Category Archives: Orthodox Life

Questions and Answers July 2025

The True Faith. The state of the various Orthodox jurisdictions in England today and fifty years ago. The moment when the Russian Church turned its back on Europe. The Oxford and London Russian parishes fifty years ago. Tsar Nicholas in England. The coming end of the war in the Ukraine. The consequent fall of the European elite and of its ideology versus Orthodoxy.

Q: What for you is the True Faith?

A: In my late childhood and early teenage years, I came to three conclusions about what must be the True Faith:

Firstly, the True Faith must be about Christ, as only Christ is God and man, combining East and West, North and South. The True Faith must therefore represent the spiritual reality of Him and not State manipulations of Religion and the Bible, based on nationalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism and all cultures of apostasy, like the White Supremacy Western world.

Secondly, the True Faith must be historical and not some recent invention, neither of the nineteenth century, nor of the sixteenth century, nor even of the eleventh century, for it must go back a thousand years before, to the Scriptures, to the Word of God Himself.

Thirdly, the True Faith must be universal, as is Christ. In other words, the True Faith must be for all races who seek it, accessible to all, that is, to all who are repentant and so seek Christ, and so is not some esoteric or obscurantist religion for one nationality, or for the select few or elite.

Q: Why did you not become members of the Antiochian Diocese when you left ROCOR in 2021, unlike the three Western riters who were purged by ROCOR and went to Antioch?

A: The short answer is that none of us twelve clergy, or any of our thousands of people, had ever been Anglicans, let alone Anglican vicars. You have to understand the Antiochian Diocese exists in this country for them. We have all always been Orthodox and have never known any other religion, so something for ex-Anglicans, however worthy and sincere they may be, has no interest for us. It is irrelevant to us.

Also, Antioch is not European, as we are, and cannot members of one of the four Arab families who operate it. The Church of Antioch here is tiny, consisting perhaps of only a thousand people, mainly ex-Anglicans or ex-Protestants, especially rather puritanical conservative evangelicals. (This puritanism is rather ironic given the behaviour of the former Antiochian Archbishop in the USA and also drives away normal Orthodox, who, like Arab Orthodox, are not puritans).

Another problem of Antioch being so small is that it is desperate to recruit clergy and people, with one recent disaster when they accepted a reject from the mainstream Churches, based in his front room in Liverpool, and another disaster, some years ago, in Belfast. I believe in the latter case that vicar-priest ended up in prison for fraud. Other Non-ex-Anglican clergy under Antioch eventually transfer back to the Local Churches they come from. They cannot take the Anglican mentality, however hard they try to deny their origins.

The long answer is that our first act after we learned, directly, (it was actually boasted of by the culprit!) of the ROCOR schism in April 2021 was to warn the ROCOR Synod of what was going on. As soon as we realised that the whole Synod in New York had been perverted into the new ROCOR, not leaving a shred of tradition and the old ROCOR, and misinformed, our second act was to report to Moscow. When they replied that, although they perfectly understood the insanity of the situation, for purely political reasons they could not receive us, our third act was to join the Paris Archdiocese under Moscow. This had largely been cleansed of liberal French intellectuals and we have many friends and family there.

After Paris was told by Moscow, which could not make up its mind at first, that it would not be allowed to keep us, as the Moscow aim was not to expand Paris but to close it down, our fourth act was to look at our other options. Although three different jurisdictions wanted us, the obvious and only correct option, which we adopted very quickly, was to go with our old friends in the Church of Romania. (Romania had been the original choice of the Paris Jurisdiction when they had quit Constantinople there years before, but occult forces had rejected that choice and it had joined Moscow. So we made the choice for them). The Romanian Church had been suggesting to us for years in case ROCOR turned schismatic and it was supported by Moscow for purely political reasons, we could transfer to them.

So we joined the Romanian Church with the tacit blessing of Moscow, and any other refugees who want to leave the schismatic ROCOR for the Romanian Church have been invited to do so too. We have simply paved the way for the others, who will follow us. The strangest thing about this was that there appeared a lie on the internet that the Romanian Church had not received us! There were actually people who believed this, though not in Moscow. But the lie only discredited him who invented it and those who believed it. Today the culprit for the lie is isolated, shunned and shamed as a liar.

Q: So Moscow is abandoning ROCOR behind their backs? Why did you not opt for the Russian or Greek Churches?

A: As I said, Moscow was not allowed to receive us for political reasons, even though it knew that ROCOR was engaged in its insane schism. As Moscow was not politically free (a very serious fault), it had to go along with the ROCOR schism. This was a turning point and next year, in 2026, all will see the significance of this. Later, Moscow was punished for this lack of principle and has since had to tolerate the recent horrible Russophobic attacks on the Moscow Patriarchate by both ROCOR bishops in Germany.

This is what happens when you compromise yourself with the positions of enemies of Church teaching, even if only once. It is a downward spiral, as you have to accept everything else they do later on. Moscow already regrets it, indeed it is the great loser in all of this, but that was its choice. It was clearly told what was going on, but Metr Antony Sevryuk suicidally rejected the warning and told us to join the Romanian Church. Thus, the Russian Church turned its back on Europe – I don’t think that even now he realises the scale and significance of his error. In one act he had handed over Western Europe, including the local Russians, to Romanian Orthodox jurisdiction.

As a result, the Moscow Diocese in this country is now programmed to become a small embassy ghetto, a dependency, with just its church in London and the small church in Oxford surviving, exactly as it was fifty years ago, the rest has literally been left to die out. Since the British Establishment, like the other Establishments in Europe, has blacklisted Moscow, Moscow has no hope of expansion or incarnation into Western society. Therefore, Moscow is for the time being closed down in Western Europe. There is no future for the Russian Church here. It has had to close its window on Europe, given European political hostility to it, and is looking towards Asia and Africa. It will take a generation for Moscow to turn back to Europe, if ever it does. 2022 will go down in Western European Church history as the moment when the Russian Church lost it.

As for the Greek Archdiocese, it has recently been renewed, as it was dying out. It now has several younger bishops, including one excellent one (if only he could be the next Patriarch!), still has excellent infrastructure and several big parishes in London and some outstanding priests, but it has huge problems. It is profoundly ethnically and politically Greek, compromised by its CIA Patriarch, and, like Antioch and the Moscow Church here, most of its priests are elderly and dying out.

As Archbishop Nikitas told us recently, he has 100 elderly priests to replace in the next ten years and only 3 candidates. It is now not possible to get lots of poorly-educated young archimandrites from Greece, like they did in the 60s and 70s. That source has dried up. Moreover, only one church, the newly-frescoed Thyateira chapel, actually belongs to the Greek Archdiocese. The others are all privately owned by Greek and Cypriot businessmen and restauranteurs, who do as they want.

Q: What then is the future of ROCOR?

A: In rejecting the mission of the Diaspora Church to gather all Orthodox together through its schism and racism towards Greeks, Romanians, Moldovans and rooted English Orthodox in particular, it refused to concelebrate with the mainstream and cut itself off from communion. It has instead concentrated on attracting extremists, the naïve, the vulnerable and the pathologically ill. This is the path of the sect and the cult. And that is what it has become.

Q: Did you know Fr Mark Meyrick and Metr Kallistos Ware?

A: Of course. I first met the then Fr Kallistos in September 1974. He was an old-style, upper middle-class High Church Anglican, with an incisive public school-trained intellect. I loved his lectures and learned a lot from him. But above all, he was a very kind and sincere man. I remember him and pray for him with gratitude, although I was on a quite different wavelength from him.

I first met Fr Mark in July 1976. The problem with Fr Mark, who came from a long line of Anglican vicars, is that he had chosen to live among Anglicans, cut off from the Orthodox mainstream. As a result, he had a tiny community in a Norfolk village, isolated from Orthodoxy. He mainly seemed to be interested in converting young Anglican men and encouraging them to grow extremely long beards! As I had no interest in either Anglicanism or long beards, that was not for me.

Fr Mark (later Archimandrite David), transferred from ROCOR to Moscow, I think, in 1981. This was because of the attempted Americanisation and sectarian fanaticisation of ROCOR, which began at that time and which ended in 2021 with the triumph of American convert ROCOR in Europe and its abolition as part of the mainstream. It is now an American crazy convert colony and has no future. Crazy convert Orthodoxy does not export, as it is culturally alien to Europeans.

Q: Are Orthodox bishops worse today than fifty years ago?

A: Absolutely not. Fifty years ago, I knew three of them. One was a homosexual bureaucrat who ordained his boyfriends. One of those he ordained became an alcoholic, another gave up the priesthood within two weeks. A second bishop was a lady’s man who spent time with his main mistress in a cottage on the south coast, or so I was told. I knew her. A third was an anthroposophist. So we decided to return to Paris, to people who knew the Tradition. Today’s crop of homosexuals and sociopathic narcissists created by being spoiled as children are no better, but also no worse.

Q: What do you remember of the University of Oxford in the 1970s and the Russian chapel, then inside the house in Canterbury Road in Oxford?

A: In those days (and I am told that it has not changed very much since then), there were three ways of getting into the University of Oxford as an undergraduate. In order of importance, these were: aristocratic privilege, wealth, and academic achievement. I was therefore automatically and distinctly third class from the outset. The first two types were there to complete their Norman education, so they could enter the Norman (British) Establishment.

Moreover, those aristocratic or wealthy types who had nearly always attended public schools were shockingly, to me an innocent aged 18, often suffered from Norman homosexuality, like William Rufus. Oxford was riddled with it. Another reason to keep well away. In any case, I was not there to enter the Norman Establishment, though many who had not been to public schools allowed it to happen to them, as they were venal careerists. I was there for exactly the opposite reason, to understand how to de-Normanise. By Divine Providence I studied in the Alfredian College, by tradition (even if not in reality), the only pre-Norman College in Oxford. All was right.

I attended the Russian chapel in Canterbury Road in October 1972 and again in February 1973, when I was sixteen, just before the modernistic, octagonal chapel was built in the garden. The old chapel inside the House is now the library, based on Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, which I helped put in there. That old chapel was charming.

On the other hand, the rather effete University chapel later built in the garden of 1, Canterbury Road was definitely not for the ordinary people of Oxford. The Serbs, who were ordinary people, kept well away, as did most of the Greeks. The few by then elderly Russian academics who were still alive went when they could to one or other of the two Russian churches in London.

Apart from the majority of normal people who went there, there were also wealthy Anglo-Catholic homosexuals, or else those who mistakenly thought that Church Tradition means the same as right-wing political conservatism.

Q: What was the London Russian Church in Ennismore Gardens like at the time fifty years ago in the mid-seventies? And the ROCOR Church?

A: The London Patriarchal church had been taken over by upper middle-class people from wealthy west London, owners of Cotswold cottages, villas in Tuscany or on Greek islands. These were intellectuals, Liberal Democrats, BBC directors, well-to-do academics, lawyers, journalists etc, so rich that they had the leisure time to be enthralled by ‘spirituality’, Orthodox or Buddhist, as spiritual tourists. In 2006 they left en masse for Constantinople, as their hero, Metr Antony Bloom, had died. He was the reason for them joining, so once he had gone, in 2004, it was all over. Their cliquish snobbery continues. Only five years ago I overheard one of these now elderly people saying about a very pious and simple Romanian man, who dared (once) to frequent his clubby (rented) church: ‘I hope he does not come back, but at least he has a degree’. Is that Christianity?

Fifty years ago the Emperor’s Gate ROCOR Church had twice as many people as the Bloomite church, but it was an old people’s home. Apart from two or three Anglican homosexuals, the average age of the parishioners, who were very nice, must have been about 80. The writing was on the wall. It was an ethnic club that had no future, as they had failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants.

Q: Is there anywhere you would go on to a pilgrimage to the Royal Martyrs in England?

A: There are two places: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Sandringham in Norfolk. Of the two I much prefer Sandringham, which is connected with the Tsar. He is still present there and he dreamed of becoming a Norfolk gentleman-farmer, if ever he had to leave Russia. Things will happen here.

For your interest, here is a full list of the five visits of the Tsar to England, with places and dates:

In 1873 the future Tsar first visited Queen Victoria as a five-year old child. He arrived on the Imperial Yacht at Woolwich on 16 June, stayed at Marlborough House on the Mall, visited Chiswick House on 28 June and on 28 July left for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, staying at Albert Cottage. On 8 August he went to Cowes Regatta, leaving England on 13 August, having spent nearly two months in England.

He visited London at the end of June 1893, having been met at Charing Cross Station, and staying at Marlborough House again. He went to Windsor on 1 July, visited Hurlingham on 4 July and Buckingham Palace on 5 July, attending the wedding of the future King George V on 6 July. He left the next day, having spent just over a week in England.

He arrived on 20 June 1894 to meet the future Tsarina. He arrived at Gravesend in Kent and travelled to Walton-on-Thames via Waterloo Station. He also visited Frogmore, Bagshot, Sandringham, Kings Lynn, London, Eton, Slough, Farnborough, Aldershot and Richmond-on-Thames. On 19 July he left for Portsmouth to cross to Osborne House and Albert Cottage, visiting Newport. He left on 23 July, after over a month in England.

1896 was his first visit as Tsar, with the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Olga. They arrived at Leith on 22 September and went to Balmoral by train via Ballater. Here he visited Braemar Castle. He then travelled by train via Preston and Oxford, taking the Imperial Yacht at Portsmouth on 3 October.

On Monday 2 August 1909 the Tsar and his family visited Cowes on the Isle of Wight for the Regatta. He stayed at Osborne House, visiting Barton Manor and leaving on 5 August, having given £1,000 to be distributed among the island’s poor.

Q: When will the war in the Ukraine end?

A: This US proxy war against Russia (as Marco Rubio has openly described it) is a war of attrition. First, the Russians ground down first the first Ukrainian Army, then the second Ukrainian Army with old Soviet equipment from Eastern Europe, and now it is finishing off the third Ukrainian Army, with its NATO equipment. Wars of attrition, like the American Civil War and the First and Second World Wars, can go on for years, but they always end very suddenly, as the Second War ended suddenly in Berlin.

We are now reaching that point in the Ukraine, as the Americans are getting rid of their actor-puppet Zelensky. He has got too big for his boots and is too corrupt, resists the puppet-master and has refused peace, which is want Trump wants. The end will come suddenly and, I think, fairly soon. This is why Trump gave him (not Putin) 50 days so Zelensky could be finished off. Either he will get out on a CIA plane or else he will finish with a bullet in his head. When will Kiev collapse? The German-led, Pan-European invasion of the USSR in the Second World War lasted three years and eleven months. So maybe the end to this war will come within the same time span. At present it has lasted three years and five months.

The only danger is that NATO may invade Russia, as it has threatened, then that will be full war. That is possible, if the crazies in NATO have their way. If so, they will be crushed, as NATO has already been demilitarised by Russia. Russia has defeated all the Western Coalitions that invaded it, that of Napoleon, that in the Crimea, that of Hitler, and now this American-led NATO one.

Q: What will happen to Western Europe, once it has been defeated in the Ukraine?

A: The consequences of the defeat of the Western puppet government in Kiev, created and used as a proxy battering ram against Russia, and so the defeat of the whole of NATO, will be tremendous. The West will never get its money back. Worse still, it will never get its prestige back. The West has gone, replaced by the multipolar BRICS world. This will feed through and the old governing elites in Europe will have to be replaced.

This is because all empires decline in depravity and perversion (from Roman emperors to the debauched King Edward VII and now the Mossad-Epstein orgies) or buffoonery (the leaders of Western Europe and Kiev today, if they are not also pedophiles and cocaine addicts). Decadence comes at the end and with it a total lack of sense of reality, as buffoons live in virtual reality, fantasy, just as Hitler did at the end. We can see this clearly in the last 35 years of US leaders, from Clinton-Lewinsky to Obama, ending with the demented Biden and the world’s greatest narcissist, the result of a materially spoilt childhood, Trump.

Q: Do you think that Europe could return to Orthodoxy?

A: Europe, no, but a small portion of Europeans, yes. In the Romanian Church we are preparing for this literally, as you will see next year. We already have ten bishops in the twenty-one countries of Western Europe and a flock of nearly five million. One of those bishops is French, all speak at least one Western European language, if not two or three.

Moreover, our bishops also have a conscience of the importance of the veneration of the local saints of Western Europe. This is unique. I remember the fierce and insulting opposition of the ROCOR bishops to their veneration until 2017, when they finally realised that the tide was too strong for them to swim against any longer and then they stopped persecuting me on that score at least.

It is clear that we are moving towards a post-American Europe, the post-1945 part of the history of Western Europe is over. The American invasion and occupation will soon end. Its old puppet governments, in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere, will fall. And Eurasia, Russian, India, China, India and Iran, north, south, east and west, the centres of the Heartland, are now co-operating in BRICS. Thus, the Western world, which was formed in the eleventh century has after a thousand years made itself spiritually irrelevant.

Q: Are the media censored in the UK?

A: Yes. The name of the official censor is Ofcom, but censorship relies above all on editorial control. Here news editors are appointed to carry out the censorship duties imposed by the State/Establishment and journalists who are completely mercenary, ‘presstitutes’ as they say. The BBC is a classic case of such censorship, of deliberate non-reporting, deliberate misreporting, and diversion (reporting irrelevant local stories of no interest instead of reporting the actual news).

 

 

 

 

The Latest ROCOR Scandal – This Time in Australia

https://news-pravda.com/world/2025/06/29/1477487.html

It is with great sadness that we have heard from multiple sources (a google search confirms all) of the latest Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) scandal, this time in Australia. There it has made all the main newspapers and media, though of course it will probably not make the largely ROCOR-run, anti-Greek, and heavily censored ‘orthochristian’ website.

Indeed, the Australian story has done nothing for the American Synod (ROCOR), which had already been publicly shamed in a court case for its blatant lies about Fr Alexander Belya and his Vicariate, as shown by the very expensive court case which it lost, and also for its blatant lies about the ‘Colchester Diocese’ in England. Here ROCOR lost half its Western European diocese through its anti-canonical, anti-Moscow schism, racist and sectarian persecution, slander and greed.

As a result, in all the nineteen churches combined of its so-called ‘Western European Diocese’, it is doubtful if on an average Sunday there are even 1,500 people inside them, many of which it does not even own. The ROCOR scandal in Geneva, with the vicious persecution and expulsion of the most faithful of the old ROCOR, all disciples of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, also remains unresolved. The Old Pre-Revolutionary Tradition ROCOR has been killed off by the New Convert ROCOR. St John of Shanghai has ben put on trial and suspended by the American Synod for a second time.

Now in Australia, after the sentencing of the ROCOR pedophile priest from Bombala, publicly known about for over seven years, though in the 1990s they had wanted to make him a bishop (!), another cleric, Fr Boris Ignatievsky, has made a shocking statement typical of ROCOR clericalism: ‘The sheep must not judge the shepherds’. Several of the Russian ‘gyprocker’ clergy in Australia, have already been responsible for scandals, including alcoholism, infidelity and wife-beating. Little wonder that our dear friend in Australia, a priest of integrity, Abbot Sergei Shatrov, left monasticism and the priesthood and became a taxi-driver. (Fr Michael Boyko, another Jordanville graduate, also left the priesthood and became a miner).

It all comes after the arrest and court case involving the notorious Fr Seraphim (Scuratov) in England back in the 1980s (the one whom they also wanted to make a bishop!), and the equally disgusting sexual scandals in the USA, in Boston, Blanco, Jordanville, Platina and Virginia. In the latter case a ROCOR monk left after being approached by a pervert-monk, went to his ROCOR bishop to talk of his trouble and then got touched up by the no less pervert-bishop, who claims to be ‘canonical’. (The monk threw off his monastic garb and walked away in disgust). Is all their monasticism composed of pedophiles? The half a dozen still active bishops of ROCOR (a generation ago, there were twenty – there are several who have ‘retired’ with disgust at the manner in which the new American Synod operates) do not know what to do.

The American ROCOR Archbishop for Australia, a former traditionalist Roman Catholic, rebaptised into ROCOR, is now spreading traditionalist Roman Catholic-style anti-birth control booklets, also to the scandal of the faithful. Russians have no truck with this. The pastoral crisis is in full swing here too. The ROCOR policy of sending out convert American bishops, who have no idea of the Russian Orthodox pastoral and cultural realities outside US convert ghettos, to the ROCOR colonies overseas, has been shown to be a catastrophic mistake.

Meanwhile, at their headquarters in Moscow, certain senior metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church (I know two of them, who informed me so) are thinking of replacing the ROCOR bishops with their own. They wanted ROCOR to be an embassy Church for them to improve their image abroad. In reality, ROCOR has made their image worse. Moscow is just waiting for the key old one to die, for he ‘zasidelsja’, has stayed on for too long. Most of the increasingly small numbers of ROCOR laypeople who are left would follow Moscow bishops. As for many former ROCOR clergy and faithful, they are now scattered as refugees from gross injustice, in the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Romania.

Moreover, both Patriarchates are keen to take even more of those fleeing the anti-canonical and schismatic actions of the rebaptising and anti-family ROCOR Synod. Therefore, they will take them all without letters of leave, which have no value or importance, as the new ROCOR is a schismatic group, which continues to persecute, in the harshest of ways, faithful clergy and people.

Scandals always accompany the decadence that comes before the end. It is just another nail in the coffin of the corpse of what was even twenty years ago a Russian Emigration Church with a largely respected and even glorious history. Sadly, a Persecuted Church has over the last generation become a Persecuting Church. All we can say to all is: Keep well away from ROCOR, approach it at your peril, for the old ROCOR is dead, killed by crazy converts, with their sexual and financial scandals.

To repeat the words of Fr Boris Ignatievsky: ‘Condemnation is a form of pride’. But the American Synod has been condemning the good and faithful for decades. Now it condemns the parents of outraged sons, who denounce pedophile clergy. Presumably then, in their view, pedophilia is a form of humility?

One commentator has asked: How did the Bombala pedophile get away with it for so long? All I know is that he had a terrible reputation when he was in Jerusalem in the 1980s. And all I can say is that either the bishops concerned are stupid, poor judges of character, or else, less charitably, they operate just like the Roman Catholics, as a gay mafia, protecting their own. One or the other. Sad, but true. The need for an Inter-Orthodox Council becomes ever more obvious to us, though apparently not to the majority of the bishops.

 

 

Convert or Converted? The Psychodrama of the Unconverted

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long, and is kind; love envies not; love vaunts not itself, is not puffed up.

1 Cor 13, 1-4

Religious psychosis, my ‘magical Orthodox thinking’, inspired by my obsession with listening to pseudo-elders on the internet, destroyed my life…I was living in fantasies that allowed me to escape reality and totally neglect my real responsibilities because I was setting myself an impossibly high standard of Christian probity and constantly failing.

Letter from a convert in the USA

Foreword

The worst case of a convert I have come across was in 1997, a young woman who had spent twelve years as a nun living in a cave in a Greek Old Calendarist sect in Greece and had come to realise that she had wasted her life. The only parallel I know of is that of that scandalous convent in the Urals led by the now fortunately defrocked Sergei Romanov, and which I visited in 2018. Time and again I return to the same conclusion: Keep to the mainstream, where there are families and children and flee from those who boast that they are not in communion with others. The Orthodox Church is the Catholic Church, that is the Church of Catholicity, of Conciliarity, and not of a lack of communion and so sectarianism, where there is no Church, only psychological manipulation.

Converts and Converted

The Apostles were all converts. How Christ gathered them together is recalled in the Gospels, for example the callings of Andrew and Peter the fishermen and Matthew the tax-collector. Then in the Acts of the Apostles we read about Saul the Persecutor who became Paul the Apostle on the Road to Damascus. However, we never think of the Apostles as ‘converts.’ Why? For the simple reason that they were converted and so their status as ‘converts’ ceased – they had become Orthodox Christians, like the rest of us. Although we were all once ‘converts’, even when we were children, we were then converted. For to remain a ‘convert’ means to remain in an infantile state. Those who think of themselves as converts need to grow up, to become adults and cease the things of children.

Pathology and the Convert

And now we come to the tragedy of ‘converts’ in contemporary Orthodox Christian life, and not only in the Diaspora, understanding that there is no theology here, only psychology, and often pathology, the manipulation of the vulnerable. For many of them do not want to know about the reality of Orthodox life and the services in Orthodox parishes and Orthodox families and how we live. Having listened to various fantasists and misguided idealists on the internet, often they straightaway want to become monks, which is impossible because to be a monk, obedience is essential. But Orthodoxy as monastic life is not accessible to them. For that would be to run before learning to walk. And that means falling. We have to start at the beginning, not to start at the end.

Pride at the Root

This is pride and it is pride that always goes before the fall. The problem with such converts is that they have entirely missed the point. They may join the Church, but this is not the same as ‘becoming Orthodox’, that is, being converted. To ‘become Orthodox’ does not mean keeping certain external monastic observances, such as growing long hair and (if a man) a long beard, (if a woman, wearing floor-length skirts and covering her hair with what looks like a table-cloth), dressing in black or talking with exotic words and incessantly and very boringly about the Typicon, ritual regulations, the canons, ‘the Fathers,’ or individual clerics. All this is irrelevant and ordinary Orthodox parishioners do not do such things, it is boring. Just look at them! Love is the sign of Orthodoxy.

Love at the Root

The essence of Orthodox Christianity is to acquire love for God, for others as for oneself. All external observances and long and boring issues about clerical personalities are irrelevant. Otherwise. it is all ‘sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’, because they have no love, as the Apostle Paul wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. And tragically there are ‘converts’ who even after fifty and sixty years have remained ‘converts.’ This is because they have no love, for love is the fruit of maturity, which is what they do not have, precisely because they have remained ‘converts’, infantiles, for they have never become Orthodox Christians. As Fr Seraphim (Rose) quoted an elderly Russian woman saying about a ’convert’ some fifty years ago: ‘He is certainly Orthodox, but is he a Christian?’

Afterword

Indeed, this disease of ‘convertitis’ has nothing to do with Christianity. It is always characterised by negativity, hypercriticism and interference in the lives of others. This dissatisfaction with others (real Orthodox are dissatisfied only with themselves and are generous and indulgent towards others) always results in the abandonment of Orthodoxy and schism, even if it takes them 50 or 60 years. There have been many contemporary examples, in the Old Calendarist schisms, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian (ROCOR). The convert disease of ‘illusionment’ always ends up in disillusionment, which, by definition, can only come from ‘illusionment’, which is called in Greek ‘plani’, in Russian ‘prelest’, in Romanian ‘inselare’, and in Latin ‘illusio’. Such a waste of life.

 

 

 

 

 

The One True Church and the Two False Churches: The Pastors Persecuted by the Politicians

Introduction

Even though they do not wish to join the Orthodox Church, let alone actually become Orthodox, certain Non-Orthodox admirers of Orthodoxy sometimes pronounce: ‘Yes, the Orthodox Church is the Church of the Holy Spirit’. They speak with naïvety and sentimentality, which is the result of their spiritual tourism. In reality, ‘The Orthodox Church is the Church of the War for the Holy Spirit, and it is a very bitter war. We Orthodox have two great enemies, those who prefer Mammon to the Holy Spirit and those who prefer Phariseeism to the Holy Spirit. Christ suffered from both and warned about both.  And both of them crucified and continue to crucify Christ and His Church.

The Church of the War for the Holy Spirit

The Head of the Orthodox Church is neither a Pope, nor a Patriarch, nor any other worldly leader, but the Risen Christ. The Church is His Body, irradiated and governed by the Holy Spirit, as the Church is the Bearer of the Holy Spirit. Our Church is not a dead body, a corpse, but it makes Saints, who are the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Any organisation that does not make Saints is not the Church, it is a mere human business, a sect or a corporation, not the Divino-human Church. For the Saints are the sign of the Holy Spirit. Where there are Saints, there is the Holy Spirit. Where there is the Holy Spirit, there are Saints. And where the Holy Spirit is not, there are no Saints.

The Church of Mammon

Ask any Orthodox from any Orthodox country why they rarely go to church and they will usually tell you that it is because of priests who demand money from them. For alongside the real Church there exists a parasitic organisation known as the ‘Church of Mammon’. This is full of those, mainly clerics, who carve out of the business careers for themselves and high salaries, exploiting the people, charging them money for all. Some are sexual perverts and the unprincipled, they swim with the tide, according to the wishes and whims of those who pay them. For them, the Head of the Church is not Christ, but States, and the Church is not governed by the Holy Spirit, but by Mammon.

The Church of the Pharisees

Ask any Orthodox from any Orthodox country why they rarely go to church and they will tell you that it is in part because of narrow-minded bigots and fanatics. For alongside the real Church there exists a second parasitic organisation known as the ‘Church of the Pharisees’. The Pharisees are clerics and laypeople who self-righteously proclaim that they are the heads of the Church, national leaders, and hypocritically devise all manner of human rules to oppress and condemn others and to cling on to power. They are deeply involved in State politics, nationalism and even militarisation. The word ‘schismatics’ for them denotes those who are of another nationality and do not worship their ethnarchs.

Conclusion

Who will win in this War for the Holy Spirit against both the Church of Mammon and the Church of the Pharisees? On the face of it, we know that these two powerful groups of enemies of the Church of the Holy Spirit work closely together. The businessmen and the pharisees love each other, as they have the same interests and so feed off one another. It would seem that it is two against one. However, paradoxically, their persecution of the Church makes us stronger. Their Persecuting Church never wins over our Persecuted Church, for we know that the last word in history belongs to Christ, Persecuted and Crucified, but also Risen from the dead. Not Death will vanquish, but Life.

Striving for Russian Church Unity: A Historical Note

For 47 years, from 1975 to 2022, I strived to help create unity inside the severely divided Russian Church, which then consisted of three aggressively warring ‘jurisdictions’. From 1975 to 2000 I fought against the Saducees with their ‘anything goes’, swim with the tide secularists, ‘all religions are the same’, ‘we all have the same god’ syncretism. From 2000 to 2022, I fought against the Pharisees, the scribes and the hypocrites, the old words for narcissists, who love only themselves are therefore Anti-Christians.

The division was purely political and went back to 1917. Only once we had achieved unity inside the Russian Church through the non-political, those of goodwill, in each group, could we hope to achieve unity with representatives of the other Local Churches in the Diaspora and so work towards a Local Western European Orthodox Church. To our great joy, we saw intra-Russian Church fully achieved in 2019.

However, the devil also has ears. Three years later, just like Constantinople with its control freak and isolating mentality decades earlier, the Russian Church then suicidally destroyed that unity through more nationalist politics. As a result, in 2022, all of us multinational clergy, parishes and people, some 5,000 in all, crossed, with the approval of Moscow (rather like Fr/St Sophrony (Sakharov) in 1965) to what will be the largest part of the future Local Church, the Romanian. The Russian Church in the Diaspora is now isolated and very small, as it has lost Ukrainians and now many Moldovans, not to mention local people.

In the last three years, the Moscow Church in Moldova has lost nearly half its parishes. According to updated information, Moscow now has 1,200 parishes and the Romanian Bessarabian Metropolia no longer has 200, but 1,100 parishes, with many monasteries. The movement from Moscow to Bucharest is in one direction only, at the rate of 4, 6 and even 10 parishes and mainly young people per week. As Metr Vladimir famously wrote in October 2023, Moscow treats Moldovans like second-class citizens, just as it treats other Non-Russians, including English people. See:

https://gordonua.com/news/worldnews/rossija-otnositsja-k-nam-kak-k-beskhrebetnomu-narodu-mitropolit-moldavskoj-pravoslavnoj-tserkvi-napisal-pismo-hlave-rpts-1685283.html

Although Metr Vladimir wonders about contacting Constantinople and asking it for autocephaly, that will not happen. Patriarch Bartholomew does not want to interfere in Moldova (he already made his huge mistake in the Ukraine) and get on the wrong side of Bucharest. He will be going here next October to take part in the consecration of the new Patriarchal Cathedral, the largest Orthodox church in the world. It is too late for Constantinople, just as it is too late for Moscow. Far more likely, given Moscow’s stubborn refusal 30 years ago to grant Moldova autonomy or autocephaly, is that the elderly Moscow jurisdiction in Moldova will disappear, except for the ultra-Russian nationalist Bishop Markel, and Bucharest will grant Moldova autonomy.

This will also mean the end of most of the Russian Diaspora in Western Europe, as it largely consists of Ukrainians and Moldovans, especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal. The nationalist attitude of Moscow is suicidal. God gave Moscow so much, the largest country in the world, and yet it destroyed it twice, in 1917 and then again very recently. The  Soviet-style ideology of nationalism has destroyed a once multinational Church.

 

 

The New World Order and Communion and Decentralisation

Foreword

I had a great interest in British and European history and geopolitics long before I started lecturing on these subjects at the ESSEC Graduate School of Business in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s. I suppose that I am probably one of the few Orthodox priests in the world who has also worked in lecturing in geopolitics and Western and Russian history. As such, I cannot help applying observations – and they are observations and not opinions – about the political world to Church life. Church life after all exists in the world shaped by politics, so the human side of Church life reflects politics, Cold War and post-Cold War. For example, the decentralisation or deglobalisation, now going on internationally, will be followed in Church life, though Church decentralisation originates from the model of the Holy Trinity, Unity in Diversity. But let us first look at the world and this process of momentous changes, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and has now reached the highest political level in the USA.

Part One: The End of the Old World Order

The End of the Millennial Western Cycle

In the last millennium Western Europe gradually came to dominate the world, reaching an apogee in the British and French colonial empires of the nineteenth century, which controlled nearly half of the planet. (Indeed, quite anachronistically today, those two countries, which no longer have colonial empires, still have seats on the unrepresentative UN Security Council). Then, as a result of Western Europe’s twentieth-century suicidal wars, falsely dubbed ‘World Wars’, power passed to the USA and to the ‘Wild West’ in California. Now that the US has also failed to keep its supremacy because of its own countless lost wars, we are returning to the old multipolar, pre-Western Globalist world, a decentralised world, which is what the ever-expanding BRICS, founded in Ekaterinburg in Russia in 2009, is. BRICS exists because it is representative of the real world, unlike the unrepresentative UN Security Council. And BRICS has been hugely boosted by the rout of West in the Ukraine and now by Trump’s tariffs.

The Rout of the West in the Ukraine

The Collective West’s last attempt to cling to power was to try to hang on to its domination by fighting a proxy war in Europe itself, against Russia in the Ukraine. Once Russia had been ‘reduced to rubble’ by the West, as promised by the demented Biden in 2022, the plan was to destroy China. This is why the ‘West is Best’ Westerner, the discredited liar, Boris Johnson, rightly warned that if the West lost in the Ukraine, it would lose its ‘hegemony’, that is, its domination of the world. This is correct as the Western rout in the Ukraine is now obvious. The recent sight of ‘invincible’ German tanks burning in their scores in the south of Russia’s Kursk province, a repeat of the same German defeat there in 1943, tells us the outcome of that attempt. As a result of seeing this NATO defeat, the West has been divided and Trump’s bankrupted USA is walking away, recognising that that his resources are much too limited and the Ukraine lies in the Russian sphere of influence. The ball is in the court of ever-squabbling Western Europe.

The End of Western European Power

With the anti-diplomatic insults wielded by European politicians like Macron and Starmer against Trump (anti-diplomatic because diplomacy only exists where there is free speech, and there is no free speech in Western Europe today, which is why it now has no free trade), it is clear that Western Europe has little future. None of its war criminal leaders, guilty of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, has more than 25% of support from their electorates. Thus, Trump marks the end of the globalist and centralist EU and NATO as he marks the end of centralisation. The EU elite is opposed to such decentralisation because it benefited the most from centralising Globalism, unlike the 90% at the bottom of their societies. That is why, for example, Brexit was supported by the bottom half of society and is opposed by the UK Metropolitan elite of politicians and journalists, who hate economic nationalism in favour of their self-interest.

The End of the EU and the UK

The West is divided. Europe collapses. Leading an authoritarian regime, the unelected EU elite, like the anti-Brexit UK elite, is based on top-down centralisation. European centralisation (‘unity’), like Europe itself, is artificial and depends on a European Deep State, a Superstate, an authoritarian EU or ‘Frankish’ (in the UK, it is not Frankish but Norman) Dictatorship. Thus, the EU is run by autocrats and commissars like von der Leyen. They are opposed to democratic leaders like Georgescu and Le Pen, trying to imprison them, and also to states like Russia and China, where leaders, who govern in the national interest, are very popular. (The only exceptions to unpopularity in Europe are pro-Trump leaders like Orban and Fico). As they say, Western countries are governed by different Parties, but by the same Policy and therefore the Parties are called the ‘Uniparty’. On the other hand, countries like Russia and China are governed by One Party, which changes its Policies in the national interest.

Import Tariffs

The irrational, plutocratic, narcissistic and even megalomaniac import tariffs of President Trump exist because he is the only one who has the courage to try and wipe out the huge US deficit and debt of $36.7 trillion, accumulated since 1991. Though the tariffs are not the solution, they mark the end of Globalism and US domination of the world, known as ‘Unipolarity’. Unipolarity began in 1991 after the fall of Bipolarity and the fall of the Marxist Soviet Union and rule by only one Power, the USA. These tariffs are not new. They echo the attempt by Great Britain to keep its Empire through ‘Imperial Preference’. Although the decline of the British Empire can be dated to 1878, Imperial Preference, that is, British Protectionism, was systematically implemented only in the 1930s. It failed. The introduction of Protectionism, through import tariffs or other anti-free trade measures, is a survival method which comes at the end of empire, when a country is on the way out, as is the USA, despite Trump’s fantasies.

BRICS: Decentralisation Defeats Globalism

As we have said, in 1991 the world moved from Bipolarity to Unipolarity and so Western-controlled Globalism. Today we are rapidly moving back to Multipolarity, which historically speaking is Normality, for Bipolarity and Unipolarity are historically abnormal, as we can see in India before 1711, China before 1839 and Russia before 1917. And today’s Multipolarity is embodied in BRICS, the Alliance of equal and sovereign countries, the model for decentralisation and anti-imperialism. BRICS, with half the world’s population and GDP, already has many representatives from the whole Non-Western world and dozens of countries are waiting to join it, and is led precisely by three of the world’s four largest economies, China, India and Russia. Thus, China overtook the USA in 2020, even on corrupted PPP figures, in reality, probably in 2008. India is fast catching up. And, at No 4, sanctioned Russia, which two years ago overtook Germany and then Japan, already has the largest economy in Europe.

Part Two: The New World Order

The USA versus BRICS

Today, the USA elite has isolated itself through imposing its bullying tariffs and united the world against it. All Afro-Eurasia’s 128 nations are uniting against it, despite resistance from the isolated, discredited and tariffed EU, former US allies, but now isolated from Russia, China and the USA. Thanks to the tariffs, the former enemies, China, Japan and South Korea, have met together. South-East Asia is drawing towards China. China is meeting Pakistan and Afghanistan. India is meeting Bangladesh. China and India are meeting together in friendship. Russia is meeting African countries. Powerful Indonesia has joined BRICS. Few of these countries need the USA, especially a USA which imposes tariffs on their goods. They not only can, but now have to, trade with one another. Even Western Europe and Anglosphere Oceania will be thrown into the embrace of China and, in the case of suicidal and much-weakened Western Europe, ironically, also into the embrace of the Russia that it once hated. How?

The Anglosphere

The US appear to be abandoning Africa and Western Europe with its EU and NATO, which Trump hates, but it is laying claim to Latin America, together with Greenland and Canada. In the Americas it is very doubtful if the USA can lay hold of Latin America or anything outside Northern America, that is, outside Greenland and Canada. It could, if it wished, probably and logically lay hold of the whole of the rest of the Anglosphere, the UK, Ireland (once both are divorced from the EU) and also Oceania, though with new elites. As for the rest of Western Europe, the suicidal old Western European elite must also be replaced, once the people have grasped that elite’s defeat in the Ukraine. This will mean the appearance of a new political governing class, drawn from the people, one which will respect others because it respects the people. It will mean introducing a democratic system, for the first time and respecting others, including Russia, which answers our question as to how Western Europe can embrace Russia.

England Versus Britain

Norman-founded Britain caused nearly a thousand years of continual violence, invading 171 of the world’s 193 countries, mainly since the seventeenth century, at war all the time, like the USA since 1941. But the Norman regime’s first victims were always the English, followed by the other native peoples of these Isles. Despite them and despite perceptions, parts of England still survive among the people, in the countryside, market towns and hidden places. True, films exist comparing the best of other countries with the worst of British England. This is as absurd as comparing the worst of others with the best of English England. True, the worst does exist. In Britain political instability has become the norm, with one minority authoritarian government after another, there is mass illegal immigration, caused by the Globalist elite, money is given to corrupt Kiev, parts of the health service are in a disastrous state, while potholed roads and litter-strewn pavements make parts of the country look rundown and third world.

Pessimism and Optimism

Thus, there are indeed good reasons for pessimism. And yet, England has been under threat since 1066, but we the English ‘plebs’ are still here, still alive, as are the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh. The day of liberation of all of us and of our lands from the oppression of the British Norman elite is at last dawning. We all await liberation and the overthrow of British oppressors. A new political elite in the UK will also mean the end of pedophilia, which pollutes its politicians, economists, media like the BBC, the bishops and clergy of its strange Establishment Religion, founded by the sadistic maniac and thief, Henry VIII, and for centuries its queer German Royal Family. The fall of that perverted elite will be the end of the Norman Empire, whose first pervert was William Rufus. And he was only the first, which culminated in Victorian times, with Victoria’s children, and the stream of twentieth-century royal perverts, from the Duke of Kent, who died while crashing a plane in 1942, to the rotted Battenbergs.

Part Three: The Church

The Decentralisation of the Church and Communion with the Church

In May 1983, I asked Fr, now St, Sophrony (Sakharov) why heresy and schism are dangerous. He replied that danger comes from them because they are based on a lack of love. I learned from this that if you see a bishop consciously, self-justifyingly, and publicly falling into schism, and even condemning other Orthodox peoples in order to justify schism, you must leave him as soon as possible, unless you want to take part in his spiritual suicide, caused by his hatred of others and their views. In 2021 our alarm bells rang, when schism, falling out of communion after we had worked so hard and for so many decades to regain it, was implemented. We could not take part in it. So we all left. We do not regret obeying our conscience, indeed, we thank God that we escaped from that sin of hatred of others, which even the blood of martyrs cannot wash away. To fall into schism and so to fall out of communion with the Church is to be dreaded. Communion is the sign that we belong to the Church. And we do.

Communion and Decentralisation: Unity in Diversity

Schism is caused by excommunicating yourself from the Church because you are trying to enforce a politically-inspired, Papist centralisation. This can be seen very clearly in the present shameful schism between two of the most important Local Orthodox Churches, Moscow and Constantinople, which is a purely political combat about centralising power and gaining money. In the Church, unlike in the secular world in recent centuries, we have not Excommunion and Centralisation, but Communion and Decentralisation. If we have in our hearts and minds, as we should as Orthodox Christians, the Holy Trinity, Three in One, Unity in Diversity, there is no contradiction between Communion and Decentralisation. Like the Holy Trinity, Three in One, Communion and Decentralisation describe relations of Love. It is time for Moscow and Constantinople to respect other nationalities and other lands, decentralising without losing Communion, the sign that we belong to the Church. And we do.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Chisinau, Moldova.

Feast of the Archangel Gabriel, 26 March/8 April 2025

 

 

 

 

 

Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Future of the Orthodox Church in Western Europe after the Western Defeat in the Ukraine

The colonial era is widely accepted to have started in the 15th century…, but in fact colonialism started in the 11th century.

Fadi Lama, Why the West Can’t Win, Clarity Press, 2023

Introduction

Europe

The 10 million square kilometres of what has for several centuries been called Europe is divided into two almost equal halves. The Eastern half is populated very largely by East Slavs and consists of only three countries. It stretches from the Urals in the Russian Federation to the borders of Belarus and the future Ukraine (when the borders of the Ukrainian people have at last been self-determined). It has a population of some 185 million, if we include the smaller numbers who live beyond the Urals, as far as the Pacific coast. The vast majority of them are baptised Orthodox Christians.

The Western half stretches westwards from those borders to the Atlantic coasts of Iceland, Ireland and Portugal. Unlike the Eastern half of Europe, the Western half is divided into forty-one countries and is populated by different races, with some 555 million people, three times more than in the Eastern half. Most of the countries in the far West have since the eleventh century colonised much of the world. By background these are mainly the new Roman Catholics or Protestants, but there are also 55 million of the much older, original Orthodox Christian population, mostly living in the smaller and poorer countries.

Part One

The Eastern Half of Europe After the Conflict in the Ukraine

The future of Russia was already clear to Tsar Nicholas II (+ 1918), who wanted to restore Russia to the era of Tsardom before the Western-minded imperialist, Peter I (+ 1725). Tsar Nicholas II was prevented by aristocratic traitors from this restoration, as he rejected their feudal system of serfdom of the Russian Empire (1721-1917). In his turn, President Putin has today rejected the anti-Russian system of atheism of the Soviet Empire (1917-1991) and the Western system of capitalism of the corrupt oligarchy of the three countries of East Slavdom (1992-2022). This 300-year period and its illusions ended, ironically, thanks to Western sanctions, illegally and suicidally applied to the Russian Federation, after the conflict in the eastern Ukraine became large-scale.

In other words, after a 300-year interruption, Russia and all the East Slavs are about to return to the period of Pre-Imperial Tsardom. This means economic sovereignty and independence, not subservience to the Western Powers and their Globalist ideology. Unlike the Feudal-Capitalist period of the past 300 years (1721-2022), which was chiefly concerned with money-making, as loved by pseudo-White, that is anti-Tsar, Russian emigres, and then by Westernised oligarchs, Tsardom also means social justice. The Revolution came about precisely because of the lack of injustice. Like all Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Russians are socially conservative, but also value social justice, the sources of stable family life and stable national life. Here is the future.

The Western Half of Europe After its Defeat in the Ukraine

The first and second parts of the Great European War, known as World War One and World War Two, were caused by imperialist rivalries in Western Europe, notably the British elite Round Table’s and the German Kaiser’s ambition to exercise global hegemony, controlling the whole world. Through its failed aggression, in 1916 that British ruling class ended up having to begin to cede its dreamed-of global hegemony to the US elite. Failing to manipulate the US for its own purposes, later even the arch-manipulator, the half-American Churchill, was to see his beloved British Empire dismantled by the US. The present conflict in the Ukraine, which is as close to World War Three as we can get, was caused by the similar ambition of the US elite. It tried to reproduce the dream of the British ruling class, to exercise global hegemony, killing ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

That conflict has already lasted for over three years, for ‘as long as it takes’ (= for as long as it takes for the Ukraine to collapse). The EU and UK still refuse to admit the defeat of their Ukrainian proxy. They are too proud to lose face and admit defeat and so continue to justify themselves and talk about making war and not peace (strangely these warmongers want to take part in peace talks!). This refusal to accept reality is so deranged that it is delusional. Thus, the coming end of the Nazi Ukraine will also be the end of the Nazi EU fantasy. In reality, Europe does not exist, there are only the at present forty-one countries of Western Europe. After the eventual collapse of the EU and the UK, the approximately 555 million people of the forty-one nations of Western Europe may perhaps divide into four Regional Confederations of Sovereign Nations.

Part Two

Four Regional Confederations in Western Europe

In the Southern half of 280 million, the two Regional Confederations could be that of the at present eight largely Latin countries of South-Western Europe (France, Monaco, Italy, San Marino, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Andorra, numbering some 185 million), and that of the sixteen countries of South-Eastern Europe (Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus, numbering some 95 million). This smaller group, with its large Orthodox presence would naturally be close to Russian-oriented Eastern Europe.

In the Northern half of 275 million, the two Regional Confederations could be that of the at present ten largely Germanic countries of Northern Europe (Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland and the British Isles, numbering some 110 million), and that of the at present seven largely Germanic countries of Western and Central Europe: the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Poland, numbering some 160 million). These two Northern Confederations have much in common, as do the two Southern Confederations. Perhaps they would combine?

Old and New Countries

However, new countries, forced apart into separate countries for purely political reasons, and those artificially constructed from regions of their neighbours, could reform and reunite. Thus, on the one hand, the now politically divided Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and perhaps Bosnia-Herzegovina, could reunite into one. On the other hand, the territory of Belgium could be returned to its three component countries, the Netherlands, France and Germany, of which it was artificially composed. And although we presume that Italy and Germany will remain united, this is not certain. Notably, there are great differences between eastern and western Germany and northern and southern Italy.

On the other hand, centralised Spain could at last cede independence to Catalonia and the artificial union of the UK, a failed state, could dissolve back into England, Scotland and Wales. These could finally reclaim their freedom and independence from Britain, and with the long overdue reuniting of Ireland. Thus, that ruthless band of colonial Vikings, raiders and traders (much the same thing), who formed and imposed the British Establishment in their Crusade in 1066, began their worldwide aggression. Their wicked legacy is continued by the British State and its propaganda mouthpieces over nearly a millennium, may at last disappear. Such possible changes would still leave a Western Europe of forty-one countries.

Part Three

The Russian Rejection of a Western European Orthodox Church

In this new reality of Western Europe (effectively, Non-Russian Europe) and Eastern Europe (effectively, Russian Europe), what is the future of Orthodox Christianity in this Western half of Europe? In the last four years, the Russian Church has refused to tackle its own internal schism there, caused by the sociopathic hatred among its converts and their breach of internal communion. If, as it seems, Russian nationalism has taken hold and indifference to Non-Russians is now the norm, the Russian Church will indeed lose everything outside the Russian Federation, where it has already rejected its age-old, best friends. It seems to have turned its back on the West, rejecting the legacy of the old Russian emigration and the hopes of Patriarch Alexis II, who had himself been an emigre. For now the Russian Church is looking to Africa and Asia.

Some prophesy that since 1991 Russia has been condemned to wander in the wilderness for forty years, but that it will be led out to the Promised Land by its Moses-like Saints and only then, in about 2030, will a Tsar come. Only then will come renewed interest and the awaited Great Cleansing of the Church. Indeed, over the last thirty-five years the Vatican-style homosexualisation of the Moscow episcopate has been accompanied by pseudo-intellectualism, ecumenism and financial corruption a la Alfeev. The abandonment of the Western world by Moscow and its reduction to ghetto nationalism has left a vacuum in its discipline. This is being filled in part by the CIA takeover of the New York branch of the Russian Church, with its sectarian doctrine of the rebaptism not only of Catholics and Protestants, but also of other Orthodox Christians.

The Greek Rejection of a Western European Orthodox Church

This new self-imposed irrelevance of all parts of the Russian Church to the foundation of a new Local Church of Western Europe repeats the same self-imposed irrelevance of the Greek Church of Constantinople. The latter also turned its back on a Western European Local Church, though several decades ago, as a result of Greek nationalism. We remember many, many incidents of such nationalism over the last sixty years, with Western Europeans being told by Greek archbishops and priests to ‘go away’ (in fact, much less politely than that) or being told to ‘join the Anglicans’ or ‘become a Catholic’. One well-known Cypriot ‘spiritual father’, who possessed a doctorate, informing us that Orthodoxy only exists because of Plato and Aristotle, ‘who are virtually saints’, as without those pagan Greeks ‘there would never have been any Christianity’!

Over the last sixty years the Vatican-style homosexualisation of the episcopate of Constantinople has gone hand in hand with the same pseudo-intellectualism, ecumenism and financial corruption, this time, a la Zisioulas. It is curious to see how these four phenomena are always interconnected in both Churches. The recent revelation, long-rumoured, that the CIA paid the Phanar $15 million (in fact $20 million, but the corrupt Kiev regime filched $5 million for its own slush fund) to found their fake gangster Church in the Ukraine is symbolic of the spiritual decadence. After all, the CIA escorted under threat of death Patriarch Maximos V to Switzerland in 1948, since when the City has indeed been lost, captive to politicking. Only a new Patriarch can ‘retire’ all the homosexual bishops and cleanse the Phanar, in effect refounding the Patriarchate.

Conclusion: The Input of the Romanian Orthodox Church

With both the Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox worlds fallen to political nationalism in the last few years, and without hope, for now, of restoring the old multinational catholicity of Russian Orthodoxy, now out of communion with many other Orthodox, who can we local Orthodox look to? Abandoned by Greeks and Russians alike, the responsibility for the possible foundation of a future Western European Orthodox Church falls for now to the second largest Local Orthodox Church, the Romanian, if only because of its size.

The Romanian language is not only a Latin language which uses the Latin alphabet, but the Romanian Orthodox Church is also in communion with all the Local Churches, unlike the Greeks and the Russians. The Romanian Church is also by far the largest in Western Europe, with 5 million baptised, 1,153 churches and 10 bishops. However, a future new Local Church must encompass all Orthodox, inclusively, non-politically and non-nationalistically. This can only come in an alliance of Churches, in the spirit of catholicity of the whole Church.

 

 

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.