Category Archives: Orthodox Life

Questions and Answers October-November 2024

Q: What would the attitude of Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh have been to the war in the Ukraine?

A: It will soon be 44 years since he tonsured me reader, in January 1981.

Although he was not a monk, Metr Antony was a pastor and not a politician, and he would have prayed for peace and helped Orthodox Ukrainians and Russians equally. He would certainly have taken in and protected any priests from Moscow who had refused to pray for victory, like his disciple Fr Andrey Korodchkin, and instead prayed for peace. He would have abhorred militaristic attitudes in the Church and, while having no illusions about the pernicious role of the US and the Kiev regime in starting the war, he would have fully supported Metr Onufry of Kiev.

He must be spinning in his grave at what is going on in today’s almost Stalinist, nationalist administration of the Patriarchate in Moscow. Do not forget how Metr Antony supported Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s. To be honest, he would have contemplated leaving such a Moscow Patriarchate and perhaps taken refuge in another Patriarchate, certainly not Constantinople, but possibly Bucharest.

Q: How do you tolerate a bishop who is filled with hatred and jealousy for you?

A: Our personal experience is that you must tolerate it, knowing that their hatred and jealousy for Orthodox will always sooner or later lead to their schism and then heresy. Such was the case with the clerics Arius (a priest) and Nestorius (an archbishop), who started with hatred and jealousy and then fell into schism and heresy through their personal vice. Vice always leads to schism and then heresy. Once it has, not only you can leave him, but you must leave him. It is your spiritual duty.

On the other hand virtue leads to Orthodoxy. This is a spiritual and moral fact. Their hatred comes from the fact that you are more popular than they are because you have compassion for the people. Their jealousy comes from the fact you have a normal family life, whereas they are homosexuals or perverts and so cannot have a normal family life.

Q: How do you deal with a sociopath?

A: Sociopaths prey on the compassionate and pastoral, any whom they consider ‘vulnerable’, trying to make them their victims, trying to make them feel guilty and enslave them, thinking that they are weak and naive. Sociopaths are control freaks who try to exploit and manipulate, losing their temper very easily in order to do so. Outwardly they can be charming, but they are in fact narcissistic monsters, who bully and punish without any empathy or sense of guilt. However, they try and make others feel guilty, even to the point where some of their non-believing victims may commit suicide.

They are helped in this by the fact that sociopaths are delusional liars, they do not even realise that they are lying. There is only one way to defeat them and that is to flee from them. Always have a Plan B ready, a sideways move. They will always be astonished by this because they think that their power is absolute and they cannot possibly lose. This is why when they do lose, they lash out like a cornered animal, slandering and maligning, and they may start drinking. Then they will portray themselves as victims! We moved sideways to escape their snobbery and we have absolutely no regrets. If we may quote a world leader, talking about the USA:

‘They clearly did not expect such insubordination. They simply got used to acting according to a template, to grab whatever they pleased, by blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and convinced themselves that these methods would work forever, as if they had been fossilised in the past’.

Q: What are the results of being on the left-hand side of Church life and on the right-hand side? (By this I mean the liberal, modernist side and the traditionalist, pharisee side?).

A: The left leads to arid, dried-out intellectualism – or rather pseudo-intellectualism. The right leads to perverted narcissism.

Q: How do you deal with jealous Establishment types who repeat slanders about you?

A: Ignore them as there is no truth in their words, as the Psalmist says. They slander themselves, eaten up by their jealousy of their own hearts. I tremble for them. They will suffer for repeating open lies. As St Paisios the Athonite said: ‘I would long ago have gone mad because of the injustices of this world, if I had not known that the last word in human history will belong to Christ our Lord’.

Q: Who is part of the English Establishment, how big is it and how do you recognise it?

A: First of all, it is not the English Establishment, it is the Establishment which is in England, just as a virus enters a body as a parasite, it does not come from here. If you prefer, it is the British Establishment.

The word ‘British’ was first used by the Romans, then by the Normans (who moved the capital back from English Winchester to Roman and Norman London) and then was revived by the Tudors and all those who followed. In other words, the connotations of the word ‘British’ are purely imperial.

However, the Establishment is not a race, but a mentality, the ‘British’ mentality. It is called ‘the Establishment’ because it was established by the parasitic Norman elite after 1066. The British Establishment is the British Deep State, the part that remains constant whatever the government, whatever the ruling dynasty, whatever the century.

It concerns firstly the elite of British society, less than 1% of the population, as the money and power are with them. However, at least another 20% or so of the population have been dragged along into the Establishment by their money, their powerful media, intimidation, inertia and especially snobbery – they want to be associated with the ruling class, as it makes them feel important. This is the origin of the word ‘snob’, which has gone into many other languages, as other cultures do not have this reality.

You can easily recognise the Establishment because it is pro-Zionist (‘Western people are the chosen people’), and therefore pro-US, pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-British (and anti-English), pro-Israel, pro-Kiev regime and, today, pro-Woke. As globalists, they always put non-national and anti-patriotic interests first, to the detriment of their own electorates. They are also contaminated by various sexual perversions, which is why they are pro-Woke.

Such is the case of the recent globalist and woke Archbishop of Canterbury who covered up child abuse. The Church of England is riddled with sex abusers and always has been, like Roman Catholic clergy also, but like the whole British Establishment – the BBC for example. This is why they are woke – it is all in self-justification: ‘our perversions are normal’ is what they are saying. This is why we should be very careful before receiving any Anglican vicars as laypeople into the Orthodox Church. There have been too many mistakes already.

Q: In the Creed we say that we believe in ‘One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church’, Isn’t this very confusing? Surely people will understand Roman Catholic?

A: This is a very old debate. Some suggest an alternative translation, like the Slavonic, such as ‘Conciliar’. Another possibility is to change the pronunciation to the Greek and pronounce the word ‘Cathólic’, with the stress on the middle syllable. Clearly, a solution needs to be found.

Q: Do you in the Orthodox Church pray for the dead?

A: In the Orthodox Church we do not believe in death and so do not have any dead. All are living, whether on this side of the veil or on the other side. And we pray for all the living, whatever side they are on.

Q: What do you think of tithing?

A: Tithing smacks of Protestantism, the Old Testament and Phariseeism. It must never be made obligatory. All giving to the church should be voluntary, never some obligatory ‘membership fee’. Remember that the widow’s mite received praise from Christ. Years ago I remember seeing a board in the entrance to a church in the Ukraine, detailing the names of people and how much each gave each month. See where that got them.

Q: Why do Orthodox rarely have names like Abel, Sarah, Zachary, Joel, Joshua, Aaron, Jared, Ruth, Deborah, Isaac etc?

A: There is nothing wrong with such names, it is just that they are rare in Orthodox societies. Why? Because these are Old Testament names and are often borne by people in societies of a former Protestant culture. Orthodox, like Roman Catholics, do not much read the Old Testament, apart from the Psalter, which the devout know well, so these names are rarely used, except in monasticism, where the Old Testament is read. Put simply, for Orthodox the New Testament is far, far more important than the Old Testament.

We have to understand that the Protestant world has always been close to Judaism, it even uses the Jewish text of the Old Testament instead of the Christian text. In English history even the revolution of the Puritan Cromwell was financed by Jewish bankers, so that they could move from Amsterdam, where they had moved from Venice and Northern Italy, to the safer haven of London. Later, in about 1916, they moved from London to the safer haven of USA, where aerial bombardment was not then possible.

Q: What is the Orthodox attitude to nature and the environment?

A: Nature was originally created by God. However, what we see around us is fallen nature. In this, lions tear apart antelopes, cats tear apart mice, spiders kill flies. So let us not be sentimental. The present environmentalism is nature-worship, as is visible in tree-hugging. The desire for clean nature is good in itself, but what we have to is a secularist form of puritanism, the search for the pure. Originally moralistic and anti-sexual (Protestant Puritanism invented witches and their hunting and murder), today’s Puritanism is all about pure nature. None of this is spiritual. Spiritual purity gives both sexual self-control and respect for the environment. Environmentalism, like Puritanism, gives neither because they are both anti-spiritual and merely moralistic.

Q: How many Romanians live in the UK?

A: Romanian speakers are by far the largest practising Orthodox group in Western Europe and in the UK, several times more than practising Orthodox Greeks, let alone the relatively small numbers of practising Orthodox Russians and others. According to past official statistics, the number rose from 83,168 in the 2011 United Kingdom census to 557,554 in the 2021 United Kingdom census. Between 2011 and 2021 Romanian went from being the seventeenth foreign language in Great Britain to the second, just after Polish.

This is over three years ago. The number is greater now and in any case Romanian, but English-born, children are not included in it and the number does not include Moldovans, who could easily number 50,000, perhaps more. Fairly reliable estimates, such as that of Dama Laura, the Romanian ambassador whom we know well in our church and count as a friend, put the actual number of Romanian-speaking immigrants and their English-born children at over 1.1 million. This is why the UK now has a Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese with its own Archbishop.

Q: After nearly fifty years in the Russian Church, how does it feel to be in the Romanian Church? Do you have any regrets?

A: The only thing that counts is to be in a free branch of the Orthodox Church, away from bullying and narcissistic sociopaths, with their hate-filled schism, guru-led sect, vicious jealousy, and that we have canonically left them (according to Canon XV of the First and Second Council of 861) and prosper more than ever. It has felt good to be back in the mainstream, just as it felt in 2007, when we helped bring ROCOR back into the mainstream for a decade – for even then American ROCOR had been threatening to leave the Church.

What is sad and I regret it, is how some hierarchs in the Russian Church quit the mainstream, just as those in the Patriarchate of Constantinople before it, persecuting clergy because they are patriots to their own country, in my case, to England (not to Britain, which is an alien, Norman construct). The worst thing is that in Moscow they have not learned from their mistakes.

For this persecution is an exact repeat of that in the 1920s when some senior clerics in Moscow persecuted all Russian Orthodox outside the USSR because they refused to give allegiance to the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Now it has been happening again, with all the usual threats, aggressiveness and ‘defrockings’, whether in the Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania and Western Europe.  Non-Russians are generally not welcome in the Russian Church today. Never tell me that history does not repeat itself!

Being in the mainstream and with the majority both in England and in Western Europe, that is, from inside the Romanian Church, is very important because it is the mainstream and also the majority, who can therefore commit the most to the future Local Church. Romanians generally attend church; Russians, like Greece, far less.

Q: Why have we seen in the last generation the appearance and phenomenal growth of gender confusion and the trans-movement?

A: I think there are four reasons, though which is the most important of the last three, I would hesitate to say. Firstly, there are the rare genetic accidents. Just as there are genetic accidents which mean that some children are born blind or one-armed or with dysfunctional organs, so some are born with some hormonal insufficiency. Secondly, there is bad parenting, which the divorce epidemic since the 1960s has only encouraged. The fact is that some mothers have always had sons and brought them up as daughters (the Oscar Wilde syndrome) and fathers who have moulded their daughters into sons. Thirdly, there is vice. This is not only widespread, but, terrifyingly, actually fashionable.

Finally, there is chemical pollution by pesticides, food additives and hormones, which has entered the food chain and affected children’s hormones. This seems to have caused in part not only the epidemic of autism, but also the LGBTQ epidemic. Chemical pollutants, surely cause the appearance of ‘gay frogs’, ‘gay swans’ and ‘gay bulls’.

 

The Ukraine: Winning the War, Winning the Peace and Winning the Church

Introduction

The world has been contorted by the catastrophic conflict in the Ukraine, which in turn has led to the genocidal massacres around the US proxy of Israel. But what if the first conflict ended? Surely the second conflict would also end, and the third conflict, threatened by the US against China through its proxies in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, would never even begin? Ever since losing its war in Korea in 1953, when it was driven back into the south of the Korean Peninsula, and then, much more disastrously, since losing its war in Vietnam in 1975, when it was entirely ejected, the US has conducted proxy wars. In such wars, others are paid to do the dying on its behalf, just as Non-Romans were paid to die for the pagan Roman Empire on its behalf.

Proxies are convenient because they are expendable, but, as in Afghanistan, proxies can always turn and take the side of their own people against US and Western occupiers. If we may draw a parallel, in the Ukraine we are now in January 1945. Hitler has just disastrously lost his Ardennes offensive, just as Zelensky has just disastrously lost the NATO-planned Kursk offensive. The delusional Hitler, like the delusional Zelensky, is in his bunker, refusing to negotiate because of his wishful thinking. So delusional that he drew up a ‘victory plan’, which was in fact a defeat plan, since NATO countries do not want their soldiers to die for the comedian in Kiev, which is what the ‘victory plan’ entailed.

When that did not work, Zelensky decided to tell everyone that North Korean troops are fighting for Russia and so therefore NATO troops should officially fight for Kiev!  When this was laughed down, he said that he wanted a ceasefire. Of course, he does – just like Hitler’s lieutenants wanted a ceasefire when Soviet troops were at the gates of Berlin in 1945. There was no ceasefire then, and there will not be this time either. After all, last week Zelensky was talking about dropping non-existent nuclear bombs on Russia. The delusion is clear – except to the delusional. The Ukrainian Army is crumbling – few in it even want to fight, the collapse is inevitable, though many Western politicians are still, even now, in delusional denial, believing their own PR lies.

Winning the War

In the Ukraine the US has actually publicly proclaimed that it will fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’ (soldier). They are now close to achieving that catastrophic aim. This tragic conflict between fellow-Slavs was never a territorial war. When you are by far the largest country in the world and one of the least populated, as Russia is, territory is totally irrelevant to you.

This is a conflict being fought because the US and its puppets threatened the Russian population both in Russia and in the Ukraine with genocide through conventional, nuclear and biological arms. This is a conflict which is therefore all about Russian security and national identity.

The Russian Army, now greatly expanded in number through enthusiastic volunteers, has been advancing for over two years in a war of attrition and encirclement in the Ukraine. At the latest, this conflict will end in 2025, perhaps in early 2025, given the present Ukrainian situation, exactly as the then Russian Minster of Defence announced in 2023. This deeply tragic conflict in the Ukraine is now drawing to its end, with Russia militarily victorious against NATO, but with Ukrainian military manpower bled to death.

Winning the Peace

As is well-known, it is one thing to win a war, but what happens after the war is over? How do you win the peace? It is clear that the Russian Army has never wanted to invade the whole of the Ukraine or harm Ukrainian civilians. In that sense it is pro-Ukrainian – unlike the Kiev junta, which has been destroying the Ukraine and Ukrainians. The only territories of interest are the formerly Russian east and south, where a majority of the oppressed population has always considered itself to be Russian, ever since their families were forcibly transferred to the Ukraine by Bolshevik tyranny in 1922. The only enemy has been the military. What then will happen in the north and west of the old, Soviet-created, Ukraine in conditions of peace? In other words, what will happen after the Ukraine has been decommunised, returned to the pre-Communist situation?

It appears that the Russian policy here has always been to wait for a popular Ukrainian revolt, perhaps by a group of disaffected soldiers and officers, tired of being used as cannon fodder for the Neo-Nazis, and the disaffected will overthrow the murderous, US-created junta in Kiev. This would allow them to establish a popular and once more democratic government of the New Ukraine. This would in effect unite at least ten, perhaps more, provinces of the north and west of the old Soviet Ukraine into a neutral country, a southern Belarus, demilitarised and denazified, as Russia and all want. Its capital would remain in Kiev and it would have its sovereignty and defence guaranteed by Russia against NATO imperialism and its economy rebuilt by BRICS.

The old Ukraine was the most prosperous part of the USSR. It is potentially very wealthy. The New Ukraine, Ukrainian-speaking and independent, but Non-Nazi and demilitarised, would also be a country of freedom for the Church, with all the 1500 churches stolen so far by the thugs of the US-organised fake Church restored to the canonical Church. The fake Church would then collapse and disappear. Then also would come the end of absurd and illegal Western sanctions against Russia and Russians, which have effectively bankrupted not Russia, but Western Europe.

Winning the Church

All of this would do nothing to create peace inside the Orthodox Church, that is, to resolve the five-year long schism within the Confederation of the 16 Local Orthodox Churches. This is the schism between the largest and the once most prestigious Churches, between the Russian Patriarchate in Moscow and the US-controlled Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul (Constantinople), backed by its small colony in Alexandria. This situation echoes once again how the last century was, in Europe especially, the age of Imperialisms, when Europe and the Orthodox Church found themselves crushed between the Imperialisms of Nazism and Communism. Spain was the early example of a country caught between the two Imperialisms in the late 1930s, but it was Central and Eastern Europe which were affected even more profoundly.

For example, in the 1930s and 1940s Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece were in particular tragically caught up in the geopolitical bloodshed of the Nazi and Communist powerbrokers and had to switch sides very swiftly. Today, it is the Orthodox Churches precisely in Central and Eastern Europe, which find themselves caught between the nationalist power politics of Moscow and Constantinople. They are caught between Russian and Greek and their completely unspiritual battle for imperialistic territorial control. These Orthodox Churches in Central and Eastern Europe, which stand between those ecclesiastical Imperialisms, mean specifically the ten Local Churches of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, together with (North) Macedonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Georgia, and even, screaming and kicking from Greek nationalism, those of Greece and Cyprus.

They will be joined by the many millions of the still not autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church and of Orthodox in Moldova and elsewhere, who have all long been victims, third class citizens, of either Greek or else Russian imperialism, and their territorial battles and jealousies. Nobody recognises the ‘defrockings’ of clergy for purely political and schismatic reasons. Thus, wronged and ‘defrocked’ but genuine pastors from the Russian Church have had to flee sociopathic or morally corrupt bishops to the Constantinople and Romanian Churches, while others have fled the politicking of Constantinople for the Russian Church. It is an international scandal, so-called Christians practising hatred.

Conclusion

It is the above ten Local Churches, a majority, most probably supported by three Non-European Local Churches, those of Antioch, Jerusalem and America, which will be left to meet at a Council. Here they will have to call on the Churches of Moscow and Constantinople, the latter supported by the aggrieved Church of Alexandria, to resolve their differences. These differences relate directly to the imperialistic attitudes taken by the administrations of these Churches. These effeminately vengeful attitudes have caused them to dispute territorial control and leading them into schism and mutual, uncanonical and unrecognised ‘defrockings’.

These three Churches of Moscow, Constantinople and Alexandria are going to find themselves under pressure to reach canonical agreements. These would include the granting of full independence (autocephaly) to Non-Greeks and Non-Russians at present suffering inside them, who are, naturally, concerned neither by Greek, nor by Russian nationalism. Directly these would include at the very least the peoples of the New Ukraine and Moldova. However, the fates of Orthodox in the Baltic States, in Africa and the Diasporas of Western Europe, the Americas and Australia, must also be taken into account and autocephaly granted to them. Here is the opportunity for the purely political and centennial anti-canonical scandal of ‘jurisdictions’ to be overcome, caused only by those who are clinging on to power and money.

Then we shall at last begin to live in a normal Orthodox Church, which has suffered so much since 1917 from the abnormal situation in which we have been forced to live because of bishop-politicians and not bishop-pastors. The bishop-pastors, from St Nectarios of Aegina to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, have, with their disciples, always been slandered and persecuted by the former. Enough. The careerist wolves in shepherd’s clothing, who deceive sincere but untutored neophytes are to be cast out. There are plenty there to defrock.

 

Towards a Council of the Orthodox Churches

Introduction

In 2006 I took part in a Local Church Council of the Russian Diaspora. A very divided part of the Russian Church debated its future, whether to enter back into canonical communion with the rest of the Russian Church or not. Suddenly, the division more or less disappeared. We visibly felt the wafting of the Holy Spirit over us. Such is the vital importance of all Church Councils, Universal, Regional or Local. This wafting is the spirit of catholicity, of conciliarity, this is the Holy Spirit, Who alone heals divisions by revealing the clear Will of God.

Universal Church Councils

Who has the authority to call a Council of all the Orthodox Churches? Purists will respond ‘the Emperor of Constantinople’. There is not one, so that is absurd. Greek nationalists will respond ‘the Patriarch of Constantinople’. This is at once divisive and also untrue. And then does a Council have to include all the Local Orthodox Churches in order to have universal authority? Clearly not, for there have been many purely Local Councils, which have with time gained universal authority, for example the ‘Palamite’ Councils of the thirteenth century.

Consultations

In any case, nobody can call a ‘Council’ of the whole Church as such. Any Consultation of bishops can only be called a Council after the event, for the decisions of a Consultation have to be ‘received’, that is, recognised by the clergy and people. Until ‘reception’ has taken place, there can only be a Consultation. This we saw quite clearly with the Consultation of some 150 Orthodox bishops from several of the Orthodox Churches in Crete in 2016, which was, absurdly, called a ‘Pan-Orthodox Council’ before it had even begun! Of course, it failed.

The Need for a Consultation

So let us therefore be realistic. Any head of any Local Church can issue invitations to a Consultation, inviting the heads and episcopal delegations of any number of other Local Churches who wish to attend. Such a Consultation is necessary because at present two of the sixteen Local Churches, Constantinople and Moscow, are in schism with one another and refuse to talk to each other, let alone concelebrate. As a result, the whole Church suffers and is even to some extent in a state of paralysis. The Church needs to hold a Consultation.

Who Could Call a Consultation?

Thus, the head of any Local Church can call a Consultation. Several enjoy prestige. For example, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who is at is the centre of the Church. Or the Patriarch of Bucharest, as his Church is the largest outside Moscow. But others enjoy respect and prestige, for instance, the Patriarchs of Sofia or Belgrade or the Archbishop of Albania. But really any of them. But what would an invitation to a Consultation mention? It should certainly not be restrictive, as that was the error of the agenda-imposed 2016 meeting in Crete.

Two Initial Stages of Consultation

Let us suppose that the head of any one of the fourteen Local Churches sent out a circular letter to the other thirteen heads and invited them, perhaps each with two other bishops, to discuss initially the intra-Church crisis. This would be Stage One of a Conciliar process composed of 42 bishops. If they met, they could talk and, if they agreed, they could go to a Second Stage, which would be for a Consultation of the nearly 500 bishops, who do not belong to the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow, which have over another 500 bishops.

The Third Stage

Observers from Constantinople and Moscow would naturally be invited to the First and Second Stages. A Third Stage would be for all Orthodox bishops, though that would mean Constantinople and Moscow ending their schism. That, at present, is not realistic, as the nature of their schism is political. And as long as both Patriarchates are engaged in politics with States, there is no hope of that. A Consultation, let alone a Council, can only be held among the politically free, which is why no Consultation ever took place during the Soviet period.

An Agenda

So a Consultation is necessary, but why? What would its non-restrictive agenda be? At present, the Church faces two sets of challenges. Firstly, there must be a dogmatic response to the doubts and denials of the contemporary world by affirming the Creed of the Seven Universal Councils. Secondly, there must be a pastoral and administrative witness to the same contemporary world. The first response affirms the Revealed Truth of God, the second affirms Love, that the teaching and witness of the Church is not political and nationalistic.

The Dogmatic Agenda

By affirming the Creed a Consultation would affirm that God is the Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible, rejecting Secularism, which proclaims that the universe is self-made through an inexplicable process of ‘evolution’. It would affirm the uniqueness of Christ, the Son of God and His Salvation, Resurrection and Return and the Procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, Who spoke through the Old Testament, and in the uniqueness of the Church and Her Baptism. All these are challenged by the contemporary world.

The Pastoral Agenda

Of a world population of over eight billion, only 200 million, two and a half per cent, are Orthodox Christians. There is little doubt that the mission of the Church has been severely limited by politics and nationalism, not least Greek and Russian. There is a need for new Local Churches to be founded, immediately in the Ukraine, where the lack of a Local Church has caused division and distress, secondly in areas where millions of Orthodox live, in Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, and thirdly in most of Non-Christian Asia and Africa.

Conclusion: The Alternative

Without a Church Council divisions will continue. This happens when one or both sides refuse to move. For example, ever since 1014, when the elite of the then small part of the Orthodox Church in Western Europe ended its communion with the Church by altering the Creed, it has refused to return to the Creed. Indeed, it has actually justified its change and so remained out of communion with the Church. Thank God, the present conflict between Constantinople and Moscow does not concern the Creed, but it does concern communion. And that is vital.

 

 

 

The Struggle for Catholicity Against Papist Centralisation and for Unity Against the New American Heresy of ‘Corrective Baptism.’

Introduction: Centralisation and Decentralisation: Unity in Diversity

The Church is an image of the Holy Trinity, a Unity of Three Persons in One Essence, of Diversity and Unity, a subtle balance between centralising and decentralising forces. If centralising forces take over, legitimate diversity in Church life can be threatened, as we see outside the Church, in Roman Catholicism. This results in the boycott of the Church, which is no longer seen as being ‘our Church’, but the ‘Church’ of an irrelevant, distant, alien and foreign clerical elite. If decentralising forces take over, Church unity can be threatened by divisions and sects, as we see in Protestantism. This results in the dissolution of the Church into secular fragments, which are irrelevant to spiritual resistance and incapable of ascetic struggle for the Truth of Christ.

The Two Struggles of My Life

Personally, my life can be divided into two halves. The first half was spent in apprehending and comprehending God’s presence in the world, in learning and in serving in the Church in Europe. The struggle then was for the teachings of the Church against ideological compromises, being forced onto the Church by the anti-Christian Western world. That US-led world was trying to impose on all others its One World Government under the name of ‘Globalism’. This meant trying to deform the integrity of the Orthodox Church by imposing syncretistic modernism and ecumenism and corrupting its clerical elite, as Globalism had already done with Protestantism and Roman Catholicism and was then trying to do with Orthodoxy too. This was an attack on the integrity of the Church.

The second half of my life is being spent in England, building towards the inevitable Local Church of Western Europe. This ongoing struggle now takes place from within the largest part of the Orthodox Church here, the millions of the Romanian Metropolias of Western and Southern, Central and Northern Europe. This struggle is for the Catholicity of the Church through the concord of fourteen of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches. This is because the two remaining Local Churches, Moscow and Constantinople, have tragically fallen into schism with one another because of their rival nationalist centralisations. Through their Papist-style centralisation of finance, power and control they are trying and failing to divide and share out the Orthodox world between them.

The Struggle for Catholicity Against the Papism of Constantinople and Moscow

Thus, the fourteen other Churches, the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, the Churches of Georgia, Cyprus, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, America, Albania and Macedonia, are fixed between the two extremes of Constantinople and Moscow. True, some are much closer to one or the other, but still they say to Constantinople: Yes, you were once the Patriarchate of the Imperial City, but that was nearly 600 years ago and even then you had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of others. And to Moscow they say: Yes, you are by far the largest in number, but you are still only one among sixteen, so do not try and tell us how we must live and think. The Soviet age is over, so stop denying the diversity and Catholicity of the Church.

The friction can most clearly be seen in the Ukraine. Thus, most, if not all, of the fourteen Local Churches know that what Constantinople did there in setting up a fake Church outside its own territory was wrong, against the canons of the Church. This is very clear, especially through the statements of the heads of the Churches of Albania, Poland and Bulgaria. As for Muscovite centralisation, so reminiscent of the Soviets, it is rejected not only by all others (though in the case of Constantinople, the rejection is clearly politically dictated by the US and so has no spiritual authority), but also in the Moscow Patriarchate, in the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metr Onufry and wherever decentralisation and new autocephalous Churches are for pastoral reasons urgently required.

We can see all this visibly, if we simply compare photographs of bishops. The photo of the average Constantinople Metropolitan appears to show a bureaucrat with a thin black veil and a carefully trimmed beard, like that of a married priest whose wife dislikes beards. Only the metropolitans are not married, supposedly monks. The photo of the average Moscow Metropolitan appears to show a richly-decorated and rigidly-uniformed military man, at the service of a State army, not of the Word of God. Both show careerists, ‘Princes of the Church’, to use the Roman Catholic term for cardinals. My favourite photo of a metropolitan from one of the fourteen Churches shows a man in a dusty old cassock hauling a bag of cement in a wheelbarrow to build a new monastery.

The Novel and Aggressive American Heresy of Rebaptism

Orthodox Unity is now being challenged by the novel and highly aggressive American heresy of rebaptism. This sectarian heresy of rebaptising Orthodox is known as ‘corrective baptism’, a term quite unknown to the Fathers of the Church and the Saints, because it has been brought into the Church from the sectarian Lutheran world outside. Contradicting the Creed of the Church ‘I believe in one baptism…’, it means rebaptising those who have been canonically received into the Church by the established authority of its thousand canonical bishops. Although the Orthodox in question may have been receiving the sacraments of the Church for years, the schismatics are rebaptising them. This revolt against Church practice is uncanonical, heretical and sectarian.

The practice was condemned by all as long ago as 1976, when the Syshchenko scandal in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) broke in London. Then this same practice, implemented by an uncanonically ordained and very poorly-trained Ukrainian priest, was thoroughly rejected by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret and the then still Orthodox ROCOR Synod as the heresy of Donatism. Sadly, this view is no longer held by some of today’s ROCOR bishops who do not know the Church Tradition. Thus, apart from ‘bishops’ in old calendarist sects, there are now those in ROCOR who have also turned aggressively schismatic, imposing their pseudo-Russian, American old calendarism, which is in fact nothing more than a sectarian Protestant revolt, a new outburst of Anabaptism, the bullying and hypocritical pharisaic rebaptism for ‘the pure’.

This is the first heresy of converts, neophytes who want to be ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’. Such converts do not remain Orthodox because they have not yet cleansed themselves of the post-Schism Western mentality, they still do not know the Pre-Schism Western mentality. For them Orthodoxy is not existential, it is just a decoration added on top of what they do not want to renounce, a cherry on top of the Western cake. Their mentality therefore remains fundamentally anti-Orthodox. And they can go to one extreme or the other. Being anti-Orthodox is not only being pro-ecumenist, pro-modernist, pro-reformist, it is also to be filled with hatred for Roman Catholics and Protestants. Both extremes are equally anti-Orthodox, equally opposed to Truth and Love.

Conclusion: The Dangers of Centralisation and Sectarianism

With their natural Russian flock dying out or leaving them, these bishops are desperate to make up falling numbers by recruiting disgruntled ex-Protestants. These often psychologically unstable extremists have no spiritual roots in the Church. To my knowledge, so far two American ROCOR bishops in different continents are publicly boasting of rebaptising other Orthodox, though others may be involved. Once this news reaches the for now politically unfree Moscow and it has the time to act, there will be trouble for the ROCOR schismatics. So continues our struggle for the Catholicity of the Church against anti-missionary and secular-inspired centralisation, and for the Unity of the Church against sectarian attacks, always towards the new Local Church of Western Europe to be established through a Council.

On the Tragedy of Metr Hilarion (Alfeyev)

The Budapest scandal which broke on 5 July 2024, revealed by a half-Russian, half-Japanese teenager, led to the downfall of Metr Hilarion (Alfeyev). Regardless of whether the Metropolitan himself was set up or is wholly guilty, it is clear that the young man involved in this blackmail case and the woman behind him are thieves and criminals. However, it is equally clear that the Metropolitan led a hypocritical life quite unworthy of a supposed monk, regardless of the details. None of this came as a surprise to us. Plenty of other careerists of his rank, and not only in Moscow, are guilty of the same, but they have not been entrapped or caught out. Their turn will come.

The case is now being tried in Moscow by three very young Metropolitans and one equally young Archbishop (my sister-in-law literally used to change his nappies when he was in summer camp). All of them are younger even than Metr Hilarion. One of them, the very young Metr Antony (Sevryuk), was sent to Japan this spring in order to investigate the family of the criminal involved in the case. Some have suggested that this proves that the whole case was a set-up. That is only a speculation. There is no proof. Whatever the case, it seems highly likely  that Metr Hilarion will be defrocked. There is however one way out for him, the way taken by so many others in Moscow, who also opposed the conflict in the Ukraine.

This would be for him to join the Patriarchate of Constantinople. On the one hand, this seems highly unlikely, as Metr Hilarion has time and again condemned that Patriarchate for its ignoble and uncanonical actions in the Ukraine. Surely Constantinople would not want him and he would definitely not want Constantinople? It would all seem like a betrayal. However, if the USA intervened on his behalf…’Metr Hilarion of the Slavic Exarchate of Western Europe of the Oecumenical Patriarchate’. It does have a ring to it…. Constantinople is desperate to control the Diaspora and Metr Hilarion is pro-Catholic. And for the Americans there is the question of the successor to the increasingly frail Patriarch Kyrill (and Patriarch Bartholomew). Here the CIA is deeply involved, as usual… However unlikely, nothing is impossible with the possibility of repentance.

Western Aggression + Russian Naivety = Ukrainian Tragedy + Millennial Transfiguration

Introduction: The End of an Old History

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 should have been a Godsend to the whole world. It should have led to the demilitarisation of the West since, with the fall of its Communist ideological rival, military aggression should have had no more meaning for the Western Capitalist world, if it ever had. Although, at the time, some spoke of ‘the peace dividend’, it became apparent that power had gone to the heads of the Western elite and they actually wanted to implement their ultimate fantasy. This consisted of totalitarian globalist control by the Western elite under the pretence of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to the rest of the world through ‘humanitarian intervention’.

To do this, they would as usual use the organised violence of their ever more bankruptingly expensive military to impose it. They wanted ‘the end of history’ with ‘the global victory of the West’ and its messianic Zionism of ‘freedom and democracy’ (= slavery and tyranny), over all other and much older and far more sophisticated Civilisations. Already, even before the formal fall of the USSR in 1991, the Western elite had decided to invade the oil-rich and gas-rich Muslim world through Iraq. There followed decades of Western massacres of millions in various Muslim countries, which continue today, notably in the genocide in Gaza, with nearly 200,000 civilian dead so far.

Russian Naivety

Meanwhile, however, the pro-Western Russian government was dreaming about a common European home ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok’, made richer by demilitarisation. ‘We are Europeans’, claimed the now anti-Communist Russian governing elite. Even after 1999 the ultra-cautious and legalistic lawyer-leader of Russia, the pro-Russian President Putin, continued to want this common European home and even asked to join NATO. Indeed, for nearly three decades after 1991 Russian leaders continued to speak naively of ‘our Western partners’. With Communism removed, why was such idealistic friendship not possible?

However, naïve Russian leaders did not understand the true and envious nature of ambitious Western aggression. From 2008 on, after the West had aggressively declared that the Ukraine and Georgia would also have to join NATO, after already breaking all its promises to Russia not to expand to the whole of ex-Soviet Eastern Europe, Russia at last began to be alarmed. It had lost its post-1945 buffer zone set up to protect it from continual Western invasions. For the first time it resisted and defeated the aggression of the Western puppet government in nationalist Georgia. Relations between the West and Russia sharply deteriorated, requiring an utterly failed ‘reset’.

The situation came to a head in 2014 with the anti-democratic CIA regime-change coup on Russia’s doorstep, in Kiev. Manipulating Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, this Western-financed (it had cost ‘only’ $5 billion, as the US politician Nuland publicly boasted) coup was directed at destroying Russia. The aim was to start a proxy war and invade Russia from a highly militarised and NATO-ised Ukraine, then overthrow the Russian government, break this millennial country up, colonise it and seize its huge mineral wealth, thus surrounding China from the north. This was the dream of the Western elite, as openly expressed by the Pentagon’s think tank, the US Rand Corporation.

Such exploitation had already been tried in the 1990s, disastrous for the impoverished and humiliated Russian people, creating the corrupt class of Russian and Ukrainian (in fact, mainly Israeli) oligarchs. Thus, for eight long years between 2014 and 2022, the CIA-controlled Kiev regime and its US and British PR advisors and arms merchants massacred, persecuted and repressed the large Russian minority (about 40% of the population) in the east and south of the Ukraine, arming the Kiev regime to the teeth. During this time naïve Russia still constantly tried to create peace and negotiate, mainly through the Minsk Accords.

Naivety Rewarded by Western Aggression

In these ‘Accords’ the naïve Russian elite was systematically betrayed and deceived by the West, especially by the German and French leaders, behind whom stood Washington. Slowly, the extremely naïve Russian governing elite began to realise what had been obvious to others all along, that the US would not allow peace and that the Western European vassals were entirely in US pockets and no longer had any policy of their own. When at the end of 2021 it became obvious that the Kiev regime was about to invade and genocide Russian majority areas, in February 2022 a small Russian task force was forced to pre-empt Kiev and enter the east of the Ukraine, formerly Russia.

Numbering some 90,000, but facing the largest and perhaps best-trained, best-equipped and best-fortified army in Europe, that of the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime, this force had as its aim not to occupy, but to withdraw, having forced Kiev into realistic peace talks. However, again Russia was betrayed and lied to. In early April 2022 the US, through its UK subsidiary, forbade peace, even forcing Kiev to pass a law to forbid any negotiations with Moscow. In return, it promised to arm the Kiev regime with all the stocks of Western-held weapons, obsolete or not, it could give it, and to train its troops, if necessary, to ‘die to the last Ukrainian’, so killing as many Russians as possible and weakening Russia.

Thus, the Western elite forced Russia to make its small token operation into an operation against the whole of NATO. This meant the huge growth by voluntary conscription and reprofessionalisation and re-equipping of the Russian armed forces. It also meant the end of reliance on the typically post-Soviet private military Wagner mercenary company, run by the crooked Russian oligarch, Prigozhin, which was the equivalent of the US Blackwater. Much more than this, seeing Western hypocrisy, double standards and intense, Western media Russophobia with its Cancel Russia culture, the pro-Western Russian elite was shocked and even traumatised to its core.

At the height of the Nazis, no-one had ever thought of cancelling Goethe, Hegel, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Heine, Wagner or any other giants of German culture. Russia’s dreamed-of friends have turned into nightmarish enemies, who will not even speak to Russians any more. And the diplomat-free Western elite invented 20,000 illegal anti-Russian sanctions and, as true racists, called its patriotic President ‘Hitler’ (who was a Westerner as was his Fascism also Western) and its people ‘Asiatic barbarians’! Russia was forced to turn away from the hostile and uncivilised West to friendly and civilised China and India, becoming the champion of the anti-Western Global Majority.

From the Ukrainian Tragedy

Gradually, the pre-empting, token Russian Special Military Operation sent in to force negotiations on 24 February 2022, had to turn into another Operation, This had not just to liberate the eastern corner of the Ukraine, with its long-suffering Russian people, and demilitarise and denazify the rest of the Ukraine, but to demilitarise and denazify, that is, disarm and defeat, the whole of NATO. This defeat could well lead to its collapse and the eventual withdrawal of the bankrupt US from Western Europe. However, this in turn will mean the collapse of US world hegemony through the dedollarising, Russian-led BRICS Alliance, liberating Africa, Asia and Latin America from Western tyranny.

These will no longer fear a defeated West with its continual regime-changes of colour revolutions (currently involving Serbia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Armenia, Georgia, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru etc). Some Global Majority countries, especially in French colonial West Africa, have already seen the victory of Russian arms over the West in the Ukraine and liberated themselves in turn from French and US troops. In the end, BRICS may well take with it still relatively free European countries, like Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, perhaps the rest of the Central Europe and the Balkans, and perhaps ultimately Italy and others, thus in time collapsing the US Neo-Nazi EU puppet.

In the last few days, at least 12,000 fanatical Kiev regime troops and many NATO mercenaries, still believing in the recently invented myths of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, have been sent on a fool’s errand by the US/NATO, ostensibly in a terrorist operation which threatens the Kursk nuclear power station, in reality an operation which is guaranteed to fail so that Zelensky can be discredited and replaced. They have been sent as cannon fodder to die in a crazy and suicidal incursion across the Russian border to occupy 40 (not 1,000) square kilometres and a few villages in the south of the province of Kursk. Thus, the last of NATO arms sent in this US-promoted PR stunt to ‘invade Russia’ will be destroyed.

However, these last elite troops, the few trained left, supposed to defend the east of the Ukraine and Kiev itself, have been thrown away together with their German (and British) tanks fighting near Kursk again. All they have achieved is to occupy some fields, forests, hamlets and tiny villages in the vastness of Russia. Now they are running out of logistics, air cover, supplies, ammunition, fuel, food and water. Some 2,600 are already dead or wounded and over 300 of their NATO tanks and armoured cars destroyed. Many Ukrainian soldiers, trapped inside Russia, have surrendered. But Russian public opinion is outraged. ‘Go for Kiev’ is the message they are giving the once moderate Russian government.

To Millennial Transfiguration

Some have even suggested that the whole operation was a Russian trap, set to destroy this last gasp of the collapsing Kiev regime. Some compare the operation to the suicidal Nazi operation in the Ardennes, ‘the Battle of the Bulge’, in December 1944. This may be the end for those currently cowering in their bunker in Kiev. Russia never wanted any of this. But the treacherous trauma of Western aggression since 2014 in Kiev, which has led directly to today’s tragic bloodshed, has also made Russia into the linchpin of BRICS. Thus, it has allied itself with the Global Majority, that is, 90% of the world, the Non-Western world. The Orwellian-censored Western elite has been left sulking.

It has set about trying to assassinate any leader it can, apparently in Slovakia, Hungary, Iran and even regime-changing the USA itself, replacing the senile Biden in a palace coup with the unelected Harris, and trying to assassinate Trump. Its State propaganda mouthpieces call ‘war’ ‘peace’, ‘tyranny’ ‘freedom’, oligarchy’ ‘democracy’, and ‘lies’ ‘truth’. (Orwell was forty years too early, 1984 = 2024). Many have commented that this is a transformation which takes place only every 500 years. The period of exploitation and colonisation of the New Worlds, that is, everywhere outside Western Europe, between 1514 and 2014, from Latin America to Asia, from Africa to the Ukraine, is over.

It is the Ukraine that has been the bridge too far, the fat morsel which the greedy West has bitten off and choked on. However, in reality, this is a millennial transformation. For the West began its ascendancy in Rome when on 14 February 1014, the newly-installed Pope Benedict VIII crowned the centralising and imperialistic Holy Roman Emperor Henry in Rome. This was to the reading of the newly-formed dogma of Western ideology, expressed in the new Roman Catholic Creed, at variance with the age-old Creed of the Church. For Henry II had forced Pope Benedict VIII to include the word filioque in the Nicene Creed agreed on by the whole Church in the fourth century.

This is the proclamation that all authority and infallibility, the Spirit of God, proceeds uniquely from Western leaders, who are the replacements (‘vicars’) of God on earth. This is an ersatz humanist religion, replacing God by men, Faith by religion. Moreover, this authority and infallibility has been passed down to all Western leaders, whoever they may be, whether they have been Popes of Rome (up until the sixteenth century) and Western Kings (up until the revolutions of 1688 in England and 1789 in France), and then Western European Emperors (Napoleon), Presidents, Prime Ministers, Chancellors or, since 1917, US Presidents.

Conclusion: The Beginning of a New History

However, what will happen after the Russian Special Operation in the Ukraine is over? How will Russia, which has no intention of occupying the whole of this Communist construct of the Ukraine, win the peace there? Will there be a new Russia-friendly government in the New Ukraine (will it even be called that?), its capital still in Kiev, but perhaps shorn of between five and nine southern and western provinces, gone back to Russia, and of between three and five provinces in the far west, gone back to Poland, Romania and Hungary? And how will the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church cease after the fall of the now illegal, atheist Jewish dictatorship of Zelensky?

What will the new status of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church then be? Will the naïve Russian Church free itself of its corrupt or CIA bishops? Will the New Ukraine join BRICS, as part of the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus? So many questions remain, for this conflict is only the beginning, not the end, of a new history. What is certain is that this new history will be led and created not by the West, but by the Global Majority, led by Russia and China. The US will be left isolated and the US-appointed EU Commissars, German and UK ministers will, with their Fascist ‘liberal’ globalist ideology, be as discredited as their Nazi grandfathers, and run away into US exile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 Does it Need to Found a Local Church in the Diaspora?

The Orthodox Diasporas in the Western world have so far given birth to only one new, albeit compromised, Local Church. This is the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), founded over 50 years ago. Much disputed by others, it has unfortunately been a failure – the vast majority of Orthodox who live in Northern America have not joined it and do not wish to. It has not united Orthodox. However, it must be said, it has been a bold failure and its failure is hardly a matter for rejoicing. It was bold because elsewhere founding a new Local Church has not even been tried. We should learn from the OCA’s strengths as well as from its weaknesses.

True, in England, there was in the 1970s an attempt not to build a multinational Local Church, but a multinational or, at that time, trinational, chapel. This was in Oxford and involved émigré Russian (and English) academics, Greeks and Serbs. It was never going to work. The Serbs never took part, apart from a certain rather effeminate bishop who was then ‘disappeared’. It was set up in a tiny, octagonal, Methodist-looking chapel, not at all traditional on the outside. Then the ‘Russians’ left it through ejection and miraculously managed to set up their own English-language chapel elsewhere.

It left Greeks and a tiny number of ex-Anglican, pseudo-Russian Bloomite elitists in their Methodist-looking chapel. Now that large numbers of new Romanian immigrants have set up their own church in Oxford, the whole experiment is best forgotten. The Oxford chapel represents not even 10% of local Orthodox, rather like the OCA representation in Northern America. Why these failures? It is always ideologies that destroy the unity required for a Local Church, because ideologies are always by definition exclusive.

For example, new calendarism (one of the great failings of the OCA) and old calendarism (one of the great failings of the new 2020s ROCOR sect) are ideological enemies, as are political and nationalist ideologies, like those of the Greek nationalist Second Rome and the Russian nationalist Third Rome. Neither of them ever learned from the failure of the First Rome with its equally nationalist ‘Roman Catholicism’ (a contradiction in terms). All of these isms operate against and are destructive of any multinational Church, for any Diaspora Church must by definition be multinational, not nationalist. Only the concept of a Second Jerusalem can be successful. This, for example, was where the Russian Church failed, and three times over. Thus:

In Russian émigré Paris, French liberal intellectualism, imported back from Saint Petersburg, did nothing for the Paris Russians and as a result their jurisdiction became very small because exclusive. But at least, small, they were not corrupted by money, like the other two.

In the émigré ‘Russian Orthodox’ Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the substitution of the subtle moderation of Russian émigré Orthodoxy for the very unsubtle extremism of US convert Orthodoxy. Well-financed Lutheran fanaticism was substituted for real Christianity. That is spiritual suicide, for no-one apart from crazy and uncharitable converts is interested.

The Moscow Patriarchate itself has been badly served both by Soviet nationalism and the corrupting riches of the post-Soviet episcopate together with their sexual perversions, as we can see at this very moment. But what has been rumoured for years in Moscow and elsewhere, is only the tip of the iceberg. The MP and ROCOR have to be cleansed. An antique-filled seaside cottage (cottage, not the antique-filled Victorian house, that is another story) on the south coast of England (in the nineteenth century gay Anglican bishops would also ‘resort’ to south-coast Brighton) is not the solution.

In England, we Orthodox will be neither pro-Soviet, nor pro-American, but faithful to local realities. You can only build a Local Church, if you want it and believe in it.

 

The Bulgarians Rout the ‘Phanar Lobby’: Next in Line – the ‘Lavender Lobby’

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2024/07/03/bolgary_razgromili_fanarskoe_lobbi

 

The following article is a translation of the above Russian article, published in Moscow on 4 July by the well-known Church journalist Anatoly Stepanov. It clearly outlines how by choosing a new Patriarch, the Bulgarian Church has come to support the canonical Church in the Ukraine under Metropolitan Onufry. Thus, it has for the moment defeated the pro-Phanariot lobby and its fake and schismatic ‘Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU), whose main sponsor is the atheistic US State Department. However, it also shows that the US-controlled liberal/ecumenist/pro-Catholic/pseudo-intellectual/celibate lobby which is trying to split the Church is also profoundly homosexual. This is not news for some of us, but it will be to many.

Moreover, this split is not a Greek-Russian split, for apart from the very well-known homosexual metropolitans, archbishops and clerics within the Patriarchate of Constantinople, there are also many others of other nationalities, such as Bulgarians and Russians. Such are also part of this homosexual (‘lavender’) lobby, for instance the notorious but only recently defrocked Moscow Abbot Peter Yeremeev. He was allowed for years and years to continue his activities quite openly in Moscow to the scandal of the faithful. As the article hints, but does not dare say openly, he and others were and are protected by powerful clerical friends of the same narcissistic ‘variety’, who, moreover, as we well know, are also very active outside Russia in corrupting Church life with their boyfriends and persecuting the faithful. Here is a translation of the article:

 

On Sunday June 30, the election of the Primate of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC) was held. This attracted the close attention of Orthodox observers and the public not only in Bulgaria. And no wonder, because the fate of not only the future of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, but also the future of all world Orthodoxy was being decided.

On the eve of the elections, we witnessed open interference in the internal affairs of the BOC by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. On May 19 an extraordinary event took place: a group of Bulgarian hierarchs headed by the most influential in Bulgaria, Metropolitan Nicholas (Sebastianov) of Plovdiv, visited the Patriarchate of Constantinople and openly concelebrated with representatives of the schismatic Orthodox Church in the Ukraine (OCU).

This was not only a challenge to the Bulgarian Church, which, as you know, does not recognise the legitimacy of the OCU, but is also a revelation of the future course of the BOC. And then Patriarch Bartholomew was invited (it is not clear on whose behalf, since there was no decision of the Synod) to take part in the ceremony of the election of His Holiness the Patriarch of Bulgaria and his enthronement.

It was a public act of interference. And how many behind-the-scenes attempts to exert influence, which, for sure, took place both on the part of the American embassy and on the part of ‘our overseas partners’, as the Russian Department of External Church Relations (DECR) has long called Constantinople, which has long been under the control of the United States.

Therefore, many anxiously awaited the decision of the Council of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which was supposed to elect its Primate. On the eve of the final voting, as is known, the Synod of the BOC elected three bishops as candidates for the post of Primate of the Church – Metropolitan Grigory (Tsvetkov) of Vrachansky, who acted as Locum Tenens, Metropolitan Gabriel (Dinev) of Lovech and Metropolitan Daniel (Nikolov) of Vidin.

According to all forecasts, experts gave preference to Metropolitan Gregory, who was considered as a kind of compromise figure, albeit a conditional compromise, since his sympathies for the Phanar were well-known. However, unexpectedly, in the second round of the final voting, Metropolitan Daniel (Nikolov) of Vidin won, for whom 69 members of the Council voted, Metropolitan Gregory received 66 votes in his support. In the first round, Metropolitan Gregory received 64 votes, Metropolitan Daniel – 51 votes, and Metropolitan Gabriel – 19 votes (several ballots were declared invalid).

The decision of the Council became a sensation for many, a joyful sensation. It testifies to the fact that the supporters of canonical Orthodoxy, and it was from these positions that Metropolitan Daniel always spoke, turned out to be in the majority in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and preferred to have as their Patriarch a person who, on the eve of the elections, again clearly and unequivocally outlined his position on the rejection of the Ukrainian schismatics. Moreover, he was the only candidate for Patriarch who spoke directly on this key question

Of course, the results of the vote testify to the shaky balance of power in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church: 69 votes against 66 is the clearest evidence of this.Nevertheless, the decision of the Council is final, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has a Primate who will defend canonical rules and norms and will not allow the Phanar to establish control over the BOC and deepen the schism in world Orthodoxy.

However, it is clear to everyone that the new Patriarch Daniel is receiving a very difficult inheritance, and his unequivocal rejection of the schismatic actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople will not go unanswered. And we are already seeing the latter answers in the form of dirty tricks. Patriarch Bartholomew, apparently dissatisfied with the results of the choice of the Bulgarian Orthodox, refused to serve the first Divine Liturgy with his newly elected brother, went home, demonstratively leaving his representative, an archimandrite, to concelebrate.

Moreover, he is one who has a very dubious reputation – Archimandrite Kharalampy (Nichev), who was once a cleric of the BOC, but was expelled after a scandal, but was accepted in his present rank in Constantinople. At the same time, this same Archimandrite Kharalampy has a reputation as a person who belongs to the ‘lavender lobby’. Moreover, during the first Divine Liturgy of Patriarch Daniel, Archimandrite Kharalampy, being the senior priest by consecration, led the service as a representative of the clergy.

There will certainly be many more such dirty tricks on the part of the Phanar. But they do not pose a danger, but an attempt to provoke a schism in the BOC from among the bishops and priests dissatisfied with the election of Patriarch Daniel is a more terrible danger. And given the results of the vote, almost half were dissatisfied. It is clear that there is a long distance from discontent to a change of jurisdiction and an attempt to split, but the problem is serious. His Holiness Patriarch Daniel will obviously have to exert a great deal of effort to prevent a split in the BOC. Therefore, it is very likely that he will take some conciliatory actions and steps first of all.

It is very likely that the opposition to the new Patriarch will be led by the already mentioned and very influential Metropolitan Nicholas of Plovdiv, who has extensive connections in political circles (there are rumours that his father served in the security service of the Communist leader of Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov, i.e. he was not the least person at that time). Metropolitan Nicholas has recently become a leader of the pro-Phanar policy in the BOC.

Metropolitan Nicholas is a visible embodiment of the failures of the policy ‘of an Orthodox direction’ of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, which for a long time banked on him. And it seems that there were reasons for this, in addition to the family ties of the Metropolitan of Plovdiv. He was educated at the Moscow Theological Academy and for a long time demonstratively supported pro-Russian positions in the Bulgarian episcopate. In addition to the DECR, as far as we know, our Embassy also banked on him. So this is proof of the failure of all Russian diplomacy, not only ecclesiastical. As a result, we have now received a deafening slap in the face since Metropolitan Nicholas has become the main propagandist of the Phanar in the BOC, and the DECR and the Russian embassy seem to have got it all wrong.

Moreover, Metropolitan Nicholas not only changed his political orientation, but also committed openly offensive actions against His Holiness Patriarch Kirill. We are talking about his arbitrary restoration to the ecclesiastical dignity of the former hegumen Peter Yeremeev, who was banned in the Russian Church, who has recently been seen several times at the Divine services of Metropolitan Nicholas. And this is not just an insult to His Holiness Patriarch Kirill personally, who approved the decision to defrock the former hegumen Peter, but also in fact the creation of a serious problem in relations between the Bulgarian and Russian Orthodox Churches…..

Hegumen Pyotr Eremeev is a notorious personality. In addition to the fact that he held high positions in the structures of the Russian Orthodox Church, being the abbot of the historic Vysokopetrovsky Monastery in the centre of the capital and the rector of the Russian Orthodox University, he is widely known in narrow circles as one of the most prominent faces of the so-called ‘lavender lobby’ in the Russian Orthodox Church. Believers whispered about this and spoke with sorrow. And his ban from serving was perceived with great satisfaction by many Orthodox believers as a sure sign of the cleansing of the Church from the ‘lavender filth’.

Therefore, the story of the former abbot Peter testifies to the fact that the new Bulgarian Patriarch, in addition to the ‘Phanar lobby’, has another dangerous and influential opponent – the ‘lavender lobby’. It is no coincidence that in Bulgaria they whisper about the non-traditional sexual orientation of Metropolitan Nicholas of Plovdiv. It is also surprising and sad that Russian Church diplomats considered him to be the main supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church in Bulgaria.

By the way, as informed people say, the strange inclinations of the former hegumen Peter began to manifest themselves after his studies in Bulgaria, where he met and became friends with the then vicar of the Bulgarian Patriarch, Bishop Nicholas (Sebastianov) of Znepol. These unhealthy inclinations led Pyotr Yeremeev into a scandal with students of the Moscow Academy, which was the reason for his exile from Moscow to Khabarovsk in the Far East. But then he returned to the capital, supposedly cured of the sodomite disease, a story which turned out to be untrue.

Of course, we rejoice at the election of the new Bulgarian Patriarch, especially realising that we are witnessing the manifestation of the action of Divine Providence in history, which inspires us with hope in these desperate times. But let us be aware that Patriarch Daniel faces the most difficult trials ahead. Therefore, it would be right for all of us to at least sigh before God for Patriarch Daniel of Bulgaria, who is embarking on the difficult path of struggle for the Church of Christ and for the unity of world Orthodoxy.

 

Russian Nationalism Loses Control of the Russian Church

After the 1917 Revolution and the dissolution of the Russian Empire, the Russian Orthodox Church, formerly the Church of the Russian Empire, was forced to decentralise and give up various territories like eastern Poland and Finland, and the churches in them. Thus, the new country of Poland (and also Czechoslovakia) came to form its own independent (autocephalous) Local Orthodox Church. As for Russian Orthodox in Finland, like the emigres centred in Paris, and later Ukrainian emigres, they joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

However, the bulk of the Russian emigration, then in China (from here many later moved to Australia) as well as in Western Europe (from here many later rejoined others already in North America), became independent of Moscow. Eventually the descendants of this emigration became known as ROCOR or the New York Synod. Despite the fact that in 2006 several parishes in England and France had left the jurisdiction of Moscow itself to join Constantinople, in 2007 most of this New York Synod formally returned to Moscow, though a minority went to various old calendarist sects. In 2019 many of the descendants of the Paris emigres also rejoined Moscow, though a very large minority remained with Constantinople.

Despite reunification as recent as 2019, five years on, the 2024 situation mirrors the post-1917 chaos, when parts of the Russian Church refused to be subject to the politically-driven Russian Church administration.

Firstly, the Church in the Ukraine declared itself fully independent of Moscow. So much so that it set up nearly 100 parishes for its emigration in Western Europe, quite independently of Moscow. As for the Russian Orthodox Church in Latvia, it did much the same inside Latvia. In Moldova many parishes also left politically-coloured Moscow for the Romanian Church. Abroad many Moldovans went to Romanian churches, where they are not abused by Russian racism.

There is also dissidence in Lithuania and Estonia and even in Russia itself, where some Russian Orthodox also joined Constantinople. As regards the Russian Orthodox centred in Paris, now under Moscow, most there do not commemorate (or respect) their own Russian Orthodox Patriarch, whom they see as a politician, not as a churchman. More radically, the bulk of the old Russian emigration, now centred in New York and highly Americanised (they openly advise people to vote for Trump and support other post-Protestant phenomena), are also protesting. Some of its bishops openly called on the Russian Federation to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine!

Many suspect that several bishops and senior priests of this New York group has yet again been infiltrated, just as it was between the 60s and 80s, by the CIA. In any case its American or American-linked bishops parrot anti-Russian CIA propaganda, despite the fact that they call their fragment of the Church ‘Russian’! As a result, many Russian Orthodox patriots have been obliged to leave the New York Synod for other Local Churches, since the Moscow-centred Church, suicidally, refused to accept these patriots!

Thus, scandalous corruption in the New York Synod forced quite a number of patriotic Russian Orthodox in the USA, who also objected to the CIA hold over the group and yet were abandoned by politically-driven Moscow, to join the Church of Constantinople. In England, scandalous persecution from New York forced patriots in half the local diocese, abandoned by Moscow, to leave for the canonicity of the Romanian Church, thus skilfully avoiding politically-driven Constantinople. Here they continue to live exactly as before, as Russian Orthodox using the old calendar, but in exile as Russian Orthodox, as Moscow abandoned them. They are much supported by Moldovans, who are tired of being mistreated by Russians.

Ukrainians and Moldovans alike, tired of Russian racism, have been leaving, the Ukrainians setting up their own churches, the Moldovans, as we said, going to the Romanians. Making Non-Russian Orthodox feel like second-class citizens, usually deliberately, is suicidal for the Russian Church. The Russian Church is not only becoming a National Church, but rather a Nationalist Church. Suicidal politically-motivated and nationalistically-motivated actions by individuals in, or sent from, Moscow means that it has lost the loyalty of literally tens of millions of former Russian Orthodox.

At the present time, it is difficult to see how Moscow can ever get these tens of millions back. All this seems particularly strange when the Russian Church is supposed to be the Church of the multinational Russian Federation, part of the multipolar BRICS Alliance! And yet the Russian Church appears to be unipolar and uninational! Surely a Federation would be better represented by a multinational, and not nationalist, Church? Perhaps, once the conflict with the USA and its vassals in the Ukraine is over, the Russian Church, just like the Russian military with its four corrupt and now arrested generals, will also be cleansed of treacherous corruption, CIA bishops and all the rest?