised France drinks wine – so in England to this day also.

For example, in East Anglia people refer to ale, in the East Midlands which begins after the Rivers Ouse and Cam in eastern Cambridgeshire and ends near Newark in eastern Nottinghamshire, they refer to beer, and in the West Midlands, west of Newark and ending on the Welsh border, they refer to cider. Beyond this of course, we arrive in what used to be purely Celtic areas, Cymru (pronounced ‘Kumri’, called ‘Wales’), Cornwall (the ‘Welsh’ who live in the ‘corn’ or ‘horn’), Cumbria, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Ireland. Here the Celtic languages are still today, if only among a minority, alive. English was not spoken there until recent centuries.

East Anglia and Its Character

East Anglia is the furthest east you can go in England (the actual most easterly point is Lowestoft) and therefore, racially, the most English. This is also the closest to the Netherlands, whose Dutch and Frisian languages are linguistically the closest to English. Geographically, East Anglia consists of Norfolk, Suffolk, eastern Cambridgeshire as far as the eastern bank of the River Ouse, including Ely, and of the River Cam, and of a strip of North Essex near the Suffolk border some seven or so miles deep. The extent of the East Anglian domain could once be determined by the dialects of Norfolk and Suffolk, lapping over to eastern Cambridgeshire and North Essex, though these are less and less heard today. Where East Anglia ended in eastern Cambridgeshire, there began the East Mercian (East Midlands) accent and where East Anglian ended in North Essex there began the Essex accent, which is the same as the east London accent. What can we say of East Anglians, who are always so underestimated by foreigners, newcomers and upstarts, who understand little of our history and reality?

The East Anglian character is outwardly modest and hidden, but inwardly we are sturdy, rugged and reliable. You do not mess with us, unless you are a foreign fool and you will always come off worse. We are also bluff, that is, good-naturedly frank, and our humour is very dry and wry. Here there is a similarity to our neighbours, the Dutch. Prone to invasions from Continental Europe just across the shared lake of the North Sea, we are suspicious and sceptical of others and always test them to see what they are made of. It is make or break time for them. We are practical and pragmatic, always concrete. However, there also exists among us a romantic lyricism. This can be seen by the fact that although the greatest English music in inspired in the west of England, the greatest English art is made in East Anglia. This is illustrated by the works of Gainsborough (1727-1788), Crome (1768-1821), Constable (1776-1837), Cotman (1782-1842), Munnings (1878-1959) and Seago (1910-1974). The huge skies, the rolling landscape and, above all, the characteristic light of East Anglia have here been fundamental.

 

Thoughts on the Orthodox Future of the Post-Western World, Europe and England

Introduction: After the Defeat of the West

Even Western-sponsored Ukrainian terrorism has failed. The Western media are none too keen to expose the Western defeat in the Ukraine and so the media are now largely falling silent about the Ukraine. The US and the EU have completely failed to weaken, destroy, dismantle and balkanise Russia into between 18 and 32 separate republics by illegally sanctioning it and then overthrowing its government. The West wanted to do to Russia what it had done to Yugoslavia. ‘Since we can bomb and destroy Belgrade, let us bomb and destroy Moscow’, was the fantasy. This aim was publicly announced in the 2019 Rand Corporation report in the USA. According to this report, Russia had to be destroyed in order then in turn to weaken China. This was to be done by manipulating (and then betraying) NATO-armed Ukrainian proxies, in whom it otherwise has no interest (as Borrell has openly admitted), into dying for Western aims ‘to the last Ukrainian’. Among the western Ukrainians they found pro-Nazi Russia-haters. They were the ideal useful idiots for use as cannon fodder.

After the Western defeat the world is entering the post-Western age, the real New World Order. The West is old and tired, its symbol is the dementia of the US President, who with his minders confuses wishful thinking with reality, the virtual world with the real world. The end comes after a thousand years of domination and exploitation, firstly by Western European Empires, Papist and then Protestant, and since 1945 by the Secularist USA. Through its war on Russia through the Ukraine, the West totally isolated itself from the Global Majority, which mocks its ruling imperialist caste and its age-old visceral hatred, inspired by jealousy and greed, of Russia. Western Europe has lost the last traces of its prestige, as symbolised by the humiliating ejection of colonial France from West Africa. The new multipolar world, founded by the Russian-initiated BRICS Alliance, is going to look very different from the old one. Western Europe will of course still exist, but simply as a Region equal among many others in the global community.

As for the USA, it is going to go home to lick its wounds and sort out its debt and internal chaos and decadence after 35 years of hubris, arrogance and delusion and two recent routs, first in Kabul, then in Kiev. Perhaps then, and only then, God will bless America, which for now appears to have cursed itself. The millennial defeat of the West means that it must admit that it has been humiliated, that its values were false all along. It will have to rethink its whole place in the world and ponder on its tragic history, becoming humble in the face of reality instead of delusion. The Western ideology of arrogant military superiority, enforced since the eleventh-century Crusades by superior forms of organised violence and murder, including through illegal economic sanctions, is discredited. So what will the future world, the future Western Europe and specifically the future England look like? First, let us look at the post-Western world in general.

The Twelve Regions of the Post-Western Multipolar World

  1. Eurasia (The Russian World of the East Slav Three, ‘Rus’, together with the three independent republics of the Caucasus and the five of Central Asia)
  2. Western Europe (See below)
  3. East Asia (The Chinese World, also Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, Japan and the Philippines)
  4. South East Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia)
  5. South Asia (The Indian World and countries around it, including Pakistan and Afghanistan)
  6. West Asia (the former so-called ‘Middle East’, including the Arab World, Turkiye, Iran and Iraq)
  7. Northern Africa (largely Muslim)
  8. Southern Africa (sub-Saharan Africa, largely Christian)
  9. Northern America (the USA, Canada and Greenland, largely English-speaking)
  10. Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean (led by Mexico)
  11. South America (led by Brazil)
  12. Oceania (led by Australia and with a tiny population)

Two of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches are in Region 1 and ten of them are in Region 2. We suggest that Region 1 needs initially another three Local Churches to cover the Ukraine, Belarus, and Central Asia (the five stans). Two of the Local Churches (Jerusalem and Antioch) should cover Region 6. One Church, Alexandria, should cover Regions 7 and 8. There is one disputed Local Church in Region 9. We suggest that Region 2 initially needs seven new Local Churches (see below), Region 3 initially needs two (for China and Japan), a Local Church for China and another for Japan. Regions 4, 5, 10, 11 and 12 all initially need one new Local Church each. This would bring the total number of Local Churches to 33, the number of the age of Christ. Some of these new Local Churches would at first only become autonomous (partly independent) while waiting to grow and mature, others would from the start become autocephalous (fully independent).

The Four Confederative Regions of Western Europe in the Multipolar World

Western Europe means the western half of Europe (54%), not the eastern half (46%), which consists of Belarus, the Ukraine and Russian Europe. Its Americanisation began in 1942 in the UK, then in 1944-5 in the Western half of the Continent, spreading eastwards in 1989. After the end of US unionist organisations like NATO and the EU, what could its future be? We suggest its future is as four Regions which have common histories:

  1. North-East Europe (Poland, Finland and the three Baltic States, formerly largely part of the Russian Empire). All these five countries could be taken care of by the Polish Orthodox Church, to be renamed the Baltic Orthodox Church.
  2. South-East Europe (the racially very mixed former Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empire in Europe, nearly a half of which is Orthodox Christian: Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria, European Turkiye, Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia). This Region has nine Local Orthodox Churches. We suggest a new binational Local Church should be founded for Hungary and Austria, similar to that which already exists for Czechia and Slovakia.
  3. North-West Europe (the largely Germanic world: Iceland, Ireland, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Flanders, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein). None of this region has its own Local Church. We suggest three, one for Germany, the Netherlands, Flanders, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Liechtenstein; one for the British Isles and Ireland; one for the four countries of Scandinavia.
  4. South-West Europe (the largely Latin world: France, Wallonia, Monaco, Italy, San Marino, Malta, Andorra, Spain, Portugal). None of this Region has its own Local Church. We suggest three, one for Iberia, one for Italy, San Marino and Malta and one for France, Flanders and Monaco.

At present this Western Europe consists of 42 countries. However, if one day, for example, Serbia and Montenegro reunite and Bosnia-Herzegovina dissolves back into Serbia and Croatia, once US pressure for Balkanisation is removed, Moldova and Romania reunite, and Belgium dissolves into Flanders, going back to the Netherlands, and Wallonia, going back to France, but the UK separates into its constituent parts of England, Scotland and Wales (with Northern Ireland returning to the Republic of Ireland), that would make 40 countries.

The four Regions of Western Europe could form a Western European Confederation and consult in a new Confederative centre. The ideal geographical location for this centre is surely Vienna, the Capital of Austria, in what used to be called Central Europe. Vienna is also closer to Orthodox South-East Europe and to Moscow, both geographically and culturally, and Moscow is effectively the centre of the eastern half of Europe, which stretches to the Urals, but also far beyond that to the Pacific, so providing Belt and Road connectivity to China. Moscow is also the capital of Russia, which has the largest economy in Europe and is its main source of energy.

The Decomposed and Recomposed ex-United Kingdom and Reunited Ireland as an Example of Future Western European Countries

The United Kingdom (UK) is a state as artificially-invented and disunited as the Ukraine or Belgium, and was invented just over a century ago. It is reigned over by a Dutch-German Royal House, ingloriously imported by regime change by the Norman-founded Establishment and City of London merchants for their ‘Great British’ manipulation from 1688 on. Since 1956 the UK has been governed as a satellite of the US-controlled British branch of the Globalist Uniparty. This is why, only recently, Brexit did not take place under the opportunist Johnson, who never believed in anything apart from himself. Since his sacking for disobeying his own laws, the UK has been ruled by unelected Prime Ministers and reigned over by an unelected and disliked King. It may be time to find a new dynasty, a new Royal House of England, perhaps composed for the first time since 1066 of Englishmen and Englishwomen?

Both Left and Right agree that the future lies in the so far vitally absent policies of National Identity and Social Justice, the two things that the Globalist Uniparty does not allow and which it contemptuously dismisses as ‘populism’. The alien British Establishment hates the three peoples, the last which still remain directly under its tyranny, the English, the Scottish and the Welsh. If all the peoples of the former UK could free themselves from Globalist tyranny, denormanising themselves, they could form an Anglo-Celtic Confederation, together with a reunited Ireland, to be called perhaps ‘IONA’, the Isles of the North Atlantic, with an administrative capital at the central point of the Isle of Man, from where all four countries are visible. Four Countries, One Confederation.

Conclusion: The Future of the Western Half of Europe

As US troops are at last pulled out of Western Europe, eighty years late, a result of NATO’s comprehensive rout in the US war against Russia in the Ukraine, fear and panic have begun to spread among the US-appointed elites in Western European capitals. Like children who have been abandoned by their parents who used to tell them what to say and do, now they do not know what to say and do in their empty house. Like those who were subject to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, they are frightened of freedom and prefer to be serfs and vassals. They are like drug addicts who have run out of drugs. It is time for the alien and narcissistic ruling caste, which rules by intimidation, creating fear, anxiety, stress and bogeymen among the people (Communism, Islamism, Brexit, Covid, Putin etc), to be replaced by those who do not gaslight because they have come up from the people and can represent them.

As NATO is disbanded, so every Western European country can make huge savings on so-called ‘defence’. Western Europe can be denuclearised and demilitarised. The money saved can go to improve its derelict infrastructure and public services, which have largely become disservices, and paying off its crippling debts, inflicted by the ruling class. Once the Western ruling caste has been ejected, good relations can be established with Russia and the eastern half of Europe composed of the three countries that form the Union State. There is little doubt that the three States, Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus, will be cleansed and come to be ruled officially by a new Tsar. In this way, work towards rediscovering local patriotic identities and implementing social justice may be carried out in the other countries of Western Europe, which suffer from similar oppression as in the ex-UK.

Once despised and repressed by the USA, they can now become creative once more by reference to their roots. At the same time, in the new multipolar world those countries would have to work together. Not in a Unionist, ‘one size fits all’ form, as in the old and hated, US-imposed European Union with its anti-democratic Commissar gauleiters, who in panic face Eurexit in their failure to create a mythical Europe, but in a Regional Confederative form. Western European countries have to adapt to Freedom – to their real place in the new multipolar world, returning to their identities which are rooted in their still undiscovered and concealed first millennium. This process of the dewesternisation of the West is what we have been speaking of for nearly two generations. It is now under way and presents both challenges, but also extraordinary opportunities, both political and spiritual.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Apostasy of Western ‘Civilisation’ and Our Salvation

Introduction: The Rise and Fall of the Western Empire

It has become customary to speak of the Middle Ages in Western Europe as a ‘Papal Empire’, later of ‘the Spanish Colonial Empire’, ‘the Portuguese Empire’, ‘the French Empire’, ‘the British Empire’ and most recently of ‘the American Empire’. In fact, all these empires have only been facets of one single empire, ‘the Western Empire’. Although this has been an Empire that has covered much of the world geographically, it is also an Empire of the Mind. One day, and probably quite soon, someone will write a book called ‘The History of Western Exceptionalism’ and will show how this imperialist mentality developed. Certainly, this will mention the model of the Pagan Roman Empire that obsessed the barbarians who invaded Western Europe and how a Frankish barbarian princeling called ‘Karl’, later known as ‘Charlemagne’, wanted to ‘renew’ that Pagan Empire and failed, but how he was still ‘the first neocon’.

More interestingly than this failed forerunner, it will then go on to speak of the crucial eleventh century, of the appearance of the Western superiority complex, ‘we are right, everyone else is wrong’, or as they say now ‘West is Best’. They will speak of elitist Papism and castle feudalism, of 1054 and 1066, of the ‘formation of a persecuting society’ to persecute all others, of hatred, intolerance, genocide and ‘crusades’, on which ‘Europe’ was created and united, of the bloodshed on which the Western Empire was founded. Since then, there followed 900 years of slow but steady rise to world domination and then the dramatic and suicidal events that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and led to those in Kiev in 2014, which have led to the progressive fall of that Empire to the mess that it is in today, when we have once more reached a millennial turning-point. Below we give an outline of what is happening now.

Belief and Unbelief

A few years ago, I took part in a BBC Radio 4 ‘religious’ programme – although as with all BBC ‘religious’ programmes its direction was purely secularist and in fact anti-religious. There I was told by a former MI6 agent/BBC journalist who took part that since only 2% of Russians go to church, the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Civilisation in Russia is irrelevant. I was astonished by his total lack of understanding and limited secularist/post-Protestant view of the importance of religion. But then what else can you expect of a typical British Establishment atheist? It is values and actions that matter, not how often you go to church to gain spiritual strength. He had missed the point. They all have.

Although only 2% of the population may be in church on an average Sunday in Russian Orthodox countries (though not necessarily the same 2%), the rest do believe. This is different from the West, where only 2% go to church, and it is the same 2%, but the rest do not believe. In other words, the West has lost the roots of its Civilisation, it no longer has any Civilisation. If it had a Civilisation, it would not support Ukrainian and Israeli genocide and would not promote LGBT. Here is the difference. The West no longer believes in its roots. What remains is its profound self-delusion. Whether it is slanted to the left or to the right is irrelevant – the disease is one and the same.

The European Union Repeats the Soviet Union’s Fate

As a result of this lack of belief in civilised values and actions, the main political and economic institution in the historic European centre of the Western world, the yellow-starred European Union (EU), is corrupting, fragmenting and collapsing in exactly the same way as the old red-starred Soviet Union (SU). It is a Soviet Union II. Just as most had stopped believing in the Soviet Union by the 1970s (as I know from living there then), knowing that its unelected commissars were lieing, that it was bankrupt in every sense and had failed in its aims, so most have stopped believing in the EU, because it too has failed, is bankrupt in every sense and has failed in its aims. Indeed, the EU’s once strongest ‘locomotive’ economy, the German, is being deindustrialised, is in recession and was overtaken last year by the booming Russian economy, which is now the fifth largest in the world and is due to overtake the Japanese economy in two to three years. In front of it then will be only the expanding Chinese and Indian economies and the disastrously flagging US economy.

The EU has not only failed to make Europeans prosperous, but it has also failed in its aim to unite Europe. For instance, it has failed to unite the Western European peninsula edge with most of Europe, which is mainly in Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. It has failed to unite with the Western Balkans and failed to keep the UK in itself, let alone getting prosperous Switzerland, Norway and Iceland to join itself. On top of that, it is now financing on a huge scale the Nazi regime in Kiev and the proxy war in the Ukraine in order to try and force that country to join it. Just as few in the SU had the courage to say that the SU was dead, so too today, for the same reasons of censorship and punishment, few in the EU have the courage to say that the EU is dead. The difference is that in the SU, all people bought the Izvestiya and Pravda newspapers, because there was no toilet paper, but in the West some people still buy newspapers and, incredibly, read them and actually believe in them, despite the availability of toilet paper. Such is the level of the delusion of some of the EU population.

Delusionists: The Western World

After the defeat of its multinational Western invasion of Russia under Napoleon in 1812 and stalemating in its invasion of Russia in 1854-6 under the Franco-Ottoman-Sardinian-British, the West tried to fight its wars using proxies, ‘colonial’ troops, as cannon fodder. For example, in the nineteenth century in its colonies and also in the First and Second World Wars, which were essentially tribal European Wars, it used millions of Indian and African troops. The Ghurkas and the Foreign Legion are the remnants. The Far West, the USA, used this proxy method too and in both those wars joined in after they had begun, hoping for easy pickings after the suicidal Europeans. In the Second World War, the Anglo-Americans hoped that the Nazis and the Russians and their allies would kill each other and then they would be able to pick up the pieces. That did not entirely happen. Nevertheless, in the 1990s the West used the same proxy technique in yet another anti-Russian war, using Chechens. However, the Chechens realised that they were being used by the West, turned on their Western masters and sided with the Russians.

In the latest Western War against Russia, being fought by proxies in the Ukraine, similar things are occurring, as Ukrainians slowly realise that they too have been deceived and betrayed by the West. Here again, the Western Ukrainian proxies, encouraged to die ‘until the last Ukrainian’, are being routed by joint Russian and Eastern Ukrainian forces. Afraid of facing reality, the delusional West is refusing to negotiate and negotiations have been banned by law by the Ukrainian puppet dictatorship, which tortures those who speak freely, has banned other political parties and democratic elections and plans to ban the Church. It has disguised this refusal to negotiate with the absurd claim that Russia wants to take over Western Europe. This laughable propaganda claim, invented by US and British PR hireling firms in Kiev, has been made in the Ukraine and duly been repeated in the Baltics, Germany, Sweden, the UK and Norway so far. It is the familiar old excuse ever since Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941, who claimed to be saving ‘Western Civilisation’ from the ‘Asiatic barbarian hordes’ of Russia, ‘better dead than red’.

Realists: Hope in South-Eastern Europe

In its current war against ‘the Asiatic hordes’ of Russia, which war the West began in 2014 with its unprovoked, full-scale invasion of the Ukraine, the West has committed suicide several times. Having given eight years to Russia to prepare a Plan B in case it had to fight a full-scale war against the ever-aggressive West, the West imposed thousands of sanctions which have helped destroy its own economies. The present revolts in Western Europe are about the impoverishment resulting from the facts that so much money has been given to the Ukraine, that there are so many Ukrainian ‘refugees’ being paid for nothing and because the USA ended by violence the supplies of cheap gas from Russia. These revolts are not only of farmers in Poland, Romania, Germany and France, but include mass strikes of millions of workers in the Dickensian UK, Germany and France. In all these countries the destitute have been forced to use food banks to survive. In Northern America too, the rulers are extremely unpopular and revolts are ongoing in Canada and in Texas.

Deluded Western leaders have actually believed their own delusions, which they call ‘PR’. Most people no longer believe in those lies, repeated ad infinitum by the State-controlled Western media and nearly all Ukrainian flags have been taken down in Western Europe – only the now panicking very rich still fly them. Many are beginning to understand the great manipulation. Nowhere is this more obvious in Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders are the only Western leaders not to be US puppets. As the Russian victory becomes obvious, other countries will also free themselves from US/EU tyranny. Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and even perhaps neutral Austria may enter this Union of Free Europe. In other words, the whole geographical entity of South-Eastern Europe may come to link itself with Russia and the other BRICS economies, of which Russia is the closest to them. This is the future path to peace, justice and prosperity, away from the disaster and decadence of the warmongering US-created EU vassal.

Conclusion: The Mystical Presence: North-Western Europe

Some ask: How then do you in North-Western Europe, in England, survive, as you still labour under the tyranny of the Norman-imposed British Establishment and its moral perversions and lies, and now completely under the heel of the corrupted Washington elite? Around us blow hurricanes, however we remain calm. Why? We have a secret. It is because our saints, in our case, those of Eastern England, are with us. Never have we felt the intercession and mystical presence of our saints so strongly as over the last three years, when so-called ‘Orthodox clergy’ began persecuting us. Only this week we were in Ely again and felt the prayers of and experienced a miracle of St Audrey, as we bowed before her right hand, whose fingers are still clasped in the sign of the cross after exactly 1350 years. She responds to real veneration, not to that of the pseudo-Orthodox sectarians who suffer from that selfsame American exceptionalist complex that they are right and all others are wrong, They persecute real Orthodox Christians and their families and try and steal our saints and our churches. Those outside the Church cannot feel the mystical presence of our saints, for their pretended veneration is political and sectarian and in fact is a perverted persecution of the faithful.

But we have felt the presences of St Edmund in Hoxne and Bury St Edmunds, of St Fursey in Burgh Castle, of St Botolph in Iken, of St Felix by the old fortress in Felixstowe, of St Osyth in the woods in Chich, of St Cedd in his still standing church in Bradwell on Sea, of St Eanswythe in her relics in Folkestone, of St Walstan in Bawburgh, of St Withburgh in Dereham, of St John in his holy relics in Beverley, of St Guthlac and St Theodore in Crowland, of St Huna by his hermitage-farm in Chatteris, of St Ivo in St Ives and of St Neot in St Neots. They are all present and have all resisted the great millennial apostasy of the new Western world, whose depth has become so astonishing in its present death-throes. The patience of these saints is unending, calling those who live here back to repentance, waiting for them to return, like the father the prodigal son. Victory is theirs and, because we venerate them and ask them for their protection, victory is ours too. We feel the warmth from their relics. It will not be long now. And the same presences are all over Western Europe as the First Millennium says to the finishing Second Millennium: We told you so, but we are still waiting for you to return. Herein is their witness and herein is our salvation from the devil’s yoke.

2. Practical Consequences of No Local Church: The Pastoral Situation in England

As one Serbian priest in France put it to me 30 years ago, living in Western culture for Orthodox Christians is like entering an acid bath. In other words, you face spiritual death through assimilation, unless you keep your identity – that is, the Orthodox Faith. And that is virtually impossible to do unless you have a normal parish church with services at least twice a week and which is accessible. Here I will speak of England because I have known the situation here for fifty years, seen them all come and go, and here is where I know today’s situation best. Here most churches are either dying out or have already died out.

1) ROCOR

ROCOR in England had completely died out after three generations (1917-1992). The faith had not been passed on at all. Typically, children, grandchildren and, even more, great-grandchildren abandoned Orthodoxy, the process sped up with intermarriage (with such tiny numbers, there was literally ‘no-one to marry’ inside the Church). With basically only one permanent church to go to in west London and living outside London, people lost a Church, which appeared to give them no pastoral care outside London. Some of the first generation, like the late Professor Nikolai Andreyev in Cambridge, themselves actually had their children baptised in the Church of England from the outset: ‘We are in England now’, he said.

Others changed their surnames to English surnames, Volkoff to Wolcough, Kalinsky to Kay, for instance. Some strove to eliminate any sign of an English accent in their speech. The old ROCOR priest in Bradford refused to baptise any Russian children and sent them to the Church of England for ‘christening’. He told his parishioners: ‘There’s no point. They won’t replace me, so the church will close down after me’. Of course, he was actually right. He died and that was it. His church disappeared many years ago. Most children said that Orthodoxy was only for old people: ‘It’s nothing to do with me, I’m English’ and ‘I don’t understand what it’s all about’. Two years ago, already tiny ROCOR lost by far its biggest parish, six other parishes and over half its clergy, half its jurisdiction, because of its now schismatic foreign nature and its arrogant refusal to listen to the local people. People and clergy voted with their feet and left.

ROCOR only continues to exist today because it ‘restocked’ over the last thirty years from the ex-Soviet Union (though Ukrainians have now left that aggressively Russian institution) and from a few American-style crazy converts with their sectarian views. I know only six of the old generation, whose Russian grandparents immigrated here. Three are atheists, one is Church of England, and one became a Jew by being circumcised when in his twenties. Only one, now in her eighties, remains Orthodox (though her children and grandchildren are all Church of England). However, she does not go to church, even though she lives only 30 minutes away from London, because of the sectarian nature of the new ROCOR regime.

Constantinople

The Patriarchate of Constantinople used to have by far the largest jurisdiction in England. It expanded greatly between the 1950s and 1970s through the mass immigration of Cypriots. At one time it had six bishops. Its new Archbishop has told me that he now has 100 priests who are very elderly, but only three candidates to replace them. Churches that were attended by 500-1,000 forty years ago now get congregations of 20-30 elderly. Many smaller seaside town parishes will probably close. Whenever children appear in them, you know that they are Romanians. There are also embarrassing rifts between Cypriots, Greeks and Cretans. The worst case by far was in Brighton, but it is not easy elsewhere, with Greeks looking down on Cypriots as provincials who cannot even speak Greek properly. There are large numbers of Anglican vicars of Greek descent, whose parents had immigrated here. I have come across over twenty of them (and one who is Russian). Why? Because they never understood a word of Greek services. On top of that, considering themselves to be English, they could get a well-paid job and a free house in the Church of England. Nothing like that in the Orthodox Church!

The Greeks have a reputation for the flag waving of extreme nationalism. It is probably unfair. Russians can be extremely racist. And others. However, I have to say that all the worst experiences I have come across over the last fifty years have been with Greeks, but perhaps simply because they were so numerous. I have met several English people who visited Greek churches and were told literally: ‘Go away’. (Also in far less polite language). One Greek priest told one Englishman: ‘Join the Church of England, you are English, you can’t join us, wrong nationality’. (The man in question later joined the Russian Church and became a priest there). Another case: ‘You can’t come here, you’re not dark enough’. It is a sad fact that most Greek churches (but in fairness, not only Greek ones) are merely ethnic clubs.

As a prison chaplain, I regularly see middle-aged Cypriots in prison. They are the children and grandchildren of the original immigrants. They do not speak a word of Greek and have not the least idea of Orthodoxy. One of them told me that when his grandmother had told him that he was ‘Orthodox’, he had thought that he was a Jew. The only bright spots are the convent/monastery in Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, now with 25 Romanian nuns, and at last building a larger church, and Bp Rafael, the new Greek bishop (and the only Orthodox bishop) in Scotland. Tolleshunt Knights has welcomed all nationalities. Bp Rafael has done the same, welcoming all nationalities and calendars and is in effect the Bishop of Scotland. Only he has the authority and openness. (A pity for us that he is not in England!). In both cases, there is real hope. Why? Because both put Christ first and not their nationality.

The Others

Leaving aside the post-1945 Belarussians, Latvians and Poles who all died out, also the tiny numbers of very inward-looking but still churched Georgians and Bulgarians, and the Paris Russians (ROCOR virtually killed them off with aid from the Moscow Patriarchate), we come to the Serbs, the Patriarchal Russians, the Antiochians, the Ukrainians and the Romanians. The Serbs have faced the same problems as the others and the wave of post-1945 immigrants died out; one of the last of them I buried in a Suffolk village a few years ago. He had not been to church since the 1950s. Few kept the Faith. Some changed their surnames, one Serbian priest I knew dressed like an Anglican minister also baptised like an Anglican minister, by splashing water on foreheads of babies, telling me that: ‘We are not in the Balkans now’.

The Patriarchal Russians, once Bloomites, have also largely died out, but have restocked from the ex-Soviet Union. Today their Church sometimes gives the impression (which may or may not be the case) of being an aggressively nationalistic ghetto, an extension of the Embassy, with all the faults that can be found in churches in post-Soviet Russia, all about money and ritualism. However, possibly things will improve after the conflict in the Ukraine ends. The Antiochians appear to be a group for dissatisfied Anglicans and elderly ex-vicars, who do not know how to celebrate the services, but perhaps if they get enough laypeople of other nationalities, something may come of it. Some of the converts are rather extreme Evangelicals, who have little idea of Orthodoxy. That is worrying, however, some of its clergy behave as real pastors. The Ukrainians are very divided into pre-2022 Ukrainians (under Constantinople, extremely nationalistic, elderly, dying out) and the refugees since the tragedy of 2022. The latter are very small in number for now (most of the refugees were atheists, schismatics or else Uniats) and live under the disputed jurisdiction of Kiev.

Finally, we come to the masses of Romanians (and Moldovans). Nearly all have come here recently and in huge numbers, over 400,000, perhaps 500,000 or even more, forming the vast majority of Orthodox in this country. However, although there are very big parishes, with hundreds coming every Sunday, there are still fewer than 40 priests, still no resident bishop and a small monastery under construction near Luton. This is a jurisdiction that is being formed, but with a chronic lack of infrastructure because all is new. However, it is very young and dynamic. One Romanian priest I know does nearly 1,000 baptisms a year, usually about 20 at a time, every week. This is the youth. Speaking a Latin language and with a surprisingly open mentality, Romanian parishes are generally by far the most welcoming and the most open to English. Hope is here, providing that we learn from the mistakes of the Greeks and Russians who went before us. The three-generation rule seems to be implacable: if you manage to transmit the Faith to the third generation, a new Local Church can be born. If not, you will die out.

 

 

The Church on Earth Belongs to the Faithful People, Not to the ‘Princes of the Church’

  1. Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be a bishop desires a noble task.2 Now the bishop is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. 5 (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s Church?) 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. 7 He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.

I Timothy 3, 1-7

England

The Church belongs to Christ, as all agree. Christ, and no other person or institution, however powerful, is the Head of the Church. However, as for the Church on earth, it is purposeless without the people. It exists to save souls. Nearly three years ago a certain very young foreign bishop, parachuted in from abroad, tried to impose his own alien culture and language on us, take away from us our church building, bought by the people and valued by the insurers at £2.35 million ($3 million), and all its contents, which he enumerated like an accountant in minute detail and for which he had composed an act to be inserted into the deeds of ownership. (For £340 our Church solicitor informed us that this act was illegal and amounted to theft). We warned the bishop and his superiors that if he continued, he would find himself with an empty building, quite expensive to run, no clergy, no choir and an empty bank account, as the people would categorically not follow him. As usual, he refused to listen to anyone, including to his own Patriarch.

The people had already obtained a very bad impression of the bishop from earlier visits, with his outbursts of rage, threatening demands for more money and bullying, basic theological and liturgical errors, as well as racist utterances against Romanians, Moldovans and English – half the parish! Sadly, as he was such an inexperienced neophyte, born after most of us, and had never taken or listened to any advice at all, he continued his threats which he published on his several de facto personal websites and on other sites where he had friends, issuing bits of paper about clergy having ‘no grace’ and discrediting himself among the whole Orthodox episcopate throughout Europe. By persecuting the faithful, he only managed to destroy his own cause and isolate himself from the Christian mainstream. It was suicidal on his part. Thus, he destroyed his own future clerical career.

Latvia

We can see similar problems in many other parts of the Russian Church today. For example, in Latvia, the local Metropolitan, in connivance with the government, has declared his Church independent (‘autocephalous’) and banned the commemoration of the Russian Patriarch. The people, a smallish and predominantly Russian minority and with a strong nationalist twist, which comes from the anti-Russian persecution they have borne for over thirty years from the US puppet government in Latvia, are furious. They had already been suffering for years from the homosexual scandals there, which nothing had ever been done about in sleeping Moscow. Now, since they have no canonical alternative to the Russian Church (no other Orthodox jurisdiction is present here), the people are voting with their feet and staying at home or else crossing the borders to go to churches in Lithuania or Estonia, where they do commemorate the Russian Patriarch.

At the moment, as far as I know, only two Russian priests in Latvia are defying their Metropolitan and the government and are commemorating their Patriarch. We await further developments in EU Latvia. This could go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, though that Court actually seems to encourage religious persecution against Russian Orthodox, as in the Ukraine. The boycott of churches in Latvia means a fatal lack of income for the Metropolitan and it is perhaps this factor that will be decisive. For the moment, the very elderly Metropolitan has consecrated a very ill priest to the episcopate without his Patriarch’s blessing in order to create four bishops, the minimum required in order to be an independent Church. This has created even further division. It is suicidal.

Moldova

In Moldova the situation is very different. Here, Orthodox are not a small minority as in Latvia, but some 98% of the whole population. The mass of people, who are in fact Romanians, are divided between two Churches, the Russian and the Romanian. The former was the obligatory Church in the Soviet period after 1945 and is still the majority, perhaps some 80% or more.  However, the Romanian Church, whose territory this was before the Second World War, is gaining ground, quite rapidly since the conflict in the Ukraine stepped up in 2022 and since the Russian-appointed bishops in Moldova began intimidating and persecuting the clergy and the people who have left. This intimidation, by spoken and written word has, as in England nearly three years ago, had very negative consequences for the bishops who are speaking and writing thus.

Showing themselves not to be Christians by issuing threatening bits of paper about clergy who no longer ‘have grace’ is the worst thing they could do. What began as a slow movement towards the Romanian Church could easily snowball because of their actions, just as it did in England nearly three years ago. The people are urging their priests to leave the Romanian Church. Can the pastors desert their flock who want to return to the legitimate, pre-Soviet Church? No. Several of the Russian-appointed bishops in Moldova, where, as in Latvia, the set-up goes back to Soviet times, were already very compromised by videos and other leaked information, just as in England and Latvia. This is also suicidal and it is happening, exactly as in England, where there is a canonical alternative to the Russian Church and plenty of canonical Orthodox bishops who are happy to take persecuted Orthodox into their jurisdictions.

The Ukraine

Here the situation is better known, partly because it is so catastrophic. There is in the Ukraine only one canonical Church, which, living in an independent country with which Moscow is at war, has, quite reasonably, declared itself completely independent of Moscow, as indeed it used to be, though long ago. As a result, it has become the victim of persecution from centralist Moscow and also from the atheist State in Kiev. It is like Christ on the Cross, against Whom the two thieves railed, until one of them repented (Matt. 27, 44 and Mk. 15, 32). The atheist Kievan State has even set up its own rival State-run ‘Church’, given a veneer of ‘legitimacy’ by a piece of paper issued by the Patriarchate of Constantinople under US pressure, with the help of ‘a very large sum of money’ (rumoured to be $25 million). Since very few practising Orthodox in the Ukraine are interested in this fake Church with its fake clergy – they can see through it – the fake Church has been stealing church buildings from the canonical Church, which it then locks up and leaves empty, as there are no clergy and no people to fill them. It is Soviet-style persecution all over again.

This is similar to the situation in England, only in the Ukraine the gangsters have the backing of the atheist State; in England the State is simply contemptuous of religion, not actually hostile. You can try and take over churches through outbursts of rage, bullying demands for money, threats and intimidation, but you can only succeed in doing so by force, if the atheist State supports you. And even then you will only succeed in emptying them. Nobody goes to them, neither the authentic clergy, nor the people. We are reminded of the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1949): ‘A time will come when not persecution, but money and the pleasures of this world will turn people away from God and far more souls will perish than during the times of open persecution. One the one hand they will raise up crosses and gild cupolas, but on the other hand the kingdom of lies and evil will come. It will be dreadful to live until those times’.

The People

The fact is that the Church on earth belongs to the believing people. There must be consent and agreement from the faithful people. When whole parishes, clergy, their multigenerational families and the people in solidarity, apart from a tiny number of naïve, misinformed or hoodwinked individuals or recent converts, fewer than 1%, leave their bishop, it is because the bishop is in the wrong. In these cases, in truth, ‘vox populi, vox Dei’, the voice of the people is the voice of God. And the saints confirm that by their miracles.

However much the bishop may offer in bribes to clergy to set up parallel churches in the same city, sends letters to denounce the clergy and the faithful to other bishops (which they ignore, as they only discredit the bishop in question) or tries to divide the families of clergy, attempting to set son against father, a bishop cannot succeed against the impregnable fortress of real Faith. At best he will win a Pyrrhic victory, but for the most part he will utterly humiliate himself and lose everything, as has happened and is happening in all the above and other cases.

Conclusion: The Corruption of Part of the Episcopate

I remember meeting the late Fr Alexander Schmemann in Paris in May 1980. I asked him for his impressions of the episcopate inside the then Soviet Russia. He answered me: ‘Half of them are saints, the other half are demons’. Indeed, in Russia there is a popular saying that when a priest is consecrated bishop, a demon tries to enter him: sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he fails. When the demon succeeds, the consequences are awful. Visiting Florida in the USA in October 1996, I spoke to a much older priest who explained to me the struggles of his three-thousand strong parish in Pennsylvania against the intrigues of what he called ‘the lavender mafia’, (homosexuals), who controlled his previous jurisdiction. Their demands were all about property and money. That type certainly love their comfort.

Roman Catholicism in Western countries is rapidly dying out, largely because of the enforcement of celibacy on its priesthood and all the associated homosexual and pedophile scandals. In the Orthodox Church, it is not the priesthood that is the problem, but the episcopate, which also is obligatorily celibate. Thus, the pool of candidates is very small, especially where monastic life is very weak. Our unsurprising conclusion is that to be a good bishop you must have a pure soul (see I Tim 3, 1-7 above). For bad bishops will consecrate others in their own image and even more unworthy than themselves (their homosexual boyfriends, as we have so often seen) and that is why there are so many woeful metropolitans and bishops in the Church: ‘But, when the Son of Man comes, shall He find faith on the Earth?’ (Lk 18, 8).

 

 

 

The King Edmund Ironside League (1016-2023)

The King Edmund Ironside League (1016-2023)

 

The last King was slain a thousand years ago and more.

King Edmund’s killers said lies are true and truths are dead,

And, without regrets, those dwarves grew much in pride and war

And then, denying God, they enthroned themselves instead.

 

Taught wisdom by His Love, now we Ironside’s children, fed

By the Risen Lord Himself, are called to come to know

That in this land of Alban, Austin, Bede and Alfred

Trade is in no wise the end for us here below.

 

Once the greed for gold and the golden calf’s hateful gain,

Born of faithless lore and gilded vice, have been cast down,

We Edmund’s faithful children will raise up once again,

As long before, the Altar, the Cottage and the Crown.

The Latest Statistics on Religion and Language in England and Wales

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/language/bulletins/languageenglandandwales/census2021

59.6 million people, 89% of the UK population, live in England and Wales. According to the 2021 national census, 46.2% of these are nominal Christians. This is down from 59.3% just ten years ago. It comes as no surprise at all, as the various churches here have for decades been frequented almost only by old people and those churches are therefore quite unsurprisingly dying out. We would fully expect a drop of at least another 13% in ten years’ time, bringing the number of nominal Christians down to 33% and in thirty years’ time the figure for Christians could well reach 7% of the population.

The census also reveals that the second largest group in the country is those who have no religion, at 22.2 million people, or 37.2%. Their number was only 25% ten years ago. This will in ten years from now probably become the largest group.

The situation reflects that in other Western countries. Some are ahead of this (Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Czechia, Canada, Australia), others still some years behind (USA, Poland), though rapidly heading in the same direction. So this is the suicidal direction of the whole Western world, unlike in other civilisations, where traditional religious values, national identity and family life are important.

As regards the two most common languages in England and Wales apart from English and Welsh, these are Polish and Romanian. 612,000, 1.1% of the population, speak Polish, and 472,000, 0.8% of the population, speak Romanian. Ten years ago there were only 68,000 Romanian speakers in England and Wales. This means that over 400,000 Romanians and Moldovans have settled here in the last ten years, the vast majority of them Orthodox Christians. It would suggest that there are at least half a million Romanian-speaking Orthodox in the British Isles and Ireland, with perhaps 450,000 Romanians and 50,000 Moldovans.

Protestantism (which includes the so-called ‘Church of England’) is dying out, as it is a culture of the past, and Roman Catholicism has largely been destroyed by pedophilia and lack of normal priests. In the Orthodox world, Greek Orthodox churches are emptying, as the mainly Cypriot immigrants who came here largely in the 50s and 60s are dying out, their children assimilated into secularism, though they leave behind them an excellent infrastructure of churches and property which belongs to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. However, of its clergy that Archdiocese has 100 elderly clergy and only 3 candidates to ordain to replace them. Though far smaller, the Russian and Antiochian Orthodox are in the same situation, indeed there is no longer a single Russian bishop in the UK. Other Orthodox groups are far smaller still.

All this explains why there are so many Romanians in all Orthodox churches. Generally, where there are children, you know they are Romanian. For example, we usually do about 120 Romanian baptisms a year and about 40 of all other nationalities, Moldovan, Greek, Russian and English. However, in the Northampton Romanian parish they did 850 baptisms last year.