Category Archives: Europe

Towards Palmyra

From Recent Correspondence – August 2015

On Current Events

Q: At present there is great concern about financial events in China. What do they mean?

A: I cannot say, I am not an economist, but it seems to me that there are two things to be said which are no doubt apparent to many. First of all, it is significant that because of stock exchange turmoil in China, the Western world is panicking. This marks a turning point, for it shows that the Chinese economy is now the most important in the world. This was unthinkable even five years ago, let alone twenty-five years ago. Secondly, and as a result of this, I think there is behind this crisis some artificial manipulation to stop China becoming even more important and to protect the US dollar as a reserve currency and so as a global control mechanism. For the powers that be, China must not be allowed to become independent of their global control. This speculation is artificial. I cannot help wondering if the recent massive and deadly explosion in the Chinese city of Tianjin is also connected. Could that have been sabotage? I don’t know.

Q: What is happening in the Ukraine now?

A: It is very difficult to know what is happening there. There are many rumours. I would not pretend to understand, since reports are so mixed and chaotic. I would much rather quote what a well-informed person has said about the reason for the crisis and civil war in the Ukraine – and also in China. Thus, in an interview with ‘The Saker’, Paul Craig Roberts has explained this and also the general hatred towards Russia among the governing elite in Washington:

‘While the US was focused on its Mid-East wars, Putin restored Russia and blocked Washington’s planned invasion of Syria and bombing of Iran. The “first objective” of the neocon doctrine was breached. Russia had to be brought into line. That is the origin of Washington’s attack on Russia. The dependent and captive US and European media simply repeats “the Russian Threat” to the public, which is insouciant and otherwise uninformed.

The offense of Russian culture is also there – Christian morals, respect for law and humanity, diplomacy in place of coercion, traditional social mores – but these are in the background. Russia is hated because Russia (and China) is a check on Washington’s unilateral uni-power’.

I think that it is clear from the Ukraine, not to mention the Middle East, that although Washington is not insane in its single-minded and ruthless logically thirst for world power, it is morally insane. We already saw the beginnings of this moral insanity after World War II, first in the Korean War and then in the Vietnam War, but since the fall of the Soviet Union it has become blatant. Who can forget the first Gulf War, an artificial provocation, in which thousands of US troops were affected by ‘Gulf War syndrome’, poisoned by their own side.

On White Russia

Q: Does the White Russian Movement today have any meaning almost one hundred years after it began?

A: The words ‘The White Russian Movement’ are meaningless! It is rather like the phrase ‘The Catholic Church’. You can find Catholics of all sorts, many very far from Orthodoxy and some very close to Orthodoxy and a great many inbetween.

So, in the same way, firstly, you must define ‘The White Movement’. The White Movement was very varied. Sadly, only about 10% of those who fled for their lives from the Soviet Union continued to live in the Church and supported the Tsar. The majority were not interested in Church life and indeed had not been when still in Russia. They were simply anti-Bolshevik for political reasons. That is not the same as Orthodox. This was clearly pointed out by St John of Shanghai in his report to the Second All-Diaspora Council of 1938. Such ‘White Russians’ were soon assimilated into Western society, as they had no interest in Russian Orthodoxy, the source of their identity. An English example of this is the notorious secularist and former Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, whose grandmother was ‘White Russian’, but there are many others.

Yet other so-called ‘White Russians’ went into schism, leaving the Russian Church altogether and joining the Patriarchate of Constantinople. These modernist aristocrats and intellectuals of the Paris schism supported renovationism, both the primitive, pseudo-Protestant sort and the sophisticated, pseudo-spiritual sort, which was inspired by perennialists like Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon with their Hindu and Muslim concepts. The first group was and is purely secularist, but the second group was and is equally secularist – through its spiritual impurity which flattered and flatters the immense, narcissistic vanity of such intellectuals.

Therefore, if we wish to speak of the true White Movement today, then we can only mean today’s Church Outside Russia, ROCOR. However, since the Church inside Russia has been free, those who are Churched there share identical views with us. So true ‘White Russians’ are all who follow the Church and support ‘the White Tsar’, regardless of whether we live inside Russia or outside.

Q: What do you mean by ‘those who are Churched there’?

A: The Church inside Russia is huge and you can meet all sorts of individual viewpoints, shared by those who are at various stages of being Churched, who have not yet moved on to ‘Churchliness’ (tserkovnost), the understanding of the Church and Church life, who belong to the mainstream. For example, inside Russia there are small numbers known as ‘kochetkovtsy’, who are modernistic and ecumenistic, but at the other extreme, there are those who are called ‘Orthodox Stalinists’ i.e. nationalists who imagine Stalin to have been a supporter of the Church! There are extremes of all sorts on the fringes of Church life. Then there are those who are corrupt, who exploit the Church to enrich themselves, a few clergy among them. Clearly, such small, unChurched groups do not belong to the mainstream of the Church. ROCOR has nothing to do with them, but with the mainstream inside Russia.

The Crisis in Europe

Q: What is to be made of the present migration crisis in Europe, as hundreds of thousands of refugees come here from the Middle East and North Africa?

A: How interesting that since the word ‘immigration’ has brought the Establishment into disrepute, they have changed the word to ‘migration’! It is the same in France. The elite has changed the vocabulary in the hope that the people are stupid enough not to understand what is happening. Newspeak!

I would say this of the tragedy, in which hundreds are dying, usually by drowning, every week.

Each of our actions has an inevitable consequence, there is always a price to pay. For example, why was the First World War fought over Belgium? Because Belgium had to pay for the genocide that it had allowed its King to carry out in the Belgian Congo, where he slaughtered between five and ten million people and maimed millions of others, according to even conservative estimates. And why did Hitler carry out his genocide of 50 million precisely in Europe? Because Europe had to pay for the racist genocides it had carried out in its colonies in the Americas, Asia, Australasia and Africa. What Hitler did to the Slavs, Jews and others in Europe, was no more than what Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal had already done outside Europe. As one cynical comment has it, if the Jews had been black, the USA would have been on Hitler’s side. The First and Second ‘World’ (= European) Wars simply brought Europe’s crimes back to Europe.

Today, irony of ironies, European secularization, the anti-Christian spirit responsible for Europe’s exploitation of its colonial empires, is leading directly to mass immigration, that is, European Islamization. Europe is to become ‘Eurabia’. Today Europe has to pay the price for inventing the crazy borders of countries like Libya, Syria and Iraq. It has to pay the price for invading, or supporting the invasion of, and creating the present chaos in Yugoslavia (from where the immigrants are entering the EU), Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and standing by and doing nothing during the massacres of Christians in those countries as well as in Syria, Nigeria, Eritrea and Turkey. This wave of immigration (‘migration’ as Western governments now camouflage it as) is the consequence of Europe’s meddling in other countries or else its fiddling while they burned.

Germany is paying an especially high price. Why? Because it brought Eastern Europe into the EU in order to exploit those countries and Germany played the main role in destroying Yugoslavia. These immigrants are not stopping in Macedonia or Serbia or Hungary or Slovakia (which says that it only accepts Christians), they are heading for Germany first.

A: So Europe is in crisis. What is to be done?

Q: Europe has been in crisis since 1914, more especially since 1918 when the members of the Russian Royal Family were slaughtered. Do not forget that the Russian Royal House was European. Tsar Nicholas II was Russian in spirit, in his soul, by racial origin he was almost entirely a Western European, as was the Tsarina. Tsar Nicholas was an immensely cultivated man, with two degrees, who spoke five languages, including his mother’s Danish. To kill the Russian Royal House was suicide for Europe, which is why the order for their slaughter came not from Russia or from Europe, but from New York. Until European nations realize this and assert their sovereignty, they will for ever be US colonies and vassals. Europe must repent.

Today, nearly 100 years after those events, Europe sits between secularism and Islamism. Therefore, the present struggle is for the very soul of Europe. I fear that Europe may disappear, that it is lost, too late, for there appears to be no repentance. The European struggle is between dark and light, between Europe’s spiritual identity and its spiritual nonentity, for its very survival. Can the peoples of Europe survive against the unprincipled venality of their elites, their Establishments? I am increasingly pessimistic.
The spiritually conscious in Europe seem to be sailing to Russia on the wreckage of the European Titanic, fleeing the Dead Sea of Sodom.

Q: Are you thinking of the British Establishment, when you speak of the ‘venality of their elites’?

A: We now know, as was long suspected, that the British Establishment, like the Ancient Roman, is corrupted by pedophilia, but the other Western Establishments are in general no better. I know the murderous French Establishment in particular.

Q: So, do the Churched members of the Russian Orthodox Church, what you would perhaps call ‘the true White Russia’, have a message for Europe in its present spiritual crisis?

A: The Russian Orthodox Mission to Europe is to save the best of Old Europe, that which is compatible with the Orthodox Faith and Church, compatible with Holy Rus. This means that our Mission is to Resurrect Holy Europe – the Saints of Europe. It is the Saints of Europe, the best of Old Europe, who speak to Holy Rus, for our ideals are the same.

The West fell into hedonism and hedonism has become bestiality; the West fell into the cult of comfort and comfort has become the end of culture, moral ruination. The two first Romes, Rome and Istanbul, cannot help here, because they are only relics, albeit very important and historic ones. They Have both been nationalized, one by the old pagan Roman mentality, the other by Hellenism. Only a New Rome with a strong State and Faith and multinational spirit can resist. Thus, our Mission is to give Europe the commandments of Holy Rus in order to save her.

Q: What are these commandments?

A: These commandments are to keep:

1. Orthodoxy, uncompromised as is in the best of Holy Rus, what we may call the true White Russia, regardless of whether it is inside Russia or outside Russia.

2. Sovereignty, the sovereign spiritual identity of each European people and tongue.

3. The People, respect for each people and culture of Europe by showing them that we do not live by bread alone.

If the West ignores these commandments and offers no spiritual resistance, its future is Palmyra.

Afterword: The Euro-Orthodox Alternative to an Orthodox Europe

Following the recent trilogy of articles on gathering together Russian Orthodox of all nationalities and languages in Western Europe into a Metropolia, the first of which was posted on 25 July and the last, the article ’The Path to Unity’, on 5 August, a member of the Paris Exarchate (Patriarchate of Constantinople) has written to reject this vision for an Orthodox Europe, or a ‘Russian Europe’ as he strangely calls it. Since he is not Russian Orthodox and, according to his very undiplomatic words, never will be, his rejection of something which does not concern him seems not relevant. However, if he is interested in one day seeing a Local Church of Europe, we must recall that the only Local Church which is proposing an Orthodox Metropolia in Europe, precisely the basis for a future Local Church of Europe, is the Russian Orthodox Church. In other words, the offer by Patriarch Alexis II over ten years ago is the only offer on the table.

The only purely theoretical alternative consists of a now very old-fashioned, autocephalist, that is, nationalist, ideology. This was once again put forward by the Greek Orthodox ‘Fraternite Orthodoxe in Western Europe’ at its Fifteenth Congress in Bordeaux in Spring 2015. With absolutely no offer of autocephaly (canonical independence) made at any point over the fifty years of its existence to this small, mainly French group by the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople (to which virtually all its members belong), doubts were long ago raised about its practicality. No autocephaly can ever be given to this small group because it is on a shared canonical territory.

No-one would want to repeat the error that the Soviet-epoch Patriarchate of Moscow made in the USA nearly fifty years ago, giving a canonically disputed autocephaly to a small and rather nationalistic American group, led by Parisian intellectuals, now called the Orthodox Church in America (OCA). One does have the impression of leaders blinded by their autocephalist ideology misleading sincere and idealistic but also blind converts, who have no concept of the practical problems and realities of the Local Orthodox Churches and Diasporas outside their own narrow, intellectual horizons.

A French TV film of their recent Congress shows members of the Paris-based Brotherhood singing in French at a meeting or service (it was unclear what it was) in a modern conference hall in Bordeaux. There were virtually no icons, no iconostasis, no candles and no-one at the meeting or service, standing in lines in front of rows of chairs, appeared to make the sign of the cross. The atmosphere presented was that of a ‘charismatic’ event, common to Catholic modernism (or Protestant modernism – it is the same thing). Present were two Greek bishops, one of them the controversial leader of the schismatic ‘Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church’, and a Catholic bishop. The impression was that many of those present were either Catholics or else ex-Catholics. The meeting was certainly highly ecumenical and also political.

The atmosphere of exaltation, of a lack of sobriety and prayer, and the absence of any Orthodox dress code indeed gave the impression of a political meeting, rather than of a Church service. Most of those shown in the film looked to be middle class people, mostly of the same older generation, aged between 60 and 75. Could this be because they joined the Fraternite in its heyday in the late 60s, 70s and 80s, after the French social revolt of 1968? Enclosed and isolated in the same intellectual ghetto for so many years, without exposure to the realities of the contemporary Diasporas of the Local Orthodox Churches in Europe or in their homelands, members have had no opportunity to evolve. In this way they have not adapted to reality and the generation which has grown up in the Orthodox Churches since the fall of Communism and the liberation of the Local Churches in former Communist countries. Could this be why ‘passeiste’ (living in the past) members still insist that ‘nothing has changed’ in Russia and Eastern Europe and still appear to be living in the Cold War?

Of course, a film can give a false impression. Unfortunately, it is exactly the same impression that was given to us by Fraternite members in the 70s and 80s and also that given to Orthodox from other Local Churches who have visited their Congresses in recent years. They have all said the same thing: that this is a divisive group driven not by spiritual concerns but by political concerns. Its spirit, different and alien to that in the vast majority of Orthodox monasteries and parish churches in Western Europe, gives the impression of a New Age cult or sect. There is a ‘pick and mix’ mentality, for example, you fast and confess only if you really want to, taking communion freely, as in modern Catholicism. It takes what it likes from the Russian Church and the Greek Church, but rejects the disciplines of both the Russian Church, both inside Russia and outside Russia, and of the Greek Church in Greece. (It should be noted that this group is quite outside the discipline of the diocesan jurisdictions of Greek bishops in Europe).

A great many contemporary Protestants will tell you that the empty moralism of their ahistorical and now dying denominations has been suicidal for them. A great many contemporary Catholics will tell you that they do not believe in the Pope and think that compulsory clerical celibacy is wrong. In other words they agree with us. And some look to the Orthodox Church for sustenance. The one thing that the Orthodox Church can offer those who live in the contemporary spiritual desert of the desacralized Western world, whether of Catholic or Protestant origin, is spiritual food. This is the food of faithfulness to the discipline of the Church Tradition that alone unlocks the door to the Holy Spirit, that alone gives spiritual beauty, spiritual nobility and spiritual elegance, the food that feeds the soul. This means not transmitting our little selves, but transmitting that which is far greater than ourselves, that which is both collective (cat-holic) and eternal. This is that which only the Church can give and provide the sense of the sacred, a sacralized faith that brings heaven down to earth and so makes the earthly spiritual.

The impression given, and not only by this film, is the opposite. What appears to be on offer here is a desacralized cult, worship made comfortable for the Western consumer, a castrated and rationalized piece of theatre that makes the spiritual earthly. Nowhere was there any mention of the glorious European heritage of the saints, those who had been earthly but became spiritual, neither of the ancient saints of Europe, like St Irinaeus of Lyon, St Hilary of Poitiers, St Martin of Tours, St John Cassian and others who combated heresies and died for the Faith, or of the new saints of Europe, like the Russian New Martyrs, St Nicholas of Zhicha, St Justin of Chelije and St Paisius the Athonite. This is the result of doing away with the ‘sanctoral’ and applying the other decrees of the Second Vatican Council to the Orthodox Church, as was the heartfelt desire of Fraternite lovers like Fr Elie Melia, the teacher of Pastoral Theology at the St Sergius Institute of Theology in Paris in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

The overall impression of the Fraternite is of a disincarnate form of faith invented in the past, of a rather late and old-fashioned monogenerational offshoot of the ‘charismatic movement’ of the late twentieth century, unknown to the Orthodox Church. Theirs appears to be a phyletistic or nationalistic ideology, a Euro-Orthodoxy, that puts modern Europe first and Orthodoxy second, exactly the opposite to what the Russian Orthodox Church is proposing in its forward-looking vision of an ‘Orthodox Europe’. New Local Churches have always been built on strict adherence to the Church Tradition and had a heavily ascetic, monastic and episcopal foundation, for example among all the Slavs, the Alaskans and the Japanese. Unlike their examples, the intellectuals of the Fraternite, stuck in the 1960s, seem to be proposing building a Church on the basis of an ideology that is anti-ascetic, anti-monastic, anti-episcopal, anti-Tradition and therefore in effect anti-Orthodox. Needless to say, this cannot succeed.

An Appeal for Faithfulness and for Unity

The Past

When eight years ago in Moscow a senior archpriest of the Moscow Diocese asked me to write the full story of Metr Antony, I answered him that, straight after a schism, it was not yet time, that people were not ready for it. I maintain that point of view today – only bit by bit can the story be told, only inasmuch as it serves the edifying and overriding goal of faithfulness and so unity. A bit more has been told this month at the instigation of a ‘Patriarchal’ priest of the Russian Church in the Diaspora, and only in order to point the way towards further unity. All revelations are for a good reason, not by chance, and are thought out beforehand. As for the rest, I have maintained silence on the whole story for 33 years – it can wait longer.

Thus, the article we published on 25 July regarding the past of English Orthodoxy and, most importantly, to provide a vision for the future unity of Russian Orthodoxy and all Orthodoxy in Europe has been like a stone thrown into a pond – it has created ripples, many for and some against. That shows that people are alive. It also shows just how divisive Metr Antony was, especially considering that the article was written most diplomatically, quoting Metr Kallistos. The conclusion must be: divisive personalities create division. Let us recall that the goal of the Church is to bring down the Holy Spirit on earth to produce saints, like St John of Shanghai, not to produce personalities.

Sadly, the truth hurts. And the article pained some, especially the naïve who are still in denial. But without growing pains, there can be no maturity. I have been there. As they say: ‘No pains, no gains’. And, in this case, although we would rather not talk of any of this, but keep it quiet just as everyone else keeps it quiet, this truth that hurts must be heard now. This is because to keep quiet now is to impede unity and the prize of unity is too great, for no Church or spiritual life can ever be built on myths and illusions, just as no Church or spiritual life can ever be built on schism and fragmentation. And schism and fragmentation were the case of the old Sourozh Diocese and the Paris Exarchate and, indeed, to a lesser extent, the case of both once divided parts of the Russian Church Diaspora.

Some have criticized details in the article. Two criticisms were quite right. These mentioned quite correctly that the Greek Metropolitan for Benelux is Metr Atheagoras (not Panteleimon, who was his predecessor) and that Maximos is not a Greek name. Thank you. As these were mistakes, like all the mistakes that I make, they were corrected at once. As a matter of historical fact, the Fr Maximos in question (he formerly had the fine Christian name of Michael) quit the Greek Orthodox priesthood after only two weeks. (Sadly, not a record; last year this was beaten by one recent convert, ordained without preparation, who stayed for only one day).

Another correspondent asked what was wrong with Greek vestments. He had missed the point; there is nothing wrong with Greek vestments – except when you claim to be following ‘the Russian Tradition’. Or do those words mean a consumerist, ‘pick and mix’ attitude to the Church? Another asked about Russian dress code in the spirit of, ‘But I know someone who…’, and also missed the point. I was talking about the context of general Christian dress code (which only the Russian Orthodox Tradition seems to have kept), not about the exceptions of loose sharivari trousers as worn by some peasant women in Serbia or African or Asian native dress. Orthodox dress code is universal and can be summed up by the words, ‘modesty without provocation’. Sadly, some in the name of an ideology alien to the Church, but not alien to secularism, like to provoke.

One asked me about my view of the ‘unusual and unique practices’ of Fr Sophrony (Sakharov). To which I simply answered that it is hardly for me to judge the spiritual value of such practices which take place in the Patriarchate of Constantinople. That is for the Church and Her hierarchs to judge. In this matter I am a mere observer who simply states facts and accepts the judgement of the whole Church, whatever that will be.

Another asked why we should have confession before every communion. Again he had missed the point. I was talking not about a pious convert monk who took communion every day and did not need confession every day (though his inexperienced and over-rigid convert confessor was demanding it!), but about the average Orthodox in the average parish who takes communion every two or three months and therefore needs confession before each communion. Even more so for the Greek who takes communion at every liturgy, but hotly denies even the existence of confession; since he has never heard of it and as he has never been asked to do it, it does not exist for him.

In this context, confession before communion is not some exotic Russian Orthodox tradition, it is the universal tradition of the Church – visit any Local Church and ask the faithful; everything else is mere decadence. There is only one Tradition, despite the vain attempts by Protestant-minded and Protestant-backed liberals to invent a new and alternative one and then reject the Tradition as ‘old-fashioned’ or ultra-conservative’, so moving the goal posts so that they can justify their conformity to secularism. Their technique of calling the Tradition ‘ultra-conservative’ was well-practised by the modernist Catholics and Protestants long before fringe Orthodox blindly copied it.

One said that the article was simply untrue; however, he was quite unable to reject a single point, as he is in denial of reality. All such articles are written from experience. You can deny that someone has experienced something if you wish, but it makes no difference to the fact that the experience has taken place. You are simply in denial, because you have some personal axe to grind. You are welcome to disagree with my interpretations of the facts, but to deny the facts is to deny reality and dwell in fantasy. Another who had been there at the time, squirmed and then reluctantly admitted that the whole article was true. The truest statement came from a third person who simply said: ‘We all know that this is the truth, it is just that no-one has dared say it out loud until now’. Such is the fear of the political correctness of the modern Jews.

One asked about naïve young Russian women in Russia who admire Metr Antony’s Russian (not English) writings, which Patriarch Alexis II expressly asked him to write in the 1990s. In my view, they are right to admire them, they are very well-written, ideal for beginners, just as beginners in Russia also admire the writings of C.S. Lewis. New to the Church, they need food for the mind and the highly talented Metr Antony gives this. That is why he was so popular with Anglicans, others outside the Church and those on the fringes of the Church. He wrote for them. From an atheist and secular background, he was well able to address the rationalistic doubts of people from that secular background. However, if such young women wish to be Churched, to enter the Arena, they will need to move on beyond introductions and rationalizing food for the mind and find writings with food for the soul. As for the tragic legacy of Metr Antony in England, which is what we were writing about, such young women, new to the Church, have no idea about it. We do, because we were subjected to the tragedy which wasted so much and drove so many away.

One correspondent asked about the need for a European Metropolia, and not a local English Orthodox Church. It is my polite suggestion that he should think about what I wrote of a ‘British Orthodox Church’. I wrote that we must avoid nationalism on the one hand and on the other hand admit that we are far too small to dream about a Local Church now. There may be at least 300,000 Orthodox in the UK, but fewer than 10% (30,000) practise and of that 10% it is doubtful if even 5% (1,500) are English people who practise. And most of the 30,000, including hundreds of the English people, have no desire for an English Orthodox Church; they are quite happy to belong to a Church that is based in another country. This is exactly what happened in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) – most Orthodox Americans of Non-Orthodox origin do not belong to it, thus making its claims strange.

In any case, who would provide the initiative for such a new Local Church? Not the Russian Church, for it has learned from its sad experience precisely with the OCA, whose canonicity is denied by most, as it received its contested Cold War autocephaly on a shared territory. What I was saying to this correspondent, and what I am saying here, is that now is the time for unity in a Metropolia, which could with time become autonomous and then, only with the consent of all, become a new Local Church. Now is not the time for narrow national division.

In a word, I am slightly disappointed, though not at all surprised, that some, perhaps a few on purpose, criticized the details of the trees, but forgot to look at the forest – which was, after all, the point. Above all I am disappointed that some seemed to pay less attention to the second part of the article, a vision of unity for the future, which to my mind is ten times more important than the first part. That simply lists the mistakes of the past and so explains how NOT to build unity and the future – on divisive personalities and divisive modernism. Perhaps some are not ready for the future. I am.

The Future

On what then can future Church unity be built? It can only be built on faithfulness to the Tradition. You cannot build unity on faithfulness to compromise, as I remarked thirty years ago to Archbishop George (Wagner) in Rue Daru, who could provide no answer to this truism, after he had just preached about the need for faithfulness, but never explained faithfulness to what. Why faithfulness? Because the Church that is faithful produces saints and, as we said above, this bringing down of the Holy Spirit to produce saints is the goal of the Church. A so-called Church that is against fasting, monasticism and asceticism, radically shortens and changes the services, destroys a prayerful atmosphere, conforms to the secularist spirit of the Western world, constantly berates Mt Athos, compromises on everything, and does not prepare the next generation of spiritual heroes, the saints and martyrs, as were produced by the Russian Church in the nineteenth century, is not a Church.

In a word, that is a Church that is unfaithful, it is disrespectful of the saints, does not produce saints, it produces only intellectuals who have no role to play in an organism where all the most important and so saving knowledge comes from the Holy Spirit, not from dry books of philosophy that only give you headaches. That is the Church of the philosophers, not the Church of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of illiterate Galilean fishermen, of the Saints of God. Such an unfaithful Church is no longer a Church at all and instead of saints produces only apostates, heretics and schismatics. A glance at twentieth-century Church history confirms this in abundance.

As I said to a former Sourozh priest in Cambridge in 1982, one who had just denied to me the need for spiritual heroes or even their existence and had just launched a magazine about such a new ‘Church’, that Church is just another rationalistic, secular and anti-spiritual organization, for it has nothing to feed our souls with. The Church has one foot in heaven and one foot on earth; the modernists want to make a Church with two feet on earth. They can do so if they want, but it will no longer be a Church, just a Protestant-type social club.

We have in recent years turned a generational corner in the Diaspora. Some in the old generation still seems to think that there are two parts to the Church, those who celebrate the services in ‘foreign’ languages and those who do not. At the mere mention of the word ‘faithful’, they think of their departed parents’ or still earlier generations who culted ‘the old country’ and a ‘foreign’ language. This old generation with all its complex of identity is hopelessly old-fashioned and is dying out. Today, everybody in all jurisdictions in the Diaspora uses English or another appropriate local language.

Today there are still two parts to the Church, but their division has nothing to do with language; of today’s two parts, the vast and often silent majority are trying to be faithful, a small but very vocal minority are not. The latter is not trying to be faithful because it believes in being ‘modern’, in other words, because of psychological and sociological complexes it is trying to conform to the world. ‘Faithful’ no longer means old-fashioned ethnicism; only old calendarists believe because of their chronic insecurity that faithful means a mere aping and anti-creative parroting of the past with pharisaical, imitative, almost Anglo-Catholic ritualism. Faithful means following the practices and spirit of the Church in whatever language we need. Language is totally irrelevant to faithfulness, languages are only permutations of a variety of consonants and vowels, of God-given human speech, of the Word and Breath of God that distinguishes men from animals.

True, one Georgian Orthodox priest did once tell me that God only speaks Georgian. And, some years before that, the same Archbishop George (Wagner), a convert from Catholicism and with an amazing complex about his Berlin past, while railing against the ‘modern’ Romanian use of Romanian in services, told me quite seriously that God only understands Latin, Greek and Slavonic in the services. (Little wonder that the Peckstadt parish and family, like so very many others, left his jurisdiction in those years). However, they were and are wrong! Thank God that that generation, the ones who said quite literally, ‘we would rather see our church close than hear French (or English) here’ has gone. Today, there are still two parts to the Church – but they are divided not according to language, as some in the old generation still think, they are divided according to faithfulness and lack of faithfulness. Agree with me or not, as you like, but my combat has always been with those who want to destroy the faithfulness of the Church and to pray for their enlightenment.

Faithfulness is so important because we know that our Russian Church has produced tens of thousands of saints and so survived, whereas renovationism has produced not a single one – it has produced only apostates, heretics and schismatics, those who conformed to the world, collaborated with atheists and secularists and persecuted and persecute the faithful. So why is faithfulness so necessary in the Diaspora just now?

I believe that we are now at a unique time, a turning point in our Russian Church Diaspora history. In both North America (ROCOR/MP/OCA) and Western Europe (ROCOR/MP/Paris Exarchate) there are three groups of Russian Orthodox (or at least two which are Russian Orthodox and one which has Russian Orthodox origins). All three groups are now faced with the possibility of further unity – or disunity. And unity becomes possible precisely through faithfulness, whereas disunity becomes possible precisely through lack of faithfulness, as we saw with all those tiny sects which rejected the unity between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007, or with the old calendarists and their 12/13/14/15/16? tiny synods.

Today, in North America, the former leader of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) is a member of ROCOR – a unity unthinkable in the bad old days of the Cold War. The OCA itself is now held by a steady hand, Metropolitan Tikhon, whose very name takes the group back to its historic origins with a Saint of the Russian Church. It may be that unity is at hand, that the modernist-minded and divisive extremes, which have for so long impeded OCA unity with the rest of the Russian Church in North America, will leave the OCA, just as the extremes of ROCOR and the Sourozh Diocese had to leave before their unity and that of both parts of the wider Russian Church could be achieved in 2007. Extremes, mainly Protestant-minded, ‘autocephalist’, fringe modernists, who could not accept united episcopal authority could join the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople or Antioch. This would leave the former OCA free to join a united Russian Orthodox Metropolia in North America.

Today, in Western Europe, the Paris Exarchate is now also held by a new hand, Archbishop Job, whose very name indicates the suffering that must be endured if this group is to return to unity. It may be that there too unity is at hand, that the modernist-minded and divisive extremes, which have for so long impeded Church unity with the rest of the Russian Church in Western Europe, will leave the Paris Exarchate, just as the extremes of ROCOR and the Sourozh Diocese had to leave before their unity and that of both parts of the wider Russian Church could be achieved in 2007. Extremes, mainly Protestant-minded, ‘autocephalist’ fringe modernists, who could not accept united episcopal authority could join the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople or Antioch. This would leave the former Paris Exarchate free to join a united Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe.

I have always refused to take part in anti-unity, anti-mainstream, fragmenting, fringe movements, whether of the Sourozh Diocese, seeing where it was heading in 1982, or of the Paris Exarchate, seeing where it was moving in 1988, when Archbishop George (Wagner) preferred to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the Baptism of Rus with a Catholic cardinal rather than with the Russian Church, or of old calendarism which had infiltrated the local Diocese of ROCOR in 1974 and was still there in 1997, but is now gone. This is because anti-unity movements are by definition unfaithful.

You can agree with me for wanting faithfulness and so unity, or else throw stones at me for wanting faithfulness and so unity, as some indeed have done. That is your choice, though God is your Judge too. But I will not change the fight for faithfulness and so unity, that is, for true unity, the unity that is founded only on the truth and which comes only from faithfulness, not founded on myths, delusions and faithlessness. For it is no use papering over the cracks and indeed the chasms, as old-fashioned ecumenists, stuck in the 1960s, do, unity is always in truth, that is, in faithfulness. Ask St Photius the Great, St Gregory Palamas and St Mark of Ephesus.

Let me be even clearer. What I am saying is this:

When ‘The History of the Orthodox Church Diaspora, 1917-2027’, comes to be written, what will it read? Perhaps:

‘The history of the Orthodox Church Diaspora is a sad one. Apart from the one bright moment of intra-Russian unity in 2007, it is a history of disunity and bickering because of divisive personalities with divisive policies. This has continued to this day and there is little hope for the future. Starting from Pan-Orthodox Diaspora unity under the Russian Orthodox Church in 1917, which was destroyed by the tragic Russian Revolution, Pan-Orthodox unity in the Diaspora has still not been restored after 110 years, to this very day’.

Or will it read like this? Perhaps:

‘Starting from Pan-Orthodox Diaspora unity in 1917, today, 110 years after the tragic Russian Revolution which destroyed that unity, unity is once more within our grasp. This has been achieved by restored Russian Church unity, the firm foundation of which was laid in 2007 by the adherence of both parts of the Russian Church, inside Russia and outside Russia, to the Russian Orthodox Tradition by the blood of the New Martyrs and Confessors, as represented in the Diaspora by the universal spirit of St John of Shanghai. Then came the confirmation of that unity when two former fragments, the former Orthodox Church in America (OCA) and the remains of the Paris Exarchate, overcame their politically-inspired Russophobia, as well as their equally divisive American and French phyletism, and, having jettisoned that secularism, joined in with Russian Church unity.

Today, other national groups in the Diaspora, now again faithfully adhering to the unity-creating principle of the Tradition, rediscovered after generations of decadence and conformism to the practices and values of the Non-Orthodox world (in North America thanks greatly to the monasteries founded by Fr Ephraim), are uniting around this example of responsibility. For they are joining in the life of the Four multinational Metropolias, formed on the initiative of the Russian Orthodox Church, in Western Europe, North America, Latin America and Australasia. The formation of four new multinational Local Churches, following the impetus and examples of these Russian Metropolias, is now within sight. The cleansing of Church life from spiritual impurity, from heterodox-inspired secularism and historic injustice, is now leading to restoration and the return to canonicity’.

In other words, Diaspora unity, which is what we all want, cannot be built on divisive compromises, but only on faithfulness to the One Saint-making Tradition, our lifetime combat.

In other words, the ship is preparing to leave the port. We should make sure that we have tickets for it. Otherwise we shall find ourselves isolated and stranded on the dilapidated jetty of the desert island of dying heterodoxy – a lonely place to be at the best of times.

Ten Centuries of Institutional Secularism: The Despair of the Contemporary World and the Hope of the Church

Secularism, the worship of this world, has always existed and always will exist. It comes from the fact that the human-being, part breath of God and part fallen nature, is torn in two directions, towards the Kingdom of God and towards the fallen world. At times in his history he has turned more to the Kingdom of God, at other times more towards the fallen world. The attraction of the fallen world, secularism, is so strong that it can get inside religion, or rather pervert and deform religion into idolatry, for there have always been and are religions which actually idolize the fallen world, mistaking fallen creation for the Creator. They are called paganism. As examples we can mention yesterday’s Baal, Greek gods and Roman emperor-worship, or today’s religion of consumerism and entertainment (fun), bread and circuses.

Indeed, pagan secularism can enter into any religious system in forms as diverse as the physical sensuality of Hinduism or the militant violence of Islam, as the State-serving of Confucianism or the State worship of Shintoism, as the bourgeois capitalism accepted and promoted by Protestantism or the racial nation-worship to be found on the nominalist margins of Orthodox Christianity, even though officially condemned. Humanity, in other words, is capable of defiguring and corrupting anything, making the spiritual pure into the innately secular. The greatest danger is when such corruption becomes institutionalized, an inherent part of the system. It was in order to avoid this that in the fourth century monasticism began to develop very quickly and the capital of the pagan Roman Empire, which Christianity had vanquished through the Martyrs, was moved away from corrupted Rome to New Rome, uniting East and West, Asia and Europe in the Christian Roman Empire.

However, human nature is the same worldwide. Despite the removal of temptation by moving the Christian capital from pagan Rome, the spirit of the old pagan secularism still reached into Christianity there, over the centuries creating a new religion. The revived spirit of pagan Rome, of worldliness and secularism, was actually ingrained into this new religious system, made systematic and institutionalized by it. After earlier temptations it was eventually defined in Rome in the eleventh century, in imitation of the pagan Roman Empire and came to be called Roman Catholicism. This was essentially an attempt to make the former Church in Western Europe more powerful than all worldly rulers, to make the Church into a State – the most powerful State of all, to create a Roman universalism, hence its name. This was the world’s power to defigure, not the Church’s power to transfigure.

The way in which this was done was primitive enough. First it was necessary to assert that the Holy Spirit proceeded from Christ, from Him Who had taken on human nature while still remaining God. In the later eighth century the warlike barbarian Charlemagne found such a mistaken affirmation and tried to use it to assert his authority against the Church. In this he failed. Then in the early eleventh century the same mistaken affirmation was made again, but this time in Rome where within a few more years the Western leader, the Pope, began to call himself the Vicar (substitute) of Christ. This granted the Western leader Divine authority, by both theologically and juridically making him the source of the Holy Spirit. The trick was complete.

With this new ideology, the Western leader, the Pope, was in effect made God on earth, Pontifex Maximus, the infallible bridge between God and man, just like the old pagan Roman emperors. But when this God on earth commanded armies, launched pagan and barbaric military campaigns (called conquests and crusades) that looted, raped, pillaged and murdered hundreds of thousands, destroying higher forms of civilization, persecuted and tortured all those who disagreed with him, claimed to be able to sell places in Paradise, built himself palaces with every luxury, provided himself with male lovers or brothels and poisoned his enemies, people realized that his was not the Church of God.

Essentially then, what had once been the Church in Western Europe started to rot from the head downwards, its ruling warlike elite forming a neo-pagan institution, a servant of the world. Of course, it took time for the rot to spread and the former Church kept some of the outward structures of the Church that it had once been. There survived church buildings and monasteries, bishops, priests, sacraments and saints – without them it could never have kept the loyalty of simple and uneducated good souls faithful to the old Church and from whom the iniquity of the new system was hidden by ignorance and then indoctrination. However, gradually the old church buildings and monasteries were demolished or uglified into castle-like, military styled, barbarian Gothic and then worse, sections of the episcopate and the priesthood were perverted by sodomy and pedophilia, the sacraments were deformed and communion withheld.

As for the ancient saints, like their churches, they were forgotten or else remade, buried beneath layers of new and strange fashions, promoted by the elite. As even the outward structure of the Church was slowly deformed through the trick of gradualism, so that the people would not notice, the fullness of life went out of it and it began to resemble a dead formula, a mere ritual. The highest form of human life, the spiritual, gained through the ascetic, was replaced by lower forms of human life, the anti-ascetic, whether the intellectual, the psychic, the emotional or the pietistic, with which in their simplicity and naivety many of the simple people, kept in ignorance of the real, were conditioned to be satisfied.

Pagan barbarism had triumphed, disguised by the name of the Church, the Roman, the Papal, the pious, the canonical and the classical. It said that there was no difference between it and the Church of the first millennium, claiming that it had always been thus, that no revolutionary transformations had occurred in the eleventh century and the Church had never been altered! In reality, a subtle form of desacralization and so decivilization had all along been under way. As the former Western Church was gradually clericalized and turned into a mere institution, the world was divorced from the spiritual, thus leaving the political, economic and social life of the world to be secularized. Thus, the Incarnate Christ was driven not only out of the Temple, but out of all Jerusalem, which with time was turned into Babylon.

However, this idolatry of the old Roman paganism that had united Western Europe by military conquest in the name of ‘the Church’ attracted the imitation and envy of others. ‘If the Papacy can operate this trick, then so can we; we other humans can also proclaim ourselves gods on earth and call ourselves ‘humanists’. Thus, Europe drifted even further from the heritage and memory of the old Western Church as it had been. The new imitators tried to imitate the old Roman paganism in their own way, setting up a new Roman Empire which they called ‘Holy’, but which was not, but Unholy and secular. They in turn were followed by others who in protest set up still more forms of Christianity, allying themselves with princes and economic power, subjugating ‘primitive’ and ‘ssvage’ peoples outside Europe (‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ because they were not yet gods on earth like Western men) and becoming worshippers of Mammon.

There is no better example of this than the Victorian Imperialist in Britain, who stamped his pennies with the image of Roman Britannia and who just like the pagan Roman Imperialist, once a simple and honourable farmer, left his homeland to conquer and reorganize the ‘savages’ and so lost his own soul in the process. Just like the pagan Roman Imperialist, he learned Latin, he had strict and narrow moral views, a devotion to imperial duty and what he saw as the public interest – res publica. He was firmly convinced of his moral superiority over the clever but immoral ‘Greeks’ (French and Germans) and over the idle and superstitious ‘Orientals’ (Latins and Indians), over the backward and savage (all other races, as in ‘Darkest’ Africa), whom it was his business and duty to conquer. ‘God is an Englishman’, he wrote, for he had created a god in his own image. Moral censoriousness, sense of duty, xenophobic national glory and devotion to money-making, and so to ruthless and predatory exploitation, were his only goals. His Bible was the Bible of Mammon.

There were many other imitators who also deified themselves. There had already been Napoleon who dressed himself as a Roman Emperor and crowned himself from the hands of the Pope and later there would be Hitler, both paganized Catholics, who tried to re-establish the pagan Roman Empire in Europe by military conquest – and failed as soon as they had to face even the weakened remnants of Christian Russia. All these ideologues were deluded, whether they called themselves Capitalists, Liberals, Darwinists, Socialists or Nazis. Little matter what they called themselves, the secularist aim of worshipping this world has always been the same, including among those who today are for the moment re-establishing the pagan Roman Empire in Europe, a Fourth Reich, by economic conquest. They too are failing but only because again they have to face the weakened remnants of Christian Russia.

Thus, the conspiracy of rejection and concealment of ten centuries of the Faith of the Christian saints in Western Europe and their relics, condemned as living in the ‘Dark Ages’, as unsaintly, uninteresting, obscurantist and primitive, followed by ten centuries of barbaric institutional secularism, extolled as ‘Western culture’, have brought the Western world back to where it was 2,000 years ago, to the new, or rather old, paganism of today. This ‘new world order’ is thoroughly undermined by its narcissistic self-admiration, selfish exploitation, its utter lack of any spiritual purpose, dynamism and leadership, its spiritual futility. So, almost as if by sleight of hand, an anti-spiritual world order has been established. The West has gone from Christ to Antichrist in 1,000 years and turned full circle back to its paganism of 2,000 years ago.

Today’s remaining Western Christians are still little conscious, still largely shackled by their idolatrous attachment to their culture rather than to the purity of the Gospel of the Kingdom. Thus, they are still in denial of the inherent responsibility for the contemporary situation of their gradual thousand-year apostasy. Some have reacted to the contemporary acceleration of the apostasy, for which they still do not see their responsibility and see as due only to a recent process, with apocalyptic and depressing pessimism – the depressive Protestant philosopher Kierkegaard and the Catholic writer Bernanos did so. Others, superficial ‘feel-good’ Protestant evangelists or the deluded, Origenistic Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin and Catholic modernists and even a few Orthodox, fallen away from the Church, have gone to the opposite extreme of idealistic naivety. They have imagined like pantheists that the world is merging into some great Universal Church which will bring the spiritual unification of humanity. Of course, they are right, only the Universal Church in question is the Church of Antichrist, not of Christ.

What is the Orthodox view? How do Orthodox view the future of the world that has become repaganized by ten centuries of systematic Western secularism made global? Orthodox say that, of course, the Apocalypse is potentially upon us and the West has potentially created the Kingdom of Antichrist. However, we should also know that the Church, and the Church alone, has the Power that provides hope of transfiguration and can resist the ten centuries of secularist repaganization that have brought the world to its present state. That is why we do not recognize as part of the Church the movements, delusions and so-called ‘saints’ of the second millennium, for they do not belong to Her spirit but to the spirit of apostasy, even if ever so subtly and under the cloak of good. For we know that the Church alone has the Power to change the world that Power has been lost to the institutionalized and the secularized.

For, behold!, just as the Church conquered the pagan Roman Empire, so in our own time She has conquered the pagan Soviet Empire. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean! Thus, all may not be lost. This conquest of both the Roman and Soviet Empires came about precisely by the spiritual vitality of the Commonwealth of Christian Peoples, by the Power of the Saints – the Power of the Holy Spirit. And Victory over two Pagan Empires can yet be extended to a Victory over a Third, today’s Western Empire. The victory of the Saints is not in numbers but in heroic Power, the Holy Spirit’s Power to see deeper and further than the secularists, to make the impossible possible. This isolates them from the world which ignores them, as it has isolated from the blinded world both the Saints of the West of the first millennium and the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, but this isolation is always triumphant.

The Western world never totally threw off the yoke of pagan Rome. And once it had abandoned the Faith of the Church, Orthodoxy, in the eleventh century, it could no longer preserve itself intact from the temptations of that yoke. They all came back, one by one. Through them the Christian way of life gradually became reduced to a legalistic philosophy, a hypocritical puritanism and a powerless and sentimental pietism. The pagan principle of secularism has once more become inherent in Western culture over the last ten centuries as that pagan yoke has gradually crept back into Western life through becoming institutionalized, an ingrained and systematic part of the Western Establishment.

The Divinely-inspired values of the Saints, of noble selflessness, of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, of Hope, Faith and Love, are the strongest-known values known to world history. They are the only values that can destroy the ignoble selfishness, vulgarity, unreason and evil, the despair, apostasy and hatred of the lunatic asylum of the contemporary world. That deranged world has been made powerful through usury and technology, but it has been made powerless spiritually because it has emptied its soul. The values of the Saints conquer because they are inspired from outside this world by the Power of the Holy Spirit, by the real world, that is, by the Kingdom of God, to which the Orthodox Faith and Church alone direct us. And this is the Faith in the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory that will triumph at the end of history, showing us that all else was mere illusion.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

The Dissolution of Europe

Anyone who knew European society fifty years ago, then fell asleep and returned today would say that he is visiting another planet. So radical are the changes that have taken place in the last fifty years in the Civilization that underpinned that society that it has now dissolved. These changes can be seen every day by just looking at the way modern Europeans dress, listening to their politicians or their singers, seeing their lack of reverence and good manners, listening to their conversations in which they reveal their values and informality, watching their television and films or hearing of their bestsellers like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. We Orthodox Christians who lived here fifty years ago and remember it as it was then, find that we do not belong to it now, even less that we did before; for the most part most modern Europeans come from a different planet to us. Little wonder that we write of the ‘Dissolution’ of European Civilization; what then was has dissolved into the hurricane of ugly and vulgar atheism and Gadarene lunacy from which all nobility has fled away.

However, it is no good being nostalgic and wishing back something that existed fifty years ago. Apart from the fact that this is impossible, any solution must be far more radical since the compromises that have undermined European Civilization began much more than fifty years ago. The seeds of the present fall and destruction of Europe go back a great deal further, for they were inside it from the start. For the thousand years of its existence European Civilization has always been an alien amalgam of ruthlessly aggressive and bullying paganism, both Roman and Germanic, together with Christianity. Gradually, as we can already see from the feudal enslavement, sinister castle-building and blood-soaked crusades which lie at the foundation of Europe in the eleventh century, paganism triumphed over Christianity, Babylon triumphed over Jerusalem. And so today an American President can assert that sodomy is an integral ‘Western value’, and nobody is shocked. The crisis is therefore not a matter of fifty years, it is not even centennial, it is millennial.

Europe is a puzzle to be solved. Europe needs a solution to counter its present dissolution, a Divine glue to put all its pieces back together again. All the pieces are there, but there is no glue. There are Peter and Paul, Ignatius and Laurence, Sebastian and Alexis, Leo and Gregory, Anastasia and Agnes in Rome, Boniface in Ferentino, Ambrose in Milan, Benedict in Montecassino, Irinaeus in Lyon, Hilary in Poitiers, John Cassian in Marseille, Victor in Lerins, Julian in Le Mans, Ursula in Cologne, Willibrord in the Netherlands, Maurice in Switzerland, Senorhina in Portugal, Boniface in Germany, Anschar in Denmark, Lucy in Syracuse, Vincent in Valencia, Eulalia in Barcelona, Alban outside London, Olaf in Norway, Sigfrid in Sweden, David in Wales, Patrick in Ireland, Columba in Scotland, Denis and Genevieve in Paris and many, many more. All the pieces are all there, but they cannot be joined together. Europe cannot join them together by itself; It needs help from outside, it needs the forest to even see its trees, the overview to understand its holiness. Then all will fall into place.

Europe denies that it needs help from outside because it is technologically progressive and therefore ‘superior’; Europe has so long relied on itself for its successful material progress that it is too proud to ask for help, even when it realizes that it needs help and that material progress is a secondary thing. On account of this lack of humility it has again and again adopted many substitutes, false messiahs instead of Christ, from Papism to Lutheranism, from ‘Enlightenment’ to Revolution, from ‘Democracy’ to Marxism, from Fascism to Consumerism. But these have only proved to be failures and also shown the failure of material progress to satisfy human needs. Power, wealth and technology, however developed, are all deathly without the spiritual vitality of Faith. We have always known that they are false, but at the time Europe adopted each of them and believed in them wholeheartedly. Why? Because of its lack of humility, its inability to accept Christ precisely because He is not ‘European’, but Universal, uniting all, whereas Europe divides all.

And so Europe is spiritually regressive and cannot solve the puzzle it has set itself and glue the pieces back together again. Although it needs humility to accept from outside its deficient culture the glue which it is so sorely lacking, it is too proud to accept help from a ‘foreign’ (= Christian) culture. However, fifty years ago even the most smug and self-satisfied had begun to realize that Europe was in crisis. Thus, when at that time the Church of Christ returned to Western societies and started to become known, some Europeans were interested. However, history has shown us that some of those who were interested in reality did not want the Church; they wanted rather to ‘change the Church’, to impose their own agendas on the Church, they wanted a Westernized substitute for the real thing. So was born ‘Halfodoxy’, ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, ‘Orthodoxy Lite’, an emasculated and degutted religion. But this deathly fantasy that feeds the proud intellect but starves the humble heart, is already dying out, together with those who have promoted it.

The false messiahs of the West have included many spiritual deviations which deny the simple truth that real faith is a way of life. It is a system of beliefs and practices, sacramental and mystical, through Christ and the Holy Spirit, by which our life is brought into harmony with the Threefold Life Who created and rules the life of the whole universe. And that Life is called Love; hence St John says ‘He who does not love, does not know God, for God is love’. These spiritual deviations range from Origen-loving gnostic intellectualism, which announces that only the philosophers of the academy will be saved, to condemnation-loving pharisaic sectarianism, which announces that only the moralists of the ghetto will be saved, to sentimentalism-loving pietistic guruism, which announces that only those who do not know ascetic struggle will be saved. Essentially, however, the delusion of Europe is simply primitive paganism, a force once rejected as dead, but now reinvented and glorified with the illusory trappings of the immense power, wealth and technology of today.

It is profoundly sad that Europe has learned nothing from the fall of Communism. All that Europe can do is gloat over the fall of the Soviet Union; it cannot even see its own defeat, the recipe for its regeneration. Europe has missed the point. For Communism was the very essence of Western materialism and its downfall was therefore the triumph of Christ and the Cross over the West. Therefore only the heroic effort of Orthodoxy that conquered the Soviet Empire can now save the West. Yes, Europe has the pieces to its puzzle, but it is unable to stick them together. For that it needs Orthodoxy. Only Christ and true Christianity, which is what Orthodoxy means, can help it. Heresies of Christianity, produced again and again and again by Europeans, will not help – they, not really Christian, that is, not Orthodox, are responsible for the present crisis, the cause of the problems, not part of the solution. In any case, the heresies of Christianity have been utterly rejected by Europeans; their places of worship are neglected except by Asian and other tourists.

Pedophile-ridden European Establishments have lied to us for a thousand years; they have told us that, God-like, they have all the solutions, that they were the best, better than ‘the rest’. That was a lie, the lie. With only technological leadership but no spiritual leadership, Europe has enslaved itself and, through its New World colonies, the Western world enslaved all mankind to Mammon. So Europe has produced an inhuman and anti-spiritual order worldwide, which is nothing but the kingdom of Antichrist, waiting only for its Temple to be built and its King to be enthroned inside it. However, just as the apostles used Roman roads and all the imperial infrastructure to proclaim the kingdom of Christ, we use European infrastructure and technology to do so once again, thus providing that missing spiritual leadership to call the whole Europeanized and European world back from its delusions to repentance. Like St John the Baptist of old, the prophetic and visionary voices in the Church of God have been calling to repentance for years: now is the time.

A Parable (Part One)

There was once an Emperor called Europe, whose father, Emperor Nero, had been especially wicked. However, thanks to Emperor Europe’s marriage to the Good Empress called Orthodoxy, who was a beautiful and noble lady, Emperor Europe began to forget about his wicked father and his evil deeds. Emperor Europe did many fine things and it seemed as though the evils of Emperor Nero were a thing of the past.

All went well at the beginning of their marriage until one day Emperor Europe began thinking about how rich and powerful his father, Emperor Nero, had been. He thought about he too could become just as rich and powerful. He was supported in this by a prostitute he had met. She seemed to be very beautiful and her name was Secularism. She told him that if only Emperor Europe would marry her, she would make him the richest and most powerful Emperor in the world and that he would rule over all the countries in the world.

Some say that Emperor Europe went mad. Others that a demon entered into him. Others say that it was all genetics – the repressed bad genes from his father had been triggered by his association with Secularism. In any case he did the most outrageous thing: he exiled Empress Orthodoxy to the east and a vast and empty land of forests and steppes and married Secularism, making her his new Empress.

Then the wicked Emperor, directed by the wicked Empress, began re-introducing all the customs of his wicked father, changing the faith, even claiming that God proceeded from him, putting up statues, forcing the priests to shave and making them eat biscuits in church. And then, incredibly, he, yes he!, accused Empress Orthodoxy of being unfaithful to him! Empress Secularism, who was an exceedingly jealous woman, was very happy.

Meanwhile, however, the vast land of Empress Orthodoxy had become powerful and influential, freeing peoples around the world who had been massacred, invaded, occupied and cruelly exploited by the wicked Emperor Europe and the wicked Empress Secularism. The wicked Emperor and his Empress were very jealous and sent armies of all the wicked men of European Empire to invade their land.

First General Teuton went and he was followed by General Pole. But they both failed. Then they sent General Napoleon, a little later General Crimea and then General Kaiser, They too failed, So then they sent General Revolution. Although General Revolution managed to kill Emperor Orthodoxy using wicked men, he did not manage to kill Empress Orthodoxy. So Emperor Europe sent General Hitler, but he too failed miserably, even though he did great harm, causing massacres and destruction.

After some years Emperor Europe and Empress Secularism had two sons, whom they called Eurosodom and Gomorrhica. It was at that time that, urged on by their sons, they decided to invade the land of Empress Orthodoxy again. This time, before invading, they decided to tell as many lies as possible about the Good Empress Orthodoxy, just as they had at the beginning, and accuse her of being unfaithful, servile, drunken, corrupt, cruel, barbaric, despotic, violent, uncivilized, ugly, evil and even mentally ill! They were of course talking about themselves in every detail, but many silly people fell for these wicked lies. This all happened in the year 2014.

(Part Two of this Parable will appear later – before the end of the world).

The Restoration of Europe and of Russia

The eleventh century made the distinction between the secular and the ecclesiastical fundamental to European society and culture for the first time and permanently. Since this distinction was the foundation on which European civilization has been constructed, it is not easy for Europe’s children to remember that it might have been otherwise. Our history has been written by the victors in the struggle to bring this social order into being, in the certainty that their victory was right, and because it was right, inevitable. By the middle of the twelfth century the victors dominated the record almost entirely and their spiritual descendants occupied the commanding heights of European historiography until the Enlightenment, and of much of European education, including higher education, until well into the twentieth century.

The First European Revolution c. 975-1215, R.I. Moore, Pp. 12-13

Introduction: A Spiritual Pilgrimage

I am one of ‘Europe’s children’, one of those who in the second half of the twentieth century ‘remembered’, first by instinct and then by knowledge, ‘that it might have been otherwise’ in Europe. In other words, I made a spiritual pilgrimage to the roots of Europe and found Another Europe. This was made possible firstly by the fact that I had been born into a family linked with farming in the English countryside, so into the most traditional of backgrounds. This took me back beyond the little that those in the big towns were allowed to know, especially those uprooted in unEnglish London, back to the great realm of lost knowledge. Secondly, with shock my father, a soldier of the Second World War, also told me in childhood what he had seen of the unjust way that the imperialist Norman British Establishment behaved in Egypt and in other colonies, a way completely at odds with the far older, neighbour-loving, Christian traditions of popular England. All this gave me a sense of the beyond, a sense of piercing the veil beyond the present and superficial, getting through to the essence and roots of things, and also to a sense of my own destiny.

The Consequence of the Sense of Beyond

The sense of the beyond came to me in my discovery of the Old Saints of England, who had lived locally. Their names in some form or other had been passed down in local place names, which is how I first came to hear of them, and yet their lives and feats had been made into foolish legends or else wholly forgotten: Felix, Cedd, Botolph, Audrey, Osyth, Albright, Edmund, Alfred and many others who witnessed to holiness, that which was quite unknown to the England of the present, meaning that all manner of charlatan could claim to be holy without being so. I noticed that these Old Saints had all lived long before the Middle Ages, itself a period long before the rapidly disappearing Protestant present of fifty years ago. And then I discovered at the age of twelve that that past was still alive in spirit in Orthodox Christian Russia and indeed in all the other much smaller and captive Local Orthodox Churches. At that time, however, the Russian Orthodox Church was Herself captive to an atheist regime, the ultimate, fully anti-Christian result of the spiritual degeneration of the Western world which had first begun to lose its way precisely by forgetting its saints, its Felixes, Cedds, Botolphs, Audreys, Osyths, Albrights, Edmunds, Alfreds and many others.

The Double Restoration

Therefore it has somehow been my calling, obviously in a very, very modest way, to help contribute to a double restoration. Firstly, there has been the restoration, contributed to by so many, of the veneration of those Old Saints, not only of Old England but of all Old Europe. And secondly, especially in the last twenty-five years since the slow but long hoped-for resurrection of Russia began, and again in a very, very modest way, to help contribute from outside Russia to the restoration, contributed to by so many others who have played far, far more important roles, of the Centre of the Orthodox Church in Russia. This has meant struggling for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy against all deviations to left and right, both inside the Russian Church and in the other Local Churches. And this has also meant defending the Incarnation of Orthodoxy into life, both inside Russia and also in other lands, through the preparation and hope for the restoration of the Christian Emperor, the Tsar. For, since our Faith is not some private, individualistic, Protestant-style fantasy, this incarnational public restoration is the only thing that stands between us and the apocalyptic End of the World.

Conclusion: Hope Against Hope

I have lived and fought for the Church of God, quite naturally centred outside the secularist Anti-Europe which in its anti-Christian delusions so fears, hates and tries to destroy the Centre of the Church. I have done this so that ‘it might be otherwise’. I have challenged the victors and their spiritual descendants, the historiographers, who have supported that false and secularist millennial social order. In the certainty that their victory was not only wrong, but also not at all inevitable, I therefore venerate the Saints of Old Europe and honour all the others for whom it was otherwise. I have struggled to reverse the temporary, though millennial, victory of their Anti-Europe and unfolded the vision that it once was and again shall be ‘otherwise’. For in the third millennium the revolutionary New Europe, that is, the second millennium Anti-Europe presaged by Charlemagne in Aachen, may yet be overthrown. Thus, first millennium Old Europe can be spiritually restored through the Church of God in Europe, made possible as a Metropolitan extension of the Christian Empire of a restored Holy Rus.

The Battle for European Civilization

Introduction

In history the manipulators who stand behind the official rulers of the world have gone under many different names, but their objective has always been the same: global domination under a single world leader come to power by the manipulated mob. Whether the puppets who officially rule have been evil fanatics (Hitler), captives (Merkel), simply stupid (for example, Bush Junior) or extremely vain and so self-deluded (for example, Blair, Cameron, Obama), the puppeteers (today called neocons) fear only one thing. This is the re-emergence of a Sovereign Ruler who denies them the world domination they so ardently seek for the one who deludes their vanity too. Such denial would come about by that Sovereign’s adherence to spiritual independence, spiritual values, spiritual resistance and popular support for him. This is why they have always sought the overthrow of Christian monarchs – at no time so obviously as since 1914.

Free Russia

Although today the puppeteers fear powerful Non-Western rulers, whether in China, the Muslim world or Latin America, their greatest fear by far is the re-emergence of a new Russian Empire. This is because it is the only possible Christian Empire in the world, ruled by a Christian Emperor, a Tsar. Thus, when President Putin two weeks ago in his regular phone-in programme to the public apologized for what the USSR did under Stalin in 1945, making captive the very Eastern Europe which Soviet forces had just liberated from Fascism, the pro-Fascist neocons were alarmed. This is because they have always tried to make out that President Putin is a new Stalin and that his policy is to recreate a Stalinist Soviet Union. If that fantasy were the case, they could easily discredit him.

They would be equally happy if the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is the spiritual backbone of any re-emergence of the Christian Empire, Tsardom, were limited to a tiny number of zealots or if the Church could be divided or ‘Balkanized’, as in Macedonia or the far western Ukraine. Alternatively, the Church could perhaps be CIA-controlled, as with the Vatican and the Phanar, or intellectualized, as in Paris, or divided into many warring sects like the Protestants (which is why the CIA funds old calendarist sects which feed on their neophyte and immigrant pathologies and self-justifying Russophobia). Then the Russian Orthodox Church could be dismissed as a piece of irrelevant folklore, the domain of a tiny and disincarnate minority, without any constructive, civilizational force. What they really fear is the revival of the Church’s incarnational values which spread to the masses and to the State, so resulting in the restoration of the Orthodox Emperor, the Christian Empire.

Free Europe

What they then fear is the next stage. This is that a Russian Orthodox Emperor, a new Tsar, would be recognized as Emperor by the rest of the Orthodox world. Already the neocons of the EU are turning Greece and Cyprus to Russia. And even though Bulgaria, Romania and increasingly Serbia (with Montenegro and Macedonia) are governed by EU-selected elites, many among the people there are also looking to Russia. Indeed, even in countries with only small Orthodox minorities but which neighbour Russia, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Lands, there are many who also look to Russia. Even in Poland many are now looking to Russia to protect Christians in the Middle East, given their abandonment by the anti-Christian West.

What the neocons fear next is the potential spread of Orthodoxy and the spirit of independence beyond Eastern Europe to Western Europe. One of the favourite accusations of such secularists is that Orthodox Christianity is anti-Civilization, anti-cultural, ‘obscurantist’. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Here are a few cases of Russian Orthodox Western Europeans whom I know or have known personally:

A Russian Orthodox Archbishop, the son of the last Minister of Culture in the Weimar Republic and so dismissed by the anti-culture Hitler.

An aristocratic friend in France who is a descendant of the French King Louis XV.

A Russian Orthodox priest’s wife who is the cousin of the Italian film star Claudia Cardinale.

An acquaintance, received into the Russian Orthodox Church, who was a renowned British composer and knight of the realm.

An Orthodox priest’s wife who was the niece of the Czech artist Alfons Mucha.

A Russian Orthodox Portuguese layman close to the former Portuguese Royal Family.

A Russian Orthodox Swedish priest, formerly a senior member of the Swedish Lutheran Church.

Why are there so many such examples? Because the Christian Faith in its uncompromised form, that is, its Russian Orthodox form, is at the root of the European culture of over 1,000 years ago and spiritually sensitive Western people know it. They have realized that if European culture, now being made atheist by secularization or being crushed by Islamization, is to be saved and rebuilt from the ruins of the great European suicide since 1914, this can only be done through Russian Orthodoxy.

Conclusion

Here is the nightmare of the puppeteer neocons, that all their long-held plans will be dashed, that there will once more be a Tsar in Russia, a restored and united Orthodox Empire and that a Europe of Patriots, of Free Nations, will see through their manipulation and abandon their EU project. Thus, they will throw off the US-cloned EU superstructure, the United States of Europe. Then Europe could spiritually revive with the help of the new Sovereign Ruler and Tsar of the resurgent Orthodox Empire centred in Russia. Thus, the outlying parts of the Orthodox world in the Balkans and elsewhere and through them the former outlying provinces of the Orthodox world in Western Europe will be spiritually united once more and the veneration of the ancient Western saints restored. A millennium of injustice overthrown? This is what is at stake.

Christ is Risen!

From Recent Correspondence (March-April 2015)

On the Destiny of the Church Outside Russia

Q: What was the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) supposed to do in the eighty-five years between its formation in the early 1920s and the reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007?

A: Our first calling was to obey the Gospel by beginning the preaching of Orthodoxy worldwide before the end (Matt 24, 14), which we were providentially enabled to start by virtue of being scattered throughout the world. In other words, it was our calling to bring the serious (and not superficial hobbyists) into the Church, to contact all those who realize that the Church is higher than the spiritual impurity of any national establishment and local culture.

Our preaching was called to be the preaching of Orthodoxy without either of the compromises caused by spiritual impurity, that is, to be real Orthodox Christians free of both provincial and inward-looking Russian nationalism on the one hand, and of the modernist, Protestant-style illusions of disincarnate modernism on the other hand. This preaching was to lay the foundations of the preaching of the Gospel in the Orthodox context so that then, once the Church inside Russia was free and we were strengthened and reinforced from Russia, we could accomplish this great task together.

Our second calling was to canonize the New Martyrs and Confessors. This was the only way of conquering atheism inside Russia and so working for the restoration of the Tsar, the Orthodox Monarchy, the protector of all Orthodox peoples and all who know that beyond the veil of this secular world there is a world to come, the world of spiritual reality, the real world. Atheism inside Russia could not be conquered by military means. Both the White Movement after 1917 and the Vlasov Movement of the Second World War failed precisely because they tried to use military means to conquer atheism. You can only fight evil spirits with spiritual weapons, as the Apostle Paul wrote: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’ (Ephesians 6, 12).

This need for spiritual weapons is why it took until 1981 for the Church Outside Russia to canonize the New Martyrs and Confessors. It should have happened much earlier but, very sadly, political and nationalistic elements in ROCOR resisted. The True White Movement, which is the essence of the whole Russian Orthodox Church, is a spiritual movement, not a political movement and those political elements had to be overcome before their canonization was possible. I personally knew many parishioners in various ROCOR churches, not least in the London parish, who were opposed to the canonization. To the scandal of the faithful, they thought in secular and nationalistic categories and held back our part of the Russian Church from accomplishing her mission and so fulfilling her destiny.

Q: What is the calling of ROCOR today?

A: As soon as Russia was freed, we were called on to ally ourselves with Her as closely as possible, thus strengthening both parts of the Church. The earthly remains of Russian Orthodox heroes like Ivan Ilyin had already been returned to the Centre, we too were to return, although spiritually we had always been there. In order to return, we had to avoid the various nationalistic and political traps that had been set us by the world. It is sad that some political, that is secular-minded, elements fell into them. The destiny of the whole Russian Diaspora and her missions was to return to the liberated Centre, in order to stand together with her in solidarity. The alternative was to fall into a hopeless provincialism and parochialism, which is exactly what befell the marginal fringes who broke away from the Church in the Diaspora for various ghetto-like sects, whether renovationist and modernist on the left (Paris, North America) or old calendarist and nationalist (ROCOR dissidents) on the right.

Q: You say ‘as soon as Russia was freed’. So why did ROCOR not reunite as soon as 1992, after the fall of the atheist government there?

A: There were naïve, patriotic, nostalgic and very emotional individuals in ROCOR, often very elderly, who did reunite or wanted to do so immediately. I do not judge them. But since 1972 I had known the leaders of the old ‘Moscow Patriarchate’, as it was called, from inside and I knew how corrupt it was, especially in the Diaspora. The fall of atheist government was one thing, the spread of a Non-Soviet and fully Orthodox mentality to the top of the Church took time.

For example, there was no possibility of unity with it in England until the self-cleansing of 2006 when at long last Moscow appointed an Orthodox and not a renovationist bishop, the present Archbishop Elisey. It was one thing not to have an atheist government after 75 years, but it was another for the old Soviet-style reflexes to change and see the practical consequences of freedom in the Church hierarchy, with the deaths of the old school of Soviet appointees who did incalculable harm to the Church, rejecting the faithful and self-sacrificing and persecuting the zealous and God-loving.

There were so many appalling scandals from that time. ROCOR could never unite with such spiritual impurity which was working against the Church. Our hearts are still deeply wounded by what we went through at that time and we feel so sorry for those who died without repentance. Indeed, the real Orthodox inside the old Soviet-style Patriarchate, like Archbishop Anatoly in England, actually told us to have nothing to do with the Patriarchate until it was inwardly free. I can remember him saying that in 2003. And inward freedom only came to it in May 2006. It then took us in ROCOR one year to get ourselves ready for the inevitable.

Q: What about those elements in the Church inside Russia who are themselves still today modernist or otherwise sectarian?

A: There are a few rather absurd and very old-fashioned individuals on the fringes of the Church inside Russia, leftist dissident leftovers from the recent Soviet past, like Fr George Kochetkov (whom the modernists wanted to serve at the Patriarchal Cathedral in London), the hippyish and disgraced Deacon Andrei Kuraev or naïve admirers of the heretic Fr Sergiy Bulgakov and modernists and dreamers of the schools of Schmemann, Bloom and other strange émigré cults, or others who are simplistic, rightist Old Ritualist-type sectarians, but they are all irrelevant to the mainstream. In a Church of 164 million, you will inevitably find a few marginal types. In Russia they have no authority or role whatsoever and people generally mock them.

A few eccentric individuals hardly prevent us from our great task of resurrecting Christian Imperial Russia, which we are all engaged in together, inside and outside Russia, in total unity of purpose. Everywhere in Russia you will find icons of the Royal Family – that is key. we work very closely with all who venerate them because they are Churched Orthodox. If Christian Imperial Russia is resurrected, then the whole Orthodox world will be resurrected, and so we can protect all who have values and understand that the ultimate destiny of all humanity is in the life to come and not in primitive Darwinism and pagan Secularism. It is foolish to spend much time dwelling on such marginal individuals; we must not waste our time looking at eccentric, individual and irrelevant trees who are so easy to resist, we must speak with and move forward with the great and irresistible forest, ever onwards to what God is calling us to do. We are people of destiny.

Q: At the 2006 Diaspora Council in San Francisco at least one voice spoke with concern about the present Patriarch who was then a Metropolitan. Was that a reasonable concern?

A: Thee greatest miracle of God is that He changes people. Look at the apostles, Peter lied, the disciples fled from the Cross, Paul persecuted the Church. But they all repented – except for Judas who despaired and hanged himself. Repentance is always possible – only pharisees, like those who criticized Christ’s visit to Zacchaeus, do not understand that. I think that the Soviet-born Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad who twenty years ago opposed reconciliation with the Church Outside Russia was one person, our Patriarch Kyrill is another. And make no mistake, he is OUR Patriarch. He has been transfigured by the grace and international responsibility of becoming Patriarch and is now able to represent all Russian Orthodox all around the world, as no-one else. I have only met him twice, but I am convinced of this. He understands us and has a profound sense of the role of the restoration of Holy Rus, of the global mission of the Russian Orthodox Church and Her Tradition. This is a miracle.

On Non-Orthodox

Q: Can you explain in the simplest of terms and without mentioning the word filioque the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy?

A: Catholicism came into existence some 1,000 years ago, theologically and then immediately structurally. Although it preserved the Revelation of the Old Testament, that there is only One God, and the Revelation of the New Testament, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God become man, it failed to preserve the Revelation of the Church, that Christ is with us and we are with Him by the Holy Spirit. This happened when at the defining moment of its foundation Catholicism replaced the Holy Spirit with the Pope of Rome. In this way Catholicism replaced the authority of the Church, which is holiness, whose source is the Holy Spirit, with a mere man. Here is the difference between Catholicism, which is essentially a Trinitarian heresy, and the Church: The Pope or the Holy Spirit. As St Seraphim of Sarov, whose resurrection we now await, said: ‘The goal of Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit’. It is not to obey a man who lives in Rome.

Q: Do Catholicism and Protestantism have sacraments?

A: There are no sacraments outside the Church, however, there are sacramental forms. These have been preserved as a heritage, as vestiges from the past. In other words, outside the Church there are wine-glasses (however deformed and defective they may be) but they contain no wine. Thus, Catholicism has seven sacramental forms and classical Protestantism (the sort that baptizes by water in the Name of the Holy Trinity) has one – baptism. Thus, in receiving people from what I call ‘Frankish religion’ (Catholicism/Protestantism) into Christianity, the Church does not absolutely need to repeat the sacramental form (though She can if She considers it better to do so in the specific circumstances). What is vital is to communicate the wine, not the wine-glass. For example, Uniats have a wine-glass which is almost identical in form to the Orthodox wine-glass, but it still contains no wine.

Q: Are you saying then that Catholics and Protestants have no grace at all? That seems harsh.

A: No, I am not saying that at all. That is old calendarist ‘light-switch’ black and white ideology – one moment you have grace, the next you do not. The truth is much more subtle.

According to Orthodox Christian theology, the Holy Spirit can come to us in two different ways. Firstly, He comes to us through the Body of Christ, the Church. This only works if we are real Orthodox, that is, practising members of the Church, living limbs (and not withered or nominal branches) of the Body of Christ. If we are outside the Church, we can receive no grace in this way. Secondly, however, the Holy Spirit can come to us directly. This is what happened to the prophets of the Old Testament, who were also outside the Church, and this is also what happens to those outside the Church who receive the calling of God to join the Church, whether they were first-century Jews and Greeks, third-century Latins, sixth-century English, tenth-century Kievans, nineteenth-century Alaskans, Chinese and Japanese, or twenty-first century Western European Catholics and Protestants.

Q: Speaking on the subject of married priests, a French Catholic bishop recently said that the life of Orthodox priests is ‘infernal’ because they have to combine family life and parish life, and therefore he is against married priests. What would you say?

A: The life of an Orthodox priest is certainly difficult. But who said that it would be easy to get into Paradise? I find it amazing that a Catholic bishop would think that it is easy to get into Paradise! This is the same spirit that asks why we Orthodox stand at services, whereas they sit down in comfort. They have no concept of the ascetic. As for Catholic priests – and I know many of them in various European countries – many (usually the best ones) have a mistress and children, many others – and I have met them – are homosexuals and pedophiles. Recently I was speaking to a Polish taxi-driver in Colchester. He comes from Krakow, which is the Polish Canterbury. He told me that he had made his living there ferrying priests, monks and seminarians to brothels. When I was in Portugal 20 years ago, I visited the Portuguese Canterbury, a city called Braga. Local people called it the city of the two Ps – priests and prostitutes. Now that is what I call infernal. What infernal hypocrisy on the part of that Catholic bishop…Has he met the pedophile former Catholic Bishop of Glasgow?

Q: How would you describe the Church of England and the rest of the Anglican Communion?

A: Anglicanism is a Gothic shell, the shell of Catholicism, a kind of Protestant Uniatism, preserving an outward semblance, even a ritual imitation of a sort of Catholicism, but devoid of even Catholic content. The Church of England is State-founded and State-run, founded by a mass murderer and destroyer of monastic life, an English Lenin, who like him also died of syphilis. The Head of the real Church is no such murderous blasphemer, but Christ the Son of God.

Q: Do you think that the Church of England will one day have a female Archbishop of Canterbury?

A: It would be thoroughly logical. Since any secular institution can be headed by a man or a woman, why should the Church of England be any different? As a matter of fact it was a woman, Elizabeth I, who composed the doctrines of the Church of England and it is a woman, Elizabeth II, who heads it at present. Only misogynists can be against female heads of secular organizations.

Q: Do you think the Church of England will eventually introduce homosexual marriage?

A: It is highly likely. It always takes orders from the British Establishment, whether on its doctrines, the EU, fox-hunting or buggery, which is so widespread in that public-school Establishment. The Church of England has always followed the government of the day, ignoring the truism that the American writer Mark Twain expressed: ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it’.

Q: Can those of what you call ‘Frankish religion’ help us in combating secularism, abortion, euthanasia etc?

A: Individually definitely, but sadly the institutions that such virtuous individuals belong to are actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. More and more of them are realizing this. For instance, I was talking to a group of anti-abortion Catholics last year and I saw that they were horrified by their own episcopate, whom they completely distrusted.

Q: Are any of the Orthodox jurisdictions in England close to the Church of England?

A: Virtually all the 300 or so English members of the Antiochian jurisdiction in this country are former clergy and laypeople of the Establishment Church of England. Many seem to be profoundly Anglican, using the Anglican calendar, church-buildings and vestments, so I am not sure why they made the change. They seem to be dedicated to converting other Establishment Anglicans to themselves, ordaining men within days of their reception into the Church in order to do so. This policy of Anglicans only seems very narrow to me, as it repels the vast majority. This is not the way of the Church – our mission is to the people, to the masses, to the whole country, to the 99% of people in England who have never had any real link with the Church of England.

Thus, I know of one ex-Anglican Antiochian priest who has banned the use of any language other than English in his chapel and sends away Romanians telling them that he has no time for them, yet spends hours with prospective Anglican converts, whom he receives very quickly and then very soon lapse. He rejects reality. The clergy are here to serve the people of God, not ourselves, not our personal fantasies. This is just Anglican clericalism. Another wealthy ex-Anglican (in another jurisdiction, it must be said) told me that he liked ‘small churches’ with select groups of English people only and did not want any ‘foreigners’ in his church. This is typical of Establishment racism, regardless of jurisdiction.

Q: But surely the mere existence of the Antiochian jurisdiction in the UK is because of Greek and Russian racism? The Anglicans in question asked to join both the Greek and Russian Churches first and were refused on racial grounds, so the Anglicans got into the Orthodox house ‘by the back window’, that is, through a special arrangement with Antioch.

A: I absolutely agree that the then Soviet-enslaved Moscow Patriarchate and the Church of Constantinople refused them, the latter because of racism and both because they were not politically free to receive them because of their ecumenist compromises. However, the Anglicans in question made one huge mistake on account of their Establishment mentality – they came with their own agenda and list of demands. In this way they refused the Cross, that is, they refused to ask to join ROCOR, the free Russian Church which had and has no ecumenist compromises. We would have received all sincere Anglicans happily, only we would have made sure that they became Orthodox first and would have trained their future clergy how to celebrate etc.

It is no good joining the Orthodox Church without first becoming Orthodox. Otherwise it is just the religion of the Establishment, Anglicanism, or Anglo-Catholicism, with icons. All Churched Orthodox reject that; we know in our guts that it is wrong. What has happened since their refusal to come to ROCOR is that the ex-Anglicans in question have become marginal, finding themselves on an isolated wing of the Church, outside the Orthodox mainstream. So much has been wasted in this way. Similarly Establishment Anglicans who joined the Church of Constantinople have had to undergo Hellenization, having to take on hyper-Greek names like Kallistos, Pankratios, Aristovoulos, Panteleimon etc., whereas the Greek clergy themselves anglicize their names and are called John, Gregory, Peter, Paul etc!

On the Contemporary Western World and the End of the World

Q: What would you say of the present spiritual state of Western Europe in general?

A: Western European countries are increasingly and paradoxically typified by Secularism on the one hand and Islamism on the other hand. For example, the name Mohammed in its various spellings last year became the most common boy’s name in London and there is a wave of mosque-building throughout Western Europe. However, at the same time the secularists who control Western governments and media are completely indifferent to the tens of thousands of Christian victims of Islamist fanaticism throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa and the tens of thousands of Christian victims of the Nazi junta in Kiev. Why? Because those being killed ‘are not Charlie’, in other words, not anti-Christian secularists like themselves. And who will say at the end of time: ‘Je suis Charlie’? It is Antichrist.
So in the West we have the perfect combination of Secularism and Islamism.

Q: Are there not aspects of Islam that we can appreciate?

A: Moderate or Traditional Islam, as opposed to Islamism, condemns violence and keeps certain universal practices like other traditional religions. Thus, Muslim women dress modestly, for instance, wearing a head covering, a universal practice except in the post-1914 secular West.

Q: More and more Western countries allow euthanasia. What do you think of this?

A: In his short story ‘The Veiled Lodger’, written over 100 years ago, a secular writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said: ‘If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest…The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world’. In other words, euthanasia, like any other form of suicide, is the result of an ideology that does not believe in the immortality of the soul and in life after death. All belief rejects euthanasia, but where there is no belief, there is suicide. In this sense euthanasia is symbolic of today’s Western world as a whole – as a suicidal world.

Q: What do you think of the experiment with the Large Hadron Collider on the French and Swiss borders? Some people say that it could lead to a catastrophe.

A: I am not a scientist and am simply not qualified to have an opinion and say whether it will lead to a catastrophe or whether it is perfectly safe. However, since it a vast and vastly expensive experiment concerning the nature of matter, I think we can say that it does represent the Western obsession with the material world as opposed to the spiritual world. In general, I am suspicious of such large experiments and operations. As someone said centuries ago: ‘The chief proof of man’s greatness lies in his perception of his smallness’. And as has been said more recently, ‘Small is Beautiful’. In other words, this is all a question of humility. But I am not able to say any more than that.

Q: How should we vote in the forthcoming elections in the UK?

A: Pray and then vote according to your conscience, voting for whomever you consider to be the lesser evil.

Q: Is there a change you would like to see in Great Britain?

A: I would like to see the concept of ‘Britain’ rejected once and for all. It would mean freedom for all of us from tyrannical ‘Britain’ and its Norman Establishment. As a dream, I would like to see four independent but friendly and co-operating nations, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Their representatives would gather in a round building, a ‘Council of the Isles’, on a high point on the Isle of Man, from where alone the four countries in question are all visible.

Q: Where is the Western world going?

A: The USA controls the Western countries through their elites which have been installed by US PR companies as feudal vassals. All that the Western elites do is in imitation of the USA, its clothes, its food, its television series, its media. Here are four recent statistics about the sex and violence of the USA, which God-fearing Americans know and for which they detest the White House:

85% of the world’s pornography comes from the USA.

Every day 24 former GIs who served in Iraq and Afghanistan commit suicide.

In March 2015 the American police killed twice as many people than the British police have killed since 1900.

In a recent global poll representatives from all the countries of the world, except for the USA, UK and France, declared that Public Enemy No 1 is the USA.

Should not such statistics make us think? It seems to me that either the Western world, especially the USA, is on the point of some great disaster, a hurricane, a tornado, a volcano, an earthquake, a tidal wave, or else it is on the point of repentance, of realizing its foolishness and turning back. It can go either way, but it cannot continue with impunity as now. It is not possible. Our actions always have consequences. It is called responsibility.

Q: Is Antichrist coming soon?

A: Nobody knows if he has even been born, let alone if he is coming to power. However there are clear signs that his coming is being PREPARED. Notably, there are these four signs: worldwide sodomy imposed by Washington and willingly promoted by the Western European elite; the genocide and expulsion of all Christians from of the Middle East; the war between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims, actively encouraged and financed by Zionism; the invasion of the western marches of Rus by the forces of Satan and their occupation of Kiev, the Mother of Russian Cities.

As yet, however, the Temple has not been rebuilt on Zion and, in general, we should not despair and certainly not fall into fatalism. I think that the coming of Antichrist has been delayed many times in history, not least last year, when the Ukrainian people rose up and fought the Satanic forces that the White House has put into power in Kiev. Despite the American threat of nuclear war, Russia did not rise to the bait and sweep away the junta within a fortnight, as it could have. That would have led to the end of the world with nuclear war started by the Nazi neocons in Washington and their paid allies: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Condoleeza Rice, Tony Blair, Carl Bildt and all those other satanists who have spoken directly of destroying the Church of God. As long as we fight and resist Satan, Antichrist cannot come. It all depends on us.

Q: ‘It all depends on us’. But what can we do?

A: At present we are resisting and fighting. There is no time to lose. Together all Orthodox who have an understanding of Orthodoxy have to work together. The visit of the new Greek Prime Minister to President Putin is a great sign of hope. President Putin gave the Greek leader, who says he is an atheist but in fact is just spiritually inexperienced, an icon which had been stolen by the Nazis from Greece. This was highly symbolic. The soul of Greece has indeed been stolen by the West. Now is the time of restoration. This is a personal message to the young Greek leader, but also a message to the whole Greek people. Restore your soul and give up on Nazism, both the old form and the new neocon form of the US/EU.

It is the same in Romania and Bulgaria. Satan is now trying to steal the souls of the Ukraine, Serbia, Moldova, Georgia – everywhere the same processes. Even in Western Europe there are those of us who are also fighting – for the liberation of the Western Lands from the West, for the ‘de-Europeanization of Europe’ and the restoration of Orthodoxy here too. Together, as conscious Orthodox, as the Army of Christ, we can conquer the Satanic spirit of Mammon and its sinister and idolatrous forces.

When asked how Russia could defeat the far superior American armed forces (each year the USA spends eleven times more on arms than Russia), over twenty years ago now the great and newly-revealed St Paisios the Athonite replied: ‘The Russians will win because the angels will help them’. We see such huge solidarity between all the conscious Orthodox peoples, from Damascus to Nicosia, from Belgrade to Kiev, from Bucharest to Sofia, from Athens to Moscow.

The time will come when Constantinople will be freed. And make no mistake Constantinople will not be freed so much from the Turks as from the Americans. But first there will be a Tsar in Russia for all Orthodox and he will call a real and free Council of all the Orthodox, not a diplomatic nicety. And that Council will not waste time talking about the US-imposed secularist agenda of human rights, racial discrimination and gender equality, it will thunder out the truths of the Church, about the Nation and the Family, which the Western world has deliberately forgotten in the cold and dark tomb, where Satan has buried its soul.

And then there will be a new generation of bishops in Constantinople, not appointees of the US State Department, but taken from the monks of Mt Athos, who, never forget it, are in the jurisdiction of Constantinople and who so eagerly support and pray for the Risen Russia. The old decadence will be gone and those pseudo-bishops who parrot the politically correct doctrines taught them by the Zionist CIA, visit synagogues and change the services will be gone. Great difficulties, but also great days, lie ahead for us all. The time will come, as St John of Shanghai prophesied, when you will hear ‘Christ is Risen’ shouted all through the Orthodox world, with an intensity and faith and conviction and unity that you have never heard before.

On Easter Night, after the Gospels at the Liturgy, I heard an insistent voice in my head speaking in Russian. It said: ‘Budet Tsar v Rossii’ – ‘There will be a Tsar in Russia’. Do not ask me how or when or who. That was the voice. I wonder if others heard the same voice?

Christ is Risen!

Our Role and Destiny As

…Faithful Orthodox

Since the Western elite had successfully neutralized the vestiges of Christianity in the West, deforming them into self-justification for its planetary greed and insatiable ambition, it next had to neutralize the Church. This was the spiritual meaning of the twentieth century. Thus, after the Western-orchestrated overthrow of the legitimate Russian government in 1917, an example of Western regime-change long before the more recent, well-rehearsed example in Kiev in 2014, the West set about dividing the Orthodox Church by establishing ‘Halfodoxy’ and persecuting us through atheistic Communism and atheistic Nazism. It need to devise and impose a religion in which the sacred had become secular, a Halfodoxy so secularized that it would be indistinguishable in its essence from modern Catholicism and Protestantism.

Through the soft and impoverished underbelly of the Church in Constantinople, Western agents, first British, then American, began to implement their time-worn policy of divide and rule. From there they moved step by step to the Balkans and the Middle East, little by little crushing resistance. In this way, it invented the myth of two Orthodoxies, one spiritually and morally compromised, new calendarist, masonic and modernistic, which it unfairly and libellously dubbed ‘Greek Orthodoxy’, and the other, faithful to the Orthodox Tradition, whose bastion is in Russia, for long inaccessible to the West, ironically protected by militant atheism. That did not prevent them from perverting Russian Orthodoxy on the fringes, among Westernized Russian emigres, corrupt individuals and politicized nationalists of all origins.

…Members of the Church Outside Russia

During the captivity of the Church inside Russia, unlike the politicized Pharisees who condemned and condemn the repentance of the fallen and forgiveness for them, the faithful of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR, fulfilled our role and destiny of loyalty to the whole Russian Church. We waited for freedom inside Russia, so that we could play our role in the greater destiny of the whole Russian Church. When the faithful inside Russia had been taken hostage and underwent persecution from atheists and their spiritual twins the renovationists, we witnessed in freedom and in many languages, fighting for Christ spiritually against compromises and treachery. This meant isolation, mockery and even excommunication from those who had given themselves up to the spirit of this world, but we carried on despite them.

Now that the Church inside Russia is free, we can witness to Russian Orthodoxy worldwide, together with local representatives of the Church inside Russia. It means that at last we have a voice strong enough to make contact with those outside Russia who are our allies, an opening to those who have seen through the millennial Western myths, both those on high and among the humble. No longer can we be dismissed by the propaganda of the enemies of Christ as ‘schismatic’, ‘reactionary’ and ‘a tiny group of foreign immigrants who are dying out’. Such enemies now have to recognize us as a force to be reckoned with. From Europe to South-East Asia, from Australia to Latin America, from North America to Indonesia, ‘we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and into the Greeks foolishness (I Cor 1, 23).

…Orthodox Living in the Contemporary West

Today the neocons in Washington say like the post-Protestants they are, ‘as we are all saved but you are going to hell anyway, therefore we can destroy you’. Thus, they fantasize about launching a nuclear war against Russia and, in the words of one Nazi-sympathizing US general, ‘killing Russians’. Not only has Washington declared war on Russia, but so has its puppet elite in several EU and other countries, all fanatical vassals of the neocons. However, not all Europeans by far agree with the neocon elites. There are still patriotic Europeans who seek Christ and oppose the aggressive and hubristic anti-Christian Western elite. They look to a Europe which does not invade other countries and start wars, but only fights to defend itself and others against Western aggression and opposes Eurosodom. That Europe is called Russia.

In this sense, ‘Russia’ is not a country or a state or a nationality, but a spirit and a civilization, indeed, the centre of Orthodox Christian civilization. This is the centre which after a generation is raising itself up from the ruination of Western-imposed materialism into the alternative Europe, the Europe which is opposed to the post-Christian world and its anti-values. And that and that alone is why the neocons have declared war on the Church of God. They have declared war on those who love Christ and therefore propose a unity different from theirs, a Eurasian unity from Lisbon to Vladivostok, a unity of sovereignty and freedom, a unity in Christ. The neocons created an ‘Arab Spring’, a movement of terror, bloodshed and destruction. We propose a ‘European Spring’, a Spring of Christianity and Civilization.

Orthodox England

events 'blog

Category Archives: Europe

Towards Palmyra

Afterword: The Euro-Orthodox Alternative to an Orthodox Europe

An Appeal for Faithfulness and for Unity

Ten Centuries of Institutional Secularism: The Despair of the Contemporary World and the Hope of the Church

The Dissolution of Europe

A Parable (Part One)

The Restoration of Europe and of Russia

The Battle for European Civilization

Christ is Risen!

Our Role and Destiny As