Category Archives: Moscow

The New Age of Sovereignty

You always knew who the goody was and who the baddy was in the cowboy films of the mid-twentieth century. The goody always wore a white hat, the baddy a black hat. Simple. This reflected the Cold War mentality of the time. The Capitalists were good, the Communists were bad. It was all an oversimplified world of good versus evil, right versus wrong, ‘with us or against us’, as per Bush. It was a simple, bipolar, dualist, Manichean world of black and white. It was not of course reality, which is usually lighter or darker grey.

In reality, although nobody liked the tyranny of Communism, especially those who lived in Communist countries, the paradoxical tragedy was that after the fall of Communism, the world became unipolar. In other words, the US and its Western vassals could brook no rivals. It was the ‘spoiled brat syndrome’ – ‘I am the only one’. ‘Hegemony’, that is, supremacy and domination over all, became the order of the day. But hegemony and bossy control freakery do not work – ask any Californian bishop who has tried to impose it.

However, as the whole world, except for the Western, now knows, neither a bipolar world (Capitalist versus Communist), nor a unipolar world (Western), work. Rule by one or two always leads to despotism. The solution is a multipolar world, which breaks the tyranny of the monopoly of one and the warring opposition of two. This is the realm of the Holy Trinity. Sadly, the West wants either unipolar or else bipolar, the ‘democratic’ (West) versus the ‘autocratic’ (East). This is the heretical nonsense of Manichaeism.

The fact is that the Western Establishment oligarchies are certainly autocratic, they ignore and despise their ‘deplorable’ peoples. ‘plebs’, as in France, the UK and Germany, all governed by minority governments. For the people are the greatest threat, as we saw from the very unexpected (for the elites) results of the referendum on Brexit and the recent US election. They were not unexpected for the people. As for the pro-Western CIA-sponsored dictatorships in the Arabian Peninsula, Latin America and Asia, are they not autocratic?

But the most autocratic of them all is the Kiev regime, which has banned other political parties, critical media, sent all opposition to the firing squads, prisons and torture chambers of the dreaded Secret Police, and is now even banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. On the other side, India is the world’s largest democracy. And President Putin can easily win any election, in the same way as the very popular political leaders of China and Iran. Some people like such ‘autocratic’ governments – the more the better, they say.

As long as the Western elites and their venal media criminalise or ‘hitlerise’ a dialogue with ‘cancelled’ Russia (though they talked to the USSR and China during the Cold War), the only end to NATO’s anti-Russian war in the Ukraine is Russian victory and their total defeat. And that will not be long now. The Western elite never cared about Ukrainians, or any other Non-Western people, it just used them as proxies, so their own troops did not have to die. However, this does not mean that the Russians are not guilty of mistakes.

For one thing, as President Putin has openly admitted, there was the continual Russian naivety with regard to Western politicians from 1989 on. The Russians actually thought they were dealing with honest people, viz the Minsk Accords. And then there has been the problem of the hangover of the old Soviet centralisation. After 1991, the Russian Federation failed to give the real Ukraine (the north-western half, not the Russian southern and eastern half), autonomy and to respect its culture and language, authentically Ukrainian.

It was the usual condescending Great Russian chauvinism and imperialism, dating back to the pre-Soviet times of the Imperialist Establishment, which says that if you are not Russian, you are a third-class citizen. This is the same attitude as in the Russian emigration, pre-Soviet and post-Soviet, towards all Non-Russians. This imperialist attitude of both many Russians (and many Americans – they have that in common) meant that the US conquered very venal Kiev in 2014 for a paltry $5 billion. But look at the miserable results.

The scale of the events in the Ukraine is that of a Shakespearian tragedy. The main role was performed by the CIA-hired and very overpaid actor and comedian Zelensky, who  firsthad to improve his English, learn Ukrainian and be reclothed in khaki sweatshirts for the role. Like Caesar, expect Zelensky to be betrayed and stabbed by Brutus. The Ides of March are near. President Putin is waiting for free Ukrainians to take power, perhaps with Trump’s backing. Then banned peace talks can start and the European elite can resign.

There needs to be a New Ukraine, sovereign, independent, free of NATO and the EU – which are not going to survive anyway. And as a Sovereign Nation  it must have its own autocephalous or independent Church. Ordinary Ukrainians, unlike their greedy oligarchic elites – usually Non-Ukrainians – have been the sacrificial lambs of both American and Soviet Imperialism. Hopefully, President Putin can persuade the Church in Moscow to abandon centralism and give autocephaly to all Russian Orthodox in territories outside the Russian Federation.

This may mean that before Trump’s inauguration in seventy days’ time the Russians will advance towards the Dnieper, taking from four to seven more Ukrainian provinces, including the Black Sea Coast, so joining up with Transdniestria. The territories outside the Russian Federation, where Russian Orthodox live, would need autocephaly, meaning a Church of the New Ukraine and a Church of the Baltics. All the other Diasporas, as well as Moldova, would have to come to an agreement with the other canonical Orthodox there.

Imperialism has always been a problem. It bankrupted the seventeenth-century empires of Spain and Portugal, of eighteenth-century France and of nineteenth-century Britain, each time the bankruptcy taking place in the century after greatness. Imperialism caused two ‘World’ (European) Wars. Now in the twenty-first century, Imperialism has bankrupted the USA. We believe that the Russian Federation has learned from the bankruptcy of the equally Imperialist USSR. The administration of the Russian Orthodox Church must learn that too.

We have entered the new Age of Sovereignty. Sovereignty is what multipolarity means, where one nation is balanced out by the others and no-one can become too powerful. All defend their own and each other’s interests, as the UN should have done. Away with the old Imperialism of unipolarity, World Dictatorship, and the bipolar Imperialisms of two rival blocs, everyone else crushed between them. We have entered the world of Sovereign Nations. Imperialism caused two World Wars and has nearly caused a Third. Enough is enough.

Soviet Vestiges: Centralisation and Personality Cults among Neophytes

We all know how the Soviet Union unconsciously adopted the outward, cultural practices of the Russian Orthodox Church. Thus, instead of the Holy Trinty, Soviet Communism promulgated Marx, Engels and Lenin, iconographically presented as an indivisible three in one, a new Holy Trinity. It was blasphemous, since these three were not gods or even decent men, but quite vile people. Then, anyone watching film of a Mayday Parade in the old USSR notices at once the abundance of banners and red flags, which simply imitated the church banners and icons of Easter processions, which also take place around 1 May. Christmas too was substituted by pagan Soviet New Year drunkenness and overeating.

Then there was the substitution of Christ. Who was the new Christ? Lenin and then Stalin. First came the iconography of a benign-looking Lenin, whose chemically-preserved mummy is still on display in the centre of Moscow like unholy relics. Then after him came the iconography of a kind and fatherly Stalin, which was everywhere on streets and in schoolbooks of that age. Yet he was a mass murderer and an evil persecutor of the Church. Famously, the idolatry of Stalin even had to be denounced by Khrushchov as a personality cult – which is exactly what it was. Little wonder that President Putin said years ago that only someone without a brain would want to restore the collapsed Soviet Union.

However, some in the Russian Church unconsciously adopted the outward, cultural practices of the Soviet Union. Indeed, one part of the Soviet Union did not collapse in 1991 – the Moscow Patriarchate, the Soviet-period administrative superstructure of the Russian Church. Sadly, this administration has retained two elements of the old Soviet Union. The first is Soviet Centralisation. The USSR dissolved into fifteen separate republics – the Church did not. The result is anti-Moscow schisms in the Church in Orthodox parts of the old USSR which do not have their own independent Church, in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, with Russophobic discontent expressed in Belarus, Kazakhstan.

The second element that survived in the Moscow Patriarchate is Soviet-style personality cults. This can be seen in the statues of Russian saints. In 1976 I met the pious and talented sculptor Vyacheslav Klykov: I dared not tell him what I thought, that statues replace the statues of the Bolshevik monster Lenin. As such they are welcome, but statues are not a traditional part of Orthodoxy. For Orthodoxy free-standing statues are considered idolatrous. And this is precisely the danger of all personality cults. There exists an exaggerated cult of certain clerical figures, bishops, priests or monks. Among some it is enough for a man to be in a cassock and have a beard and he is already worthy of worship.

This attitude is concerning, for enchantment with mere people is always followed by disenchantment – disillusion always follows illusion. If this is news, read the Psalter. We have seen this clearly with the tragic story of Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfevev), whose photos have suddenly been removed and whose books are suddenly no longer on sale. ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men’. We can see it also in the situation of other clerical figures. Fr Andrey Tkachov is an example. Absurdly popular for really just an ordinary if well-read priest, his categorical and even extremist views are typical of one who comes from the complexed far west of the Ukraine, not of the average Orthodox.

His aggressiveness, lack of diplomacy and tact and just plain rudeness is shared by others and also gives rise to a cult following among the simple and unthinking. Fr Andrey is far from being the only such example of one engaged in broadcasts, podcasts and the writing of books and who makes a lot of money in this way. For instance, I know one Russian woman who never comes to church, but she does spend a lot of time on her computer reading the ‘prophecies’ of ‘holy elders’. This too is an example of personality cults. She told me that she prefers ‘elders’ with very long hair and very long hair. The attachment to externals is typical of the superficial and the neophyte, not of the rooted and the grounded.

As I have remarked many times, it took 75 years for the USSR to Sovietise and then fall and therefore it will take 75 years for de-Sovietisation to take place. 33 years after the dissolution of the USSR, the administration of the Moscow Patriarchate still retains the above two elements of the Soviet mentality. It is therefore no surprise that Ukrainians insult Russians by calling them ‘Moskali’ – Muscovites. It has long seemed to me that the top-heavy and highly centralised Moscow nationalist administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, with all its tiresome bureaucracy and taxes, is not something that is to be retained from the USSR. Nor are clericalist personality cults which are so close to idolatry.

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Q: Where did you meet the Countess?

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

Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?

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

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

Q: What did you study as a young man?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What about Moldova?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Why do bishops break communion?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 2024

 

 

What Will Happen to the Orthodox Church After the Fall of Washington?

The powers of this world have throughout history tried to abuse religious belief by making it into their own nationalist and ritualist institutions. This has been to camouflage and justify their nationalism, that is, their attachment to this world, their worldliness. Chinese, Indians, Jews, Greeks, Japanese, Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, Latins, Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Russians, French, British, Americans, they have all done it. These are just facts from Church history. How do Christians remain outside and resist an ideology which puts national and worldly issues above Christ, all for the sake of amassing more power and money? There are only two ways of resisting:

Either you are a Confessor, or else you are a Martyr. Thus, St Stephen the First Martyr was stoned to death by the Jews because he upset their nationalism. He was only following the prophets and St John the Baptist, who had told the nationalist King Herod the truth, and Christ Himself, Whom they crucified. Then came such Confessors as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. And in the twentieth-century there were the hundreds of thousands of Martyrs all over Eastern Europe, as well as Confessors like St Nectarios of Aegina, St Luke of the Crimea, St John of Shanghai or St Paisios the Athonite. There is nothing new under the sun. The saints are always the best witnesses.

In recent centuries the Church in the Middle East and the Balkans was oppressed by Ottomans, Poles and Austro-Hungarians. Meanwhile the Russian Church was oppressed by Westernising rulers, even more so after 1917. In the nineteenth century and even before, the main Patriarchate outside Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was used as a plaything by the British and French ambassadors. The Western Powers also appointed German kinglets to rule the newly-liberated Balkan countries in their name.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in the same way become the plaything of US ambassadors there. Meanwhile the Patriarchate of Moscow was being used as a plaything by the Soviet State. Neither the US State of the Soviet State was Christian. Both were, whatever the theory, in practice atheist. This situation has continued by centuries of inertia even after the end of the first so-called Cold War in 1991, but in ways even more terrible than before.

Thus, in Moscow, Stalinist centralisation has continued, repelling all Non-Russians from the Church, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova openly described in his recent letter to Patriarch Kyrill. For fifty years we too were treated as second-class citizens by the same Russian Church. None of this is because this mentality has been forced on the Church by the State, but because it has become a bad reflex inside the Church. It is nothing to do with the State. For example, a fragment of Moscow, the New York ROCOR has done this too, completely discrediting itself, mistreating Non-Russians. (As one of its bishops said to me recently, ROCOR is ‘a train wreck’).  The mentality to repel all, including many Russians, has been imposed internally. The only real slavery comes from ourselves, not from others.

We can see the same mentality also in the uncanonical, US-orchestrated actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and elsewhere since 2018. Sadly, Constantinople fell to Greek racist hatred and jealousy of Russians.  It could simply have refused to do any of its horrors. But the $25 million bribe was irresistible to the weak. Since then a second Cold War has begun, with US proxy forces trying to weaken and destroy Russia from the Ukraine. It means that the heavy burden of steering the ship of the Church has fallen to those less politicised, more free, to the now 14 other Local Churches. Their role has been dependent on the political freedom which they have.

Thus, under Communism in Eastern Europe and under the US control of the Greek Churches, the Serbian Church stood out as a beacon of relative freedom and theology. Today, in this respect the Albanian Church seems to have taken the lead as the voice of freedom, though the long-overdue visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America to the persecuted Ukrainian Church is also a miracle. The remaining 14 Local Churches are not all united because they do not enjoy the same measure of freedom. They are only relatively free compared to Constantinople and Moscow. For instance, the actions of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople have brought some of the other Local Churches into a state of internal schism.

Specifically, the Cypriot and Bulgarian Churches are now in a state of internal schism as a direct result of the US interference in Constantinople, both direct and indirect. Equally, the US-controlled Patriarchate of Alexandria and Moscow are in schism because of the latter’s interference in Africa. Other Local Churches, like the Romanian and the Georgian, which have a strong national identity, take an independent line, ignoring uncanonical Greek and uncanonical Russian alike. This is despite the attempts by the local US ambassadors, who behave like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to interfere in the choice of Patriarchs and policies. This independence is the only way to go. It is freedom.

However, our question is what will happen after the US stops interfering in internal Church affairs. It is our hope that, once political pressure eases, the Greek Churches in particular can take the lead and get out of political distortions and contortions, abandoning imperialist fantasies, recognising new autocephalies, notably that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora. However, the Russian Church also has to give up its Soviet-style centralisation, which is its imperialist fantasy. It has to grant autocephaly to parts of the Church in now independent countries.

The shadow of the old Imperialism, Russian or Soviet, just like Greek and Latin imperialism, has cast a long shadow on Church life. Its time is up. For the Church does not consist of one Local Church ruling imperially over all the others, but of their entirety, their catholicity – all the Local Churches together. Once political meddling is over, all the Local Churches must hold a Council together. A free and canonically ordered Council, not the 2016 robber-Council farce in Crete. Then the very many long-outstanding issues between the Local Churches can at last be resolved. In freedom. May God’s Will be done!

 

 

Who Will Create a Multinational Local Orthodox Church in Western Europe?

Introduction

Millions of Orthodox Christians live in Western Europe and are under some thirty bishops. And yet we have no Local Church of our own, unlike the far fewer in any of the twelve Local Churches in Bulgaria, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Albania, the OCA or for that matter in the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Why?

Constantinople?

For a very brief period in the mid-1980s, we hoped that the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople might create a united Local Orthodox Church for the then hundreds of thousands of Orthodox, 99% immigrants or descendants of immigrants, in the countries of Western Europe. Given the political paralysis of the far more numerous Russians and the purely political ideological division between the three warring Russian immigrant groups, ultimately caused by the Soviet atheist regime and the oppression of a hostage-Church inside the USSR, as well as personal passions, the Greek solution seemed possible. The Greeks had a whole network of bishops in Europe and unity. All was possible.

Sadly, the Greeks were largely only interested in playing politics and Greek nationalism, known as ‘Hellenism’, implemented by bishop-bureaucrats. ‘God only understands Greek’, as they used to say and still say, when they told Non-Greeks to ‘go away’. In 1989 Constantinople consecrated an ambitious Non-Greek bishop, but he had to pay a $20,000 bribe out of his pocket for the privilege. It all ended up very badly and he was soon suspended in a scandal. And now it is happening again: an ambitious young convert-careerist, though not in the same Patriarchate, has messed up and created a scandal. We have seen it all before. It is tiresome when a young know it all does not learn from the mistakes of others.

Moscow?

After our long-awaited victory with the reconciliation of the largest part of the Russian emigres with the Church inside Russia in May 2007, for which unity we had worked tirelessly for over two decades, we had new hopes. Sectarianism had at last been suppressed. From 2007 to 2017 we hoped against hope that the reunited and reconciled Russians would use their God-given opportunity to create a new Local Church in Western Europe. This would naturally have meant not repeating the error which the Moscow Patriarchate had made with the ‘OCA’ in the USA, that is, it would have to encourage and involve the co-operation of all the Local Churches with Diasporas in Western Europe, not least the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This would require diplomacy, bringing all on side, not isolationism and exclusivist political and racial ideologies.

Sadly, the Russians responsible messed up big time and chose the wrong way. For example, the main Moscow bishops appointed in Paris went from bad to worse. One was openly homosexual, the next openly lived with his wife and child and was alcoholic, and the next was a ruthless political careerist who backed a schism. Then came Russian isolationism after the schismatic US Greek project in the Ukraine and, among the emigres, full-blooded schism and sectarianism. Russian nationalist ghettoes, increasingly more extreme, more pathological and therefore ever smaller and crazier, were formed. The new level of conflict in the Ukraine and associated persecutions and defrockings of clergy, who have a different political opinion from the official hierarchy. All this, amid the hypocritical silence of the emigres, has made the situation dire.

Bucharest?

Politically-inspired Greek and Russian infighting in Church matters in Western Europe seems petty and irrelevant in the face of the massive Romanian/Moldovan Orthodox immigration to Western Europe of the last 15 years. This now numbers well over 4 million on official statistics (1), in nearly 1,000 parishes, soon with 12 bishops. Unlike Russians and Greeks, of whom only about 2% at most ever set foot in church, Romanians and Moldovans massively practise their faith. Moreover, Romanians speak a Latin language written in a Latin alphabet, they are generally very open, welcoming and want English in their services for their children. And children there are. As one Greek bishop told me: ‘When you go into a Greek church in London and see children, you know that they are Romanians’. They are some of the children of the 200,000 Romanians who live in London alone (there are nearly 600,000 Romanians and Moldovans who officially live in the UK, no doubt more unofficially).

All other Orthodox are outnumbered by them by perhaps five to one. The mantle has then passed to the Romanians, as both Greeks and Russians have failed to meet the challenge of setting up a new Local Church. The Romanian Church is by far the largest Church in Western Europe, bigger than all the others put together, but although autonomous, as the newest it is also the poorest, with the weakest infrastructure. With such numbers there is an opportunity. However, the same mistakes can still be made all over again. In other words, the Church can be made into a nationalist organisation, which will be irrelevant to the UK-born children of Romanian and Moldovan immigrants. We who belong to the Moldovan part of the Church, meaning that we have Russian liturgical customs and the old calendar, are especially conscious of this. Let us not repeat the errors of the Russians, who have mistreated Moldovans as second-class citizens for so long, just as they mistreated us English Orthodox in exactly the same way for so long.

Conclusion: The People’s Orthodoxy and Leadership

What is certain from what we have seen over the last fifty years is that there will never be a Local Orthodox Church in former Roman Catholic and Protestant Western Europe until ideologies cease. It does not matter whether these ideologies are racial (not to say racist), or political (Russian right-wing or Greek left-wing). All ideologies are divisive. Only the grassroots People’s Orthodoxy can defeat such top-down ideologies, but for this they also need leadership. The absence of a Local Church is the result of this failure.

Note 1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_diaspora#:~:text=Therefore%2C%20the%20number%20of%20all,countries%20where%20they%20are%20indigenous.

The Coming Synod in Moscow: An Example to the Vatican?

Introduction

The Synod of the Patriarchate of Moscow will meet in just a few days’ time. Of the many issues the Synodal members will have to decide is that of possible autocephaly for the Orthodox in Moldova. As we know, Metr Vladimir of Moldova has asked for autocephaly in order to overcome the problems in his country. He fears either that the Moscow Patriarchate will be banned in Moldova or else that his flock will transfer en masse to the Patriarchate of Bucharest. This is difficult for Moscow. This thorny problem is, however, only the tip of the iceberg.

In the last century the Patriarchate of Moscow granted autocephaly to Orthodox in Poland, Czechoslovakia and to Carpatho-Russians in Northern America (the ‘OCA’). Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union into fifteen different republics 32 years ago, it has not given autocephaly to anyone. It seems to us that the granting of autocephaly to Orthodox who live in now independent republics is long overdue.

Thus, we would suggest that Orthodox in the Ukraine (all those on territory under the political control of the government in Kiev), Moldova, and the three Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) should all receive autocephaly, but not be allowed a Diaspora presence (see below). This would mean that the Orthodox in Belarus would remain in their Exarchate, as they have not requested autonomy (as they have in Japan and China), let alone autocephaly.

However, if this Synod in Moscow were to become a Synod of Decentralisation, that is, of Autocephaly, Autonomy and Exarchate, we would suggest that perhaps further decentralisation should take place:

 

Why not give up the remaining thirty or so Moscow parishes in North America and give them to the OCA, on condition that the whole Autocephalous Church there be renamed the NAOC – the Northern American Orthodox Church? (Northern America being the USA, Canada, Greenland and a couple of dependent islands). Local bishops and parishes of the American Synod (called ROCOR)in Northern America should be informed that they must in time, say, over the coming five years, obey the Patriarchal Synod and also join, or else fall out of communion.

Thus: Three New Exarchates, making Four Autocephalous Churches: The Ukrainian, the Moldovan, the Baltic and the Northern American.

Why not grant the Western European Exarchate Autonomy, merging that Exarchate with the Archdiocese of Western Europe? With autonomy would come long-overdue internationalisation and the organisation’s indispensable acceptance by Non-Russian nationalities. This Autonomous Western European Orthodox Church would also include all bishops and parishes of the Ukrainian, Moldovan and Baltic Orthodox Churches. Local bishops and parishes of the American Synod (ROCOR) in Western Europe should be informed that they must in time, say, over the coming five years, obey the Patriarchal Synod and also join, or else fall out of communion.

Thus: One New Exarchate, making Three Autonomous Churches: The Western European, the Japanese and the Chinese.

Why not create one single Exarchate for the Metropolia of Kazakhstan and the Metropolia of Central Asia? Why not create an Exarchate for all parishes in Latin America, from Argentina through Central America to Mexico? Why not suggest creating an Exarchate of Oceania, based on the Russian parishes in Australia (at present under the American Synod)?

Thus: Two New Exarchates, making Five Exarchates: The Belarussian, the Kazakhstan and Central Asian, the African, the South-East Asian and the Latin American. And one new potential Exarchate for the future.

 

Conclusion

Such a Synod in Moscow would surely set an example of decentralisation to the current Roman Catholic ‘Synod on Synodality’, which is, among other immense problems of its own, also grappling with its historic and spiritually deadening problem of centralisation, caused by Papism.

The Moldovan Church Saga Continues

Moldova’s population is now only about 2.5 million after the immigration of some 1.2 million Moldovans to Western Europe began after the fall of the USSR, especially since Romania joined the EU. (Most Moldovans have Romanian passports; some 15 years ago they could be bought quite simply for only $10).

The Orthodox Church in 95% + Orthodox Moldova is divided into two. Firstly, since the Soviet Occupation that began in 1941 there has been the Moldovan Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, with seven bishops and some 1200 parishes. Secondly, since the fall of the USSR there has been a second Church, the Metropolia of Bessarabia. This reconstitutes the Church as it was before 1941 as part of the Patriarchate of Romania (over 80% of the Moldovan population is Romanian). Over the last thirty years that part has gradually built up, though even now only about 250 parishes belong to it. However, that number has increased particularly over the last eighteen months, since the conflict in the Ukraine entered its latest phase.

Metropolitan Vladimir (Cantarean), the leader of the Moscow part of the Church, is losing on 2 fronts; at home and abroad. At home priests and parishes are leaving for the Metropolia of Bessarabia, which is supported both by the Romanian government and by the pro-Western Moldovan government. His ‘competition’, the Metropolia of Bessarabia, is fully canonical. This is despite the usual absurd Russian propaganda from the extremists, who ridiculously claim that those in the Romanian Church are ‘schismatics’ or ‘have no grace’!

Abroad, Metr Vladimir is also losing: young people and clergy are leaving corrupt and impoverished Moldova for a better life and so churches back home have less income and few children. Abroad, the hundreds of Moldovan parishes, especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal, have to be under the Patriarchate of Moscow, which funnels money to Moscow – not to Metropolitan Vladimir.

What can Metr Vladimir do?

He could adopt the Latvian scenario, which is to get the Moldovan State to grant him ‘autocephaly’ (independence) and stop commemorating the Russian Patriarch, as Metropolitan Alexander, the leader of Russian Orthodox in Latvia, did. Now everybody, even in the first year of seminary, knows that this is uncanonical. Only a Mother-Church can grant autocephaly. Indeed, Metr Alexander’s policy in Latvia has proved to be disastrous.

A great many churches in Latvia are now empty. The Orthodox people, nearly all of whom are Russians, are boycotting a Church where their Russian Patriarch is not commemorated. Some Orthodox are travelling to church in Lithuania and Estonia to go to church. There they do commemorate the Russian Patriarch. The income of the Church in Latvia has dropped dramatically. Of the three priests I know who continued to commemorate the Russian Patriarch despite the instructions of Metr Alexander, one has stopped commemorating under pressure, a second has been suspended and the third continues for the moment.

Therefore, in the meantime, Metr Vladimir in Moldova has written a letter to the Russian Patriarch Kyrill asking for autocephaly. On top of that he has recently been travelling to parishes abroad, notably to England and Ireland to try and get Moldovan support for an Autocephalous Moldovan Orthodox Church. If he gets autocephaly (highly unlikely, it seems), then he can claim the Moldovan parishes abroad, which are at present under the Moscow Patriarchate’s Exarchate, which is centred in Paris. This would virtually wipe out that largely Moldovan-dependent Russian Exarchate in southern Europe and pose many questions for it in Switzerland, France, England and elsewhere.

The situation has not been helped by the racism that Moldovans have experienced on the part of Russians in Western Europe and the years-long corruption involving sums of Moldovan money funnelled to Moscow. That has already quite naturally made for bad feeling on the part of Moldovans towards Russians (‘I don’t like Romanians and only half-like Moldovans’, as one young and particularly tactful (!) Russian bishop said three years ago to an audience mainly of Romanians and Moldovans!)

Most likely of all, centralist Moscow will either ignore Metr Vladimir’s letter requesting autocephaly or reject it. If so, then Metr Vladimir has an alternative which Metr Alexander in Latvia does not have; that is, to join wholesale the Patriarchate of Romania and to become an Autonomous Church within that Patriarchate, which could give him the right to autonomous parishes in Western Europe. But what happens then to relations between Bucharest and Moscow? Especially when Moscow desperately needs Romanian support against Constantinople in Church matters in the Ukraine.

 

Papism or Multipolarity: The Fake Church or the Real Church

Introduction: Conformism to the World

In the 1960s and 1970s, parts of the Orthodox Church outside the Communist bloc were affected by a creeping Protestantisation and sectarianisation. Here I am referring to the ecumenism, liberalism and modernism of that period. It was just another example of how some in the Church are willing to conform to the ways of the world, to swim with the tide. But what happens when the tide changes?

Since then the tide has indeed changed, ‘ecumenism’ has become a strangely old-fashioned and even largely unknown word. And even the word ‘modern’ is now also old-fashioned, replaced by ‘post-modern’. However, another secularising movement to imitate, this time perhaps even more dangerous, has appeared since then. This is the movement towards sectarian authoritarianism, that is, to Papism, on the part of a few Orthodox Patriarchates and even a few ordinary bishops.

The Church Leader is the Emperor

After an accumulation of occasional conflicts and disagreements that had begun with Charlemagne in 800, in 1054 the authorities of the Church in the West reached an end-point and broke off communion with the rest of the Church. Papism, the claim to universal domination, had appeared. Thus, Roman Catholicism was born and would develop step by step, taking on tentacular dimensions. Roman Catholicism, with its universalist pretensions, was an authoritarian attempt to take control not only of the Western world and all its emperors and kings, but also of the whole Church of God everywhere, in the west, east, south and north.

The new Papist or Roman Catholic ideology stated that the Pope of Rome is de facto Caesar, the supreme authority, the World Emperor, Pontifex Maximus, the successor to the pagan Roman Emperors. This ideology came to be called ‘Papocaesarism’, meaning the total, indeed totalitarian, Western control of the whole world by the Patriarch (Pope) of a single Local Church. It led almost immediately to the reactions of disagreement and persecution, which caused the Papal schism from the Orthodox Church in the eleventh century. It also gradually led to the political and ecclesiastical break-up of Western Europe itself in the 16th century and its permanent division into Roman Catholic and Protestant.

At first it meant continual wars and invasions in the name of the Popes of Rome, papal armies or papally-blessed armies massacring Jews and Muslims in Spain and Italy, invading and genociding Christian England in 1066 and later genociding Christian Ireland. Then came the so-called Crusades, the massacres of the Albigensians in France, the sack of the Christian Capital in Constantinople in 1204, the Teutonic Knights in Prussia and finally the so-called ‘Reformation’. Millions of dead. Papism also meant colossal centralisation, as described, for example, in such a basic historical account as Richard Southern’s ‘Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages’. Paperwork, protocols, legal niceties and bureaucracy took over.

Sadly, it is this Papist ideology which in recent generations has become an admired model for certain Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops. Those who admire the Vatican repeat its errors and indeed its heresy. Both the Patriarchates of Constantinople (‘Eastern Papism’) and of Moscow, as well as some others, have been tempted by Vatican-style power. Indeed, whenever a Patriarchate (or ordinary bishop) draws near to Rome, the result is that they are tempted by secular power. It is a spiritual disease, an infection of the soul. The Patriarchates of Moscow and of Constantinople could not survive, if they were to continue. However, we believe that this is not a ‘sickness unto death’, but only a temporary infection. Healthy forces in both Patriarchates will fight back and even now are fighting back. They always do. The Church belongs to Christ, not to Patriarchs or bishops, whatever their thunderous titles and pretensions may be.

Orthodox Being Orthodox Christians

We have long stated that all the problems in Church life come about when Orthodox stop living as Orthodox Christians. There are so many clerical careerists, ‘professionals’, who demand that the faithful first make appointments with secretaries in order to see them, who call their flock ‘the mob’, who do not give confessions, as reality would disturb their delusions. These are the ones who have big black cars and properties, the monocle-wearers, who appear to be aware only of their own imaginary self-importance and their Papist ‘right’ to humiliate and condemn to hell those who disagree with them. Like the pharisees, who they are, they are obsessed with gold, their dress, formality, rites and rules. This is precisely what destroyed the Russian Church in 1917, when the Russian masses rejected such clericalism and self-importance.

As the New Martyrs and Confessors are forgotten by some in Russia, the bad spirit is coming back and being rejected again. Just as real Orthodoxy is not a religion and ritual, but faith in the Living God, so real Orthodox priests are not clerics, but pastors. They are shepherds of the flock and so are unmercenary, not interested in wallets, but in souls. They build communities, from which spring miracles and saints. ‘By their fruits, you shall know them’. Carpathian saints like Elder Cleopa do not demand that people make appointments with their secretaries to see them. They do not have any secretaries. Nor in the past did the Optina Elders, St Seraphim of Sarov or the Transvolgan hermits like St Nil of Sora. Nor in the distant past did St Cuthbert and St Chad or did the Irish saints in their island hermitages.

They had no possessions. In the Church of the Russian emigration, where I was brought up and spent fifty years, there was no such Papist nonsense, with all its paperwork, protocols, legal niceties and bureaucracy. For instance, Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), Count Sheremetiev, from one of the richest families in Russia, lived in poverty in a tiny room in London, all his possessions were contained in one small suitcase. Why? He said that he lived so, because he had to repent, as his class had created the Revolution, since they had lived in luxury, while the masses had lived in poverty, on top of which his class had betrayed the Tsar and created catastrophe for all.

Archbishop George (Tarasov) in Paris lived in the same way as Fr George. Remember Archbishop Alipy of Erie in the USA? He made his own mitre, photocopying icons to stick on it, using lots of gold paper and cardboard. Remember Fr (Baron) Alexander Rehbinder? Several of his children slept in drawers. He had no beds for them. Most Orthodox emigres were like this. Most emigre churches were small and cosy, prayerful and simple – and poor. That is my Church. Think of St John of Shanghai giving away his shoes to beggars, not because his shoes were uncomfortable (as the papists will tell you), but because he had compassion. Renounce his way, and you renounce the way of all the saints.

A Centralised Church and a Multipolar Church

Ever since I returned to the Russian Federation in 2007 after an absence of forty-one years, I have said that the situation there was fragile, on a knife-edge. It could go one way or the other. Restoration was by no means guaranteed. And I also said from the beginning that what it had taken three generations to destroy between December 1916 and December 1991 would take three generations to restore. The Russia I saw in 2007, and have seen again several times since then, was not yet a Russian world, it was a post-Soviet world. Post-Soviet golden domes do not make a Church and saints.

And without saints, there will be no Church, just a post-Soviet religious-coloured national institution. And whoever says post-Soviet, says centralised and nationalist. For important parts of the post-Soviet Church are still centralised, nationalist and therefore saintless. And yet in our New World Order of 2023, the world of BRICS, we do not have centralism, but ‘multipolarity’, that is, polycentrism. Where did multipolarity come from? Multipolarity is precisely the Orthodox Christian structure on which the Confederation or Family of Local Orthodox Churches is founded.

A centralised and nationalist (and so anti-missionary) post-Soviet Church can have no place in Orthodoxy. Centralism, that is, unipolarity, is exactly the opposite of our Orthodox view of the world. Centralism, unipolarity, is the definition of Papist Roman Catholicism, not of Orthodoxy. And even though Papist Roman Catholicism has gone, its cultural reflexes have been inherited by the USA, today’s Uniparty Hegemon. Its ideology is Unipolarity, belief in a single totalitarian system all over the world, which they call Globalism. This tries to impose itself by intimidation, violence and regime change all over the world, Americanising by force and threat, as we who were in ROCOR in England know by heart. But we have resisted it and won.

Their ideology is that one size fits all, like a MacDonald’s franchise, in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and the Ukraine, in fact all over the world. Millions of dead. In other words, the US elite is a de facto Caesar, the supreme authority, the World Emperor, Pontifex Maximus, the POTUS, the successor to the pagan Roman Emperors, Papism, meaning the total, indeed totalitarian control of the whole world by the single leader of a single Nation. This is Neo-Papism.

Conclusion: Awaiting Resurrection

The above is not our Orthodox Christian spiritual and cultural inheritance. Our inheritance is the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity, the origin of multipolarity. We who were brought up in the real Russian, not Sovietised, Church await the Resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate. As also faithful Greeks await the Resurrection of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. For the moment, however, we are closer to the stern prophecies of St Lavrentij of Chernigov (+ 1950), who warned us what to avoid:

‘Not long before Antichrist is enthroned, even those churches that have been closed will be repaired and restored — not only their exteriors, but their interiors, as well. They will gild the cupolas of bell-towers and cathedrals, alike…We will have unprecedented splendour’, Elder Lavrentii would say. ‘Do you see how craftily and insidiously all this is being prepared?… I repeat yet again that one must not attend those cathedrals; there will be no grace in them!’

 

The Crisis in the Russian Orthodox Church: Where Are They Going?

Add more evils upon them, O Lord; add more evils upon them that are glorious upon the earth.

Isaiah, 26, 15 (Septuagint)

 

1917

In February 1917 the Russian Empire was overthrown. Almost automatically, Georgian Orthodox saw their Church recover its canonical status as the ancient Autocephalous (Independent) Georgian Orthodox Church, of which they had so long been deprived by Russian Imperialist politics. As well as this, certain Non-Russian territories of the former Russian Empire were ceded and became permanently independent parts of the new States of Poland and Czechoslovakia. In the ecclesiastical sphere, eventually two completely new Autocephalous Churches were formed out of the old Russian Imperial Church, the Church of Poland and the Church of Czechia and Slovakia, in which countries there were and still are considerable numbers of Orthodox.

As for the few mainly very Lutheranised Orthodox in newly-independent Finland, after 1917 they formed a group of parishes, which chose to be under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as indeed they still are. As well as this, all of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and territories that belonged to western Belarus, the far west of the Ukraine and the Romanian-speaking area known as Moldova or Bessarabia were ceded. However, all of these were forcibly returned to the USSR as a result of Soviet occupation and then liberation from Nazism between 1939 and 1945, in what was a de facto partial reconstitution of the old Empire by the imperialist Stalin.

Between 1917 and 1945 the Orthodox in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova had encountered various difficulties and political and ecclesiastical changes involving the Patriarchate of Constantinople or, in Moldova, the Patriarchate of Romania. However, by the end of the Second World War their territories all ended up as parts of the USSR, the successor to the Russian Empire, and ecclesiastically were once again put under the Russian Orthodox Church.

1991

Almost exactly seventy-five years later, at the end of 1991, the multinational but highly centralised USSR split into fifteen independent republics. However, only two Local Orthodox Churches existed in those fifteen new countries: the Russian and the Georgian. Thus, the former still had jurisdiction in thirteen different countries outside the new Russian Federation, where there lived millions of Russians but also representatives of other nationalities who were also Orthodox.

It is our view that the Russian Church should have followed the political decentralisation granted by political Moscow to the new countries. Thus, ecclesiastical Moscow should have granted ecclesiastical independence to the Orthodox in those new countries, as indeed some senior Russian figures said at the time. We believe that in this way five new Autocephalous Churches would have been carved out of the Russian Church. These would have been the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Moldovan, the Central Asian (covering the five countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and the Baltic (covering the three countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia). (As so few Orthodox lived in the last two new independent countries, Armenia and Azerbaijan, there was only a need there for a few dependency churches under Russia or Georgia).

If this had been done, there would no longer have been one single multinational Russian Orthodox Church, but a new family of seven Sister-Churches: the Russian (by far the largest), the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Moldovan, the Central Asian, the Baltic (and the already existing Northern American, called the OCA). These would have come on top of the already existing two Autonomous Churches of Japan and China, later joined by the three much more recent Russian Exarchates in Western Europe, South-East Asia and Africa, perhaps already granted Autonomy. Thus, there would today have been formed a family of Seven Autocephalous and Five future Autocephalous Churches, Twelve Churches in all.

Instead

Instead, we have seen what was once a multinational Russian Church increasingly becoming a national and indeed nationalist Church. Russian flags, unheard of before, are more and more often to be found inside Russian churches. For example, in 2020 a huge new Orthodox Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces was opened in Patriot Park outside Moscow, alongside the aviation museum of the Kubinka air base and a tank museum. This Cathedral can only be called nationalist in its design, which some have called ‘Stalinist baroque’ and even ‘sinister’, and some of its militarist frescoes involving the Red Army are highly controversial and for many very shocking. However, apparently all this is fully acceptable to the once independently-minded, émigré-founded Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).

Worse still, on 15 August this year, the most recent of ten new monuments and statues of Stalin was unveiled in the city of Velikie Luki near Pskov. This was blessed by priests, one of whom is alleged to have declared that Stalin was great ‘because he had created so many martyrs’. The priests who did this have been rebuked for not having a blessing from their bishop to do so (only because of this?). However, what is even more worrying is that men with such values could have been ordained to the priesthood in the first place. They compare very badly to that pious Ukrainian priest in Moscow who was recently, quite uncanonically and shockingly, ‘defrocked’ for refusing to pray for Russian victory in the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine and instead of that praying for peace. We had thought that all should pray for peace, leaving the rest to God.

It seems as though the whole Russian Church has today been reduced to nationalist politics and centralised ‘protocols’, rules and regulations. We can only imagine the protests that would now be flooding in from the senior bishops of the old Moscow Patriarchate, like Metropolitan Antony Bloom in London or Archbishop Basil Krivoshein in Brussels. They must be spinning in their graves, seeing the utter rejection of the Gospel values they lived for and wrote about and the total destruction and renunciation of all their efforts to create multinational Orthodox missions. Indeed, after a lifetime of devotion to the Moscow Church, Archbishop Basil’s nephew, Nikita, now writes and acts against Moscow nationalism and its Church. It is hardly surprising.

Far Worse Still

However, all of this is as nothing compared to the Church wars that have been triggered elsewhere outside the Russian Federation since the Russian Patriarch Kyrill endorsed in no uncertain terms the eighteen-month-old Russian Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. Last year he even stated that those Russians fighting against Ukrainians, many of the latter Orthodox, and dying in battle, would go to heaven as martyrs, rather like jihadis. So far, some 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and at least 40,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in this Operation.

This is exactly the opposite of the example of Bishop (later St) Nicholas of Tokyo. After Japan had treacherously attacked Russia in 1904, Bishop Nicholas ordered his Japanese Orthodox priests to pray for the armed forces of Japan (not at all the same as praying for their victory) and himself retired into seclusion to weep and pray, refusing to take part in any public activities. Surely Patriarch Kyrill, officially Patriarch of both Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox, as well as many other nationalities, should have done the same? Who can rejoice at war?

The result is that most Orthodox in the Ukraine, as well as many in Moldova and Latvia, some in Lithuania, Estonia, Western Europe and North America, and even a few in Belarus and the Russian Federation itself, have left the Russian Church. Orthodox in the Ukraine have declared that they are ‘fully independent’ of Moscow and Orthodox in Latvia have been declared to be autocephalous and both are acting so, not commemorating Patriarch Kyrill. Now, the usual completely unChristian ‘anathemas’ and uncanonical ‘defrockings’ are flying around. (Defrocking takes place for acts against morality, not for acts against immorality, though try telling immoral bishops that…).

Typical is the example of the very aggressive and highly controversial Bishop Markell of Baltsy and Falesht in Moldova who has declared the usual, that anyone who leaves the Moscow Church (in this case, for the Romanian Church) is automatically defrocked and ‘has no grace’. As a result, many more Moldovans are leaving him and the Moscow Church in disgust, and he has lost several churches and properties with their income, which seriously concerns him. As a result, the already isolated Russian Church, already out of communion with the Greek Churches, is on the point of falling out of communion with the Romanian Church too. Where are they going? Insanity appears to have seized them.

 

 

News from the Orthodox World (2)

As a prison chaplain and clergyman of nearly forty years, I can confidently assert that all the worst individuals I have come across in this world were bishops. On the other hand, I can equally confidently assert that some of the saintliest individuals I have come across in this world were also bishops, including my own bishop. Thank God.

I lived through the Cold War, the 70s and the 80s. Spiritually, it was an awful period – there was no spiritually independent Orthodox Church to belong to. The episcopate of Moscow was subject to the KGB and they often made use of corrupt bishops, on whom they held ‘the dirt’, ‘compromising materials, (‘kompromat’). However, Constantinople was clearly run by the Americans and its episcopate were corrupt or homosexuals, often ecumenists (there was money in that and freemasons (there was money in that too). They are all dead now.

I remember one Constantinople metropolitan who used to celebrate the liturgy by his watch – 45 minutes was enough for him. Another future metropolitan, the late John Zizioulas, was thrown out of Edinburgh Theology Department for his open homosexuality and was forced to teach in Glasgow, where they were not particular. After all, ‘theology’ is just an academic discipline, like any other. Personal morality has nothing to do with academic disciplines. The Russians were no better. One Russian metropolitan had a string of mistresses. Then there was Bishop Gury in Paris who had a love affair with one of his equally homosexual priests. After ten years or so the scandal became so great that he was sacked and sent, literally, to Siberia, becoming the Bishop of Magadan, the equivalent of Australia for dud Anglican bishops in the past.

Talking to two Russian priests recently, one told me that all except one of the four bishops in his Metropolia is homosexual and the other told me that in his Metropolia, two bishops out of the five are utterly corrupt (‘business’ and women, their vices) and one is openly homosexual. There is a well-known pedophile metropolitan in the Ukrainian Church (MP) and another in the Russian Church (MP). The problem with the homosexuals is their hatred for normal married clergy and persecution of them through their jealousy, which causes them to try and destroy the clergy, their parishes and as a result utterly alienates the people, many of whom desert the Church in disgust. Such bishops’ constant demands for money make them especially unloved.

The Russian Church is supposed to be anti-LGBT. This is almost a joke, given some of its episcopate, who rule over a country, whose abortion rate is twice that of Western European countries. Since so many of its bishops are notorious homosexuals and even pedophiles, little wonder that so many of their golden-domed churches are empty. We really have come to the end times, which were prophesied by St Seraphim of Sarov. Churches will be open, but you will not be able to go there.

Little wonder that so many churches of the canonical Church in the Ukraine have been and are being closed down by Nazi thugs, openly backed by the Zelensky regime. Buildings in the Kiev Caves Monastery, where so many saints rest, are continually being occupied and stolen by such thugs who come from the dreaded Secret Police, the SBU, which is trained by MI6 and the CIA. (Indeed, many say that Zelensky is actually an MI6 agent).

Democracy in the Ukraine? Other political parties are outlawed and if you promote freedom for them, you may well find yourself dead in a back street in Kiev. Such is the regime supported by the West. Worse still, it is the Patriarchate of Constantinople that stands behind that ecclesiastical department of the Zelensky regime.

And that regime only has months to go before it collapses in its Kiev bunker beneath the weight of the most advanced armed forces of in the world. They belong to Russia, the most powerful economy in Europe, No 5 in the world, according to the World Bank, and not far behind Japan at No 4. This will be followed by the unconditional capitulation of the Kiev regime and the victory of nationalist Russia, which wants to achieve freedom for and unity with the Russian population in the Ukraine. (Nothing else interests it, despite the propaganda nonsense parroted by demented US and UK politicians about Russia wanting to reconstitute the Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe).

So the Church choice today is no longer the Cold War, but Greek nationalism or Russian nationalism. No choice at all. During the Cold War we chose to belong to a still spiritual part of the Russian Church, where it was still possible to venerate the Saints and Martyrs freely, even if by no means all did so). At that time, that possibility still existed. Now it too has gone, having been taken over by the same types. Corruption, ‘business’, sexual perversion and persecution of the parish clergy are the order of the day. The choice today appears to be Greek nationalism/corruption/perversion or Russian nationalism/corruption/ perversion.

That is also a false choice. There is the third way, the mystical way of the saints, not the way of all those pharisees, of whom Christ said (Jn 8, 44): You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.