Category Archives: Orthodox Restoration

On Whistle-Blowing: For the Freedom of the Church, We are Fearless Against the American Schism

If we live a life for Christ, we strive to do what He would have done.

Thus, when an MI5 spotter showed interest in me in Oxford in 1977, I replied by blowing the whistle.

Thus, when homosexual bureaucrat-bishops representing the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the sort who, once bribed, recently founded a fake church of atheist thugs in the Ukraine (the OCU), showed interest in me, I replied by blowing the whistle.

Thus, when Moscow bureaucrat-bishops, homosexuals, secretly married, alcoholics, sectarians who rebaptise one another, and, worst of all, politicians who manifestly profess atheist values, tried to recruit me, I replied by blowing the whistle.

In my lifetime, I have seen the Greeks lose it and then the Russians. The Greeks were only interested in Hellenism. The Russians, at that time, were only interested in Soviet politics. Russia, as I continually repeated ever since my return there after de-Sovietisation, in 2007, could go one way or the other, towards the whole Church or towards racial and nationalist introversion, it was on a knife-edge. Sadly, it went the other way, towards nationalist schism, and cut off from communion and concelebration with the mainstream. We can only pray and hope that that tragedy will be overcome. At present the Russian Church is out of communion even with itself in Western Europe. As for the Church in the Ukraine, it must receive independence, or else it will be boycotted. The people will not go to churches under Moscow, just as they do not go to fake churches.

The mantle has passed on our long and thorny path of building our new Local Church of Western Europe. I have no interest in those who have no openness and want to form nationalist ghettoes. There is no future with them, as they are absorbed by internal, racial questions which are spiritually irrelevant. As a result, they disobey the canons and use canonical discipline to apply purely political decisions. Those who live according to nationalistic criteria have no interest in Local Churches. Therefore, they have committed suicide in Western Europe.

When the bureaucrats obeyed the State and tried to close down our churches because of ‘covid’, I replied by blowing the whistle.

We are not afraid of death because God protects. When sociopaths become psychopaths, they turn violent. So what? Salvation lies in the path of Confession or Martyrdom.

If you have a conscience, honour and integrity, you must act against schism, whoever is creating it. At such moments you are not concerned by slanders and personal attacks, because you are taken up by the protective grace of God and you must follow that grace. Grace is irresistible. You must resist schism, because it always turns into heresy, as our Metropolitan Joseph very precisely predicted in February 2022.

Thus, the refusal to concelebrate with another part of the Church, because it receives Orthodox in the customary way of the Church, indeed soon turned into heresy. This heresy is that of the rebaptism of Orthodox who have long been receiving the sacraments of the Church. The rejection of the sacraments of the Church by such typically Protestant, anti-sacramental schismatics is a heresy. Like the proselytising pharisees, recruiting and rebaptising Christians in the freezing cold sea is not a solution to increasing the tiny numbers in your tiny schismatic and sectarian communities.

Two liturgies and five baptisms this weekend and, much as usual, some 200 communions from three chalices. And a certain ‘bishop’ wanted to close our church and even told people that we are ‘closed’! He is ignored. As with the fake Church in the Ukraine, it is the same persecution here. But here the law and the canons are on our side. Western Europe is different from the USA. Europe belongs to Europeans, not to Americans. We are not bossed about and do not speak American. We have our own culture.

 

From Kabul to Kiev and the Future of the Russian Orthodox Church

After his brutal rebuff in Washington (together with Starmer), ex-President Zelensky is now desperately touring leaders of Western Europe, even seeing the Pope, in order to try and get support for his failing regime. The fact is that, regardless of whether Harris or Trump wins in the US elections in a few weeks’ time, the US has abandoned Zelensky’s Ukraine, turning its back on it and disengaging from it. The US media will just stop talking about the Western rout in the Ukraine, as they did in Afghanistan. Kabul or Kiev, it is the same thing. You have lost, sweep it under the carpet, it never happened. The US has to face Israel’s military and economic collapse and its great commercial rival, China. It has no more time for the loser in Kiev. Americans never like losers, so it is walking away from them.

The US has dumped Kiev on Europe and will, as usual, leave Europe, whose tail the US has been wagging for years, hanging out to dry. The US refused to allow Kiev to make deep strikes on Russia, it will not allow Kiev to join NATO, indeed it cancelled the Kiev-NATO Rammstein meeting of 12 October and the majority of the EU do not want Kiev to join it. (Ironically, the only country which enthusiastically supports Kiev’s EU membership is the UK, which itself left the EU!) Yes, the EU may string Kiev along, which will then string naïve Ukrainians along, but Europe has no more arms or munitions to give Kiev, and many countries, like Germany, Croatia, Italy and Slovakia, have publicly said so. Just as the British ran back to their island at Dunkirk in 1940, so the US is running back to the Big Island in 2024.

As for Zelensky, he will also try to run away to the same place. The Russian Army has all but destroyed the suicidal Ukrainian forces which crossed the border into the Kursk province of Russia. 22,000 Ukrainian troops are already dead or wounded. From Kursk Russian forces could cross into Sumy province and take Kiev. For the 7 January? Russia will get on with the reformatting, absorbing and rebuilding of the Ukraine as a New Ukraine under a new government in Kiev, effectively forming a southern Belarus. Russia will take back the Russian south and east, including Odessa and Kharkov. A small slice of the south-west corner may return to Hungary, with autonomy granted at last to Carpatho-Rus (what Kiev condescendingly called ‘Zakarpattia’), and perhaps small slices in the south will return to Romania.

By agreement with Moldova the Russian Federation could take back Transdnistria and probably, also by agreement, Gagauzia. These moves would be extremely popular, but leaving Romania to take back most of Moldova. As for the tiny Baltics, they will die out, until they reach friendship agreements with Russia, once their US elites have been removed. This Baltic situation will be repeated throughout Western Europe, as US elites in the EU and the UK are removed by popular vote – as indeed is already happening. The defeat of the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev will also bring freedom for the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and shame on the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which the US bribed to set up a fake Church for ‘the national Ukrainian religion’, to replace the Church of God.

At this, questions will arise for the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, centred in Moscow. In nearly three years of the conflict in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate has lost control (to the CIA) of its New-York based Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), whose sociopaths have been rebaptising other Orthodox. It has also lost control of the Church in the Ukraine, in Moldova and in the Baltics. In the Western world the Moscow Patriarchate has been discredited, with the Patriarch of Moscow even being banned from Canada, the UK and Lithuania and its parishes there contracting and losing virtually all Non-Russians. The racist rejection by Muscovites of Moldovans, Ukrainians and local people, many of whom had been devoted to the Russian Orthodox Church for fifty years and more, has been scandalous.

It is now difficult to see what the Church authorities in Moscow can do to recover the situation. Moscow is in schism with the Greek Churches. It has invested in Africa, officially a Greek territory. Other Local Churches distrust it. Tens of millions have been disaffected from Moscow, after it betrayed them, in one way or another, including now banned priests inside Russia, who have been forced to leave the country in order to continue. Regardless of the outcome in the Ukraine, that is, the inevitable Russian military and political victory, you cannot force people to be what they are not. You cannot force people to go to church. It may even be that the Russian government will have to intervene in Moscow Church matters in order to bring it round to abandoning its disastrous and suicidal policy of centralisation.

May God’s Will be done.

 

 

 

Our Future after the Defeat of Millennial Nazism in the Ukraine

 Introduction

The geographical fault-line between what is Western Secularist (former Catholic-Protestant) and Orthodox Christian Civilisations runs through the Austro-Polish Hapsburg far west of the Ukraine. This is precisely the origin of the present war there, for the same reason as the war in ex-Yugoslavia took place a generation ago because of the existence there of that same civilisational fault-line, only to the south-west of the Ukraine. The Secularist desire has been to conquer the Ukraine (and then ex-Yugoslavia) in order to exploit its natural resources and riches. One Imperialistic Civilisation, the Western Secularist, is trying to take over the other, the Christian. However, we are resisting and the Christian will be victorious, for: ‘We are based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion’. What is the situation in the Ukraine now, after what will soon be 1,000 days of tragic conflict?

In the Ukraine Now

Last Sunday I asked one of my parishioners where her husband, who is a builder, was. She explained that, together with hundreds of other Russian-speaking builders who live all over Western Europe, he is in the Ukraine, six weeks on, six weeks off. There, just outside Kiev, he is helping to build a palace for the well-known Rinat Akhmetov, the richest oligarch in the Ukraine. She showed me a photograph of the palace under construction. It is indeed a huge Disney-like, oriental palace, of the sort that has not been built in this country for 200 years. She told me that it is being built with the finest materials, marble and gold, from all over the world. Here is the reality of the bankrupted Ukraine today, where tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are dying every month on behalf of such oligarchs, who have been fattened on billions of our dollars, euros and pounds, though our own infrastructure is collapsing.

Two and a half years ago Western leaders used to repeat the same hypnotising mantra: ‘We will support the Ukraine for as long as it takes.’ What did that mean? As long as what takes? For as long as it takes the Democrats to win (or lose?) the US elections in November 2024? Now they declare: ‘We will support the Ukraine for as long as we can’. But what does that mean? ‘For as long as we want?’. For today virtually everyone, even in the pro-Kiev Western media, has dropped the propaganda line and knows that the West has lost its proxy war in the Ukraine against Russia, wasting a million young lives and $250 billion. That is why few in the West now speak of it. That conflict used brainwashed Nazi or press-ganged Ukrainians to die on behalf of the USA, in order to attack and destroy Russia, without a single American dying. ‘The best investment ever’, according to Graham, a particularly Fascistic US Congressman.

The fact is that the Russian Federation has had to demilitarise and denazify not just the Ukraine, as it had originally and clearly announced as its aims on 24 February 2022 together with the third aim of the liberation of the Donbass, but also NATO. (By the way, NATO was established thanks to Nazi Germans like Reinhard Gehlen after 1945). The demilitarisation and denazification of NATO was never the ambition of the Russians; it was the fault of NATO, which gave all its political, financial and material support to prop up Kiev instead of supporting peace talks. Otherwise, the Ukraine would long ago have capitulated to Russia. The task of demilitarising NATO is why the conflict in the Ukraine has taken so long. The task of denazifying the Ukraine, which many thought impossible, has happened as a result of the deaths, or rather suicides, of whole Nazi regiments of the Kiev Army and of the emigration of others.

There will soon be no Nazis left in the Ukraine, or whatever will replace the Ukraine after the defeat of the Kiev regime and the rout of US/NATO. This was the inevitable result of the Western refusal to negotiate with the Russian Federation for eight years. Now even more NATO countries like Croatia and Slovenia have joined Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Turkey in rejecting the US/NATO war in the Ukraine (let alone in allowing the fantasy of letting the Ukraine join NATO). Italy, Germany and even disillusioned Poland fundamentally agree with them, and France, changeable as ever, has spoken of possible talks. Even the Pentagon in Washington now refuses to give any more support to Kiev, as US military stockpiles are so severely depleted. There remain only the puny military forces of the Russophobic UK, and the seven Nordic and minute and dying Baltic States which still support Kiev, at least in rhetoric.

Zelensky cannot talk, since the West forced Kiev to pass a law to forbid them in April 2022. For the Ukrainian surrender to take place so that there can be peace, Zelensky the US actor-stooge must be removed together with the whole Neo-Nazi cast of the show in Kiev. Perhaps they will murder one another in a violent coup in Kiev, or else they will run away to join the Ukrainian mafia in the USA. In any case, they will remove themselves. The time for peace talks and ceasefires is long over. Some suggest that Kiev can survive under NATO, if it cedes some land to Russia. But Russia, by far the biggest country in the world, does not want any land, it wants security. They could have taken place at any point between early 2014 and early 2022. They did not, because Kiev and, above all, its Western sponsors refused. The Ukraine, as it was, has no future. It will have to capitulate on Russian terms. The West forbade it to have a future.

BRICS

Ever since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and even before that, under worldwide Western Imperialism, the Planet has faced the possibility, one day, of a One World Dictatorship. Since 1991 this potential has become closer. The identity of a possible World Dictator seems to have been a future President of the USA, governing the world through ambassadors and vassals. After the US occupation of the Ukraine in 2014 and then the challenge to its hegemony by the Russian Federation, the possibility of such a One World Dictatorship has rapidly receded. This is because of the BRICS organisation, which recognises several centres of power. Founded 15 years ago on 16 June 2009 in Ekaterinburg, the city of the martyrdom of the last Russian Tsar, BRICS, now with nine members, already has a larger economy than the G7. The Non-Western world is now interested in BRICS, which is to meet in Kazan in a few days’ time.

Indeed, over 150 countries now either want to join BRICS or else have expressed a desire to join it. It is clear that the multicontinental BRICS Alliance, initially Brazil, Russia, India, China and then South Africa, now with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE, is going to replace the UN. The latter is in the US and is effectively controlled by three Western countries of the UN Security Council, the US, the UK and France. They can ignore and block any of its resolutions, like those regarding the illegal sanctions imposed by the West on Russia, Iran, China, Cuba etc, or against Israeli genocide. The teeming billions of Africa, Latin America and India have no real representation at the UN. BRICS is destined to set up a new Assembly or Parliament for the Global Majority. It is also pursuing the gradual process of dedollarisation of the world economy and will replace US-controlled organisations like the World Bank and the IMF. The future beckons.

The impetus for BRICS and its dedollarisation has been created by the US weaponisation of the dollar against the Russian Federation and other countries and the stealing of their assets and gold. Thus, trust has been broken in the SWIFT international payments system. It is not that BRICS is a bloc, it is not, it is a multilateral, multipolar, multicontinental, multicivilisational organisation. As a result, the Western world, which is also bankrupt, that is, the USA and its Anglosphere vassals like the UK, Canada and Australia, the divided Peninsular Western European EU, and other US coastal and island colonies and vassals like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the settler state of Israel, have been isolated – or rather have isolated themselves. BRICS means the disappearance of the hegemony of the USA and all its vassal organisations, not just the World Bank and the IMF, but the G7, the EU, WHO, UNESCO etc.

We can see this Western self-isolation and irrelevance in the fact that the Russian Federation, by far the largest country in Europe by population and area, is now the largest economy in Europe and growing rapidly, and yet Western European countries have cut themselves off from it and are declining. Why cut yourselves off from natural resources like oil, gas, fertiliser, minerals? Countries like Turkiye and all South-Eastern Europe, from Austria to Greece, from Serbia to Hungary, from Romania to Slovakia, from Bulgaria to Cyprus, from Czechia to Croatia, have realised that they are missing the boat. They will peel off from EU tyranny and join BRICS too. They may be joined by countries in South-Western Europe, from Spain to Italy, and eventually France, Benelux and Germany. Only English-speaking North-Western Europe will remain in the US orbit, but only until their US-appointed elites have been overthrown.

BRICS means the end of the domination of the Atlantic Powers, which has lasted for 500 years. The Pacific and Indian Powers have risen and are taking their place. The former Western colonies or countries that adopted one or other of the bipolar Western ideologies of Capitalism or Communism, from Eurasian Russia to Africa, from Asia to Latin America, are freeing themselves from Western geopolitical and financial colonialisation. BRICS countries work on behalf of their peoples, who believe in sovereignty and patriotism, but do not believe in the tyranny of transnational corporations, banks and Globalism. Centralisation, whether Capitalist or Communist, is dead. It is time in all spheres to move away from top-down centralised control and to delegate to the grassroots. It is time for the dinosaurs to remove themselves from the world stage, or else be removed by the ever-accelerating course of history.

The Sinking Millennial Titanic

Some observers say that the present rout of the West in the Ukraine, which the West tried to expand to and absorb by its habitual organised violence after February 2014, is a turning point. They say that it marks the end of 500 years of Western domination of the world and overseas expansion, expressed by the word ‘Globalism’. This began with Western voyages of conquest and settlement across the Atlantic to the Americas, Africa and Asia some 500 years ago. They are wrong. The Western world and its unique ideology of supremacy and infallibility began not 500 years ago, but 1,000 years ago. It can even be dated precisely – to 14 February 1014. Then, in Rome, the new foundational Creed of the West was consciously promulgated – previously it had only been proclaimed by illiterate provincial barbarians, who did not even understand what they were saying. From then on, the West moved south and east.

This new Creed, first proclaimed in Rome at the Coronation of the German King Henry II as the ‘Holy Roman’ Emperor (he was not Holy or Roman), claimed that the Holy Spirit, the Source of all authority and unity, proceeds from the leader of the West. Then the leader of the West was the Pope of Rome – even though the formal dogma of his infallibility was not proclaimed and formulated until 856 years later, in 1870. However, his supremacy was already clear in, for example, the Dictatus Papae of Pope Gregory VII in 1075, though nearly all of these principles had been repeated for decades. Today this supremacy and infallibility have been passed down to and inherited one after the other by the leaders of other Western countries. Now it belongs to the President of the USA. The claim to worldwide supremacy and infallibility has been the essential belief of the post-Christian, post-1014, post-Schism West.

The consequences of the 14 February 1014 Declaration of Papal, that is, Western, supremacy and infallibility can already be seen in the 1030s with the Papally-sponsored invasions of Spain and then Sicily. In 1066 it came again with the Papally-sponsored invasion and genocide of England, again using its Norman shock troops, and then to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, where the same genocide was repeated. But it is also clear in the German/Frankish/Western ‘Crusades’ in the Holy Land, in internal inquisitions and crusades (against the Cathars) in Western Europe, and in those of the Teutonic Knights in Eastern Europe. The essence of this ethnic Western ideology was what we today call Nazism. And it is precisely ethnic Western. For example, when the Soviet Union invaded Bulgaria in 1944, ordinary Bulgarians greeted the Soviet forces enthusiastically, for only the Germanic elite in Bulgaria was Nazi.

The fact is that Orthodox Church culture, even of lapsed Orthodox Russians and Bulgarians in 1944, is anti-Nazi. For example, let us take the case of the Non-Orthodox British historian, David Irving, who defends Nazi Germany. For him anti-Nazism is hypocrisy, given that Allied leaders also participated in Hitlerite crimes and racism in that conflict. True, Hitler hated the Jews and the West loved them, but only because the Western Allies were funded by Jewish financiers. However, just like Hitler, the Western leaders also hated ’subhuman’ Russians, Africans, Arabs and Asians. Irving should have been consistent and angry at all Nazism, not just British, French and American, but the German too. So the foolish Irving attacks Allied Nazism, not seeing that anyone can be a Nazi. For example, a bankrupt Israeli, Netanyahu, real name Mileikowsky, is also a genocidal Nazi, and as such is opposed by heroic Non-Zionist and anti-Nazi Jews.

Nothing can save the West from its sinking Titanic in Kiev. True, it can try and blame the senile Biden, but shifting the blame is not a solution. In reality, the West is not afraid that Russia will win against it in its proxy war, but rather it is afraid that the truth will win. This fear of the truth has now become the main concern. This fear of the truth is also why most Western people will not join the Orthodox Church – because they refuse to repent. As Western people claim: ‘I cannot join the Orthodox Church because of my culture’. They reject Christ because of their proudly unrepentant, Secularist culture. All they have to do is to refer back to their countries of birth before the millennial aberration and deviation of 1014. For example, I am English by blood, have a British passport, but I am not British, not even English. I am Old English and belong to Old England, to Orthodoxy, to Christ, not to Secularist pride.

The Future of Western Europe, Russia and the Orthodox Church

Thus, White Supremacism, Racism, Aryanism, Fascism, Nazism, Zionism, whatever you wish to call it, is deeply Western, as it justifies imperialism, colonialism and the exploitation of the whole Non-Western world. Ultimately, it goes back to the supremacy and infallibility of medieval Papism. This ideology is not of the Church. That is why certain Russians of the émigré Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) group, Romanians of the Iron Guard, and other Fascists, even though somewhat culturally Orthodox, were always tiny fringe groups, outside the mainstream, outside communion with the Church, outside Christianity. Let us recall that Christianity was born in Asia, not in the aberration of a Europe, cut off from the rest of Asia and, above all, from the Church of God. The tired old Western ideologies of Papism and Protestantism are dying. However, their substitution by Secularism is even worse, indeed, it is lethal.

Here we can speak of the Sovietisation of the West over the last 35 years of President Bush’s ‘New World Order’, already the Old World Order. Sovietisation can be seen in the Western elite/nomenklatura which governs by Uniparty and censorship (‘cancelling’) of ‘dissident’ views. Such ‘heretics’ commit ‘hate speech’ and so are persecuted. The elite has learned nothing from the fall of the USSR. Sovietisation is lethal, for it is based on death, hatred for God, persecution of the Church and its words of life, through abortion, euthanasia (‘good death’) and inevitable depopulation, as women are told to be men and men are told to be homosexuals. That is the new norm. On the other hand, Russia is returning to its roots. It is no longer Western, neither Imperial as it was from 1721-1917 with its serfdom, nor Soviet as it was from 1917 to 1991 with its Gulag, nor Oligarchic as it was from 1991 to 2016 with its Wild East Capitalism.

The 300 years or twelve generations of the three Western experiments in Russia failed, and disastrously so, and have now led Russia to begin the return to its roots. It is all that remains. These are precisely the roots to which the last Tsar, Nicholas II, wanted to return to, in governance, in social and foreign policy, in architecture, in Church painting and singing. The Tsar, who founded the Hague Peace Conventions, would have greatly approved of BRICS, of international co-operation and harmony. He was the forerunner to it. The future Ukraine will share in such co-operation. After the tragic conflict which the USA has created there, the New Ukraine will be renewed and its third world infrastructure will be brought to world class standards by BRICS, its corrupt Western oligarchs chased out by a State that protects its people, as has been happening so spectacularly in Russia over the last twenty-five years.

The transformation of the Russian Lands, the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Belarus, will mean transformation within the Orthodox Church, 75% of whose faithful live in those Lands. True, several parts of the Orthodox Church are for now under the control of elderly individuals, who are stuck in the past. Such is the situation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in Istanbul, where individuals still dream of an Empire which collapsed nearly 600 years ago. In Moscow too, there are individuals who also dream of an Imperial future, patterned by rigid ritualism, ultra-nationalism and propose a militarised and uniformised ‘Church-Army’. And as a result, there are individuals in the Russian Church, who call themselves ‘princes of the Church’, who dream of imperialist power and effeminate riches, ironically sometimes sponsored by the CIA, and who undertake schism, jealousy and hatred, persecuting pastors and people alike.

The reality is quite different from those delusions of empire, for the Church does not belong to ‘princes of the Church’, but to the faithful people. For example, the population of Non-Orthodox Western Europe, inclusive of and westwards of Finland, Germany, Austria and Italy, is approximately 431 million. Almost exactly 1% of that population are Romanian Orthodox (other Orthodox, Greeks, Russians, Serbs etc, number at most only 0.2% of that 431 million). Certain elderly Greeks and Russians may dream of building ecclesiastical empires in Western Europe, but they are irrelevant to 4.3 million Non-Greeks and Non-Russians. Such too is the situation elsewhere outside Russia and Greece, in lands where Orthodox have emigrated and live. The future of the Church in the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States, Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania is with the majority who live there, not with imperialistic dreamers in distant cities.

Conclusion

A fresh wind is blowing from the east and it is sweeping away the corrupted old world, the cobwebbed, antiquated and dying structures formed out of the last millennium and the domination of the planet by the anti-Christian Western world and its ideologies, whether Capitalist or Communist. The old ‘Papism’, centralised control from one centre, is dead. The unipolar and unilateral is rapidly being replaced by the multilateral and multipolar. Western Europeans, wake up! You have been fooled and betrayed for a thousand years! They have substituted the truth with a fake! Return to your spiritual roots and identity! Ignore the pathologically sick, who reject their own identity, and tell you that you are beyond salvation without their rebaptism, and come to the Church of God. Here you are welcome. Yes, indeed, our values are: ‘humanity, mercy and compassion’.  The old is going. The new is here. Welcome!

 

 

 

 

 

Towards a Council of the Orthodox Churches

Introduction

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

Universal Church Councils

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

Consultations

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

The Need for a Consultation

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

Who Could Call a Consultation?

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

Two Initial Stages of Consultation

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

The Third Stage

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

An Agenda

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

The Dogmatic Agenda

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

The Pastoral Agenda

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

Conclusion: The Alternative

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

 

 

 

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

Introduction: Centralisation and Decentralisation: Unity in Diversity

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

The Two Struggles of My Life

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

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

The Struggle for Catholicity Against the Papism of Constantinople and Moscow

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

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

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

The Novel and Aggressive American Heresy of Rebaptism

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Dangers of Centralisation and Sectarianism

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

The Russian-Founded New World Order and Moving to Russia

Introduction: Why I Have Not Moved to Russia

As a fluent Russian-speaker, I wanted to move to Russia when I was actually 20, when I was invited to study at the Moscow Theological Academy in 1977, but the Cold War prevented that. I would long ago have moved there, if I were 20 years old. In the last twelve months I have been invited to move there, where the futile slanders of me by one here are mocked, to serve as a priest by two Patriarchal bishops, whom I know and who know the real situation.

However, my family lives here and my Russian and other parishioners need me here. I will not be going to Russia, unless my whole family, all 27 of us, wishes to go. I prefer to stay and continue the fight against the ecumenists, against the covidists, and against the pseudo-Russian schismatics. I was, by God’s will, born here. God put me here to do something here. When I was 18 and the late Metropolitan Kallistos told me that, I did not know what that something was.

Gradually, the twofold sense of my life was revealed to me. It was to witness to Western European Orthodoxy, to St Felix, St Edmund and the ten thousand other Western Saints, whom St John also venerated, and so to restore the Non-Establishment West, and, secondly, in the words of the ever-memorable Slovak Metropolitan Laurus, ‘to keep the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’. This meant to act against the rogues of left and right, against both the scribes and against the pharisees.

This meant fighting against both the spiritually empty intellectuals, ecumenists and modernists, and the equally spiritually empty ‘princes of the Church’, whose only interests are their preening narcissism and love of power and money. Both sides, acting together against the mainstream, that is, against the mighty river, of the Church of God, are too cowardly and unprincipled to stand up to such corrupt bullies, anti-family perverts and psychopaths, and they repeat their slanders against us. But we are not cowards and unprincipled. God is the Judge of those who repeat slanders against us.

Russian Military, Political and Diplomatic Victories

In the wide world, today the government of President Putin is liberating the bankrupt Ukraine and its patriotic and persecuted faithful from NATO Nazism, as promoted by the local Fascist rogues in Kiev. Clearly, this conflict will end with the Kiev regime’s capitulation. Russia hopes that this capitulation will take place through a popular Ukrainian insurrection against the Kiev regime. That is possible. The US-created Ukraine is the biggest loser of this war, but not far behind it is the now isolated and impoverished Western Europe. This has lost greatly, as it has committed economic suicide by boycotting cheap Russian gas, oil, fertiliser and other resources and has also taken in eight million very expensive Ukrainians, who became very unpopular there through their demands and sense of entitlement. As for the third loser, the ungoverned USA, it has already abandoned the Ukraine, just as it abandoned Afghanistan and Iraq before it.

Internationally, the same Russian government has created a defensive Alliance with China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Mongolia. Thus, Russia’s borders, east and west are now secured and protected, much as they were in January 1904, before the West attacked Russia indirectly (through Japan, which later wanted to destroy Korea, China and Mongolia), and then in January 1914, before the West attacked Russia directly. South Asia, India, is already with Russia and we will soon see the consolidation of the Eurasian heartland, as Central Asia joins this defensive Alliance of Eurasia.

As for the Russian-sponsored BRICS Economic Alliance, even now 45% of the world population, it was founded in 2009 in Ekaterinburg, the City of the Martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II and his Family, a martyrdom ordered from New York. BRICS, now with nine countries, includes other countries from Asia (the UAE), Africa (Ethiopia and South Africa) and Latin America (Brazil). In Kazan, in seven weeks’ time, new members will ask to join the BRICS Alliance, some say thirty countries, some say more, though most of them may not actually be joining as early as this year. Among the candidates are countries as diverse as Azerbaijan, Cuba, Bolivia, Gabon, Venezuela, Belarus, Turkiye, Algeria, Indonesia, Vietnam, Serbia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and even, one day, for the moment EU Hungary, Slovakia and Italy.

Russian victory was imminent at the end of 1916, liberating Vienna in summer 1917 and Berlin in autumn 1917, just before the Western prevented that victory by overthrowing the Tsar with its agents and replacing him with the Western agents, Lenin and Trotsky, the former of whom created the Ukraine, the second of whom was born in what is now the Ukraine. Russia is back. This Russian victory may be imminent again, in 2024 – unless the West can overthrow the present Tsar. Over a century of thwarted Russian victory may be over at last, despite the spies, traitors, perverts and schismatics who have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church.

Russian-United Eurasia and European Collapse

Three of the four world’s superpowers and largest economies are in Asia: China, India and Russia.  China and India were once far more prosperous and far more advanced than Europe, before Western Europeans colonised, exploited and destroyed them. That process has now gone into reverse: Asia now dominates Western Europe. Moreover, Eurasian Russia is getting Asia to unite. East Asia (China etc), West Asia (the old ‘Middle East’), South Asia (India etc) and North Asia (Russia) are uniting. Apart from the still hesitant five ‘stans’ of Central Asia, what is missing is US-occupied North-West Asia (what is still called ‘Western Europe’, 5% of the world population) and US-occupied North-East Asia (the ever-shrinking Japan and South Korea).

The hope is that both the latter, the North-West Asian Peninsula (the Western half of Europe, which has so disastrously tried to expand into the Eastern half, in the Ukraine) and the North-East Asian Archipelago (Japan and South Korea), will liberate themselves from Americanisation (camouflaged beneath the word ‘Globalism’) and enter into this Grand Alliance of the Global Majority of BRICS. For this to happen patriotic left and patriotic right have to unite against the anti-patriotic, NATO-Nazi Globalists of the US-created Uniparty, who are the real extremists. Liberation from the 20% of the pro-US, pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-Kiev and pro-Woke Globalist Establishment is what the 80%, the peoples of Western Europe, seek. For the Globalists always put anti-national interests first, to the detriment of their own electorates.

Such liberation from the Establishment, the System, as it is called in Germany (‘the Deep State’ in the USA), is now the electoral path in the UK, France, Germany and almost every other country in Western Europe, against the highly unpopular ruling class elite. We the people want our sovereignty and our national identity, which we believe is in our saints, back. In the meantime, we have to face the contemporary Western reality. This is summed up by both the opening and closing ceremonies of the Pagan Games in Paris, which show exactly what its nature is. The Serbian Orthodox tennis player Novak Djokovich and some African athletes resisted the persecution and blasphemies against Christianity there, but few others did.

LGBT ideology and transgenderism dominate the Western Establishment (for example, the millionaire pedophiles employed by the BBC) more and more. It is shocking. The West has become the collapsing Soviet Union. It is 1989 in the West. As a result, President Putin has issued an executive order to take in spiritual refugees from the West, on condition that they share in the traditional religious values of the Russian Federation and that they are under persecution. Should people move there?

Moving to Russia

So far only one Russian family from our parish has moved to Russia, though not because they were under persecution. That was eighteen months ago.  It was a great success financially. They both have jobs which they like and they are already able to buy their own home. One other parishioner is thinking about following their example, but most of my many Russian parishioners are not even contemplating it. Let alone our Ukrainians, Balts, Romanians, Moldovans, Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks and the other twenty-one nationalities among our 600 regular parishioners.

Here some should take care, not returning Russians who know the situation perfectly well, but naïve and idealistic Non-Russian converts to Orthodoxy. They should ask themselves many questions first: Why do most Russians stay here and new Russians even want to come here? Why do they not return and others still want to leave Russia? The fact is that in today’s Russia, most live in high-rise tower blocks, abortion is twice even the appalling level of Western countries, divorce is just as high as in the West, and most baptised Orthodox are still cremated when they die. Beware of ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ syndrome.

Then there is the bureaucracy (just as bad as in France) and corruption, which is especially noticeable when it comes to health care with its universal envelopes under the table. As for the Church, only 2-3% go to church, partly because of the problems of corrupt and oligarchic homosexual bishops and money-grubbing priests (those two problems helped cause the post-1917 persecution of the Church). What many in the West do not understand is that Russia is dominated by a cultural Orthodoxy, rather than a zealous, practising Orthodoxy, just like every other country in the Orthodox world.

Then there are purely practical questions. Do you speak Russian? You will have to learn. What money will you live off, if you live in Russia? What job will you find? How will your children adapt to a very different and much tougher school system? Will you attend church in Slavonic and on the old calendar? (If you do not do so here, how will you cope there?). Just a little dose of reality.

Conclusion: Avoiding Escapism

For most it is too early to contemplate moving to Russia. Let us wait and see. As long as we can still be saved here, as long as we can still fight and resist here, despite the persecution of us here, not by LGBT fanatics, but by certain so-called ‘Orthodox’ bishops, let us stay here. To leave now seems like running away. We still have the chance to win here.

 

24 August 2024: ‘Democratic’ Ukraine Bans its National Church

On 24 August the Western-backed and Western-financed ex-President Zelensky (legally he has been a dictator since May) signed a law banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. (Zelensky is by race a Jew and by faith an atheist). This is because this Church is a Non-Western Church (just as the Ukraine is a Non-Western country), only a semi-independent part of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow. This law will be enacted in 30 days’ time. What are the options?

First of all, Ukrainian Orthodox (= the vast majority of Ukrainians) will not attend any of the fake Churches, including the nationalist, pro-Nazi fake ‘Church’, invented by Washington by paying the Greek Patriarch to set it up. This is much to the present embarrassment of that Greek Patriarch, who, he now claims, naively thought that Ukrainians would attend such a Church, founded on theft and violence, encouraged by its gangster leaders, and composed of defrocked or unordained ‘clergy’.

This means that Ukrainian Orthodox will either stop going to church and wait for better times, or else they will try and go to church and get beaten up or killed or be arrested and put in prison. Christian blood on the streets is apparently what the Western Powers and the Greek Patriarch are sponsoring.

Some say that the Russian Patriarch of Moscow, Kyrill, and the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, whose combined ages are 161, could do something else. Patriarch Bartholomew could dissolve his failed, fake Church on condition that Patriarch Kyrill officially gives the Ukrainian Orthodox Church full independence, known as ‘autocephaly’. For only a Mother-Church, in this case, Moscow, can grant autocephaly. And if the Ukrainian Orthodox Church becomes autocephalous, Zelensky’s law will be meaningless.

That would be a miracle. If it happened, all the other Local Orthodox Churches, all 14 of them, would automatically recognise the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a canonical, autocephalous Church, the 17th member of the Orthodox family. And Moscow and Constantinople could enter back into communion. And this could happen even with a Council of the whole Church.

However, such happiness is highly unlikely. What is likely?

Far more likely is that within the next few months Russia will take over the whole of the Ukraine, partly militarily and partly politically. The Ukraine will either entirely disappear as a nation-state, or else will exist with about one third of the territory it previously had and be fully dependent on Moscow. In other words, it will return exactly to its situation before Communist dictators created it after 1922. 100 years of errors will be over. Then the law banning the Church will be as irrelevant as ex-President Zelensky and his whole illegal government, which will have disappeared by then.

However, in such a case, just as Constantinople failed to force people to attend its fake Church, so Moscow will not be able to force people to attend a Church still dependent on it. As the Russian proverb says: ‘You will not endear yourself by force’. Or as the English proverb says: ‘You can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink’.

In any case, the problem will remain. Either the Russian Orthodox Church is a nationalist organisation, or else it is a multinational and missionary Church. It will have to choose. Either it adapts to and adopts other cultures, or else it will remain as a mononational Church with no multinational significance, as some of its senior bishops want.

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

Q: Where did you meet the Countess?

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

Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?

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

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

Q: What did you study as a young man?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What about Moldova?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Why do bishops break communion?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 2024

 

 

Senator J D Vance: A Question to the Russian Orthodox Church

A member of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), between 1974 and 1977 I studied in Oxford under the ever-memorable Metr Kallistos (Ware), then taught in Greece and went on to study at the St Sergius Institute of Theology in Paris. In January 1981 I was tonsured reader by the Most Reverend Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh (ROC) at the Dormition Cathedral in London. In December 1991, after a decade in which I discovered bishops with mistresses and bishop-freemasons, I was ordained priest by a bishop of integrity. This was the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), the successor of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. This ordination followed seven years of service as a deacon in the Russian Orthodox Church. I served faithfully and without recompense as a priest for thirty years, in France, in Portugal, setting up the first ever Russian parish there, and in England.

In May 2012 I was awarded my first jewelled cross in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow by His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill. This was for my efforts in helping to bring the very small, New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) back into communion with the ROC Mother Church and fighting against the American sectarianism which had infected it in the USA. I believe that this was very much in accord with what would have been the wishes of St John and Archbishop Antony. In July 2018 I had the privilege of being in Ekaterinburg on the night of the 100th anniversary of the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, his August Family and faithful servants, together with the Russian Patriarch and a host of other clergy. Then at midnight I walked the 13 miles together with 120,000 other Russian Orthodox faithful to Ganina Yama, the place where the atheists had first tried to bury the Imperial Martyrs and their servants.

On 10 April 2021, a new and highly controversial ROCOR bishop in London, a young American neophyte who had not long been a clergyman of ROCOR, was not educated in a seminary and was pastorally very inexperienced, publicly declared his intention to break communion with other Orthodox Churches. This included with the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – the ROC is over 130 times larger than ROCOR. His unilateral decision came because he no longer accepted the age-old practice of the ROC of not receiving Catholic priests and people into the Church by rebaptism, but by confession and communion. He also told his laypeople that they could no longer take communion in that part of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), where we have had close family members and friends since the 1970s, because they had followed the traditional ROC practice. Thus, ROCOR created a schism with the Mother-Church.

For us this was the imposition of Lutheran-style sectarianism and an attack on canonicity, experience and practice. Excommunication, dividing faithful Russian Orthodox into two separate groups, was unacceptable to us who had strived so long for unity. We are Orthodox Christians, not Donatist schismatics. As we had no desire to belong to a right-wing American sect which is what ROCOR had become, we carefully discussed what our canonical path would be and made discreet enquiries. Finally, after disappointment with the response of the ROC, on 16 February 2022, after four hours of negotiations with the Romanian Orthodox Church involving the chief canonical adviser of His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel, our deanery of twelve clergy, six parishes and church buildings, some 5,000 people, 99.5% of those who had sought canonical refuge, were received into the local Romanian Metropolia, which is three times larger than the whole of ROCOR.

Our theological conscience was unable to agree to being part of a schism. Thus, we entered with joy into the four-million strong Synod of eight bishops under Metropolitan Joseph (Pop) of Western and Southern Europe of the Patriarchate of Romania. It seems then that the ROC wishes to abandon its centuries-old practice of receiving Non-Orthodox by chrismation, or confession and communion, that is, by economy. This was the case of the future martyrs, Tsarina Alexandra and Grand Duchess Elizabeth, received by the future St John of Kronstadt by chrismation. More recently, in the 1970s both Metr Antony of Sourozh (ROC) and the now St Sophrony the Athonite (Patriarchate of Constantinople), both of whom I knew well, publicly rejected the reception of Non-Orthodox into the Orthodox Church by rebaptism. It seems to us that the denial of this issue of principle preceded the catastrophe of the ROC that befell it eight days later.

For within eight days of our transfer to the Romanian Orthodox Church, the ROC fell into the pastoral disaster of multiple divisions in countries outside the Russian Federation, as the conflict in the Ukraine began. At a time when the probably future President of the USA has chosen a conscious Catholic, Senator J D Vance, a man close to the Orthodox Faith, as his running mate, therefore the probable future Vice-President and possibly the succeeding President of the USA in 2028, this is serious. Senator Vance is a friend of the ROC and has openly stated that the Ukraine must make peace with Russia, returning Russian territory to the Russian Federation. This Catholic Senator has denounced the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry by the Kiev regime and also appears to support the dissolution of NATO. Does the Russian Orthodox Church want Senator Vance to believe that it considers that Catholics are unbaptised?

 

 

Global or Globalist and the Russian State or the Russian Church

Global or Globalist

It is a cliché to state that we live in a Global world. It is nothing new. The concept was inherent in the term ‘World Wars’, the first of which began 110 years ago. On the other hand, the vision of an interconnected world where all the different nations live together and co-operate in peace, respecting each other’s differences, is profoundly Christian, as in the Seven ‘Universal’ (that is, Global) Councils. ‘For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord’. However, being Global is not at all the same as being Globalist.

Unlike Global, Globalism means forcing everyone to be the same, preparing the planet for a One World Government under a Dictator, known as Antichrist. The Globalist mafia, with its alphabet soup of US, EU, UK, NATO, UN, IMF, AUKUS, WEF etc, with its Davos serfs of banksters, arms-dealers, police states, spies, Soros, Schwab, Biden, Macron, Starmer (or Sunak), Scholz etc, is a curse, as it is preparing the way for Antichrist. We resist that mafia. We chase out the Globalist elites, for otherwise we shall see our countries and our families die.

Yet, Globalism is here. Who owns the Western half of Europe, that is, Peninsular Europe? The US Globalist elite, a giant with feet of clay, supported by its Globalist client elite in the Western half of Europe, owns those countries. This is why the fall of that half of Europe, of the European Union and the rest, will be like that of the Soviet Union, overnight, like a ripe, red apple that hangs from a tree and then, without any prompting, suddenly falls. Why? Because, eaten by worms, it has rotted from inside. It is ready to fall.

The fall of the West has come through the Ukraine. We speak of the small-scale, with fewer than 100,000 troops, highly-provoked (Russian-speaking Ukrainians had for eight years been genocided by the US-installed, Neo-Nazi Kiev regime and were about to be massacred by Kiev troops) invasion, or rather liberation, of the Eastern Ukraine by Russian forces. To the astonishment of the Russians, the West forbade the Kiev regime to make peace and armed the Kiev regime to the teeth with NATO arms, declaring that it wanted all Ukrainians to die. So Russia turned to Plan B, to wage a war of attrition until the apple falls.

Thus, the West has chosen to commit suicide, defeated militarily by superior Russian arms and politically and economically by Russian-inspired BRICS. Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia and perhaps other peoples in the Carpathians and the Balkans of South-Eastern Europe, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and others, if they can free themselves of the US elite’s puppets, will also join BRICS. This will be their salvation. Little wonder that Victor Orban of Hungary has recently hosted the Chinese leader in Budapest and been hosted by him in Beijing. The rest of Western Europe, in the North-East, the North-West and the South-West, will be left aside, until it repents for arming Kiev regime troops and mercenaries and also joins BRICS.

The Russian State and the Russian Church

The conflict in the Ukraine, also as a new country, soon to join BRICS, will be a victory for the Russian State, although not for the Russian Church. The latter has compromised itself everywhere outside the Russian Federation. There senior figures in its administration have persecuted and betrayed lifelong Russian Orthodox faithful, starting in England and then in the Ukraine, then in the Baltics and Moldova, and not least inside the Russian Federation itself.

The recent events in Hungary witness to the tragic decadence that has penetrated the episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church over the last 30 years. It is not a question of one very disreputable and apparently criminal witness and his mother (why was a pervert befriended?), it is the witnesses of audio and video recordings. Nobody who knows anything about the fatal love of luxury of the episcopate of the Russian Church over the last 30 years is in the least surprised. It all just confirms a multitude of witness reports over the last 20 years in particular.

The activities of many senior figures are anti-Russian, shaming the patriotic President Putin and our good friend, Sergei, among his ministers. The recent revelations typify many others. This leaves the episcopate of the Russian Church, both inside and outside the former USSR, to be cleansed by the Russian State. Make no mistake, this will happen. However, the schismatic, money-corrupted, liberal and homosexual (usually the same ones) among the episcopate are not only anti-patriotic, but also, and above all, they are anti-Orthodox.

For Orthodox Christianity does not accept the word ‘exceptional’ or ‘indispensable’. All Local Churches act together in conciliarity and catholicity. No single Local Church, however old, however big, however powerful or however rich, has the right to lord it over the others because it is ‘exceptional’. That error is precisely Globalism, the error of ‘Roman Catholicism’.

Some may admire that; we faithful Orthodox clergy and people do not, for we are not Globalists, since that is a sin against the Catholicity of the Church. Yes, the Great Cleansing of the Orthodox episcopate, Russian Orthodox and other, is coming. The guilty bishops must be trembling. If not, they have a shock coming.