Category Archives: Orthodox Restoration

Our Common Battle for Holy Rus

The Church is a space of love, freedom and Truth in Christ, rather than an administrative, bureaucratic and punitive apparatus.

https://spzh.news/en/zashhita-very/77938-banning-uminsky-as-a-temptation-by-orthodox-papism

 

Moscow and New York: The Dual Tragedy of Modernists and Sectarians

Fr Alexei Uminsky is a well-known liberal-modernist priest in Moscow, typical of many former hippy idealists who were ordained priests in Russia after the fall of the USSR in the 1990s. We have met several of them and first heard about his activities some fifteen years ago. He is a sincere pastor, nobody could doubt his sincerity, though he has some strange views, which are the fruit of his heady intellectualism. A few days ago, the Moscow Diocesan Court agreed that he should be defrocked, though the paper confirming this decision, which seems very harsh to many, has not been signed by the Patriarch. It is our personal belief that Fr Alexei is not a bad man, just a very naïve man, who has let himself be abused over and over again by the enemies of Russia, including the many US-financed agents there.

His latest error is to refuse to pray for the victory of Holy Rus over its enemies. Like the other very naïve disciples of the late Metr Antony Bloom and of other Russian Parisian liberals such as Fr Alexander Schmemann, in Amsterdam, Madrid, Antioch (via Lisbon, where that one called his faithful ‘Orthodox witches’ and was sacked as a result) and elsewhere, who have mainly left the Russian Church and gone to the US-backed Greeks, Fr Alexey does not understand what Holy Rus is. A pacifist, he imagines that Holy Rus means the temporary political entity of the Russian Federation, which is not at all the case. Although conducting an operation to protect Russians who live in the Ukraine from Nazi genocide, the Russian Federation has never declared war on the Ukraine. However, the West did declare war on Russia through the Nazi proxies it installed and armed to the teeth there, and who created the tragedy. The Russian Church hope is that with the uniting of Rus, the ideal of Holy Rus can be reborn.

However, Fr Alexei and others like him are not the only ones who misunderstand Holy Rus. Today, large parts of the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia have been taken over by sectarians. These are the spiritual descendants of those of that same fragment of the Church who openly supported the Nazis in World War Two – those selfsame Nazis who took over the Ukraine. Those traitors were known as Vlasovites and the new Vlasovites have the same views as them and so openly express American support for Nazism in the Ukraine. Whether eighty years ago or today, the treachery remains the same. Whether belonging to the Nazi Party or to the CIA (which was largely staffed by ‘former’ Nazis when it was founded in 1947), those who took and take enemy power and money are contaminated by the same disease. These extremists reject Holy Rus, the Orthodoxy of the faithful, and her universal Orthodox practices and traditions. They support only some reactionary, top-down, right-wing sectarianism.

The End of the Old History

Since the fall of the USSR, US leaders appear to have lost their minds. Craziness has taken over from reason with the hubristic desire to divide the whole world through chaos, in order better to rule it and asset strip it. Their chaos, injustice and genocide have been seen in Yugoslavia, the Northern Caucasus, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, the Lebanon, Georgia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Belarus, the Ukraine, Yemen, Iran, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Armenia…the list goes on, throughout the countries of Eurasia and North Africa.

Over the last thirty years Western Europe has in turn chosen to turn its back on Russia and to kow-tow to the craziness of US leaders. As a result, today Russia has turned its back on isolated Western Europe and gone out to the 90% of the world, where it has been warmly greeted, unlike in Western Europe. But what does this mean for ‘indispensable’ Western Europe, especially in the near future when Western Europe realises that the USA does not want it either and that Russia has no interest whatsoever in invading and liberating it? Western Europe is not worth a drop of Russian blood, it is no longer important enough. Russia liberated Paris from Bonaparte in 1814 and Berlin from Hitler in 1945, it will no longer send a single soldier to liberate Western Europe from its American demons. Enough is enough. The local electorates must liberate themselves from those demons by ceasing to vote for war criminals, atheists and perverts, however much their zombifying State media tell them to do so.

The millennial domination and exploitation by the West of the Rest (of the world) is now coming to an end – by Western suicide. The West is killing itself. The Millennium of the West is over. It is hardly surprising that some even maintain that the standard-bearer of the West, the Pope of Rome, will be the last Pope. As for the current ideology of the West, it is not Catholicism or Americanism, it is sexual perversion, apparently in some way now supported by that Pope, though rejected by African and other healthy Catholics. Such is the ignominy which stands at the end of the millennium of Western apostasy. The only way forward is, paradoxically, to return to the time before that disastrous millennium began.

The Beginning of the New History

As Orthodox Christians we have a mystical view of the world, that is, mystical in the sense of real Christian. We believe that outward world affairs are defined by the inward state of human souls. Where there is faith in the existence of the world of the spirit, that is, the real world beyond the veil which underpins everyday life and is the world to come, there are different values from the values of this world.

In the Ukraine President Zelensky is an actor, whose script ran out after last week’s murder in a Ukrainian Secret Police prison of the American journalist, Gonzalo Lira. He was left to die by the US because he was telling the truth. In Russia the fight is on against the fifth column. We remember very well that dark time when the Russian Church was infiltrated by the KGB and how we resisted it. Now it is infiltrated by the CIA – and we resist it equally, before the whole world. The Russian Church, like Russia, is populated by patriots, but also infiltrated by those who have been spiritually colonised by the West, which is led by the CIA. Some there are now at last waking up.  The great cleansing of the Russian Church is under way.

The three Russian objectives in the Ukraine were its Demilitarisation, its Denazification and the Liberation of the Donbass from genocidal Nazism. After foolish Western interference, these three objectives have had to be expanded into something much greater: The Demilitarisation of all NATO through its weapons which have been offered up for destruction in the Ukraine; the Denazification of the Western world by the opposition to it of the 90% of the world which disagrees with Western leaders and is joining the multipolar BRICS; the Liberation of the whole of the Ukraine, and not just the Donbass, from genocidal Nazism.

England: The Victory of the New White Russia

We all want the victory of Holy Rus over Spiritless atheism, indifference, left-wing modernism and the right-wing fifth column of sectarians who have infiltrated the Church. This fifth column is the CIA-backed Americans who are also enemies of Holy Rus and have done their utmost to try and destroy us over the last seven years and utterly failed. We have worked all our lives for the victory of Holy Rus, indeed, we want its extension. As we declared at the Fourth and last Council of the then still free Church Outside Russia in San Francisco in 2006:

‘In Carpatho-Russia an elderly man asked me: ‘Father, where is your parish?’ I answered: ‘In Felixstowe’. He asked me a second question: ‘What province is that in?’ I answered ‘In the English province’. Yes, I rejoice that I serve in the English province of Holy Rus. I believe that you too rejoice, that you serve and pray in the American, Argentinian, Australian, Belgian, Brazilian, Canadian, Danish, French, German, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, Swiss, Ukrainian and Venezuelan provinces of Holy Rus. Whatever language we use, whatever local saints we venerate, we strive to preserve the spirit of Holy Rus, the spirit of Christ, our Orthodox roots’.

(http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/atcouncil.htm)

Holy Rus is challenged by the extremists of left and of right, as it always has been. We have all this time been on the front line, literally on the military road, fighting from the trenches against them all. We pray for the liberation of Holy Rus, in the Russian Federation, in the Ukraine, in Belarus and everywhere, from the US and its vassals, whether liberal LGBTs or sectarian Nazis. We are waiting and praying for the liberation of the Church, infiltrated by money-grubbing oligarchs, perverted homosexuals and self-admiring CIA agents. Moreover, we know that we shall win, for although man proposes, God disposes. God is with us!

 

 

 

Pagan or Christian?

Christ was born into the Roman Empire. Indeed, He was persecuted by the representatives of Roman Power like the puppet King Herod or Governor Pilate, who played essential roles at His birth and His death as a man. As the mob chanted: ‘We have no king but Ceasar’. Then the Romans continued to play an essential role in the lives and martyrdoms of the first Orthodox Christians, for instance, of the Apostles Peter and Paul. The question for the first Orthodox was always: ‘What shall we do with the Roman Empire’? Their answer was to make it Orthodox Christian as well, an achievement which began to become visible in the fourth century under the Emperor Constantine.

The nearly two millennia of opposition have not so much been between Pagan and Christan, but more exactly between successor-states to Pagan Rome and successor-states to Christian Rome. Thus, the Teutonic barbarian leader, Karl the Tall (748-814), better known by his French name of ‘Charlemagne’, undertook the revival (‘renovatio’) of the pagan Roman Empire. He tried to build a successor-state or ‘empire’ to it. In a later version, this would later come to be called the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, though there was nothing Holy or Roman about it and its Empire was as ramshackle as its very recent version, the European Union. Indeed, the EU capital in Brussels is only 100 miles from Karl’s capital in Aachen (Aix la Chapelle). It was precisely as a result of Karl’s attempt to revive Pagan Rome at the end of the eighth century that the first serious distancing from the Church, centred in the Orthodox Christian Roman Empire with its capital then in New Rome, later called ‘Constantinople’, was seen in parts of Western Europe.

Fortunately, after Karl’s death in 814 his one-man show fell. Nevertheless, it was an ominous sign and towards the end of the ninth century and then again at the start of the eleventh century the same temptation of imitating the power and riches of Pagan Rome reappeared. This degenerative process finally hit a peak in 1054. Then the elite of what is now known as ‘the Collective West’ cut itself off from the Orthodox Christian Faith of Christendom, still then centred in New Rome. The choice of the Western European elite (the peoples of Western Europe had nothing to do with it) was the gradual adoption of the values of Pagan Rome. Meanwhile, the Christian Roman Empire continued in the East, minus the West, whose elite was steadily falling away from the Christian Faith.

The ideological result of the revival of Pagan Rome was called by the absurd name, a contradiction in terms, of ‘Roman Catholicism’. This was even though you cannot be local and Catholic, that is, you cannot be Roman and Catholic, you can only be Orthodox and Catholic. True, the Orthodox and Catholic Church has always suffered on its fringes from what we can call ‘Localism’. In Western Europe the specific form of the disease was the especially grave disease of Romanism, which led to the outright abandonment of the Orthodox and Catholic Church and Creed. Its old saints, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, were literally and figuratively buried and so largely forgotten. However, it is also true that the Orthodox and Catholic Church has suffered from other forms of ‘Localism’, for example, from ‘Hellenism’ (Greek nationalism) and ‘Russianism’ (Russian nationalism). However, they are marginal, condemned nationalist or ‘phyletist’ racist) movements, not of the mainstream.

The split of the West from the Church in 1054 led directly to the bloody sack and plunder by the Pagan Romans/Roman Catholics of the Christan Capital in 1204. This was part of their system of campaigns of organised violence known as ‘the crusades’, which were intended to increase the power and riches of the Western elite.  Just as these ‘crusades’ began before the official First Crusade in 1096, for instance in England in 1066, so they continued long after they officially ended in 1291. Indeed, they have continued to this very day, as they are an inherent part of the violent Pagan Roman system of imposing might against right. They became overtly capitalistic and exploitative, especially grasping of gold and silver, though still acting under the pretence of ‘spreading civilisation’. Thus, the conquest of the Americas, Asia, Oceania and the ’scramble for Africa’ were all ‘crusades’, and indeed those who ran these genocidal expeditions often used that word to describe them.

Thus, in 1812, to the delight of the Pagan Roman elite, a host drawn from twelve Western nations invaded Russia under the leadership of the murderous tyrant Napoleon. In 1854, Imperialist France and Britain, allied with the Muslim Ottomans (Muslims supposedly being Western enemies!), again invaded Orthodox Christian Russia and the Roman Catholic Cardinal Sibour of Paris in turn called that too a ‘Crusade’! In 1914 and again in 1941 German troops together with a host of other nationalities from the Collective West invaded Russia and the lands around it, wearing belts with the words ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God with us’). However, in both cases in the end it was in 1814 that the invaded and wronged but still victorious Russians liberated Paris and in 1945 Berlin. And in 2003 the Protestant sectarian George Bush genocided and  invaded Iraq in order to grab its oil and gas and stated that God had told him to do it! Whoever his god was, he was not our God.

Then in 2014, a century after the German invasion of 1914, the elite of the Collective West, including Germans, gathered in triumph in the centre of Kiev (where the German invaders had stood twice before in the century before). This was after power had violently been usurped by their puppets from the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine. In Kiev the elite installed a far western Ukrainian (Galician) Fascist junta, whose grandparents had welcomed the Nazis into the Ukraine. Now, ten years on, the same Collective West has been arming these fanatical Ukrainian nationalists to the teeth, so that they can kill pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russians. ‘Our (the U.S.) return on investment is massive. Now let’s give Ukraine all they need’, according to the US Senator Lindsey Graham, calling the death of Russians ‘the best spent of US money’. Thus, he justified the American war against the Ukraine that began in 2014 and developed into the American war against Russia. But why make Russia your enemy and want to kill Russians, as did that other Westerner, Hitler? Where does this Western Russophobia come from?

The Collective Western elite’s command and control centre has since 1945 not been in Western Europe, but in the USA. This took over from the bankrupt British Empire, which hated Russia as a rival. The USA has even further than semi-pagan Britannia adopted the values of Pagan Rome, to the point of repeating its pansexual degeneracy. On the other hand, Christian Rome continued in the East, where Christ was born. After the sack of the Christian capital in 1204 by the Pagan Romans, the Christan centre of influence remained in the East, but gradually went northwards to Russia. Here is why the Pagan Roman elite has always tried to destroy Russia. Its Christian Roman Faith is hated by the successors to Pagan Rome. All the invasions of the Russian Lands by the Collective West throughout history have been about its jealousy of the neighbour next door. ‘Everything is due to us, as we are the bearers of the only true Civilisation’, they arrogantly proclaimed, confusing their mere technology with Civilisation! Here is why the Americans and their Western European vassals are fighting against Russia in their proxy-war in the Ukraine today. Their cowboy slogan is still ‘the only good injun is a dead one’, that is, ‘the only good Russian is a dead one’. Hence their demonisation of Russia, which rejects their Pagan Romanism and its sexual depravity.

This struggle between Pagan Roman and Orthodox Christian Roman is symbolised visibly even in the very architecture of the Washington White House, built in the Pagan Roman style, and the Moscow Kremlin, with its many churches and their gleaming crosses.

The Collective West has been poking the Russian bear for decades. Like the Chinese and other Asians, the Russians are incredibly patient, but if poked one time too many, the results are frightening. This is the history of the Western war against Russia of 2022-2024. There are still people in the Western elite, admittedly fewer than before, who think that they can defeat Russia. That is pure delusion, self-deception, wishful thinking. They are lying to themselves. As for the equally delusional anti-Russian far western Ukrainians (as opposed to the pro-Russian eastern and southern Ukrainians), the Collective West has continually lied to them and betrayed them. At first, they told these deluded Galicians of the far west that they would support them for ‘as long as it (= Ukrainian victory?) takes’. This turned out to be a lie. Once the Collective Western elite realised that the Galicians could not even take the much-coveted future NATO naval base in the Crimea, coveted since the Western anti-Russian Crimean war of 1854 and then by the Western Nazis in 1942-44, the Collective Western elite was no longer interested in supporting its failed puppets of the Kiev regime.

The two Presidents, Biden and Zelensky, are the greatest friends of Russia. For incompetent clown-presidents are what Russia wants – though it did not expect to get them so easily. Though the Ukrainian dictator ‘of democracy’ has banned his elections (due in March 2024) and also opposition parties, this year is a year of elections in the Western world. However, nearly all the Western countries are dominated by a Uniparty system. In other words, the electorate is granted a choice between two almost identical candidates, who are both puppets beholden to the same oligarchy. This is the myth of ‘left’ and ‘right’, with those on the so-called left often more to the right than those on the so-called right and vice versa. This is why in the West elections have low turnouts. Without an independent party which represents the people’s interests, what is the point in voting?

However, every 100 years or so independent parties do break through the Establishment/Deep State Globalist monopoly. Today, the choice is between ‘Globalists’ (all the puppets of ‘left’ or ‘right’ who represent US interests) and Sovereignists and Patriots (who represent national interests). However, it is unlikely that the latter can win, as all the lies of the media narrative are controlled by the Globalist left and right. The general absence of any moral purpose, accompanied as always by  the absence of the desire to tell the truth and incredible corruption, among the oligarch-owned Globalists of the American Empire and their vassals is the sure sign of drastic Civilisational decline. The Globalists live by the Lie, of which Solzhenitsyn prophetically warned fifty years ago, before the fall of the Soviet Empire. It is a very slippery slope. The question as to whether it is too late to halt Civilisational decline, let alone reverse it, we shall only be able to answer with more certainty at the end of 2024.

 

Five Years of Schisms: The Church Torn by Needless Divisions

2024 opens in sadness for all the Local Orthodox Churches.

In 2021 well over half the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) Diocese in England left that New York-based branch of the Moscow Patriarchate. This was because of the new ROCOR schism against the Western European Archdiocese (WEA) branch of the same Moscow Patriarchate. The Archdiocese had accepted a Roman Catholic priest into its clergy in the normal Russian Orthodox way, by confession and concelebration. However, for that reason the new American ROCOR, strongly old calendarist and imposing a quite outrageous and very aggressive policy of Americanisation, to the point of imposing the American language (!), had broken off communion with the WEA. This was unthinkable under the old Russian European ROCOR. This schism then spread Europewide under another ex-Lutheran ROCOR bishop. And then the whole ROCOR Synod backed up its young, inexperienced and non-seminary trained American bishop, ‘converted’ from Lutheranism, who had instigated the schism.

In the meantime, the Moscow Mother-Church, of both ROCOR and the Western European Archdiocese, remained silent, for unexplained reasons known only to itself. Church discipline appeared and appears to be breaking down. However, any number of Orthodox bishops fell over themselves, and are still falling over themselves (too late), to receive the group of six parishes, including with by far the largest church, the senior priest of the Diocese (with nearly forty years of conscientious service), several other clergy and 5,000 people who left ROCOR on account of the American schism. This group are now thriving in the canonical Patriarchate of Romania, despite the absurd ‘suspensions’ and ‘defrockings’, with which they were punished by ROCOR after being received into the Romanian Church. Their position was all about standing up for the Orthodox Truth, canonical Church practice and generations of faithfulness to Russian Orthodoxy.

This is perhaps the fifth time (or is it more?) that ROCOR has faced schisms on account of its adoption of and (too late) abandonment of old calendarist positions on the reception of Non-Orthodox by rebaptism. All these occasions go back to its contamination by the fanatical Greek old calendarist ideology, with its easily identifiable convert language movement (‘Pascha’ for Easter, ‘Nativity’ for Christmas, ‘hierarch’ for bishop, ‘temple’ for church, ‘chant’ for sing etc), in the 1960s. The best-known occasions were perhaps the Guildford (England) schism of 1976, the Boston schism of 1986 and then the multiple schisms of 2007, including that of the Brookwood monastic community and London convent in England at that time.

In any case, the 2021 scandal in England spread back to North America. It turns out that there at least one ROCOR bishop there had actually been receiving unrebaptised Orthodox converts from Non-Orthodoxy by rebaptism, even though these converts (surely, by now former converts?) had been inside the Orthodox Church and receiving communion for years! This is despite the Nicene Creed, which states: ‘I believe in one Baptism for the remission of sins’. The ROCOR Synod appears to be in chaos, split down the middle. Not only does it face responsibilities for its uncanonical actions in England, but also in North America.

Here the recent concelebration of Fr Alexander Belya, (now again bishop-elect) with the Romanian Orthodox Church also has to be faced by the split ROCOR Synod. Fr Alexander, a former ROCOR priest chosen by the ROCOR Synod to be bishop and then suddenly dropped and ‘defrocked’ (!), was persecuted by the ROCOR Synod for still unknown reasons (the court case for libel is ongoing). Before being ‘defrocked’, he had already joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople with a large group of similarly appalled ex-ROCOR clergy and some 20 parishes. His concelebration with the Romanian Church means that, yet again, the Romanian Church does not recognise the actions of ROCOR. The latter is proving to be yet another (irrelevant) irritant to the Romanian Patriarch, who ignores all the increasingly strange letters from the New York group. The Moscow Mother-Church can be none too happy with its New York representatives who are discrediting themselves and the whole Russian Church through their eccentric, indeed scandalous, conduct and persecution of the faithful.

The latest twist to this sorry rebaptism saga is the case of at least one priest of the Antiochian Diocese in England, a certain Fr Matei. Having freely joined the Antiochian Diocese relatively recently, he decided that his bishop (and presumably therefore all Antiochian bishops) are heretical and stopped commemorating him. This was because this bishop follows the Orthodox practice of receiving Protestants who have been baptised by water in the Name of the Holy Trinity, by chrismation. (This is the normal practice of 1,000 Orthodox bishops – the opposite of the abnormal and new ROCOR practice). On top of this, this Fr Matei objects to the old Antiochian practice of giving Non-Chalcedonians communion, which is also a practice of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Although all the Local Churches receive Protestant converts by chrismation, they do not give communion to Non-Chalcedonians. However, they do accept that Antioch and Constantinople do this as their local practice, and that is no reason to break off communion with them. What is very strange is that Fr Matei objects to these practices, as he must surely have known that these are old-established Antiochian practices from long before he so recently joined the Antiochian Diocese. (Here we see the other side of the coin to the ROCOR rebaptism schism, which is a recent innovation and quite unheard of in the old ROCOR in Western Europe). Nevertheless, in the USA, there are now other Antiochians who have suddenly woken up to the reality of long-held Antiochian practices and object to them. Where they have been all these decades remains a mystery.

All of this comes against the background of the 2018 schism between the Russian Church and various Greek Churches, such as the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria, as well as with individuals in the Greek and Cypriot Orthodox Churches, who supported setting up a fake Church on age-old Russian Orthodox canonical territory. As one correspondent has put it: ‘This is worse than Protestant dissension’.

Clearly, the solution to reverse this chaos is for all to return to canonical practices, namely of:

  1. Not setting up ‘Churches’ on the canonical territory of other Local Churches.
  2. Not refusing to concelebrate with and not breaking off communion with others because of their different practices regarding the reception of Non-Orthodox.
  3. Refusing to rebaptise those who have already been received by another Local Orthodox Church and who have taken communion in it.
  4. Suspending and defrocking only priests who have committed criminal acts (usually, the theft of money or property, or else who work as spies for the CIA or other spy agencies), or who have committed immoral acts (heterosexual, homosexual, or even pedophile), and not because priests refuse not to concelebrate with canonical Orthodox, or because they profess political opinions and vote for political parties, different from those of their bishop. (This, apparently, is considered to be disobedience and is therefore ‘uncanonical’!!).
  5. Suspending and defrocking bishops for criminal or immoral acts, instead of protecting them (for example the late Archbishop Nathanael of Vienna, (ROCOR)), Metropolitan Joseph of the Antiochian Archdiocese in North America. Apart from them, there are other immoral, homosexual and even pedophile bishops of all nationalities, who (out of jealousy?) persecute heterosexual priests and laymen who have normal family lives.

But will any of this return to canonical practices take place?

The Church After The Ukraine

Introduction: In the Ukraine

The Red Star USSR lasted for three generations after the Western-organised Palace coup of 1917. So too the White Star USA, which began its triumph in 1945, is also collapsing after the same three generations. At present we are all waiting for the end of the totally unnecessary American war in the Ukraine. According to official Ukrainian TV, Kiev losses in killed, wounded and captured troops are now 1,126,652. The Americans, who forbade the Ukraine to make peace in spring 2022, want indeed to fight to the last Ukrainian. However, as most Ukrainians are not going to commit suicide for the US elite, that elite will now have to blame someone else for its failure. In this new Greek tragedy, dramatic events are taking place in freezing and snowbound Kiev at this very moment. The main assistant of the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has already been killed by a hand grenade sent to him as a ’present’ from the President’s office and the wife of the head of the dreaded Kiev secret police has been poisoned. Meanwhile, European elites are panicking, as they face the real possibility that a nationalist President Trump will make peace with Russia, at last dissolve NATO and desert a NATO-free Europe.

Talk in Kiev is of a coup, rejecting both President Zelensky and the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Zaluzhny. The situation is even more dramatic on the front line, which is falling apart, as undertrained and underarmed, unarmed and untrained Ukrainian troops give up the unequal fight. In a war of attrition the collapse can come very fast. By Easter, 5 May 2024, the day before the feast of St George the Victorious, it will surely be over. Some say it will happen even as early as January or February, rather than April or early May. The CIA has always instrumentalised the worst elements in each client state to play the roles of heads of their puppet regimes. Thus, they used drug dealers in Latin America, fascist dictators in Spain and Portugal, mafiosi in Italy, colonels in Greece, gangsters in Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Hussein in Iraq, Bin Laden in Afghanistan, hateful extremist nationalists in the Baltic States and in the Ukraine Galician Nazis with an atheist Jewish actor figurehead. Once the US no longer needs its handsomely-paid war criminals, they are exiled, dumped or assassinated, especially if they fail in a US election year.

This will be the fate of Zelensky and will also be that of the US-appointed and now panicking NATO and EU puppets, Stoltenberg, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, Pavel, the bankrupt Russophobic European elite, which is to be ejected by its electorates. With their tiny militaries, they are irrelevant.  Already largely demilitarised, they have to be denazified. The Europe problem will be solved at last. The political results of the Democrat delusions in Kiev and their open lies in the Western media (they declared President Putin ‘dead’ twice last month alone!) are colossal. Kiev is now spelled K-A-B-U-L, only this is Afghanistan multiplied by ten, because it is happening in Europe in full view of the whole world which can now see ten years of the lies of Western politicians and the Western media. The Ukraine is the European graveyard of the US. Former vassals, which like the Ukraine are dependent on US funds for their existence, such as Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Kosovo and Kuwait, will also disappear. Eventually, the bankrupt US will have to abandon its peninsula outpost of Western Europe, NATO will disappear and the US-moulded EU will collapse, to be replaced by a Russian-founded, multipolar concert of the nations.

In the Church

However, what interests us much more are the results of the Ukrainian catastrophe for the Orthodox Church. These are the results for both what once was the most prestigious Local Church, Constantinople, and for today’s largest Local Church, Moscow, as well as for the fourteen other Local Churches.

Founded in the fourth century, this once prestigious Patriarchate in Istanbul was tempted by its glorious history a millennium and more ago as the capital of the Christian Roman Empire. Goaded and bribed by the White House in Washington, it thought it could rule over the Orthodox world through nationalist-imperialist politics. Now it is falling from its height and has to face the embarrassment of its fake Ukrainian Church, which is staffed by perverts, gangsters, thugs and Nazis. Was there ever such a shameful event in all of Church history? The existence of the US-established and US-financed fake Church in the Ukraine discredits this Patriarchate. Imperialist and nationalist politics have their price. The only way out would seem to be the ‘retirement’ of those responsible. Denials by papering over the cracks and sweeping under the carpet is no longer an option.

Founded in Soviet times in 1943, this largest Patriarchate in Moscow was tempted by its size, once nearly three quarters of the whole Church. It thought it could rule over the Orthodox world through nationalist-imperialist politics. Prey to the politics of the FSB and the CIA, it was infiltrated by traitors. Now it is falling from its height and has to face the embarrassment of its infiltration by the representatives of various secret services who betrayed it. It has lost, or is losing, many of its territories: the Ukraine, Latvia, Moldova and most of the Diaspora in the West, ultimately everything that it once controlled outside the Russian Federation. Imperialist and nationalist politics have their price. A Council or Synod in Moscow will have to enact a wave of decentralisation. If independence (autocephaly) is not given to Non-Russians by Moscow, it will be taken by them anyway.

Conclusion: The Triumph of Conciliarity

Once the war of America and its NATO vassal elite, launched against Russia and Europe, now coming to an end in the Ukraine, is over, the persecution of the heroic Church of the Ukraine will also be over. A New Ukraine will be established. And a New Ukrainian Church will also be established. And, regardless of what happens in Moscow, an independent Ukrainian Church under Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev will be supported everywhere that matters, not least by the Romanian Church. Independence for it was thirty years overdue, as for all parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. We await transformations of the centralised structures of the Church, which are now archaic, and await the removal of homosexual mafias of self-interest, corruption and power of the paid Church administrators, exactly those which St John Chrysostom denounced over 1600 years ago.

After the shameful decadence of the minority Orthodox Conference in Crete in 2016, the Church authorities will have to proceed to a real Council to resolve the real problems of the Church. These issues were never even discussed at Crete, where some signatures of the relatively few attendees were even forged. The elites of the two Local Churches which tried to impose their will over all the others over the last thirty years will have to step back, one way or another. That time is over. Now we must proceed to Conciliarity, to reaffirming the Catholicity of the Church, to reaffirming that local nationalisms are always secondary to the Church, which will not be brought down to that level, to reaffirming that in the Church we have Trinitarian unity in diversity, ‘multipolarity’, that we only have one really important passport and identity, our spiritual passport and identity. We shall be victorious, because Christ, the Head of the real Church, is always victorious.

 

The Emperor is Coming And He Will Cleanse the Church of Corruption

‘Wherever Americans come to a region of the planet, they bring chaos’.

Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister speaking on RT, 15 November 2023

The American war against the Russian and Ukrainian peoples in the eastern Ukraine is now coming to an end. However, terror and genocide are breaking out in the Holy Land, which is a convenient get-out, or ‘off-ramp’, from their lost war in the Ukraine for the US elite. For that elite, which fights wars with the blood of others, is threatening even more wars and chaos in many other parts of the world with their same imperial ‘Divide and Rule’ policy. The world knows that we are seeing global transformations in these pre-apocalyptic times.

The post-1945 US-controlled world is over and US-led institutions are collapsing, from the EU to the UK, from NATO to the WTO. This is a parallel to the collapse of Soviet institutions from 1989 on, including the Soviet-created Ukraine which is only now disappearing. A great power shift, prophesied by many, is taking place, with the old Western elites falling everywhere. The time of the prophecies has come. These include the promised return of an Orthodox Emperor or Tsar, of whom we will now speak.

Over a century ago, apostate Orthodox Christian Russians betrayed the Orthodox Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, his Family and his faithful servants.  Since then the vast majority of Russians have not yet woken up from their nightmare. The episcopate of the Orthodox Church has sunk into divisions and corruption, as though a mafia had come to reign there. However, prophetic voices have resounded. Thus, the great Elder Nikolai (+ 2002) of the Pskov Lake, answered pilgrims on three occasions that ‘The Tsar is coming’, when they doubted. On the first occasion, they objected:

‘St Seraphim of Sarov also made such prophecies, but there is no sign that a Tsar is coming. That those in the present government do not see him coming is clear, but the most terrible thing of all is that there are priests who are not waiting for the Tsar’. One metropolitan also objected: ‘What monarchy? That time is over, now we live in a democracy’. Fr Nikolai listened and said: ‘The Tsar is coming’. ‘How come? Who is coming?’ And again he answered: ‘The Tsar is coming’. They argued with him for a third time and once more he repeated: ‘The Tsar is coming’.

‘We left perplexed, but a little later this is what happened. We met a priest from Kiev, who told us how he had been in a car crash. The angels took him away, a bright light shone from above, his soul rejoiced and he thought: ‘Glory to God, I am home’. Suddenly he heard a voice: ‘Not yet, you have to go back’. ‘Why?’ ‘You are a convinced monarchist, you will pray for the Tsar’. ‘Who is the Tsar?’ ‘Only I and the Tsar know this. Even his parents and the Mother of God do not know this’. ‘Why?’ ‘Because as soon as people find out, they will immediately kill him’’.

Thus, there will be no revolutions, elections or councils. When the time comes, the Lord Himself will raise up the chosen Tsar. According to the prophecies, this will happen some time after a war. This is the American war that is now coming to an end in the Ukraine. By the prayers of the last Orthodox Emperor and Martyr and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, the Tsar will be enthroned in the coming years. Then he will cleanse the Church of corruption. As for us, we are simply forerunners, sent to announce this message, though we are unworthy even to untie his shoelaces.

 

The Spiritual Consequences of the Millennial End-Game for the West

Foreword: The Rise and Fall of the Western Empire (1054-2024)

Nearly a thousand years ago Western Europe began to expand systematically. Thus, following Frankish aggression in Spain and Portugal, there came the attacks by the Pope’s Norman shock-troops in Italy and in 1066 their full-scale invasion of England with its genocide of the English and the establishment of a Norman elite, from which the English have never recovered. The rest of the British Isles then collapsed into the greed and powermongering of the Roman Catholic Normans. Within a generation the so-called First Crusade had been launched to extend Western power to Asia by violence, massacring Jews and Orthodox Christians on the way. The fall of the Western Empire really begins 970 years later through Western imperial overreach against Orthodox Christianity in the Ukraine. Before this there had already been the ignored warnings of its impending defeat and collapse in the decades before, notably in Vietnam and Iraq.

The Death and Resurrection of Kiev

The war in the Ukraine is petering out. Nearly 600,000 Ukrainian troops are dead against 35,000 Russian troops. According to mobile phone providers there, 1.2 million users of Ukrainian mobile phones have simply disappeared. That is the total number of Ukrainian dead, missing, in Russian captivity and seriously injured. It has been officially admitted that the average age of remaining Ukrainian soldiers is now 43. The Ukraine was given second-rate and obsolete Western weapons from old stocks, which would otherwise have been scrapped. The Ukraine was only ever a giant military charity shop for the West to dispose of surplus military junk. President Biden, among others, said that he would support Kiev ‘for as long as it would take’. We now know that ‘it’ meant the Ukrainian defeat.

After the coming liberation of pro-Russian Avdeyevka by Russian forces, there will surely only be a few more months of this decade-long bloody tragedy. It began in Kiev in 2014 under pressure from the US and with the support of the American-run EU. This has been confirmed by the political establishment in Italy, which has just predicted the end of the Ukrainian conflict in the spring of 2024. On the front there is no stalemate, Kiev is plainly losing. There will be no peace talks in the Ukraine, only unconditional surrender to the Russian Federation. It is clear that the New Ukraine, in its new borders, whatever they will be, will become the third part of the already existing East Slav Confederation, or ‘Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus’. And then in turn the New Ukraine will become part of BRICS +.

From Hero to Zero

President Zelensky, whom a year ago the American media called ‘the Man of the Year’ was in fact ‘the Actor of the Year’, as an English-speaking actor was required. That is why he got the job, once he had been taught how to speak Ukrainian, even if with a Russian accent. US PR companies trained him up and created him, just as they created so many US Presidents before him. They have plenty of experience. The poor puppet is now delusional in his bunker, like the other one in 1945, dreaming of Wunderwaffen, ‘game-changers’, and that his forces will advance 500 metres a day, instead of retreating 500 metres a day. He has quite simply lost contact with reality.

Zelensky has just banned the Presidential elections, which were due on 31 March 2024, extended martial law, declaring a de facto dictatorship. Gennady Chastyakov, an assistant of Zelensky’s bitter rival for power, General Valery Zaluzhny, has been assassinated at a party, at which a box with a bottle of vodka turned out to be a box of grenades, one of which exploded. Is Zaluzhny next? The purge has begun and when purges begin, the end is not far. After Zelensky, there will be surrender. No-one will regret the incredibly corrupt Kiev, which sold off American arms to terrorists and to which Ukrainian families have to pay bribes in order to get their sons out of Russian captivity.

The Isolation and Fall of the West

The US, which has been running the whole affair in the Ukraine, has exploited and flattered the two national Ukrainian weaknesses. The first is the provincial sense of entitlement: ‘We are Ukrainian, you owe us everything’. The second is the fact that many Ukrainians would do anything for money, so opening them to corruption. Like the pagan Roman Empire of old, the US divides and rules with bread and circuses by building on these two weaknesses, not just in the Ukraine, but everywhere. However, unlike in the Ukraine, not all accept US bread and Hollywood and Facebook circuses. There are those who have faith in God, moral principles of integrity and long cultural traditions – we are made of sterner stuff and throw off US tyranny.

Thus, Kievan Ukraine, just like Tel Aviv Israel and Taipei Taiwan, is completely dependent on US dollars just to pay the salaries of its civil servants. Everywhere, the US has implemented its policy of backing minority separatist groups. In the Ukraine this meant Galician nationalists with their strong Nazi sympathies, in Afghanistan it meant Al-Qaeda, in Syria it meant ISIS, in Taiwan it means anti-Chinese Chinese, in Israel it means the unpopular and allegedly corrupt Netanyahu fanatic, one of whose associates wants to nuke 2.3 million Palestinians. Now Netanyahu has begun his holocaust in Gaza in a very long guerilla war which he cannot win. His tanks are being destroyed in the north of Israel and his rule overthrown on the West Bank.

In the White House

The politicians in the White House, also in their bunker, surrounded by imaginary enemies, China, Palestine and Russia, are just as delusional as Zelensky. The virtual world is their real world.  There will be a purge here too, given the incompetence of its failed diplomats like the Jewish Blinken and of Biden himself. Sixty years since Kennedy was assassinated and given the violent ends of so many US emperors, it is likely that the demented Biden will be removed too. As US commentators have pointed out, this is elder abuse. Some ask what Biden is on. Certainly, some sort of medication, though not the cocaine which Zelensky has, supplied, some say, by Biden’s son. Both the genocidal Zelensky and Netanyahu are now embarrassing political liabilities for Washington and they will soon become even more embarrassing.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world, seven billion people in all, rejects the West, which is isolated. All that the Muslim world, Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Pakistani, has to do to win is nothing, given Israeli and Western competence. Turkey may leave NATO. It is fragmenting anyway. The self-appointed ‘masters of the universe’ in Washington will soon lose not just the Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, but also South Korea, Japan and then the peoples of Eastern Europe (Hungary and Slovakia have already gone) and Western Europe, including even the UK. There will be a New Europe, which will reintegrate its natural geography – Eurasia. Next year the USA may well re-elect the leader of American nationalism, Trump, who will have to sort out his own debt-ridden people’s destitution and end the drain of the US-run NATO and EU.

The Fall of State Christian Religion and the Return to Real Orthodoxy

After a millennium the two Western deviations of religion, Catholicism and Protestantism, are facing extinction. The only hope is the Faith which has been oppressed by the West for a thousand years, Orthodox Christianity. However, all over the Orthodox Christian and Non-Orthodox Christian world, triumphalist, State-sponsored forms of Orthodox Christianity have first to be rejected. Nobody wants State-sponsored religion. In general, people do not want the formalistic and ritualistic, but the spiritual food of the ascetic, the prophetic and the charitable. In the new European world, the need is for the spiritual. However, this is not Islam, Hinduism and Buddhist-Confucian-Communist-Nationalism, which relate to other Eurasian civilisations, the Muslim, Indian and Chinese. So what then can we say of real Orthodox Christianity, of the Faith of St Paisios and St Porphyrios of the contemporary Greek Orthodox world and of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the contemporary Russian Orthodox world?

The administration of Greek Orthodoxy, compromised by political subservience to the secularist USA, not least by its creation of a fake Church in the Ukraine on US orders and with US dollars, and the administration of Russian Orthodoxy, compromised by its self-imposed centralising and Sovietising Russian nationalism and formalism, convince few. A political and military win in the Ukraine is not a spiritual victory, for the peace must be won and the practice of faith is voluntary. We look forward to the decentralisation, multipolarisation and sovereignisation of the Orthodox Church, meaning many new sovereign Local Churches, with their model of parishes centred around the eucharist, linked to monasteries and ascetic life and the memories of the New Martyrs and Confessors. The old corrupt State model is over. Schismatic and unhinged podcasters, gold-coated cathedrals and bishops in big black cars who have nothing to do with the people, distant and menacing bureaucrats, often homosexuals and narcissists, convince nobody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A New Booklet: The Force of Simple Orthodoxy

Recent Articles by

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

St John’s Orthodox Church, Colchester, England

‘No Cross, No Crown’

This 65-page spiral-bound booklet The Force of Simple Orthodoxy is available from: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk for £6 or $12 post-free, payable to Paypal at the above e-mail. The contents are listed below.

The last five years have been catastrophic for the administrative elites of the Orthodox Church. First, we witnessed the trampling down of the most basic canons by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and the falling out of communion with the Russian Church of almost the whole Greek Orthodox administration (not the simple clergy and people – hence the title), under foreign political threats and the financial pressure of vulgar bribes.

Then there followed no less cowardice in the face of the absurd covid manipulation and scare. The incredible and repeated scandals of Eastern Papism involved here, in terms of financial irregularity, moral perversion and the dogmatic compromises of ecumenism, have brought the spiritually weak to abandon the Church. ‘If they behave like that, why should I bother?’ However regrettable, this attitude is quite understandable, given the scandalous conduct of those on high, who were supposed to set us an example.

Then, in 2022, the American elite’s war in and on the Ukraine that had begun overtly in 2014 sucked in the Russian Federation. We witnessed at once the collapse of the once multinational, but tragically centralised Patriarchate of Moscow into authoritarian Papism and nationalism. Having discredited itself, nearly all Non-Russians, a third of the total, left it or were expelled from it. Until it purifies itself and peels off its post-Soviet, Soviet and pre-Soviet deviations of love of oligarchs’ money, fawning love of Sergianist power and love of possession respectively, nothing will change. Still stuck in the museum quagmire of the recent past, the Church administration has yet to become multipolar, as the Russian State has already become.

The Moscow collapse concerns not least its once respected American branch. In the last five years it too sold itself out for post-Soviet money, sovietising itself, then tragically fell into schism, followed by persecution, slander and open lies, and is now on the verge of repeating the Donatist rebaptism heresy. (Heresy always follows schism, just as schism always follows moral iniquity, as sure as night follows day). Many who had been faithful in blood, sweat and tears to the old Russian Church for fifty years and more have been expelled from it. The rest, like its last ever-memorable Metropolitan, are spinning in their graves.

Given the shameful apostasy of Heterodoxy over the last sixty years, what are Orthodox to do in the face of the no less shameful spiritual and so moral collapse of both the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox administrations, supposedly responsible for the majority of the Church? Have we really come to that point when, ‘When the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth? (Lk 18, 8). Indeed, ‘Let them that are in Judea flee into the mountains’ (Matt. 24, 16). This booklet suggests some answers, to be found from the Hebrides to the Carpathians.

Contents

Foreword: Memories are Made of This

  1. The Force of Simple Orthodoxy
  2. The First 250 Years of Orthodox Suffolk
  3. The Fen Thebaid
  4. Who Betrayed the Europeans?
  5. The Struggle for the Inevitable Local Church
  6. How the Orthodox Church Was Restructured
  7. An Interview
  8. Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Afterword: On Edmund the Martyred King

 

Papism or the Holy Trinity: The Multipolar Structure of the Orthodox Church

The only alternative to the Holy Trinity is hell.

Archpriest Sergij Bulgakov

Introduction: The Remaking of the World Order

The settlement after the Second World War made by a victorious USA and USSR is over. The red star Soviet Empire, given birth to by British-orchestrated regime change begun in blood on 30 December 1916, ended on 25 December 1991. The white star American Empire, given birth to by the Truman Doctrine, formulated on 22 February 1947, ended on 24 February 2022 with the tragic events in the Ukraine. Both had lasted for three generations. The Age of Empires is over. The whole World Order is being remade.

The Ukrainian Tragedy

The recent events in Ukraine, very accurately described by the President of Poland as ‘the drowning man who is drowning his rescuer together with himself’, can only be described as the Last Crusade of the West. However, those events do not just mean the dissolution of the old Ukraine, invented by the USSR from 1922 on, and of the old NATO, they are symptomatic of much more. The Ukraine is only one of the historic shifts that are taking place in the world, where we are witnessing the rebirth of a multipolar world.

That varied and multi-centred world existed a millennium ago, before ‘the West’ took on the demonic idea that it was exceptional, proclaiming that it had the right to dominate the whole world through the arrogance of the ‘crusades’. The first of these began officially in 1095, though in fact they had started before that, in Italy and Spain and in 1066 in England. The last one was not Pope George Bush’s ‘Crusade’ against Iraq in 2003. It is the attack on Russia today, Pope Joseph Biden’s Crusade, which is the Last Crusade.

The alphabet soup of old institutions that my generation has grown up with are gone or else will inevitably go: the USSR (gone already), NATO, the EU, ASEAN, the OECD, the IMF, the WTF, the G7, AUKUS, the UN, the UK (to split into its different countries), perhaps the USA too, are next. Through ‘BRICS’, which is set to replace them all, we are heading towards a Planetary Alliance of Sovereign Peoples. The alternative is a neocon-inspired nuclear Wasteland that even T.S. Eliot could not have nightmared of.

BRICS, already more powerful than the G7, soon with eleven members, is the future present. This is the multipolar world of Russia, China, India, Africa, Latin America, Oceania and all the others. This is the Alliance of the seven billion of Planet Earth. The remaining one billion on their islands and on their Western European peninsula will be obliged to join and co-operate with this Alliance as equals, or else die. The old Western millennium is over and, ironically, the new millennium has been given birth to by this Last Western Crusade.

The Multipolar Structure of the Orthodox Church

The old Western-controlled world had a unipolar or totalitarian structure, which has its origin in the unitary, centralised Papist structure of the second millennium of Western Europe. This is not the structure of the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church, also called the Orthodox Churches, now numbers sixteen. Why the paradoxical use of the singular and the plural, Church and Churches? This use is only as paradoxical as that found in the essential Gospel Teaching of the Holy Trinity: God is One, but also Three.

It is this Tri-unity that is at the basis of this rebirth of a multipolar world that is taking place before our very eyes. In other words, the multipolar reality of the ever-expanding BRICS is based on the very description and definition of the structure of the Orthodox Church(es). The ‘Papism’ of the Western world is thus the opposite of the Trinitarian model of the Holy Trinity, as seen in the Orthodox Church(es). It is therefore no surprise that BRICS has basically been founded by Orthodox Christians from Russia.

The Orthodox Church(es) has also known the temptation of ’Papist’ or unitary rule. But each time those centripetal, that is, unipolar or ‘Papist’, tendencies have been defeated, just as centrifugal or splitting forces have also been defeated. The whole Orthodox world is now awaiting the outcome of the tragic conflict between NATO and Russia in the old Ukraine. We all know that the resulting New Ukraine will be one that is viable. (Remember how foolishly an unviable Germany was created after 1919, resulting in a new War).

The Russian President is not only a politician, but also a Russian Orthodox layman. As a provincial intelligence officer, he lived through the collapse of the USSR and the human catastrophes that ensued. As he proclaimed several years ago: ‘He who does not regret the USSR has no heart; he who wants to restore it has no brain’. As for the future structure of the Russian Orthodox Church, for example in the New Ukraine and in other former Soviet republics which are now independent nations, he has no interest in it. He is a politician.

Conclusion: Multipolar Orthodoxy

Such matters will be for the Russian Orthodox Church hierarchy to sort out, inevitably in consultation with the fifteen other Local Orthodox Churches. We believe that the Russian Orthodox Church will follow the multipolar model and grant independence (autocephaly) to its different constituent parts. This is not because the Russian Orthodox Church wants to follow multipolar politicians, but because it is part of the whole Orthodox Church, whose structure is inherently theologically multipolar, that is, Trinitarian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Papism or Multipolarity: The Fake Church or the Real Church

Introduction: Conformism to the World

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

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

The Church Leader is the Emperor

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

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

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

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

Orthodox Being Orthodox Christians

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

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

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

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

A Centralised Church and a Multipolar Church

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: Awaiting Resurrection

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

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

 

Unlocking the Crisis in the Orthodox World

The 200 million-strong Orthodox Church is in an unheard-of state of schism between the clerical leaders of 14 million Greek Orthodox and the clerical leaders of 140 million Russian Orthodox. This crisis has been caused by nationalism. Indeed, even the word heresy is being used of this schism.

Thus, Greeks accuse Russians of nationalism by promoting their concept of ‘the Russian world’, which Greeks find akin to the heresy of ‘phyletism’ (racist nationalism), which denies the Catholicity of the Church. For them this is what the conflict in the Ukraine is about – the nationalist desire of the Russian government to unite into Russia all Russians, including the Russians who were persecuted and massacred while living near the Russian borders in the east and the south of the old Ukraine and keeping the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under its control. In the nationalist Russian world, non-Russians, even if they are Orthodox, may be treated as second-class citizens.

Russians also accuse Greeks of the same heresy of phyletism, in their claim that the whole Orthodox world must be under the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, who is effectively an Eastern Pope, and that all Non-Greeks, even if they are Orthodox, are therefore effectively second-class citizens. This we have seen in the Greek establishment of dependent ‘Churches’, led by some very dubious individuals and even criminals, in the Ukraine, Estonia and elsewhere. And all this on the age-old canonical territory of the Russian Church and under the political patronage and with the finance of the US State Department.

We are neither Greek nor Russian, as we are drawn from the other 46 million Orthodox. We, who belong to the majority of the fourteen other Local Orthodox Churches, with over a third of us belonging to the Romanian Orthodox Church, are left in the middle. We are in communion with both Russians and Greeks, but in disagreement with both. We find that they are influenced by extremism and that they should sort out their problems at a real Council of the whole Church. Sadly, the elderly Patriarch of Constantinople has rejected this, claiming that he is above Councils!

Given the Greek rejection of a Council, which Council has been promoted by us in an attempt to resolve their schism, cynics say that the Church will just have to wait until the two aged Patriarchs, of Moscow and Constantinople, have died. Only then will the situation be resolved, as the only way out of the crisis is for both patriarchs to pass on and be replaced by new, non-political patriarchs, free of nationalism and US interference. This is to reduce the whole affair to a mere personality issue. That is not at all the case, for here is a vital theological issue about putting the Catholicity of the Church above nationalism, and also we are not cynics. We are believers.

We have already lived through a similar situation of blockage, that of the Cold War, when Church affairs were blocked by politics, in the USSR for 75 years, in the rest of Eastern Europe for 45 years. (Although there was no Greco-Russian schism then). What happened? In 1991 the USSR fell overnight. The hand of God. The present schism is, we believe, not yet as serious and as long-lasting as the era of the Communist captivity of the Church. Those who despair have forgotten the Faith. The hand of God intervenes and all can change in a moment.

As we have seen, there is no possibility of a Council of the whole Church, as it will be boycotted by the Patriarch of Constantinople, as he has stated. What is possible, however, is a Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) which recognises that the USSR no longer exists. One country became 15 independent republics. Surely the ROC needs to decentralise and found new Local Churches, by giving independence/ autocephaly to those Russian Orthodox who for over thirty years have lived in other countries. If independence (autocephaly) were granted by a Church Council in Moscow to those Orthodox outside Russia, but who were formerly in the USSR, this would completely undermine Constantinople’s fake Churches in the Ukraine, Estonia and Lithuania (this latter created only by Moscow defrocking priests for no canonical reason), pulling the rug from under Greek feet.

Firstly, a new Local Church for the New Ukraine is required, as Moscow mulled over doing in the 1990s. The New Ukraine is what will be left of the old and purely artificial Soviet Ukraine, once the latter has been dismantled. Already five provinces with the Crimea have been transferred to Russia. It is not known if other provinces, perhaps two (Nikolaev, Odessa?) or even two more than that (Kharkov, Dnipropetrovsk?), will be transferred to Russia, another two may return to Romania and Hungary. Russia has never wanted to invade or occupy the whole of the Ukraine. It has enough territory of its own and knows from recent history that it cannot occupy areas that are not Russian, where it is not accepted.

So a New Ukraine will still exist, not as large as the old Ukraine which is a construct invented from 1922 on, but still large, between half and three-quarters of the old one. It will be a Ukraine that does not have a US puppet government and one that is demilitarised and denazified, that is, neutral. Unlike the old Fascistic Ukraine which is now collapsing, it will also have to grant all its citizens democracy, freedom to practise their religion without fear of the secret police, and other essential human rights.

The New Ukraine will need a Church which is fully independent of the ROC in Moscow. Similarly, a new Local Church for the three Baltic statelets and another new Local Church for Moldova can end divisions there. However, if Moscow does not do this, Orthodox there and elsewhere, notably in Latvia, will precisely turn to Constantinople for autocephaly and Moscow will also lose Moldova to the Romanian Church. Ultimately, the same may well have to happen for Orthodox in Kazakhstan together with the other four ‘stans’ of Central Asia and then in Belarus.

The point is that Russian nationalism only works with Russians, just as Greek nationalism only works with Greeks. The situation with Greek nationalism is all the more critical for Constantinople. Still seemingly denying that the Greek Orthodox Empire fell in 1453 and still addicted to US dollars, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is going to have to deal with the consequences of the Russian military and technological victory in the Ukraine and its economic and diplomatic victory in BRICS +, which includes Africa, where the ROC is very active.

Both Russian victories already mean the humiliation of the United States and Western Europe, especially of the fatally divided NATO and the EU, which are both likely to collapse. For example, Turkiye, whose President was saved from US assassination by Russia on 15 July 2016 and who was recently in Moscow for talks, has shown great interest in joining BRICS + and so leaving NATO. And Turkiye, whose application to join the EU has been humiliatingly rejected by it on many occasions over the decades, is precisely where the Patriarchate of Constantinople is fixed.

If Turkiye, whose army is for now the second largest in NATO, joins BRICS +, US influence there will collapse, as also in the part of Syria which it occupies and exploits. BRICS + means the end of the prospect of a potential future World Dictatorship, as foretold in the prophecies of Antichrist. Since Russia has good relations with Turkiye and thousands of Russians live there permanently, it will not be long before the ROC opens an Exarchate there, as it has already done in Africa. In Africa it seems as though the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria will go back to what it was 100 years ago and still essentially is, a small Greek diocese covering Egypt and Libya.

If Constantinople boycotts a Council of the Church, then a Council will go ahead without it. It will be its loss. If Constantinople does not need the Church, the Church will not need it. However, if Moscow does not give autocephalies to the Orthodox in the independent countries formed over thirty years ago, it will find that those countries will gain their Orthodox autocephaly without Moscow. This has already happened in Latvia, just as generations ago it happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia and North America. The peoples of the Church do not need bureaucracies, protocols and their pieces of paper to live and develop. They need freedom. This should be blatantly obvious. Sadly, to some it is not.

In any case, both Greeks and Russians will have to recognise that there is no future in phyletism, racist nationalism. Nationalism is the hatred of other countries and, as it is hatred, it can have no place in Christianity. Patriotism, however, is a Christian value, for it is the love of our native country and, as such, in no way excludes positive feelings towards other countries. Let both Greeks and Russians be patriotic, as much as they want, but let patriotism not degenerate into nationalism. The Church of God is much larger than Greeks and Russians. It is the Holy Spirit Who alone creates the spirit of Catholicity, uniting all peoples in their Local Churches. It is called Unity in Diversity and is the image of the Holy Trinity.