Category Archives: Orthodox Restoration

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

 

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

After the overthrow of the Tsar by traitors in the so-called ‘Revolution’ of 1917, and the ensuing substitution of the Russian Empire for the Soviet Union, parts of the Russian Orthodox Church broke away from it. Although divisions of tiny, temporary ‘catacomb’ church communities formed inside the USSR, divisions were nowhere so obvious as outside the USSR, where there was the political freedom to choose which part of the Church to belong to.

The anti-Soviet Russian emigration split into two warring groups, one quite independent of the rest of the Orthodox Church, the other under the British-controlled and, after British bankruptcy from 1948 on the US-controlled, Patriarchate of Constantinople (1). In any case, both groups were independent of the vast majority of the Russian Church, which was under the enslaved and enhostaged administration of the 99% of the Church inside the Soviet Union. Why did these divisions develop?

  1. The Moscow Patriarchate: Bride of Christ or Concubine of the State?

Like all other Churches the Russian Orthodox Church has had a long history of both dependence on and independence from the State. In this respect, people may think of the independence from the State of St Nil of Sora (1508) and the Transvolgan Non-Possessors (1), of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow (murdered in 1569 on the orders of the centralising Tsar Ivan IV) and of the Old Ritualist schism of the 1660s, which was largely created by reaction to the persecution of the centralising State, which demanded absurd ritual conformity. By 1917 some 10% of the Russian population were declaring that they were Old Ritualists, thus showing the strength of opposition to the centralist State. All the above showed independence from the nationalist State, and many showed faithfulness to Orthodox Tradition, placing the Holy Spirit above corruption.

Under the imperialist Emperor Peter I (‘the Great’) (+ 1725), the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate was abolished and replaced by a Protestant-style Minister of Religion. Soon after this there began the persecution of monastic life, when some two-thirds of monasteries were closed by the German Empress Catherine I (‘the Great’) (+ 1796). Nevertheless, the Church continued to live, under the great St Paisius (Velichkovsky), forced into exile in Romania, and in the Russian Lands, in Sarov and Optina, where new saints appeared, and in Kronstadt, where there began the eucharistic revival, and elsewhere. The grace of the Holy Spirit was active and the deadly bureaucrats of the State apparatus did not manage to quench it, despite their best efforts. They were opposed by Tsar Nicholas II, who, despised and mocked by the bureaucrats in cassocks, had such great saints as Seraphim of Sarov canonised.

However, during this Imperial period most Russian Orthodox omitted to take communion more than once a year and lead an active life of prayer and fasting. Church life became largely an empty ritual, an exercise in ritualism. Here is why the Soviet atheists (most of them, like Stalin, were also ritually Orthodox) came to power: there was no Orthodox conscience and so spiritual resistance to the myths and practices of atheism. Under the Soviet regime, which unsurprisingly admired the imperialist Peter I as their centralising model, the Church was run by the Secret Police. Therefore, the enslaved Church hierarchy of the time adopted a subservient pro-State policy called ‘Sergianism’, in order to ensure its survival. Sergianism was massively rejected by the politically free emigration: hence the divisions. Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, ordinary bishops, priests, monastics and faithful people were martyred in their hundreds of thousands.

The remnants of these State-subservient attitudes are still very present in the Russian Church today. For instance, churches in towns and cities usually have professional choirs (if parishioners want to sing, they are forbidden, as in the Russian church in Chiswick, a suburb of London, for example), which reduces the church to a ritualist theatre with a choir to listen to. For example, many ordinary Orthodox in Russia today reproach the Church which appears to be run like a business, the main interest seeming to be profit. Also the centralised hierarchy in Moscow actively opposes clergy who have dissident political opinions from the State about the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. This only creates more scandals.

This centralisation has led to those parts of the Church in independent countries outside the Russian Federation wanting to break away from the centralised control of Moscow. This is for national reasons, for example, there is resistance to the Moscow centralisation on the part of Non-Russians in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere. They all seek Church independence and devolution. However, there are also cases of sectarian and schismatic groups which break away from central authority for purely political, right-wing reasons, both inside the Russian Federation, but also outside it, above all in the highly Americanised ROCOR (see below).

  1. ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

In 2007 we all at last managed to get the New York-based ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) to rejoin the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. Otherwise, it would have become a schismatic sect, out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. When it reunited with Moscow, it lost some 5% of its 300 parishes. These 5% were extremists who really wanted to be in schism, out of communion with everyone, claiming like pharisees to be ‘True Russian Orthodox Churches’. There were then, and perhaps still are, about four of these tiny squabbling sects, formed in 2007, all cursing each other.

After the wonderful God-sent opportunity of reunion with the bulk of the reviving Russian Orthodox Church and life-giving canonical communion with it for a decade between 2007 and 2017, very sadly, the ROCOR authorities gradually lapsed back into their sectarian temptations from before 2007. Step by step these sectarians took control of ROCOR’s New York Synod in an internal coup d’etat, effectively isolating its ill but charismatic Metropolitan, rejecting all his decisions and using his electronic signature to justify their very strange and deeply uncanonical decisions.

Very sadly, the extremists had learned nothing from being in communion with the Mother-Church for ten years. They had simply camouflaged and justified their pharisaical, schismatic and sectarian tendencies behind their alleged unity with the Moscow Patriarchate. Today ROCOR is out of full communion with Moscow, and so its second state is worse than its first. Instead of Orthodoxy, it has espoused the sectarian American right-wingery of woman-despising ‘Orthobros’ and Trumpism, totally confusing Divine Orthodoxy with mere human conservatism and its lust for money and power.

This pharisaical state of schism and fanatical sectarianism was encouraged by deluded Non-Russian neophytes, who want to be more royalist than the King, more Russian Orthodox than real Russian Orthodox. In reality, these Lutheran and Calvinist sectarians have ended up outside full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, the King they betrayed. They have painted themselves into their own corner, apparently feeling very comfortable in their isolation. Thus, they have renounced their own saints, who were internationally-minded, not isolated, and concelebrated with and gathered together all Orthodox. These include St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, whom the US right-wingers so cruelly suspended and persecuted, leading to his premature death in 1966.

Some suspect that the new ROCOR division has been encouraged by the CIA, of whose largesse ROCOR was a well-known recipient for a generation between 1966 and 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. As participants in the San Francisco ROCOR Council in 2006 we all know that the CIA virulently opposed the ROCOR reunion with Moscow in 2007 and from 2017 on tried to censor and then close this anti-CIA (and anti-FSB and anti-MI5) Orthodox England site through an amateur agent. For a few months he succeeded, causing an international scandal and making ROCOR a laughing-stock among the other Local Churches. Perhaps money exchanged hands here too.

  1. Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

The second part of the Russian emigration which split away from the enslaved Church authorities in Soviet Moscow was the group founded by Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals and centred in Paris. (Some of them spoke better French than Russian; all spoke fluent French). Originally less than a third of the size of the now US-centred ROCOR, today it is called the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition. In reality it is very small outside France, as it is practically forbidden to expand elsewhere, and now has only some sixty parishes.

In 2019 it too at last rejoined the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, leaving behind in Constantinople, to our open relief, its masonic and modernist wing with its uncanonical practices, losing not 5% of its parishes, clergy and people, as with ROCOR, but over 40% of its parishes, clergy and people. If ROCOR had lost 40% of its body, then it would have remained in full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate after 2017. Too much of the pharisaical, ‘onetruechurchist’, sectarian and schismatic had remained in ROCOR, thus poisoning its potential. Conversely, the much smaller Paris Archdiocese not only remained in communion, but also, to its credit and unlike ROCOR, remained politically free of Moscow centralisation.

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

In the history of the last generation of pre-Revolutionary Russia under the last Emperor, it is clear that right-wing extremists played as negative a role as left-wing extremists. For example, plotting together, they murdered the Tsar’s adviser, Gregory Rasputin, who was helping him bring the Old Ritualists back into the Church. But this treacherous extremism can above all be seen in the ensuing history of the tragic Civil War between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. Then both sides committed awful atrocities, as described in any history of that dreadful war, where brother killed brother.

Sadly, just like the Reds, most of the Whites did not support the Tsar: it is reckoned that only 10% of them did so. They were the only real Whites. Most simply wanted their land, property and wealth back from the Marxists. Many ‘Whites’ were quite as openly atheistic as the Reds. As a Russian patriot and real Orthodox, the Sovereign Tsar stood above both Reds and Whites, above and outside the vulgar extremes of both left and right, above and outside their centralisation and nationalism. This is his Testament. This is our heritage. Under him there would have been no tragic war between Russian and American-proxy Ukrainians today.

Notes:

  1. https://orthodoxwiki.org/Maximus_V_of_Constantinople
  2. It is interesting that the enemies of the Non-Possessors accused them of stealing money! Nothing has changed. We know of a very greedy bishop in England today who accused a Non-Possessor priest, who subsidised his parish from his own money, of exactly the same thing! Of course, the bishop never apologised.

 

The Tsar is Alive! Eternal Rus

 In this (the defence of defenceless civilians by President Putin after the illegal NATO bombing of Libya in 2011) we see continuity with the foreign policy of Emperor Nicholas II. Today, in our fearful and unpredictable century, when Russia stands on the threshold of menacing trials, let us hope that, according to the testament of Nicholas II, ‘with deep faith in the rightness of our cause and humble hope in All-Powerful Providence’ we will be able to overcome and once more find our country strong in God and Truth.

Petr V. Multatuli, The Foreign Policy of Emperor Nicholas II, p.786, (Moscow 2012)

 

In the 1970s and 1980s I was able to meet many White Russian emigres who had been adults before the Russian Revolution. They knew exactly what the real old Russia had been like, both the good and the bad – unlike the second generation who often nostalgically idealised what they had not known. Their version was a fairy tale, a Disneyland Old Russia. It was a fantasy born from their politically hostile attitude to the Soviet regime, which was the reality then, and from the defensive inferiority complex of the children of immigrants. In reality, when we look at and compare Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, one thing clearly stands out: Continuity.

Today President Putin is undeniably very popular, to an extent that Western politicians can only dream of. At least 80% of the Russian population approve of him and those who disagree with him will still tell you that there is no alternative – all the others are worse. In this way he is quite unlike those Soviet and post-Soviet leaders who were disliked or even detested. It can be said that the present Russian President is a Tsar without the title – indeed, even the Russian emblem is the double-headed eagle and the flag is that of the Tsars.

It is a Western propaganda narrative, invented for self-justification and to raise money for its aggressive forever wars, that President Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union. The President has more than once made it crystal clear that: ‘He who does not regret the Soviet Union has no heart, but he who wants to restore it has no brain’. What is his aim then? He knows with all rational Russians that both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Empire are lost to the history books and will not be restored. Nevertheless, the threefold East Slav lands – the Russian Federation, the Ukraine (whatever its future borders and name) and Belarus, which are being united as a ’Union State’, will still form by far the largest country on earth, with nearly 12% of the world’s land area. President Putin’s aim in other words is national, to unite Eastern Slavdom.

The Russian Federation by itself has the largest economy in Europe and is set to become the fourth largest economy in the world, although with less than 2.5% of the world population. This is neither the Russian Empire, nor the Soviet Empire, but it is the ‘Empire of Rus’. Rus is what would probably have been formed under Tsar Nicholas, who, if he had not been murdered in 1918, would perhaps have died naturally in the 1940s, when he would have been in his 70s. (Without his murder in 1918, there would not have been a Second World War). With Poland, Finland, Bessarabia, the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and the five Central Asian stans given independence if they wished, probably the Russian Empire of 1917 would have turned into the Empire of Rus by 1945, as it has done now.

Just as Russia was ruled by Tsar Nicholas, but with an advisory ‘Council of Ministers’, so today Russia is ruled by one man, but with a ‘Security Council’. Just as Tsar Nicholas was a great reformer, promoting eleven reforms – the sale of alcohol, monetary affairs, education, the peasantry, the legal system, the government, religious tolerance, civil freedom, agrarian affairs, the military and healthcare, promoting free medicine and social justice, so beloved by Tsarevich Alexei, President Putin has also been a great reformer. Tsar Nicholas successfully fought off the Western invasion until 1917, when he was betrayed to the West by unpatriotic and disloyal generals, politicians and aristocrats.

Here President Putin learned from history. Tsar Nicholas was brought down by the parasitic class, called aristocrats, who under their Western sponsors meddled and betrayed the Tsar. President Putin has been able to stop the parasitic class, now called oligarchs, from meddling in Western-sponsored politics and treachery. As a result, Russia is today successfully fighting off the current Western invasion. With the disloyal and unpatriotic in exile, President Putin no longer needs aggressive but degenerate Western Europe. Today Russia does not need the decadent West with its LGBT, for Russia is itself the repository of traditional Western values, as the new Orthodox Minister of Defence, Andrei Belousov, has declared.

Just as over four generations ago Tsar Nicholas tried to help the former Ottoman Balkans unite, forming a ‘Balkan Union’ against local chauvinism, and help the Austro-Hungarian Empire decentralise, there is now hope that Russia through BRICS can help South-Eastern Europe, the now independent lands of the former Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. However, perhaps the greatest resemblance between Tsar Nicholas and President Putin is in the Window to Asia, the ‘Great Asian Programme’, which Tsar Nicholas opened. The Tsar began with the Trans-Siberian Railway and the President has successfully begun again, building the Russian alliance with the new Imperial China of ‘Emperor’ Xi.

The first Window was closed by the British, which armed and financed the Western vassal Japan to the teeth, so that it would treacherously attack Russia without warning in 1904. Now the Window is open once more. For the painstaking construction of BRICS, to a great extent the work of Russia, resurrects the whole foreign policy of Tsar Nicholas, whose aim was co-operation, not confrontation. It was the ‘White Tsar’, anti-colonialist to the core, who opposed the British in their horrifying genocide in the Boer War in South Africa, who defended Ethiopia, Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet (forcing the British invaders to leave), Thailand, and above all China, and would have helped India, had it been possible, to resist Western colonialism.

And now many of those countries have joined or wish to join BRICS. From the martyred Tsar Nicholas II to President Putin, this is Eternal Rus. It fights not only for its own re-creation, but also for the freedom of the whole world from the West, the ideology that the West calls ‘Globalism’. It fights for peace, stability and balance against Western conquest, occupation, plunder, pillaging and dismemberment for the purposes of divide and rule. Today Russia fights for this through the New World Order of Sovereignty and Patriotism. Tsar Nicholas is alive and President Putin is completing the work which he began, but which was interrupted by internal treachery, sponsored by external enemies.

Resisting Episcopal Corruption

Given the depths of decadence among certain parts of the Orthodox episcopate today, many ask the questions: What is a clergyman to do if his bishop acts immorally? Can he just leave him? And why does a bishop so rarely get punished by his fellow-bishops, if he has committed financial crimes or been sexually immoral? For example, there is the recent case of ex-Metropolitan Joseph of the Antiochian jurisdiction in the USA, who until recently had got away with long-term financial ‘extractions’ and sexual immorality, for which he would have been defrocked decades ago if he had been a priest. Why are some bishops apparently above the law and why do they appear to operate as a sort of mafia, allowing each other shameless injustice with impunity?

First of all, when talking about ‘clergymen’ in this context, we must distinguish between ‘servants of the church’ (readers and subdeacons) and ‘servants of the sacred’ (deacons and priests). The former can leave a bishop, as in this respect they are as free as laymen to go to another church. Deacons and priests are another matter, as they are bound to be obedient to the Church – which of course is not at all the same as obedience to a rogue-bishop.

In order to avoid the danger that a deacon or a priest who wishes to leave a bishop may be slandering an innocent bishop, his reception by another bishop depends on whether the immorality of the accused bishop is public knowledge, on whether other bishops know about it (they tend to know a lot about one another – it is a small world). In such a case they will therefore be quite prepared to ignore the guilty bishop’s disingenuous protests, however absurd, which will come once they have received an innocent and slandered priest without a letter of release. (This only happens after the guilty bishop has deliberately refused to issue a letter of release (wrongly called a letter of ‘canonical’ release) to the receiving bishop).

For example, a bishop may want to sodomise a priest (as happened in Moldova and Latvia a few years ago), he may want you to become a freemason (as happened in France in the 1980s), or he may want to commit adultery with your wife (as happened in England some decades ago). Or a bishop could be without a seminary education, poorly trained, ignorant of the basics of liturgics and Church history, may be trying through threats to take your money, church property, vestments and utensils from you, he may openly have a ‘boyfriend’ as his ‘wife’, whose Facebook pages are full of photos of the two lovers, or he may even be a foreign agent who works for the enemy of all Orthodox. Naturally, no accusation against such a bishop will be sufficient, if there is no proof, unless it is a matter of common knowledge among other bishops that he regularly commits such sins. This is not unreasonable. Slander must at all costs be avoided.

However, all this only hits a different level if the bishop in question is publicly (‘bareheadedly’, as the canon says) preaching heresy or has initiated a public schism with another canonical part of the Church. In other words, if he fanatically hates others to the point of heresy or schism, then any number of bishops will receive clergy without a letter of release from the guilty party. No letter of release is needed, as the bishop in question is clearly and publicly discredited and guilty of schism or heresy. In this case, there are plenty of honest and moral bishops who will receive you, even if the guilty bishop refuses to issue a letter of release (only in order then to accuse the departed clergy of ‘disobedience’!). His potential letter of release is irrelevant, as he is the guilty one and everyone knows it and mocks the guilty – even if behind his back.

Your second question concerns injustice: ‘One law for bishops, another law for others’, and ‘Do as I say, not as I do’. Such guilty bishops are not punished or defrocked simply because of politics, of the political power they and their corrupted colleagues have. For instance, the homosexual movement has brought into the Church administration pathologically ill homosexuals, and to a lesser extent bisexuals and, thank God, rarely, pedophiles. Whether repressed or not, they form gay mafias, called in the US ‘lavender mafias’, and persecute both monastics and married clergy, of whom latter they are jealous because they lead normal lives. Such individuals literally pervert the administration of the Church.

You should not be afraid of such bishops. Rather you should be afraid for them, as the guilty face terrible and inevitable judgement at the Last and Dread Judgement. As regards human judgement, even here justice will come in time, the truth will out – it always does come out. The Church is always cleansed sooner or later. The lives of St John of Kronstadt (persecuted by jealous Russian bishops) and St Nectarios of Aegina (persecuted by jealous Greek bishops) prove this. However, this is a constant in Church history: Read the lives of St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. In the words of a very senior Constantinople cleric in a recent private conversation: ‘We just have to be patient and wait for the toilet to flush’. Or in the far more eloquent words of the Russian poet, Vladimir Dixon (1900-1929): ‘God has reserves of glory for inglorious times’.

A universal God has been declared! An examination for Orthodoxy

https://spzh.live/en/chelovek-i-cerkovy/80170-a-universal-god-has-been-declared-an-examination-for-orthodoxy

12 May 04:19

1473

A sermon on Anti-Pascha Sunday.

The time of trials is given to us to understand who we are. And not only we but also those who lead, guide and teach us how to live. This applies primarily to the Church because God will judge those on the outside (1 Corinthians 5:13).

As a priest I have experienced in my life the entire period of the recent history of the Church, starting from its revival in the territory of the former USSR and ending with what we have now. But now all Local Churches are undergoing examination, including those whom no upheavals have particularly touched until this time. The spirit of the new “wonderful” world, which is gradually beginning to enter its earthly possessions, offers each of them two options: to serve it or to be gradually destroyed.

The words of Christ that “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” apply to the entire Church rather than its individual local branches. Where is the Church of St Genevieve, St Patrick of Armagh or St David of Menevia now?

Just a few decades ago, we had an unprecedented Orthodox boom. Huge editions of patristic books were published. And when the Internet entered society, hundreds of preachers began to teach people around the clock what an Orthodox Christian should be like. Teachers of faith of all kinds have been talking about Christ for almost forty years, but only a small part of them could show Him by their own example. After all, speaking and teaching about God is much easier than following Him.

Thus, we have built an Orthodoxy which externally looks fine but the strength of this structure can only be tested by an earthquake.

I remember a time when a hundred and fifty children could be baptised in a church per day. Where are these 30-40-year-old sons and daughters of God now? Are they living a spiritual life? Do they go to church or even know where it is?

The Lord has looked at us for decades and patiently awaited fruits. But now is the time for harvest. How many ascetics have grown in monasteries, righteous people in parish churches, and hierarchs in eparchial administrations during this time? I don’t know, only God knows.

Orthodox exams are taking place all over the world now. Each Local Orthodox Church is taking them. The best, privileged, one might say, position is held by those Orthodox who are openly hunted: those who are outlawed, persecuted in the media, lied against and slandered. Such a Church simply has no way out: nothing is left for it but to be crucified with Christ.

The worst position is occupied by those Local Churches that have turned from the brides of Christ into State concubines. Of course, they did not immediately decide on this adultery. It happened gradually, step by step. At first, it was necessary to make small concessions, and then to descend lower and lower.

All these processes vividly manifested themselves during the coronavirus period when, for the sake of fear, it was allowed to believe that physical death could settle in the Chalice, which is given to us as the source of eternal Life. Therefore, commune with disposable spoons, don’t trust God, trust the WHO. And do not let people go to services, close the churches for Easter and do not celebrate liturgies. And those who did not obey and did not want to violate their priestly oath received hefty fines.

All this was approved by the priesthood, which obediently adapted to the requirements of the state authority. The next step is to recognise the schismatics, then to start blessing non-traditional LGBT marriages, and so on.

There are also those who at the official level have rejected Christ and the Gospel, replacing them with national ideology and military-political doctrine. The clergy who disagree with this are banned or even imprisoned. But can all these bans be seriously considered canonically justified if they come from people who have become servants of Caesar instead of God, essentially betraying their soul to the devil?

And in recent times, among the faithful, a special type has appeared – “couch ascetics of piety”. They destroy all the “enemy filth” day and night with the machine-gun burst of their comments on the Internet. Their religion is anger. They do not understand that the only thing a person needs in this world is to learn to love the Lord and all people with all their soul.

All we need is to immerse our spirit in God and remain in Him forever. Neither in politics, nor in war, nor in Internet news, but in God. But only a few are capable of hearing this.

Judgment is approaching. Weeds have grown and multiplied all over the Earth. In the Church of Christ, there are more and more propagandists, political officers and simply opportunists. what do they direct the zeal of their flock? To hate sinners! That’s their main goal. The essence of their faith is war with global evil. But they do not see stubbornly that they are this very evil.

The Gospel calls us to be clothed in Christ, to become a renewed person. “No, this is not true,” teach modern preachers, you should kill other people “for the sake of Christ” – this is what we bless and inspire you to do. And yet the first Christians also lived in very difficult times. But for some reason, they did not care at all about the political situation of their empire; nor did they worry about either external or internal enemies.

They were worried only about one thing – whether their name was written in the Book of Life or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Situation of the Orthodox Church in Britain in 2024

Introduction: The Apostasy of Non-Orthodoxy

In the last fifty years the situation of Protestantism and Catholicism in Britain has changed radically. That transformation can be summed up by one word – apostasy. In modern Britain once predominant Protestant sects, including religious organisations like the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Church of Wales, the Methodist Church etc are rapidly disappearing. The covid period, when clergy voluntarily closed their churches, all too often it would seem through cowardice, was a disaster. Many people who were closed out then have not returned. Statistically those Protestant groups are predicted to disappear by 2060. As they were founded at earliest in the sixteenth century, they will have lasted at most 500 years. Their members have simply lost their faith. Why go to church, when its leaders preach the same secularism as everyone else and are afraid of covid?

For the moment, discredited Protestantism survives almost only among Pentecostal African immigrants and in faddish happy-clappy groups. Elsewhere, it would seem that, as one commentator has put it, the Gospel has been replaced by ‘The Guardian’. In other words, faith has been swept away by the tidal wave of secularism and wokeism, imposed from the USA: anything goes. Little wonder that some people look to Islam, whose Muslims actually believe in something. Meanwhile, pedophile-undermined Catholicism, led by a politician Pope who scandalises many faithful Catholics, has since the modernism of the 1960s also been fast collapsing. In Britain Catholicism is now populated essentially by Poles, Portuguese, Filippinos, Hungarians etc. Given this apostasy, where could the few native people in Britain who still actually believe in Christ-God look to go to church?

Orthodox Christianity

There remains the option of the Orthodox Church, also composed essentially of immigrants, and some of whose bishops are just as politically-minded and so just as secular as Non-Orthodox leaders. Over the last two generations since I have been active in the Orthodox Church, the situation of Orthodox Christianity in Britain has been transformed. Once consisting of a small number of elderly, highly politicised and often aristocratic White Russians, based in London, a few very closed Serbs and other Slavs exiled here after 1945, and large numbers of modest Greek Cypriots, living in north and east London or running restaurants in seaside resorts, today’s situation is very different. As the older generations of Orthodox immigrants have simply died out, leaving little trace, new waves of immigration have followed.

Over the last fifty years the population of Orthodox in Britain has gradually tripled from 220,000 to 670,000, to one in a hundred, mainly because of twenty-first century immigration. However, in large parts of the country, there is still no choice as to which Orthodox church to attend, since Orthodox churches are still few and far between. But in larger cities, above all in London, there is a choice of churches. What is the difference between them? Of Orthodox groups we do not include here the quite small groups of Serbs, Bulgarians, Georgians and Ukrainians, as these groups are almost always closed, mononational, and generally do not welcome native people as members. However, this still leaves four groups, which native British people could attend. These are:

The Greeks

A generation ago this was by far the largest Orthodox group in Britain. It is composed in fact not of Greeks, but above all of Greek-Cypriots. The clergy of this group, including bishops, was once notorious for sending away any English enquirers, often quite rudely, and telling them to ‘join the Church of England’, in a curious mixture of racism and syncretism. Only in recent years, faced with the possibility of dying out, has it changed. Now under Greek-American control, it realises that in order to survive and keep its young people or to attract others, it must use English in its services and stop pretending to be just some form of Greek nationalist Protestantism. It has also for political reasons accepted small groups of Ukrainians, a few Russians and some English people and has a large multinational convent or monastery, with largely Romanian nuns. With an excellent infrastructure of church properties, wisely and very cheaply amassed in the 1950s and 1960s, and still for the moment with more priests than any other Orthodox group, it has great opportunities.

However, many feel that the opening to English has come much, much too late. This group has already been destroyed by its Greek nationalism and racist imperialism, which revolts most Orthodox. Also the last thirty years when it should have made the transition to English have been wasted. The result: the Protestant Church of England has dozens of Non-Greek-speaking, but ethnic Greek clergy! Unable to speak Greek, these descendants of immigrants left for well-paid jobs with free housing in the Protestant Church of England, using a language which they spoke and understood. As a result, most of the Greek clergy in the Greek Church are elderly and many of its parishes are clearly dying out. In many parishes the only children are Romanian, the old people are all Greek Cypriots, who after sixty years here often still speak poor English. Their assimilated descendants have long since left the Church. Why should they attend the foreign Church of their great-grandparents, whose main article of faith appears to be waving Greek and Cypriot flags? They have learned that Christ was not Greek; apparently, most have not.

The Romanians

This is by far the largest, most welcoming and most dynamic Orthodox group in Britain today, with over 450,000 Romanians and Romanian-speaking Moldovans, average age about 35, not including children. The vast majority have arrived here in the last twenty years. However, the Romanian Church, made up almost uniquely of these recent and modest immigrants has very poor infrastructure, with only 70 parishes, not much better than that of the relatively few canonical Russians. The result is that many Romanians frequent other Orthodox churches (there is nowhere else to go in the absence of their own church – although when a Romanian church does open, they leave the church they used to attend). There are also some very overworked priests, some doing a thousand baptisms a year, up to 20 at a time and hundreds of confessions per week. However, the help of the Romanian ambassador has recently enabled us to obtain a bishop for Romanian Orthodox in this country, who is to be appointed next month.

His Cathedral in Edmonton, North London, bought last December, will be ready later this year. There is great potential here, but only if the Romanian Church can avoid the errors of the Russians, all repeated by the Greeks. Avoiding this error means keeping the masses of young people in the Church, despite the fact that they will inevitably end up speaking better English than Romanian and be assimilated. The error of flag-waving Russian and Greek nationalism and politics must not develop into flag-waving Romanian nationalism and politics. That would be just as irrelevant to the assimilated descendants of Romanian and Moldovan immigrants, as Russian and Greek nationalism was to the assimilated descendants of Russian and Greek immigrants. Waving a foreign flag is of no interest to those who feel more British than Romanian, Greek or Russian and have little interest in the old country. Christ was not Greek, but he was not Russian or Romanian either.

The (Canonical) Russians

The Moscow Russians were once well-known among Anglicans for their famous émigré bishop and missionary, Antony Bloom. He knew how to talk to Anglicans, some indeed thought him rather Anglican, and certainly his presence developed into a controversial personality cult. Son of an atheist diplomat from the Tsar’s Russia and of the sister of the composer Scriabin, he was a very talented man, who created a small, multinational, though rather elitist, diocese. However, he died twenty years ago, in the past. Most Russians here never knew him. Under the present wave of Russian nationalism, the remains of his diocese are tending to resemble a national ghetto. The present Russian diocese appears to have rejected a lot of Ukrainians and treated Moldovans badly, exactly as it has done some English people. Today, this group exists only in the embassy area of west London and in a number of chapels outside London. Outside the capital most of its clergy, who knew Metropolitan Antony Bloom, are dying out. Despite recent bright prospects, today its future is in serious doubt. But perhaps changes in Moscow will soon be under way.

(There is also a former émigré group of Russians, known as ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia). This now numbers fewer than 1,000, perhaps only 500. Having rejected its traditional Russian roots, gone into schism in 2021 and as a result lost over half of its already small diocese, this tiny Trump-voting, US-based and US-cultured cult has tried to attract others. Having seen its original Russian émigré base die out or leave it for non-schismatic churches, they have attracted mainly right-wing, sectarian-minded English people, including Anglo-Catholics of an unusual orientation. Having seen its original Russian émigré base die out, it is trying to recruit Ukrainian refugees unsuccessfully, as they reject anything that is called Russian and psychologically normal Ukrainians do not wish to frequent a sect anyway. The schismatic ROCOR appears to have no future, since it has cut itself off from the Church).

The Antiochians

Critics call the Antiochians ‘Angliochians’, as they seem to be largely composed of ex-Anglicans. Probably with fewer than 2,000 laypeople, and many of these visiting Romanians with nowhere else to go, the mainly ex-Anglican clergy under the Patriarchate of Antioch (in fact of Damascus in Syria) are few, elderly and often do not know how to celebrate the services. Some of these appear to be more anti-Anglican rather than Orthodox.

However, in defence, we must say that, apart from a few recent converts who have pathological chips on their shoulders, members of this group are sincere, well-intentioned and have made great sacrifices to enter this Arab Patriarchate. The mere fact of their existence is a witness to their faith and zeal, despite the discouragement of Greeks and Russians alike. Hence those who declare that ‘Anti-och’ is for those who are ‘anti-Russian and anti-Greek’.

Conclusion: Disenfranchising the Franks

For the few remaining Christians in Britain, Orthodox Christianity probably represents a step that culturally goes too far, it is too radical. For Orthodox Christianity is the millennial opposite of Secularism, whose ancestor is Protestantism, whose ancestor is Catholicism. All are cut from the same secular block. Catholicism is secular because it wanted to control the world, making the Pope of Rome into a Super-King, an Emperor of the world, higher than all rulers. Protestantism was secular because it subjected itself to secular rulers and so to worldliness, for example, in England it was an invention of the rulers Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

For this reason, to join the Orthodox Church is an act that disenfranchises, that is, ‘defranks’ the Norman-imposed Frankish Establishment, depriving them of their freedom, privileges and self-appointed right to tyrannise the people. Only if you have understood this and wish to reject this inherent secularism, would you wish to belong to the Orthodox Church. It is the only logical solution, if you want something that is not inherently and institutionally compromised by Secularism. If you have not understood this, you will remain somewhere inbetween, in what is now the no-man’s land, outside Orthodoxy Christianity. However, surely a no-man’s land is not the best place to be at a time when the fiercest spiritual warfare is raging from the trenches in the anti-Christian modern world all around us?

 

 

 

The People’s Church: 2008-2024

Foreword: Our Faith

I was born in Colchester in Eastern England. We Eastern English are renowned for our independence, straightforwardness, reliability and pragmatism. We are also bluff and good-natured, but are suspicious of newcomers and always test them to see what they are made of. That is why we are often underestimated. However, we can also be lyrical and poetic beneath our great skies, among our woods and fields, and on our coasts. We have no ideology – for the Gospels are not an ideology, but life itself – and we live by the motto: ‘Tell the truth and shame the devil’. This truth-telling can be seen in the victory of our great national hero, champion and patron saint, our martyred last King, St Edmund of East Anglia (+ 869). He told the heathen the truth, even though they did not like it. He was not afraid. We do the same.

Our love of the truth is why we always resisted the secularism of the recent past. This consisted of the liberal, modernist and syncretist ideology of indifference, that there is no truth, that all faiths are the same. This relativisation was a purely political manipulation of globalists, a pan-heresy, as St Justin described it, as it maintained that truth and lies, light and darkness, are equal. This was obviously untrue and was promoted only by those whose souls had been bought and paid for by the secularist politics of this world. Equally, however, we resist the post-modernist extreme, the nonsense that only one tiny sect possesses the truth and that all others are ‘satanic’. This very primitive and narrow ideology is clearly the fruit of sad and broken individuals with psychological, not to say, pathological problems of pride and broken childhoods. In history it belongs to the heresy known as Donatism.

Thus, truth-telling makes us unpopular and controversial among the elites of all persuasions. This is because the one thing they hate is the truth, for the truth undermines their grasp on power and riches. That is why they hated Christ. That is why we have one great strength: we know that the Truth always wins, however long it takes. With Christ it took three days. Because we are sinners, it takes us much longer, but our victory through Christ, Who is ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’, is still inevitable. This is our Faith.

The Beginnings

In 2008 I stood in the largest church in my native town, the future City of Colchester, and looked towards our second church, a small chapel. Both were empty, but they both now belonged to us, after eleven years of prayerful patience. Our monocled master had given his blessing for us to buy the property, but he told me I was mad. The main church, at 6,500 square feet, was ‘too big’ (much bigger than his own, which was a problem for him) and he gave us not a penny of help or any support. We just heard disheartening criticisms which came from his personal despair.

But I had a vision and said that with God’s help we shall fill this church and then need a bigger one. People mocked, especially him. But after 16 years, we have got to that point. Looking back, I can see three periods: The first period, one of foundation, went from our first service in December 2008 up to 2016. The first liturgy then was attended by only 35 people, however the number of those attending gradually increased to about 120 regular parishioners, becoming more multinational. We were becoming the local church.

Our second period, one of consolidation, went from 2015 to 2020. In that time, we doubled in size to about 250 regular parishioners and set up new parishes in Norwich and just outside Cambridge for those who were coming to us from such great distances. The third period, of protection, began in 2020 with covid, when the wolf attempted to close us for the first time. We never closed. This period, which is one of protecting the flock from the jealous wolves, even though they may mask themselves as shepherds, is far from over. Like the much-persecuted St John (+ 1966) before us, we shall always protect our flock from the wolves.

An Elitist Sect or the People’s Faith

Then we heard the young and inexperienced neophyte without seminary training, publicly in church declaring to us who were of many nationalities that the Greek Patriarch Bartholomew was ‘satanic’ and that he ‘disliked Romanians and only half-liked Moldovans’. Now we do not agree with several personal opinions and actions of Patriarch Bartholomew (like a lot of his bishops, priests and people, including the monks of Mt Athos, who are very good people who our dear friends and completely agree with us on these subjects), but we would never, never call him ‘satanic’. He may have an all too human weakness for money, like many bishops in another Local Church and we can name quite a few of them, including the one who called him ‘satanic’. The pot calling the kettle black. There are a dozen or so Greek parishes in London, all attended by 200-300 every Sunday of the year. We respect them. As for the single small church of that young convert, people flee its ‘police-state’, sectarian and schismatic nature. We know many of the refugees who have at last seen through it, as they now come to us.

His words were incredible. We were all horrified. A stunned silence fell on us as we heard his awful views. As for the racism of this Non-European newcomer, a new ‘Orthobro’, but not an Orthodox and certainly not a Christian, not just towards the many pious Greeks, who carry out dozens of baptisms and chrismations of Non-Greeks in this country every few months, but also towards the mass of very pious and honourable Romanians and Moldovans, as well as to English people who practised the Orthodox Faith before he was even born, we were absolutely appalled. And this alien individual was supported by his colleagues in distant America, where they do not understand Europe and despise us. It was clear that the young and very aggressive ideological son of NATO, who, like the rest of the American elite, claimed to be exceptional and able to impose its imperialism on us, had rejected all possibilities of helping to build the Local Church.

Helping to build a Local Church has always been the aim of our lives, as we are neither psychopathic ideologues, nor narrow racists, but shepherds, and so we welcome all the sheep without political or racial distinction to our church, as Christ commanded us to do. (Have you not read the last words of St Matthew’s Gospel? We do not send people away because they are not rich enough or are not effete enough). On the other hand, he had chosen the path of isolationism and sectarianism, cutting himself off from communion with all, even from his own Russian Church, and punishing all who disagreed with him. This was his practice of what he considered to be ‘punishing’ or, with the typically American Protestant mentality, ‘sanctioning’ us, so revealing his Lutheran/Calvinist witch-hunting mentality.  His actions said: ‘You dare disagree with me? Then I hate you and I will punish you’.

Our Struggle for Truth

In reality, he punished himself through his uncanonical and schismatic actions and destroyed his own already tiny diocese, the only remaining meaning of whose existence since 2007 had precisely been to contribute towards building Local Churches – our own aim. His act was an act of suicide. Since we left him, we have doubled our income and are now intending to buy a house for a third priest and pay him a salary. We have a candidate. At that time, we faced the choice of belonging to a weirdy-beardy sect of converts, or of belonging to a mass faith, to an elitist sectarian religious ghetto, which had usurped and replaced its legitimate head and forged his signature, or to the faith of the people. Filled with narcissism, and so jealousy, and so hatred, after forging its own head’s signature, sidelining him and creating its own Metropolitan, the group expelled all the senior clergy who know the Tradition and replaced them with itself and others who also have no heart and only an extremist ideology.

This was clearly not the way forward. They had committed spiritual and so moral suicide (loss of faith always ends in suicide) and destroyed their once immense potential. They had created an irrelevant and narrow sect, a fake Church, in full view of the broad and deep Orthodox world, to the wonder of men and angels alike. We faced the refusal, for purely political and suicidal reasons, of the canonical but once again captive (only the captors have changed from Soviet atheists to centralising State nationalists) Russian Orthodox Church (the ‘Sourozh Diocese’) to receive us on 10 May 2021. Next we faced the brute political force used to make the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Church, where we had sought refuge from persecution, abandon us, and so abandon the cause of a Local Orthodox Church of Western Europe in the Russian Church, in February 2022. Where would we go after fifty years?

As so often in history before, those who should not have been distracted by politics, did just that and so forgot about the salvation of souls. Thus, in the history of the wealthy Capital of Saint Petersburg, spiritual leadership went from the mighty bishops of this world to a widow turned tramp, St Ksenia, and to a provincial pastor, despised by his jealous bishops and hated by the aristocrats who wanted to kill him, St John of Kronstadt. Following the political captivity and so marginalisation of the now isolated two main Local Churches, who would take over the spiritual leadership of the Orthodox peoples? We would go to the centre where are the other fourteen Local Churches, to the astounding churchmen in the singing mountains of Carpatho-Russia and on the sunshone banks of the Jordan, of martyred Damascus and martyred Bachneny, of Tirana and Tbilisi, of Iasi and Warsaw, of Brno and Belgrade, of Budapest and Rila, of Kiev and Limassol, of Athos and Jerusalem. We would go to the living fountains of piety where God directed us to go.

Our Romanian Orthodox Church Home

The negotiations that took place on the very next day, 16 February 2022, with our friend Metropolitan Joseph, whom we had known for nearly 25 years, took four hours. All our churches and all our clergy (except for one new convert reader who naively fell to the sect) and literally 99% of our people transferred to the Romanian Orthodox Church, keeping everything as it was before. All this took place just eight days before the latest phase of the US proxy war against the Ukraine and Russia was triggered on 24 February 2022.

This passage to the Romanian Orthodox Church was entirely providential, as in this way we could remain outside politics, remaining multinational, keeping Moldovans, Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians and everyone else together, remaining on the old calendar, but also free to do services on the new calendar for all who wished. And what will happen if the British Establishment bans the Russian Church completely? The equally Russophobic Establishment in Latvia has already done that and it may happen in Estonia. It could happen here. Perhaps all will join the Romanian Church? Providentially we will still be here for all the Russians who are really Orthodox, who are not flag-waving nationalists or centralising ideologues. Others may not be allowed to remain here to care for them pastorally. We shall still be here.

On Palm Sunday 2024 we once more saw that our church building is too small. Nearly 100 people were standing outside, as the church can only take 500 people. Some 150 of these people were children. As for our overflow parish in Little Abington outside Cambridge, it was packed with 100 people, including more refugees from the schismatic Russians in Chiswick. Here then we face a new dilemma. With several seminary-trained laymen and excellent singers in the parish, we have to look seriously at setting up more new churches. After Norwich and Cambridge, we are now looking at Harlow and Southend. And then we still have to buy permanent premises for our growing Felixstowe Orthodox community. And permanent premises for the communities in Coventry, Wisbech and York? We have seminary-trained candidates for the priesthood. They can be ordained. After all we are the People’s Church.

The People’s Church: The Church They Tried to Close, Announced is Closed, and Which ‘is Now Empty and Where No-one Goes’!

In retrospect, we can cope with so many people because we had slowly been moving towards this point for years, ever since the repose of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John, who had established a multinational Archdiocese. However, after him, they dismantled this. I can remember exactly twenty years ago how we were told the following by those who left us in 2021:

‘We do not like other Orthodox because they have divorces, which we don’t have’. (My answer: Of course you don’t have divorces, because you have not had a single wedding for 25 years, because you are all so old, let alone have baptisms). ‘We do not like other Orthodox, they do different services in the same church at the same time. In one corner of the church one priest is doing a baptism, in another corner a second priest is doing a memorial service’. (My answer: What ignorance! This is perfectly normal. A church that is not doing this is dying out, it is underused).

‘We don’t like their church. It’s too noisy because there are too many children there’. (My answer: Yes, it can be noisy in church because there are lots of children. Children are life. It’s not like your church, where everyone is aged over 65. As a result of your dislike of children, your church is dying out’). And they even continued, quite shockingly: ‘Our church is like a glass of clean water; theirs is a glass of dirty water’. (My answer: Why are so many of your clergy being defrocked for moral reasons then? Remember your ‘Very Reverend’ Archimandrite Antony Grabbe, the protected son, who stole six million dollars and debauched nuns? Your view is in any case phariseeism). Obviously, we would never belong to this alien American sect of newcomers, when they ordered its formation and final fall in 2021.

Our Easter Message

How do we cope with so many people? For years I have been going to Kiev and bringing back what we need and reserves in heavy suitcases. We use bigger chalices (we have five of them), we have four stands for confession, use bigger and more utensils. We have the blessing from our Metropolitan for our deacons to give communion in order to cut down on the time taken by 200-400 communions. We are ready. Later this year we will have our own bishop in his new Cathedral in North London. For many years my niece used to work at St Paul’s Cathedral. I used to say that one day we would need that church, built according to the legend there where the Apostle of the Gentiles preached all those years ago, as we will be able to fill it. They laughed at me then, but that day is coming.

As for two calendars, we cope with them quite simply because we are pastors, not insecure, sectarian ‘onetruechurch’ ideologues, who tell lies about others. We do exactly like the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of the old Russian Church did, for he was the successor of St John of Western Europe. He too was obliged to leave Kiev. He had many old calendar Russian parishes, but his biggest parish in France was the Romanian new calendar parish. (Just like the Moscow Patriarchate which has new calendar parishes in Austria and Bulgaria, for example). Our Metropolitan Joseph has the same attitude, because he too is a pastor, not an ideologist, and so accepts both calendars for the fixed feasts and concelebrates with all. We clergy all agree to look after our people. People follow the example set by the clergy and accept each other and different customs.

There are people who keep the fast as strictly as possible (they examine the ingredients of all the food they buy as closely as possible), but they hate their neighbour as much as possible. Such people are not ours. Our Easter Message is quite simple. At the Last Judgement we shall be judged only on whether we showed love for others or hatred for others through the actions of our hearts. Our friend the Romanian priest who did 800 confessions in one week, staying at church from 7 am to 7 pm every day and who washed the feet of twelve parishioners on Holy Thursday, shows the way. Christ, the Son of God become man, the only Knower of hearts, showed the greatest love of all, allowing himself to be crucified out of love, so that He could offer all victory over death and the Resurrection of salvation. We follow Him and always will do. The wolves of this world have lost. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion. Together with the thousand voices of Easter Night again we say: Christ is Risen!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester, England,

Eastertide 2024

 

 

Nine Canons For Modern Times

In the last times the followers of Antichrist will go to church, get baptised and preach the Gospel commandments. But do not believe those who have no good deeds. You can only know a real Christian by his works. True faith is in the heart, and not in the reason. He who has faith in his reason will follow Antichrist and he who has faith in his heart will perceive who he is.

St Gabriel (Urgebadze)

Canon I

Any bishop has the right to impose a schism with another canonical Orthodox Church or any Diocese of it, forbidding his clergy to concelebrate with it and excommunicating all their clergy and people, even though his own clergy and people have close relatives or lifelong friends in that Church or Diocese. This schism may be imposed for ideological or for racial reasons and this is quite acceptable. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon II

Any bishop has the right to depose clergy who refuse to hand over to him large amounts of money or property, so that he can live a luxurious lifestyle. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon III

Any bishop has the right to abduct his head bishop, whether Patriarch, Metropolitan or Archbishop, in order to ensure that he can then do whatever he wants. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking

Canon IV (The Geneva Canon)

Any bishop has the right to depose another bishop whom he dislikes in order to ensure that he can then do whatever he or his protege want in the place of the deposed bishop. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon V

Any bishop has the right to depose any clergyman who disagrees with his personal political opinions, in order to ensure that he can preach whatever he wants without opposition. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VI

Any bishop has the right to depose any clergyman who reports to his fellow-bishops that the bishop in question is homosexual. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VII

Any bishop has the right to be jealous of any clergyman who is more successful than him in attracting people to the church. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon VIII

Any bishop has the right to forge the signature of his head bishop, whether Patriarch, Metropolitan or Archbishop, electronically, in order to ensure that he can do whatever he wants. Any clergyman who denounces this practice will be deposed under pretext of disobedience and oath-breaking.

Canon IX

Always remember the main principle: Hate your neighbour as much as you hate yourself.

 

The Orthodox World: The Third Way Holds the Centre Ground

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

 

Introduction: Secularist Greeks Versus Secularist Russians

So wrote the Irish poet Yeats in 1919 after the first catastrophic tribal European War of 1914-1918 was over. Since that time over a hundred years of ‘mere anarchy’ and ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ have been loosed. Still today some wonder how much longer ‘the rough beast’ will take to ‘slouch to Bethlehem to be born’, as Yeats wrote further in his same poem The Second Coming. In the affairs of the Non-Orthodox world, Protestantism seems to have lost all its faith and is now closing down, selling off its churches, as it is ‘lacking all conviction’. As for Papalism, it is led by an old and sick man who faces scandal after scandal and all is ‘falling apart’. What about the situation of the Orthodox Church?

Secularists, who only look at externals and fail to know the inner life of the Church, see Orthodoxy as divided between Russians and Greeks. They always have done so and always will ignore the vast majority of the Local Orthodox Churches. However, inside the Church we have a far different understanding from them, reaching much beyond the superficial nationalist politics of Greek and Russian elites. What amateur CIA writers call ‘The Clash of Patriarchs’ (1) is nonsense. The Church is not about personalities, politics or ethnicities, it is far deeper and broader than mere skin-deep secular racial identities, Russian, Greek or any other, for in Christ there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek’. Outside the Church there is only that.

The Centre Ground

Our place is in the centre ground of the other fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, which is also the ground held by churched Russians and Greeks, though not by Russian and Greek nationalists, who are merely ‘cultural Orthodox’, nostalgic and delusional for long since disappeared empires. The Centre is opposed to the divisive nationalism of unchurched Greeks and Russians. That nationalism is rejected by Non-Greeks and Russians, that is, by the majorities of the other fourteen Local Churches, which form ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’, covering Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania and Moldova, with Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria standing ready nearby.

The Hellenism of the Greek world, which ended in 1453, is rejected by Non-Greeks. In the second largest Local Church, the Romanian, we ignore both Greeks and Russians. In Western Europe we are far larger, soon with twelve bishops, nearly a thousand parishes and five million faithful. At present the Romanian Church is also reclaiming Romanian Orthodox in the southern Ukraine, Moldova and Western Europe from both Greeks and Russians. Serbs, Macedonians, Czechs, Slovaks, Russians, Romanians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Syrians, Poles and Albanians also reject Greek interference. And Russian nationalism is becoming irrelevant even in the former USSR as Orthodox assimilate, as we can see below.

The Tragedy of Russian Politicisation

It seems strange that Orthodox in countries as diverse as the Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia and Kazakhstan are still formally under the Russian Church. Already in Estonia for thirty years and for a few months in Lithuania, the Russian Church has had no monopoly of jurisdiction. As for the Ukraine, the Church jurisdictional situation there is chaotic, with Moscow losing everything. though not yet as chaotic as among Orthodox in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia, where many Local Churches are represented and people are free to choose their church. And governments there are also free to allow any Local Church to operate on its territory – or not, with the Russian Church already banned in Latvia.

The sad fact is that Russian Church life has been highly politicised; much is ideology, rigidity, negativity and coldness. The old Russian emigration anecdote goes that once a Russian was discovered by a ship living on a desert island, where he had built three churches. When asked by the captain of the ship that rescued him why he had built three churches, he replied: ‘So that there are two where I must not go’. The fact is that the Russian emigration has been marked by hatred, not love, by bishops who hate their clergy and people, ‘drowning the ceremony of innocence’, who try to steal the people’s churches, sadistically punish and generally have no idea of how to be pastors and love their clergy and people (2).

The Ukraine

What of the Ukraine? What will happen there after the forthcoming Russian victory? Probably, this will at long last create a real Ukraine, divested of its very large minorities, almost a majority, over half of the old Soviet-created Ukraine. The far south-west corner, former Habsburg territory, will surely return to Hungary after its theft in 1945. In the south, North Bukovina, which was also stolen by Stalin, will return to Romania. And surely at least two of the mainly Uniat provinces in the far west may return to Poland. The rest, the real Ukraine, minus the huge Novorossija in the south and east which is largely Russian, will remain as the real Ukraine, with its centre in historic Kiev and be Ukrainian-speaking.

Clearly, the time will then be up for the so-called ‘OCU’, Constantinople’s fake Church, that absurd State-run jurisdiction of gangsters and homosexuals with 1,500 now empty churches, stolen by State-aided violence from the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, led by the heroic Metr Onufry of Kiev. On the other hand, after military victory, Moscow, which is now at the head of a Russian National Church, will have to win the peace. It will be obliged to decentralise and at last grant the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly (33 years late…). No Ukrainian wants to attend ‘alien’, Russian-controlled, churches. Ukrainians want their own Church. This will be the seventeenth Local Orthodox Church.

Moldova

Then there is Moldova. The main Church there, which depends on Metropolitan Vladimir who is under Moscow for the moment, will soon have twelve bishops. It works in competition with the smaller Metropolia of Bessarabia, which also claims historic jurisdiction in Moldova and is part of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Metropolitan Vladimir has recently made a tour of the very large Moldovan Diaspora. It is possible that with so many bishops he may after the fall of the US-run Ukraine want to declare autocephaly (independence) from Moscow, with the full backing of the Moldovan government and the US ambassador (which is much the same thing). However, such a move will have complex implications.

For Moscow would not recognise such a self-declared autocephaly. At that point Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova should logically, if he wished, negotiate with the Romanian Church to have his autocephaly confirmed by it. This would be on condition that he create unity with the Bessarabian Metropolia and withdrew all the absurd ‘defrockings’ of clergy who have already transferred from him to it, both inside and outside Moldova. Only if the Romanian Church granted him autocephaly, would the rest of the Orthodox world recognise it, leaving Moscow even more isolated and lacking a part of its former Diaspora in Western Europe. A Moldovan Church would be the eighteenth Local Church.

The Baltics and Beyond

Beyond this, Moscow would also have to deal with Church affairs in the three independent Baltic republics. If it does not give them autocephaly, they will be further racked by schism and destroyed and undermined by their Russophobic State authorities. Moscow’s long refusal to grant autocephaly has already led to divisions in Estonia and Lithuania. However, since the total number of bishops in the three countries is, I believe, only eight, and numbers of the faithful are fewer than half a million, it would make sense to set up a Baltic Orthodox Church, covering all three territories. Indeed, it could be argued that Finland should become a fourth part of this Baltic Orthodox Church. This would be the nineteenth Local Church.

Beyond this there is the Russian Church in the Diaspora. Here there is schism in Western Europe because of the schism of the very aggressive American Synod of Russian bishops, with its ghetto churches in backrooms and garden sheds, with a dozen or so ‘onetrue church’ converts in each one and clergy who have no theological training or qualifications, ‘making it up as they go along’. They have no idea of mass Orthodoxy. The people and priests turn away from homosexual, bisexual and schismatic psychopathic bishop-pharisees, shouting in jealousy, threatening, intimidating, punishing, trying to steal property and screaming: ‘Give me the keys!’ Their refusal to co-operate with other Orthodox is based on their ideological and racial hatred.

Africa

The Russian Church has Exarchates in Belarus (see below), and two missionary exarchates, in South-East Asia and in Africa. This latter is highly controversial, as the Patriarchate of Alexandria in Egypt has for nearly a century claimed Africa as its territory, though until the late 1920s it had claimed only Egypt and Libya. Although here it has made several hundred thousand Black African converts, its missions have been weak and control of the Church is 100% in Greek hands and Greek embassies. The Russian mission appears to have opened in revenge for the 2018 Greek setting up a ‘Church’ with US finance in the Ukraine, Russia’s canonical territory. Does the Russian missionary Exarchate in Africa have a future then?

On paper the Russian Exarchate appears to be as uncanonical as the Greek ‘Church’ in the Ukraine. However, in the Ukraine the people do not attend the top-down Greek Church, which recently adopted the ‘new’ calendar against all tradition and many of whose clergy are not even ordained. On the other hand, the Russian mission has attracted grassroots interest, with over 100 African priests and their communities joining it. Collective baptisms are taking place. If the Russian mission goes native and has black African bishops, then it will have a future. But first it has to prove that it is not a political, Russian embassy set-up. Only if it goes native, will it get canonical recognition as a fait accompli and become the twentieth Local Church.

Conclusion: The Revelation Is At Hand

There are other former Soviet, but now independent republics, such as Belarus and the five stans of Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan, where there are several million Russians. At present none of these countries has asked for its own autocephalous Church, but that time will almost certainly come. As for the Moscow Diaspora in Western Europe and the Americas, it has largely become a ghetto, as the Russian Church is seen as politically compromised and has painted itself into a nationalist corner. However, the Greek Diaspora is also politically compromised, it is largely elderly, to the point of dying out, and its episcopate suffers from severe homosexualisation, with all the usual accompanying financial and moral scandals.

The Russian Church is already facing financial difficulties inside Russia. Fewer and fewer are attending churches there, as they appear to be subordinate to politics and not to the Gospels and spirituality, which the people seek. In that respect it is like the Protestant Church of England, which is also seen as hopelessly in political thrall to the State. In general, the age when the Church can be held hostage to Greek and Russian nationalism is over. The vital forces of the Church are elsewhere. The Orthodox world is not Greeks and Russians – they are only two of the already sixteen Local Churches, perhaps to become twenty. The others, what we have called ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’, provide the Third Way. This means that the Centre can hold.

Notes:

  1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/05/russia-ukraine-orthodox-christian-church-bartholomew-kirill/677837/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the-atlantic-am&utm_term=The
  2. See the portrait of the dried-up pharisee-monk Fr Ferapont, full of hatred and jealousy for the saintly Elder Zosima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, or the portrait of the very unpleasant émigré bishop in the 1957 novel Father Vikenty by Paul Chavchavadze. We know who the model for that crust-dry bishop was, obviously a repressed homosexual or pedophile.

 

 

 

The Restoration of Orthodox Christianity in Europe and Russia

 Foreword: European Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy

On my almost daily travels through Suffolk, I regularly see flying in gardens the Suffolk flag, the golden crown crossed by the two arrows of St Edmund on a blue background. It refers to the martyrdom by arrows of St Edmund, the last King of East Anglia, in the Year 869. This was part of European Orthodoxy, the England which was defending itself against paganism because it was in communion with, and part of, the Orthodox Christian world. This is just the opposite of today, when England has gradually returned to paganism because it has for nearly a millennium been out of communion with, and not part of, the Church.

In writing these words about the love for St Edmund, I am reminded how just over 14 years ago I sat with our own Suffolk Count and Countess Benckendorff in that oasis of culture, the Munnings Museum in Dedham, Essex. Then we discussed my recent visit to our Russian Orthodox ‘catacomb’ community in Old York and next fell to discussing the poetry of Masefield, a great friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, which we compared to that of Hoelderlin, de Vigny and Tyutchev. This is Russian Orthodoxy, not brash and alien, modern American or European anti-culture, which Sir Alfred used to mock. After that conversation the Benckendorffs returned to Church life, reassured that the Church at least locally survives.

On 5 April this year we and the Benckendorffs met again, at the Cock Inn in Polstead. This time we discussed a recent visit to our mutual friend, Baroness Olga Tiesenhausen, in Surrey, to whom I gave confession and communion. The daughter of a White Russian noble, turned seamstress in exile in Paris, she loved the old parish in Meudon outside Paris, where she grew up, and our then rector, Fr Alexander Trubnikov, who was one of us who love the Tradition and therefore hate extremism of both sorts. She had recently been made very unwelcome in both Russian churches in London; the one a political extension of the post-Soviet embassy; the other under the control of pathological crazies, fanatical and culture-less converts who hate all who are not schism and sect like themselves. Tragically, through their schism they missed the great opportunity to become a canonical, but also politically free and multinational part of the Russian Church, working with others in Catholicity. They have zero understanding of the real Russian Orthodox Tradition and Russian Orthodox culture.

They ‘defrock’ conscientious and principled Orthodox pastors of integrity and of the Tradition. This imaginary punishment, as it comes from schismatics, is worn by them as a badge of honour and makes them even more popular among ordinary Orthodox and proves that they are not unprincipled bureaucrat-clerics and careerists. It is all so different from the beloved real Russian Church and its European culture in which we were all brought up, like our parishioners in Old York too. With the Benckendorffs we fell to discussing the post-Soviet nightmare, which began in 1991 and continues today. We concluded that the solution can only be in the coming Tsar and the complete cleansing of Church and State of the pre-Soviet diseases of bureaucracy and corruption (as portrayed for example by Gogol), of the Soviet diseases of centralisation and persecution (as portrayed for example in the late Soviet film The Irony of Fate), and the post-Soviet diseases of (US-imposed) militarisation and nationalism.

Introduction: The Restoration of Russian Orthodox Culture

Just before the 1917 palace revolt in Russia, falsely known as the ‘Revolution’, British spies murdered Gregory Rasputin. It was the ‘first shot of the Revolution’. His name means ‘the parting of the ways’, whereas the name ‘Putin’ means ‘the way’. His way is not the way we want to take, but we believe that it will, by the paradox of Divine Providence, lead to where we need to be. This is a quite different place from now. We have far greater aims than post-Soviet deviations. These include the cleansing of the fringes of the post-Soviet Russian Church from American schism and hate-filled sectarianism, and of the post-Soviet Russian Church itself from politicking, financial corruption, careerism, moral decadence and the extremism bred by them.

Together with all our dear friends in the Patriarchate of Romania, gathered over the last three decades and who have welcomed us as refugees from the vicious persecution by Russian schismatics and hysterical converts, as well as with our dear friends all over Europe, in Russia, Moldova, the Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus, the Baltics, Belarus, Poland, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Czechia, in the cleansed St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris and our friends in the churches in Geneva and Baden-Baden, we will see the Russian Church restored to what Tsar Nicholas II wanted it to be. That is what the whole mainstream Orthodox world also needs it to be. The Orthodox world has been patiently awaiting this restoration for generations. The now very isolated Local Church of Russia has not yet taken up in the spirit of Catholicity the place waiting for it in the concert of the sixteen Local Churches, of which it is only one, albeit by far the largest in number. Only together can they be the voice of God.

Instead, it isolated itself by its refusal to turn the other cheek when uncanonically attacked by US-financed and homosexualised Constantinople in the Ukraine. Then it imposed on itself the further isolation of cutting of communion, followed by uncanonical revenge in Africa, and nationalistic and militaristic politics. The martyred Tsar’s vision of the restored, pre-Imperial Church, like the church of the Fyodorovsky Icon which he built in Tsarskoe Selo and which was restored over a decade ago, is also ours. It is like our church, also free of the decadence that began with Peter I, free of its decadent iconography and Italianate opera singing, its theatrical ritualism, bureaucratic clericalism, anti-pastoral, Statist rigidity, money-grubbing and love of luxury, nationalistic and militaristic phariseeism, hatred for others, and practice of rare communion – at best once a year.

The whole Orthodox world, not least here in Western Europe, awaits a restored, post-post-Soviet, broad and benevolent Russian Church, a Church of European culture, not of convert fanaticism or of narrow, nationalistic and militaristic post-Soviet politics, without sympathy for others and without mission. And we are the majority, the mainstream, representing all the free Local Churches, fourteen votes against two. This is the future of European Orthodox culture, though not of modern Europe. Modern Europe, for all of us heirs to Tsar Nicholas II, is like someone intent on committing suicide, both economic and moral, by hating Russia. Russia is poised to become the fourth largest economy in the world, overtaking Japan. (Russia has already overtaken Germany, indeed the latter is about to be overtaken by Indonesia). Let us look at the example of Great Britain to find the roots of this suicidal bent.

British Establishment Hatred for Imperial Russia

Emperors Paul I (+ 1801) and Nicholas II (+ 1918) of Russia were both removed and then murdered as a result of plots hatched by the British ambassadors in the Saint Petersburg of their times. As John Gleason points out in his 1952 book The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain, systematic and institutionalised British Establishment hatred for Russia began after the liberation of Paris by Russian troops in 1814, which had shocked Britain. This Russophobia was ‘an artificially manufactured product’ of ‘a campaign of a relatively small number of men’ who ‘won acceptance for their views by force of repetition’. In other words, if you repeat the lie often enough, it will stick. It was all about the British elite’s fanatical ambition for world hegemony. No rivals could be allowed.

Thus, the British ruling caste, ‘the Establishment’, engineered wars in which European countries destroyed one another, thus destroying any rivals. It was the same divide and rule policy of the pagan Romans, whom the British elite so admired. Thus, the Victorian Age became that of the purely British Establishment-invented ‘Great Game’, of which the Russians had never heard. In this the British Establishment obsessed itself with its deluded idea that Russia wanted to liberate British-occupied India. This self-delusion led the British Establishment to invade Afghanistan and lose three wars there, to occupy Cyprus (from where it now feeds the Israelis with bombs to genocide Palestine), to help finance the Suez Canal, to arm Japan to the teeth and get it to invade Russia, and then to invade and massacre in Tibet. All unnecessary.

Such British Establishment-orchestrated Russophobia was even reflected in the 1905 children’s book by Edith Nesbit, called The Railway Children. It came as no surprise, for London has long been a centre for plotting and exiled Russian traitors like Herzen, the murderous anarchist Bakunin and then the genocidal and Christ-hating Lenin. Even the evil Trotsky-Bronstein was later sent from arrest to Canada to foment revolution in Russia by the British elite. Today London is again the welcoming centre for anti-Russian oligarchs.

Conversely, the Suffolk Benckendorffs had a relative, Count Paul Benckendorff, who always remained faithful to the Tsar, as he recorded in his book The Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo. As the martyred Tsar’s noble sister, Olga Alexandrovna, who knew Count Paul, somewhat naively wrote: ‘My best friends and so many of my relations are British and I am devoted to them and to much in the English way of life….It has never been possible to discuss with them the utterly vile politics of successive British Parliaments. They were nearly all anti-Russian – and so often without the least cause. So much of British policy is wholly contrary to their own tradition of fair play’ (The Last Grand Duchess, Vorres, P. 240).

British Establishment Hatred for Soviet Russia

Through meddling in Russia in 1916 and 1917, the British elite inadvertently set up the USSR. They had imagined that they would remove the Tsar and then a group of selected oligarchs (that is, British-style aristocrats and ‘liberals’ like the transgender murderer Yusupov – there is nothing new in LGBT) would set up a British-style ‘constitutional’, that is, oligarchic, monarchy. It was clear to anyone outside the West that this would never happen in Russia. So the deluded British indirectly ended up imposing an evil Tsar, called Stalin. And then they sent Hitler to destroy the USSR. Only once again, it all went wrong. Instead of the Nazis destroying the USSR, the USSR defeated the Nazis.

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the other horror camps of Western anti-Semitism, despite Churchill who unnecessarily genocided Leipzig civilians as a warning to Soviet troops. Yet they still arrived to liberate Berlin from the Western dictator Hitler, just as they will soon do when they liberate Kiev from the Western dictator Zelensky. The shock of 1945 Berlin was a repeat of 1814, when Russian troops liberated Paris from the Western dictator Napoleon. And so in 1945 Churchill thought up his ‘Operation Unthinkable’, in which the US, Germany and the UK would invade their supposed ‘Ally’, the USSR, and destroy it. Only nobody wanted that, though the Americans did drop nukes and kill 250,000 Japanese civilians as a warning to the USSR and began the ‘Cold War’, proclaimed by Churchill soon after.

After World War II the half-American Churchill reluctantly handed over the tattered remnants of the British Empire to the Americans and the British Empire became the American Empire. However, the latter had no colonies, it was a rogue-state which camouflaged its hypocritical asset-stripping greed behind the excuse of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’. So it brought the debilitating slavery of poverty and the corrupt tyranny of capital to the banana republics it created. Who cares about freedom and democracy, when you have nothing to eat and drink? As in Latin America, Africa, Italy, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Gaza.

Even in 1956, when the US abruptly shattered British delusions of empire at Suez, and the British Establishment finally began to admit that it was only a US satellite, the British flattered themselves that they still had ‘a special relationship’ with the US. It is special, like every master and slave relationship. However, such a relationship also infects the master, for he too becomes vain, just as emperors, including those who have no clothes, become vain when they are constantly flattered by yes-men courtiers like the British Cameron and court jesters like the British Johnson. Thus, when the USSR fell because of its economic failure, because, as they said at the time, its Marxist centralised economy could not even supply its women citizens with hygiene products, the US imagined that it had defeated Russia. It is as delusional as the British imagining that they still have an empire.

British Establishment Hatred for the Russian Federation

After 1991, the British took part in the general triumphalist contempt felt by the Western world for Russia, and in the rape of Russian assets, inviting thieving oligarchs to come and live in London. The West failed to understand that Russia had not been defeated. Certainly, in 1991 the Soviet system collapsed, just as in 1917 the Imperial system had collapsed. But a temporary political system is not a country, especially it is not the largest country on earth with its millennial civilisation. The transformation of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Empire and then into the Russian Federation did not persuade the West that the real Russia could survive the failed Western political and economic systems imposed on it.

This age-old Russophobia has been summed up in the recent book of the perceptive Swiss author, Guy Mettan, now translated into English: Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria. When Britain finally began to understand that the West had not defeated Russia in the 1990s, it invented or took part in various sad conspiracies to frame and discredit the new Russia. First, there was Litvinenko, then the Skripals, then MH17, shot down by Ukrainian Nazis, then the plot to destroy the Russian Federation through helping to arm and train the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime in British military camps, the terrorist attack on Nordstream, the deployment of British Special Services to the Black Sea and British PR companies to the propaganda department in Kiev, with their invented ‘Bucha’ narrative myth and such like.

The British Establishment has shown itself to be the most aggressive of all the Western Establishments for absurd propaganda rhetoric during the US proxy war in the Ukraine and in the ‘Cancel Russia’ campaign. It is a fact that even at the height of Nazidom, there was never any ‘Cancel Germany’ campaign. Indeed, the British theme tune for the liberation of Western Europe from the German Nazis consisted of the opening notes of the German Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The British Establishment took a zealous part in applying the 16,500 illegal and backfiring sanctions against Russia in order to destroy it. They failed and made Russia even stronger. It tried to regime-change Putin, quite possibly the most popular leader in Russian history. It failed and made him even more popular. It sent Kiev regime Nazis against the Ukrainian people. It failed and Ukrainians defected to Russia. It decided the only way of winning was through creating terrorist attacks such as that on Crocus City Hall. It failed and made tens of thousands of Russians volunteer to fight against the West in the Ukraine. Today the British MI6 continues to supply Neo-Nazis with weapons in the Ukraine and the Baltics, just as it did throughout the 1950s. In their vain imagination they are working for ‘the Anglosphere’. In fact, the reality is that they are slaves to the Americanosphere.

Russia will not disappear as a reality, whatever the wishful thinking of Hitler or Thatcher, who both equally wanted to reduce Russians to a few millions of people to be herded onto ‘reservations’ for the natives in Siberia, as they openly declared. Millennial Russia will always continue in one form or another, for the moment as the tripartite Union State of East Slav Rus. In the face of the new reality of the rout of its Kiev regime proxies and the cleansing of the Ukraine from Nazi tyrants, the USA will make peace with the Union State. After seeing the US abandoning its failed Ukrainian tool and with NATO and the EU collapsed, the Western European war party, including the British Establishment, if it is not first overthrown by the English, the Scottish and the Welsh who yearn for basic health care, schools, roads and social justice, will be replaced by real leaders. They will be the peace-party, who will make peace with the Union State of Rus, because they look eastwards to the future towards Eastern Europe and Eurasia, and not westwards to the past across a vast and empty ocean.

Conclusion: The End of Western Superiority

The Western war against Russia in the Ukraine is existential for Russia. It is in fact a repeat of the 1962 Turkish missile crisis, (known absurdly in the West as the ‘Cuban’ missile crisis) which the USSR won, when the US was forced to withdraw its missiles from the Turkish-Soviet border. However, this Ukrainian war is not at all existential for Western people, only for the Western ruling class, because it has invested everything in its superiority complex, of which this war is its expression. For the British and the Western Establishment in general, the war is existential because the mere existence and survival of Russia challenges its delusion that it is exceptional, superior and indispensable to all others.

American and Western European elites declare: ‘It is essential that the Ukraine win’. But it is not essential for the peoples of the West or for the peoples of the Ukraine, only for the Western and Ukrainian ruling class, so that they can cling on to their stolen power and stolen money a little longer. Western Europe is certainly not indispensable to Russia, though Russian culture, like Russian gas, is indispensable to Western European peoples. Russian gas can give physical energy back to Europeans. And real Russian culture, which is still largely buried beneath the weight of present post-Soviet Russia, is that of Europe. It is far more European than the modern, Americanised, cultureless Europe of today’s elite. Real Russian culture, once fully revealed, can give spiritual energy back to European people.

After Russia has discredited ‘Western values’ (= orders from the Washington elite), the Western millennium will be over. The time is over, when the American elite arrogantly tells the Central Asians, the British elite tells the Chinese, and the French elite tells the Africans, how to live their lives. Nobody wants to live in the decadence of the modern West. Today the USA has accumulated 34 trillion dollars of debt, which is increasing unsustainably by one trillion dollars every 90 days, 10 trillion dollars every 30 months. It is estimated that it will take 800 years to pay the debt off. Who wants to join bankruptcy? Geopolitical and geostrategic problems and the existence of real European Orthodox and Russian Orthodox culture are ultimately geotheological. It is all about spiritual values. One day the modern West will understand this. Only by then it may be too late.

In the meantime, we of Orthodox Europe will hold on to our European Orthodox and Russian Orthodox culture. One day, once all the post-Soviet extremes in the Russian Orthodox Church, both shrill, hysterical and homosexual American convertitis and Soviet careerism, militarism and financial corruption, have gone, Russian Orthodox culture will find its rightful place in the mainstream of the great conciliar symphony of multinational Orthodox culture. This is not a place of domination or of intimidation of the fourteen free Local Churches by politicised Greeks or politicised Russians, but a place of international co-operation and diplomacy, of the Catholicity of the Church, of the Word of God, not of the CIA or of Papal-style personality cults. Then the real Russia will be restored – after over 300 years of erring along the torturous paths of Imperialism, Marxism and post-Sovietism, imposed by Western hatred for Russia and accepted by the anti-patriotic inferiority complex of Russian traitors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Returning Church Administrations to the Royal and Conciliar Way: A Plea for Catholicity

As a result of Constantinople’s US-financed aggression against the Russian Church in the Ukraine, begun in December 2018, the crisis among Local Orthodox Churches continues. The Russian Church is out of communion with Constantinople and several Greek Churches, or parts of them, and all for purely political reasons. Moreover, this Ukrainian division between Moscow, 70% of the Orthodox world, and Constantinople, one of the smallest but also the most prestigious of the Patriarchates of the Orthodox world, which followed the division in Estonia thirty years ago, has now also spread to Lithuania.

Meanwhile, Moscow and its out-of-control schismatic and sectarian ROCOR branch, which has still not been called to account for breaking communion with Moscow’s Western European branch, again all for political reasons, have been trying to impose themselves. The swamp has not been drained. All this means, ‘imposing’ their compromised authority against some of their most senior pastors by using the canons politically! The result is that all their uncanonically ‘defrocked’ pastors, the ones who have integrity and principles, are taken into other Patriarchates, not least into Constantinople.  The political use of the canons is only that – uncanonical. Those who do that subject themselves to canonical and spiritual punishment.

As a result of all this, the situation in Africa is appalling, with the Church there split into two and the Patriarchate of Alexandria ‘defrocking’ poor Africans. The poor African Orthodox, deprived of everything, have become political pawns between Moscow and Alexandria. There is still an uneasy peace between the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Now there is tension between the Patriarchates of Moscow and Bucharest about the canonical jurisdiction of the Orthodox churches in Moldova, with Moscow again ‘defrocking’ many clergy for purely political reasons, as also in Lithuania and Russia. The Romanian Church accepts them all, ignoring the abuse of the canons, just as Moscow ignores the very same misuse in Africa and elsewhere.

All these arguments and divisions are about territory. This has long been the case in the Diaspora in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia. All that has happened is that more territories, the Ukraine, Africa and the Baltics, have been added to the disputed list of the Diaspora. For where there are churches on a territory, there is income. In other words, all these sordid stories are about sordid money. And money is power. Just as Judas sold out Christ for money and power, so now they do the same. The simple people, families, clergy and monastics, are all betrayed by those who are supposedly spiritual guides!! What is to be done?

On 17 March 2024 two letters of His Beatitude Archbishop Anastasios of Albania were published. These were written to Patriarch Theodore of Alexandria concerning the Russian Orthodox Church’s African Exarchate’s activity on the canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. The first letter is from 7 February 2023, the second is from 14 March 2024. As a real archpastor, Archbishop Anastasios takes a mediating position, offering both support and criticism as necessary. He has consistently opposed Constantinople’s interference in the canonical Ukrainian Church and the creation of a gangster group called the ‘Orthodox Church of Ukraine’.

Archbishop Anastasios has also written to persecuted hierarchs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, assuring them of his prayerful support against Constantinople’s gangsters. However, he has also told Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow that he does not support the Russian Synod’s decision to break communion with Constantinople. In February 2023 Archbishop Anastasios stated plainly: ‘The incursion of the Patriarchate of Moscow into Africa (done in revenge for what Constantinople had done in the Ukraine) was clearly an unacceptable anti-canonical action, undermining the unity and the missionary work of the Orthodox Church. What you describe in detail confirms that a clear schism is unfolding within Orthodoxy’.

At the same time, the Archbishop told Patriarch Theodore: ‘Our long Church experience and theological engagement confirm that the tactic of reprisals, however justified it may seem, does not solve problems; instead, the prolongation of the conflict deepens the wounds. What is needed is the therapy of reconciliation and resolution’. As the Archpastor has done repeatedly since 2018, he again calls for a pan-Orthodox Synod to resolve the problems in the Ukraine and Africa.

His letter from March of this year repeats the same points: ‘We clearly do not agree with the demonstration of power on the part of the Patriarchate of Moscow, especially in the sensitive area of mission in Africa. We clearly deem such methods unacceptable and condemnable. Equally, we do not agree with the adoption of a similar mentality and methods of reaction – with the depositions of hierarchs and the creation of a climate of tension among the Orthodox Churches in the media. On 16 February 2024 the Alexandria Synod decided that it was ‘defrocking’ Bishop Konstantin of Zaraisk, the Russian Church’s second African Exarch. The Synod had already decided to ‘defrock’ the first Exarch, Metropolitan Leonid of Klin, in November 2022 in addition to two Russian priests in February 2022. (Metr Leonid has since been defrocked by Moscow itself, like so many of its recent bishops, but that is another story…).

Unilateral actions offer nothing to Church unity, says the Archbishop. ‘The problems that have arisen in recent years, due to the end of Eucharistic communion between Orthodox Patriarchates, cannot be resolved through unilateral decisions and announcements’. Again he calls for a Council of the whole Orthodox Church. In this way His Beatitude sums up the views of hundreds of politically free Orthodox bishops, in Albania, Romania, Antioch, Serbia, Bulgaria, Poland, Georgia and in other Local Churches, and indeed the views of the vast majority of Church people and clergy.

Enough is enough. Let them stop doing things for political and nationalistic reasons, let them do what they do for Church reasons. In disputed territories, enlightened politicians allow the people to choose for themselves which country they want to belong to. This is called self-determination. Why not apply the same principle to territories that are in dispute between Churches, such as Moldova? Such matters can be debated in a free Council. The Inter-Orthodox Royal way, that is, the Conciliar and Catholic way is the only way. This is the multilateral and multipolar, not unilateral and unipolar, way.

After the US proxy war in the Ukraine ends with the inevitable Russian victory, the Church situation there will have to be resolved by the granting of autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Its future territory will be defined by the coming peace agreement between Moscow and Kiev. The Russian State has won the war there, but that only means that the Russian Church will have to be magnanimous in victory and do what should have been done over thirty years ago: Grant the Church of the New Ukraine autocephaly – full independence. Otherwise their churches in the Ukraine will be empty and bankrupt.

The desovietisation, that is, decentralisation, of the Russian Church is inevitable. This concerns not just the Ukraine, but elsewhere, in the republics born out of the USSR which collapsed in 1991 not because of some mythical victory of the West, but because of its faulty economics. As the new generation that grew up after the collapse of the USSR comes to the Russian episcopate, all will change and the old-fashioned centralising nightmare will end anyway. The Russian Church, like the Church of Constantinople, will have to return to the mainstream, the Royal Way. Then the Constantinople schism can also be resolved and schismatics, whether Russian or Greek, called to account. All this confirms that every division in the Church is always caused by politics, by this world. There is nothing spiritual in any of this at all. It is sordid.