Category Archives: Orthodox Restoration

The Russian Orthodox Church and the Tragedy of Soviet Centralisation

Introduction: Soviet Centralisation in Kiev = The End of the Ukraine

I was recently asked a strange question: Do you think that the Ukraine has a right to exist? To which I answered: Obviously, yes! The Ukraine is for Ukrainians! And that is precisely the problem, the Ukraine is for Ukrainians, not for Non-Ukrainians. I believe in self-determination. What the Soviet-style Kiev government did not have the right to do is to ban and oppress the languages and cultures of others and even ‘ethnically cleanse’ the non-Ukrainian minorities. Sadly, that is what has been going on since 1945, starting in what Kiev still calls ‘Transcarpathia’, even though it is Kiev which is Transcarpathian. And in the last three decades that were supposedly ‘post-Soviet’ the centralising Soviet-style oppression has got worse everywhere.

Clearly, the independent Ukraine after 1991 either had to become a loose Confederation, as suggested by the leaders of Germany at the time, or else it had to change its unnatural borders, returning to its pre-1922 borders, returning land to Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania. Instead, it rejected both options, rejecting democratic referenda, remaining a centralised Soviet State. So now it is being forced to return to its natural borders by the drama of military action and appalling bloodshed. Therein lies its horrible tragedy, all so avoidable, the tragedy of all those who have not thrown off the atheist Soviet heritage with its disregard, plain lack of love, for others. It is all so typically Soviet: close the churches and padlock their doors, so people cannot go to them. ‘Hate your neighbour’ is our slogan.

Soviet Centralisation in Moscow = Autocephaly in the Ukraine

In the Russian Church, unlike in other Local Churches, there is a tradition of praying for not just the diocesan bishop, but also for the Patriarch. If you are in the Russian Church, you should do this. However, over the decades, there have been inside and outside Russia, numbers of bishops and priests who have refused to do this. Thus, after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Church in the Polish part of the former Empire received autocephaly and the parishes in Finland left for Constantinople. This was also in order to avoid praying for a Patriarch who was under the orders of atheists.

Then, for over 80 years, bishops and priests in the émigré Church, ROCOR, refused to commemorate the head of the Russian Church because they considered that the Metropolitans and Patriarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate were slaves or hostages of the atheist Communists who were persecuting the Church, and therefore they were not Orthodox. Indeed, if they had commemorated the Russian Patriarch, the people would have walked out, so not to pray for him publicly was a pastoral necessity. And in the neophyte 1990s there were protesters inside Russia who also refused to commemorate their Patriarch. These non-commemorators justified themselves as they considered that the Patriarch was an ecumenist and so was not Orthodox.

Today, in the Ukraine clergy have stopped commemorating Patriarch Kyrill for the same reason as ROCOR, because they do not consider him to be Orthodox and therefore, at the mention of his name in churches, the people walk out or else they refuse to go to church anyway. Rightly or wrongly, they consider him to be the slave of the post-Soviet State, a politician and not a churchman. As a result, the canonical Ukrainian Church has had to declare itself ‘fully independent’. It had no choice. The decision was forced on it by the people. Far more importantly than this, however, is the fact that when the conflict in the Ukraine is over, and whatever the outcome, there will be an independent/Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It will not return to centralised, Soviet-style Moscow. Moscow is still in denial about this, but this will not change the reality. Indeed, arguably, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church should have been given Autocephaly decades ago.

Soviet Centralisation = Autocephaly Elsewhere

I have always been opposed to ‘Autocephalitis’, the idea that all problems can be solved by the granting of autocephaly to groups of Orthodox, however small, in any country in the world. Autocephaly can only be justified, when there are sufficient numbers of Orthodox with spiritual maturity in any particular location. However, after the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991 and the formation of many new independent states, it should have been clear that new independent (Autonomous or Autocephalous) Churches would have to follow. Probably the time for partial independence (Autonomy) is over – it is already too late. Full independence, Autocephaly, is now on the cards for virtually the whole Russian Orthodox world outside the Russian Federation and the Russian Orthodox Exarchate in Belarus. Autocephaly means precisely that His Holiness Kyrill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, will no longer be commemorated at services.

True, it is too early for Autocephaly in the new and small Russian Orthodox Exarchates in South-East Asia and Africa, but Autonomy will have to be envisaged for both within the next ten years and then Autocephaly. Elsewhere, it is full steam ahead. The Latvian Orthodox Church has already taken the chance of Autocephaly, with the excuse of pressure from the Latvian government. However, as it has only three bishops, perhaps, as we have suggested, a single Baltic Orthodox Church (grouping all Orthodox in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, together with all Orthodox in Finland who use the canonical date for Pascha). This would solve the problems and schismatic pressures in Lithuania and in Estonia, and provide at least six bishops. (For Autocephaly, four bishops are a minimum). How long before governments in other countries also impose Autocephaly on local Russian Orthodox? 20% of Moldovan parishes have already gone to the Romanian Church. Moldova is certainly large enough to become an Autocephalous Church, indeed it would become one of the larger Local Churches.

Apart from the Baltics and Moldova, there is also considerable dissidence among multinational Russian Orthodox in Western Europe, in the Russian Orthodox Exarchate in Western Europe of the MP (potentially eight or more bishops), the Western European Archdiocese of the MP (three bishops) and in Western European ROCOR (Autocephaly impossible with its four present bishops, but clergy and people are already voting with their feet), from which many have walked out. Autocephaly in Western Europe could be envisaged, providing it was done with the co-operation of the other Local Churches, and not done, schismatically, against them. Since parts of the New York-run ROCOR have gone into schism, with the Moscow Patriarchate itself! (the Western European Archdiocese) and with the treacherous backing of politicians in the Moscow Patriarchate in Moscow!, there is no hope of this happening on the part of ROCOR. The latter has walled itself off in a schismatic bout of ‘OneTrueChurchism’, which is very American and highly political. But others are free to pursue the path of a new Local Church of Western Europe and clearly some want to.

Soviet Centralisation = Crisis

Interestingly, when Japan started a war against Russia in 1904 with a treacherous and unprovoked attack against Russia (not Russia against Japan), the Russian Bishop of Tokyo told his parishes to pray for the Japanese Emperor, the authorities and the Japanese armed forces. He locked himself away for the duration of the war. It seems to me that he, a future saint, set an example and the same should apply now. In any case, the fact is that Ukrainians consider that they cannot pray publicly for Patriarch Kyrill and the people refuse to attend churches where his name is commemorated. They see him as a politician, not a churchman.

If England were under military attack from Russia, whatever the reason, I don’t see that anyone in this country would wish to hear public prayers for Patriarch Kyrill. Either the Russian Church here would declare itself Autocephalous (as happened with the canonical Church under Metr Onuphry in the Ukraine), or else the State would declare it Autocephalous (as happened in Latvia), or else everyone would join another Local Church. Indeed, many people were forced to take the latter course by the Moscow Patriarchate itself in this country even before the war, because of the schismatic actions of some in the Russian Church, whose political support Moscow needed, even though the actions Moscow was supporting were schismatic.

In other words, nearly one third of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Non-Russian part, is in crisis. Interestingly, this ‘independence movement’ inside the Russian Church has brought no benefit to the ‘Churches’ which the US-manipulated Patriarchate of Constantinople set up in Estonia a generation ago and in 2019 in the west of the Ukraine. Most of their church buildings, stolen by violent thugs from the canonical Church, stand empty and padlocked. People know they are fake and refuse to go there. It must be depressing to be inside the Russian Church in Western Europe today. All the more so, as most ‘Russians’ here do not come from Russia itself, but are Russian-speakers from the Baltics, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Belarus and, especially, from the Ukraine.

Conclusion: New Jerusalem and All Rus

In the light of the conflict in the Ukraine, what can be said about the concept of ‘Holy Rus’? This conflict is between the largest of the supposedly Orthodox peoples of ‘Holy Rus’. Clearly, the majority are not Orthodox and indeed have not been since 1917. Today the majority still acts in the old Soviet way, with its atheistic mentality. For a long time now it has been our suggestion that the Moscow Patriarchate, a name that reminds many of the old Soviet heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church, be renamed ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’. Physically, it could quit Moscow and establish itself in the now renewed New Jerusalem Monastery by the River Istra (Jordan) nearby, and so justify that new name and new reality.

Whatever the present tragedy in the Ukraine, the Trinitarian ideal of ‘Holy Rus’ of Unity in Diversity, remains. As to whether it will be incarnated before the end of the world, we do not know, for we do not know when the world will end. It depends on mass repentance, which has been absent since 1917. Thank God, we have been released from the post-Soviet Church, in both its Russian Federation and its American political incarnations, and are able to go on in freedom to help build up the future multinational Local Church with the free Local Orthodox Churches. These are neither American, nor post-Soviet, neither CIA, nor FSB, and so, by the grace of God, can remain outside the geopolitical games of the Superpowers, as can we.

 

In Memoriam: Daria Dugina

The news of the recent terrorist murder of Alexander Dugin’s daughter, Daria, has shocked us all. Of course, in one sense it is no different from all the other brutal murders of countless human-beings under puppet regimes from the Philippines to Vietnam, from Italy to Latin America, from Greece to Africa, and in many other countries over the last three generations. Nevertheless, it concerns me more personally, as I know her father.

I first met the Russian Eurasianist philosopher Alexander Dugin in London in March 2005. He and I were two of the four speakers at an International Conference on the European Tradition. My approach was spiritual and so politically neutral, his approach was that of a right-wing academic. But regardless of that, we were heading in the same direction and, all the more as I was the only Orthodox priest present, we sympathised. I was able to speak to him between talks and we had a photograph taken together.

Alexander went on to become quite well-known on the academic and political philosophy circuits internationally. His influence on President Putin has been much exaggerated by the Western media which has decided (or rather been ordered) to cast him as ‘Putin’s adviser’, but that is another story. In fact, Alexander was a theoretician. However, as such his books, articles and talks were always stimulating and thought-provoking and will continue to be so.

It is my hope and prayer that the sacrifice of his daughter, Daria, which leaves him heart-broken, as it would any father, will not make him bitter. Rather it will inspire him to purify and refine his thought further, so that his influence through her will be ever greater. Below I attach the talk I gave that day, seventeen eventful years ago. I dedicate it to Daria.

 

Holy Europe and Anti-Europe

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten

Psalm 136, 6

Foreword

Last November I was invited to come and speak to you about Europe. My viewpoint is perhaps an original one for most of you, since it has an Orthodox Christian perspective. In the Orthodox Church we have a very different understanding of the Trinitarian God, and therefore of life, from that found in the Catholic/Protestant religion. I hope that this will become apparent to you in the course of this talk.

I have lived all over Europe and have travelled in many other parts of Europe and worked with dozens of European nationalities. I have been deeply drawn to many places in Europe, some well-known, others very obscure. I have very good friends in many European countries. So I have learned to have compassion for others, and try and look at the world from different standpoints. The following is a viewpoint which expresses the underlying unity of Europe, but which is also respectful of the diversity of the national traditions of European peoples. I hope that it will be of interest to you.

Introduction: Cynicism and Belief

Great nations are born in real belief and enthusiasm. They die in unbelief and cynicism.

Alfred Noyes, 1937

So wrote the English Catholic poet Alfred Noyes nearly seventy years ago. Perhaps we may also say, paraphrasing his words: ‘Great civilizations are born in real belief and enthusiasm. They die in unbelief and cynicism’. These words, sadly, may seem strangely apt in relation to modern Europe, which does appear to be drowning in unbelief and cynicism.

In today’s decadent European context it may therefore seem peculiar to use the words ‘Holy’ and ‘Europe’ together. However, if we can speak of ‘Political Europe’, ‘Economic Europe’ or ‘Social Europe’, then we should also be able to speak of ‘Holy Europe’. Moreover, it is our duty to speak of this, for it is the belief of the Church that if the European house does not first have a holy foundation, if it is built not on rock, but on sand, then it will possess no lasting moral or cultural values, it will be flooded and blown away, and great will be the fall of it.

It is our belief that the cause of moral and cultural decadence is always in spiritual decadence. It is our belief that a humanity deprived of spiritual values is a humanity doomed to falter and fail in a cultural and moral quagmire. Not believing in God, we no longer believe in ourselves. The result is the purposeless but uniform futility that we see around us in today’s throwaway culture, with its throwaway remarks, disposable goods, junk food, junk music, junk TV, junk culture, junk existence. This is the situation today, not so much of Europe, but of Anti-Europe. How has this Anti-Europe come into being and how can we return to a Europe of spiritual culture and moral dignity, a Europe of nobility and indeed holiness?

Europe and Jerusalem

We have forgotten Jerusalem and the land where He was born

Christmas 1912, J.E. Flecker

In any consideration of Europe and the Christian understanding of the word holiness, we must first point out that Christianity came down from heaven and became incarnate not in Europe, but in Asia. In the fourth century this was the whole sense of planting the capital of the Roman Christian Empire on the Bosphorus. At the gates of Europe and Asia, New Rome, or Constantinople as it came to be called, looked to unite both East and West, as symbolized by the emblem of the double-headed eagle.

Although Christians in Asia, including in the Middle East, were eventually to become a minority in a sea of Islam, the source of what some might call ‘the European Faith’ is not in Europe, but in Asia, or more precisely in Jerusalem. It does not matter whether it was the Russian Patriarch, Nikon (1605-1681), who in the seventeenth century built to the south of Moscow, a complex of buildings imitating the sacred geography of Jerusalem, which he called ‘New Jerusalem’. It does not matter whether it was the English visionary, William Blake (1757-1827), who wrote that he would not cease from mental fight, till we had ‘built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’. It has always been to Jerusalem that Europeans, East and West, have looked for inspiration as the source of holiness. And every step that Europe has taken away from its roots in Jerusalem has always been a step away from Christ. Jerusalem is at the roots of Europe’s Faith and Europe’s Holiness.

Indeed, when the region around Jerusalem where Christ lived was given the name ‘the Holy Land’, Europeans imitated it. Thus, like the Holy Land, the largest country in Europe, Russia, was also given the title ‘Holy’ and called Holy Russia. Elsewhere there is the Holy Mountain (Mt Athos), and in England, Scotland and Wales there are Holy Islands. As for Ireland, it was once known as ‘The Island of the Saints’. And all European countries, from Armenia to Iceland, Lapland to Portugal via Liechtenstein and all points inbetween, have adopted Patron Saints, be it St Gregory or St Columba, St Tryphon or St George and St Theodul, St Andrew or St Patrick, St Modest or St Olaf, St Denis or St Sava, St James or St David.

Furthermore, two European countries and thousands upon thousands of settlements in Europe, have taken their names from those who have won holiness and so become local Patrons. There are Georgia and San Marino, named after St George and St Marinus, and then countless cities, towns, villages, islands, mountains and lakes. To name but a few: St Petersburg in Russia and the same dedication of St Peter Port in Guernsey, St Andrew’s in Scotland and the same dedication of Szentendre in Hungary, the island of São Miguel in the Azores and the same dedications of Archangelsk in the far north of Russia, Monte San Angelo in Italy and Mont St Michel in Normandy, Santiago de Compostela (St James) in Galicia and San Sebastián (St Sebastian) in the Basque Country, Sankt Gallen in Switzerland and Sankt Johann in Austria, Saint Nazaire in France and the island of Aghia Marina in the Dodecanese, Sviatogorsk in the Ukraine and St Alban’s in England, St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly and Santa Cruz, the Holy Cross, in the Canaries.

Another tiny European country, Monaco, is named after the monks who once dwelt there, and there are hundreds of towns named after the same monks and nuns who sought and brought holiness, from München, Mönchengladbach and Münster in Germany, to Monastir in Macedonia. There are countless French towns including the word Moutiers and some thirty-two English minster-towns from Axminster to Westminster. As regards the word ‘church’ and all its equivalents, we could start with Christchurch in the south of England, go to innumerable Llan names in Wales, to Kirkwall in the Orkneys, from there to Dunkirk, the church on the dunes, in northern France, pass on to Belaya Tserkov to the south of Kiev and then back to Trinité sur Mer in Brittany, to cite just a few examples.

Other sites and towns are famous simply as holy places, be it Rome, Echmiadzin in Armenia, Trondheim in Norway, Tinos in Greece, Iasi in Romania, Roskilde in Denmark, Czestochowa in Poland, St Paul’s Bay in Malta, Zhirovitsy in Belarus, Braga in Portugal, Mtskheta in Georgia, Echternach in Luxembourg, Diveyevo in Russia, Montserrat in Catalonia, Rila in Bulgaria, Skellig Michael in Ireland, Pochaiev in the Ukraine, Iona in Scotland, Piukhtitsa in Estonia, Utrecht in Holland, Ochrid in Macedonia, the shrine of the Virgin of Meritxell in Andorra, Pec in Serbia, Birka in Sweden, Marianka in Slovakia, Valaamo in Finland, Fulda in Germany, Velehrad in Moravia, Einsiedeln in Switzerland, or Canterbury in England.

Despite these historic facts, there are those who, to the amazement of men and angels alike, would deny the Christian basis of Europe. Indeed they have just drawn up a Constitution for the atheist Europe of their dreams, and our nightmares. Such people would cut Europe off from its spiritual roots, they would confirm the Anti-Europe.

Europe and Anti-Europe

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Lord Grey, 3 August 1914

In speaking of an Anti-European spirit we may first think of the insular nationalism of the Irish and the Icelanders, of the Maltese and the Corsicans, of the Cypriots and the Sicilians, of the Sardinians and the English, of the Faeroese and the Shetlanders. Their insularity comes from living on islands. However, continental Europeans can also be insular. Those who live in the mountains have also fought their tribal battles, whether in the Swiss valleys, the mountains of Armenia and Georgia, the Carpathians of Slovakia, the glens of the Scottish clans or in the Balkans, from Bosnia to Croatia, Albania to Macedonia, Serbia to Montenegro, Romania to Bulgaria.

However, it is not only island and mountain peoples who can be insular and nationalistic. The French, for instance, have fought wars to preserve the geometric integrity of ‘L’Hexagone’, ensuring ‘insular’ borders, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine, the Vosges, the Ardennes. Where there was no natural border, nations constructed the buffer-state of Belgium between France and emerging Germany. Other European countries have been constantly overrun, because they had no natural borders, through lack of insularity, as one might say. The flat plains of Hungary, the Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, provide no protection.

In the modern context, we can also see the same insularity, the same nationalist reluctance to accept others. Western European politicians are prone to say the word ‘Europe’, and in fact mean their own country. ‘La France forte dans une Europe forte’, ‘A strong France in a strong Europe’, was the war cry of French President Jacques Chirac only a few years ago. Many another European politician has made it clear down the years that when they spoke of Europe, in fact they often meant their own selfish interests. Another example: wherever you travel in the European Union, you will see signs with the yellow ring of EU stars, in the centre of which you will find a GB or D or I or SU, or whatever it may be. This is not a European identity, this is a national identity under siege.

Thus, although nationalist insularity can embody the spirit of Anti-Europe, there is also another sort of Anti-European insularity. In order to exercise close control and create the illusion of a centrally united Europe, many politicians speak of ‘Europe’, when in fact they mean the European Union. In fact, this so-called ‘Union’ is not Europe, but merely an insular Europe. It is merely the Western corner of Europe, with some significant gaps – Norway and Switzerland, for example, which, for many, are the most European countries of all. And in this so-called European Union there are the gaps of the two largest countries in Europe: Russia and the Ukraine, and some fifteen other countries and peoples.

There is nothing new in this, for such a European Union was attempted even towards the end of the First Millennium. As the great French medieval historian, Jacques Le Goff, has written of the first attempted European Union, that of the Carolingian Empire: ‘Of all previous attempts to unite Europe, this was the first example of a perverted Europe…it was the first failure of all the attempts to build a Europe dominated by one people or one empire. The Europe of Charles V, that of Napoleon and that of Hitler, were in fact anti-Europes’. (In ‘Was Europe born in the Middle Ages’, p.47 in the French edition of the collection ‘Faire l’Europe’, Seuil, 2003). It is our belief that the present version of the European Union is just such another Anti-Europe. The very word ‘Union’ symbolises this fact, for any centrally-imposed Union, not freely-chosen, inevitably crushes the diversity of its peoples.

True, strides have recently been made to incorporate several ‘missing’ parts of Europe into the European Union. Here I am thinking of the addition of ten more countries to the EU on 1 May 2004. However, these new members have not yet been absorbed into the Brussels machine and perhaps, thank God, never will be. The accession of these ten new members has revealed an obscure but highly symbolic problem; it has proved impossible to find a single person out of 450 million who can interpret or translate from Finnish to Maltese and vice versa. Other permutations, such as Slovak to Danish, Estonian to Greek, Lithuanian to Hungarian, Dutch to Latvian, Slovene to Spanish and vice versa, have also proved very problematic. This problem symbolises the diversity within even the present European Union and the impossibility of actually imposing the Brussels centralist nightmare on such a diverse and obstinately real Europe.

Thus, in our context, when we speak of Anti-Europe, we mean both the nationalist refusal to accept the underlying unity of Europe, and also the internationalist refusal to accept its diversity. By Anti-Europe we mean that spirit which cuts Europeans off from the only thing that Europe really has in common, Jerusalem, Europe’s Christian roots, Europe’s Holiness, and that also cuts Europeans off from other Europeans. For in cutting themselves off from God, Europeans cut themselves off from their neighbours and so become tribal:

In failing to love God, Europe fails to observe the first commandment of the Gospel.

In failing to love its neighbour as itself, Europe fails to observe the second commandment of the Gospel. And he who fails to love his neighbour as himself, automatically begins to hate himself.

And so Europe takes the path of suicide. Hatred of God leads to hatred of man; hatred of man leads to hatred of self.

This is the path that Anti-Europe has taken again and again, from the Deicidal Crusades and Inquisitions of the Middle Ages, to the Fratricidal ‘Wars of Religion’ of the Reformation, to the Suicidal Wars of 1914 and 1939.

After committing tribal genocide against its own European peoples in the first half of the twentieth century, Anti-Europe came directly to its post-1945 reaction. This was the temptation of centralising, creating the cosmopolitan uniformity of the European Union. As a result, since 1945 a cultural suicide has been taking place in Europe. Mafia-like Eurocrats, encouraged by the United States, have tried to impose uniformity on all, crushing European national identities by imposing secularism. This is not the underlying unity of Europe’s roots in Jerusalem, but a false unity, the pseudo-unity of secular Brussels, of Anti-Europe. From the Christian standpoint, such ‘unity’, top-down centralisation, is no more a solution to Europe’s problems than the warring nationalisms which marred so much of Europe’s history in the Second Millennium.

In contrast, the original Christian model of international relations has never been aggressively nationalistic. Neither has it ever been soullessly cosmopolitan and internationalistic. The original Christian model has always been that of Trinitarian unity in diversity, Community, Commonwealth, Confederation. What hope is there for the victory of such a model today?

Europe and Interpatriotism

You are seeking and you shall find,
Not in the way you hope, not in the way foreseen.

A King’s Daughter, John Masefield

It is the recent accession of ten new members to the EU, with very diverse, but very European, histories, cultures and languages, which gives us hope. Their EU membership, together with the future potential membership of other European countries, may at last begin to break down the secular Anti-Europe. New members could destroy Anti-Europe’s ignorant and bigoted cosmopolitanism and its anti-religious ‘political correctness’, imported from post-Christian Puritan America, by creating a new awareness of real European identity. Their membership may at last put paid to the absurd ‘one size fits all’ standardisation and soul-destroying egalitarianism of the present European Union.

Above all, their membership could lead to a new awareness of the underlying stratum of what all European countries really have in common: Europe’s roots in the Faith from Jerusalem. It is those roots which reveal to us neither belligerent nationalism, nor soulless internationalism or Americanisation and Zionisation, which is now camouflaged under the name of ‘Globalisation’. Those roots reveal to the ignorant and bigoted a balance between the national and the international, a replacement for both nationalism and globalisation. I would call this replacement – Interpatriotism; the love not only of one’s own homeland, patriotism, but the love of the homelands of others too.

Bez Boga, ne do poroga. The Russian proverb can be translated freely as ‘No God, no entry’. It neatly illustrates opposition to the present-day EU among all who belong to the European Spiritual Tradition. It neatly illustrates what all European Christians have in common, in spite of and because of, their diversity. There are certain orthodox principles on which all who belong to the European Spiritual Tradition can agree. This is in our opposition to Godless secularism, the spirit of ‘this world’, to which we say ‘No entry’.

We saw this in October 2004 with the affair of Rocco Buttiglione, who was not allowed to express Christian sense, the sort of common sense that fifty years ago every five-year-old European child could express. At the end of 2004, personalities as diverse as Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Christodoulos of Athens, were at one in declaring that Buttiglione had been persecuted for his Faith, the once common Faith of Europe. On 19 November 2004 Cardinal Josef Ratzinger spoke of how the forces of secularism in Europe, the so-called ‘liberal consensus’, have now become aggressive persecutors of European Christendom. Like many others, we had been saying it for years before him.

There are such turning-points in European history, moments of truth, when questions of principle arise. Then we have to say where we stand, in black and white. And the united spiritual forces of Europe, united as they were for most of the First Millennium, the living Faith of Europe, can bring strength. Here I would like to give a few examples from that Europe of the First Millennium, a Europe united in diversity, before the Apostasy, betrayals and tragedies, before the Deicide, Fratricide and Suicide, which rapidly took form in the Second Millennium. For most of the First Millennium, called by many ‘The Age of Faith’, although divided and diverse, there was also unity, a spiritual unity which gave Europe the strength to absorb and baptize barbarian hordes and produce a new Europe. Here are a few names from that epoch, who illustrate true internationalism, or as I have called it – Interpatriotism:

St Irenaeus of Lyon was a Greek from Asia Minor. He was a disciple of St Polycarp, who had been a disciple of St John the Evangelist, ‘the disciple whom Christ loved’. A Church Father, he was Bishop of Lyon in Gaul, where he was martyred for the Faith at the beginning of the third century.

St Chrysolius was an Armenian who lived in the fourth century. Under persecution from the Persians, he left his homeland, went to what is now Belgium, and evangelised the area. He was martyred in Flanders and is still venerated in Bruges.

St Martin of Tours was born in the fourth century in what is now Szombathely in Hungary. He was educated in Pavia in Italy and enrolled in the Imperial cavalry. Posted to Gaul, he left the army after the famous incident in Amiens. He was to become the Bishop of Tours and one of the greatest saints of Christendom, a patron of the Loire Valley, of hundreds of French villages and towns and his name became one of the most common French, and indeed European, Christian names and surnames.

St John Cassian was born in the Dobrudja in what is now Romania. He became a monk in Egypt and in the fifth century established a monastery near Marseille in the south of France, becoming one of the great monastic Fathers of Christendom.

St Martin of Braga lived in the sixth century. Born in what is now Hungary, he became a monk in Palestine, then went to Galicia, in what is now Portugal. He is one of the greatest figures of the Iberian Peninsula and played an important role in converting pagans, like his namesake in Gaul. He made his see of Braga into the first spiritual centre for all north-west Iberia. Indeed, in Portuguese, Braga, ‘the Rome of Portugal’, has become proverbial: ‘tao velho como o sede de Braga’, ‘as old as the see of Braga’, means in English, ‘as old as the hills’.

St Theodore of Tarsus lived in the seventh century in Asia Minor, a hundred miles from the coast of Cyprus. In middle age he left for Rome and there played an important role in uniting East and West at a time of controversy. Then he was appointed the first Greek Archbishop of Canterbury. Here he played a fundamental part in uniting the strands of Irish and Roman Christianity in England, approving both as complementary to one another.

St Boniface was born in Devon in the south-west of England. In the eighth century he went to the German Lands and became a great missionary Archbishop, reforming much of the Christianity of north-western Europe. Supported by three Popes, including the Greek Pope St Zacharias, this Englishman, known as the Apostle of Germany, was martyred in Frisia in Holland in 754.

St George of Córdoba was born in Bethlehem in the ninth century and became a monk at St Sabbas Monastery outside Jerusalem. Fluent in Greek, Arabic and Latin, he then travelled via North Africa to Córdoba in Spain where he preached the Faith, finally being martyred with Spanish brothers and sisters by the Muslims.

St Wenceslas, or Václav, was Duke of the Czech Lands in the tenth century. He was martyred there in intrigues and is venerated in St Vitus Cathedral in Prague to this day, as the Patron-Saint of the Czech Lands.

St Olav was King of Sweden in the mid-tenth century. He and his family were baptized by the English missionary St Sigfrid. His daughter married into the Russian royal house, lived mainly in Novgorod, had twelve children, one of whom is venerated as a saint. In her widowhood, she became a nun, taking the name Anna and is herself honoured as a saint.

St Gregory of Burtscheid was a Greek monk from Calabria who, fleeing from the Muslims, met Emperor Otto III in Rome. At the latter’s invitation, Gregory went north and founded a monastery just outside Aachen where he was a holy Abbot, reposing in 996.

St Simeon of Padolirone was an Armenian pilgrim. Having visited Jerusalem, then Rome, Compostela in Spain and Tours in France, he settled at a monastery outside Padua in Italy, where he was renowned as a wonder-worker, reposing in 1016.

St Simeon of Trier was a Greek, born in Syracuse, educated in Constantinople, and who then lived as a hermit by the River Jordan, in Bethlehem and on Mt Sinai. Sent by his Abbot to Normandy to collect alms, he eventually settled in Trier in Germany and lived there as a much-venerated hermit. He was canonised seven years after his repose, which came in 1035.

Another Anna of the eleventh century, this time of Kiev, married Henri I of France. She played a vital role in spreading Christian values, like many other women of the First Millennium before her. As examples, there are St Clotilde in Gaul, the Greek Theodosia and also Ingonde in Spain, the Bavarian Theodelinda in Lombardy, the French Bertha in England, the English St Bathilde in France, the Czechs, St Ludmila in Czechia and Dubrava in Poland, the Swedish St Helga, or Olga, in Kiev, the Greek Empress Theophano in Germany. In Anna’s eleventh century Kiev, they were to welcome Christians such as Thorwald of Iceland and Gytha of Winchester. Both Kiev and Winchester were famed for their standards of civilization, running water, drains, pavements, education.

Here are but a few examples of the concourse or coming together, of Interpatriotic Europe in the First Millennium, before the advent of both warring nationalism and soulless internationalism in the Second Millennium. In the First Millennium, we find the roots of Europe, we find Holy Europe.

Conclusion: Roots and Routes

Die Weltgechichte is das Weltgericht
The history of the world is the judgement of the world

Friedrich von Schiller

Europe – you forgot holiness, and so you began a hundred wars of crusade and conquest over a thousand years.

Europe – you silenced your conscience, and so you invented the machine-gun and saturation bombing.

Europe – you stifled the voice of God, and so you invented the concentration camp and the Atom Bomb.

Europe – you forsook your roots in Jerusalem, and so you invented Anti-Europe.

I would paraphrase the most terrible, above-quoted words of Friedrich von Schiller, as he spoke in Jena in 1789: Die Europageschichte ist das Europagericht: The history of Europe is the judgement of Europe. The blood-soaked deeds of Anti-Europe are Europe’s judgement, but they are only part of Europe’s judgement. There is another Europe too. As I said at the beginning of this talk, the conjunction of the words ‘Holy’ and ‘Europe’ may seem strange, as though words from two different planets had collided, but I tell you, and have been telling you all this afternoon, that it was not always so. A voice from the past should be jarring on the memory of today’s Anti-Europe.

It is my belief that in seeking common European roots, or origins, we shall find routes, or paths, out of the present European crisis towards what I have called an ‘Interpatriotic Europe’, summed up so harmoniously in the French phrase ‘l’Europe des Patries’. It is in our common spiritual origins that we shall find our common spiritual opportunities. It is in our common spiritual identity that we shall find our common spiritual freedom. But if Europe denies her common roots, her common spiritual origins in Jerusalem, then, as even the warlike Churchill said of earlier twentieth-century Europe: ‘…the whole world…will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science’.

In recent years, I have heard certain naive people declaring that ‘the barbarians are at the gates’. They are not at the gates and have not been for a very long time. The barbarians entered long ago and began their long task of expelling Wisdom from the City. Ever since the barbarians have been parading in the City, destroying the walls and opening the gates wide, whenever new forms of barbarianism appeared. Nevertheless, I would end this talk with words of optimism, inherent to all Christians, who know that the last words in history will be Christ’s. As the Emperor Julian the Apostate is reputed to have said on his death-bed, some sixteen hundred years ago: Thou hast conquered, O Galilean…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Six Months On: The Completely Avoidable Tragedy of the Ukraine and the Curse of Nationalism

‘Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity, but I’m not so sure about the universe’.

Words Attributed to Albert Einstein

 

Foreword

We have never had any doubt that the Russian Federation would win militarily in the conflict in the Ukraine, for which eventuality it had carefully prepared for eight long years. (I stress the word ‘militarily’). During that time the West continually poked the bear and then was surprised when the bear’s patience ran out – on 24 February 2022. That does not mean that I approve of anything that has happened in the Ukraine since 2014. I visited different parts of the Ukraine six times between 2014 and 2021 and my many parishioners from all over the Ukraine only confirmed what I had seen.

I could see only too well its immense problems, the corruption which led to an infrastructure, far worse even than that in the oligarch-dominated UK, and the poverty of the masses, making it poorer than many African countries. In this article I take no sides. All wars are huge human tragedies and cannot be approved of. However, I am interested in the truth, not in propaganda, whichever side it comes from. And here, as everywhere and always on this site, without the burden of any careerism I am free to be interested only in the truth and its causes and consequences for Church life.

Introduction: The Tragedy: 2014-2022

After the 2014 US-organised coup d’etat (cost to the US taxpayer = $5 billion, as officially admitted by the US politician Victoria Nuland), one thing was at once obvious. This was that the new Kiev government needed to carry out internationally-observed referenda. Then they could let the various peoples in the Ukraine, with its purely artificial, Soviet-made borders, assigned to it by the atheist monsters Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, freely decide which country they wanted to belong to. Any enforcement of the old atheist centralisation from Kiev would, as in Yugoslavia, lead to exactly the same tragedy and war as in Yugoslavia. Both amalgams, Yugoslavia and the Ukraine, were hangovers from the Communist period with their absurd borders, jamming together peoples who had little in common and no desire to live in the same country as one another.

Sadly, the reality is that this current completely avoidable tragedy in the Ukraine is ‘Yugoslavia II’, that is, it the same thing again, only on a far greater and more serious scale. And here, unlike in Serbia, NATO cannot use its air force, for it will be shot down by superior Russian technology, and its army and navy are shut out.  In 2014 an internationally-observed referendum was held in the Crimea, and all went well, with a clear 97% majority choosing to return to Russia, after 60 years of enforced separation from it. However, Kiev itself refused to allow referenda anywhere, including in the Crimea. Therefore, the Kiev government, or rather those behind them who would not allow referenda, are responsible for today’s catastrophic consequences and tens and probably hundreds of thousands of deaths. They have blood, a lot of it, on their hands. What are those consequences?

The Catastrophe: 2022-

  1. Local Consequences: The Human Cost

In 2014 war broke out in the Ukraine, specifically in the Russian-speaking Donbass, whose language and culture were oppressed and mocked by the racist centralisers in Kiev. Up to 14,000 people, including 400 children, were massacred by the Kiev authorities and the other 6 million were told to leave the Ukraine, if they did not like Kiev’s new ‘democracy’. This year, there has been much worse. Six months of conflict have now passed, though it was clear from the beginning, like it or not, that the small Russian expeditionary force had already won in the first few weeks. Their feint to the North, as if to take Kiev, locked up the Kiev military there (the same tactic as the US used in Iraq with a feint from the sea), enabling Russian forces to achieve their aims of conquering much of the Russian-speaking East and take the Russian-speaking South as far as Kherson, where they were greeted by many as liberators. This was what the Russians had openly stated that they intended doing all along, but they had been disbelieved.

Like it or not, the ensuing decision by the USA/West/NATO to send billions of dollars of their weapons, disarming their own troops, to be destroyed by Russian missiles, sometimes before they can even be unpacked (as on 24 February at Borispol Airport), is only prolonging the inevitable defeat and making the bloodshed far worse. So far the Russians and their Allies have lost over 6,000 troops dead, although over the last two months since they took strategic Mariupol, casualties have been very low, as this has largely become a war of satellites, drones, artillery and precision missiles. On the other hand, the Kiev Army has lost some 250,000, at least 60,000 of them killed, and continues to lose many hundreds of ill-trained, ill-equipped and often very young or very old troops almost every day, whether killed, wounded, or by surrender and desertion.

You should not be fighting a modern war when you do not have air superiority. Kiev does not, as most of its air force was destroyed in the first few days. It is a catastrophe and leaves widows and orphans everywhere. Every son killed had a mother and a father, a brother and a sister. The whole country is in bitter mourning. Its population is now down to 30 million. Of 6 million refugees, Russia is the European country that has taken the most, with 2 million fleeing the bankrupt Ukraine. However, 4 million others have left futureless bankruptcy for various countries in Western Europe, over half going to Poland and Germany. It costs the US taxpayer $5 billion every month just to keep the Kiev government afloat, let alone the billions of dollars of destroyed US military equipment.

Unless the 13% of the world, which is all the Western world/G7/NATO is, really wants a nuclear war to annihilate humanity, as Mrs Truss says she does, the West will just have to accept that Russia has taken back the Russian Lands within the former Ukraine. People like Mrs Truss, with her extraordinary ignorance of the basic history and geography of the Ukraine, simply do not realise that this is an existential war for Russia on its doorstep, even though V. Putin explained this quite clearly. Russians will die to win this war to free their brothers and sisters in the East and South of the Ukraine.

However, despite what Mr Johnson has recently proclaimed, no-one in the UK has chosen to pay 400% more for fuel bills, let alone die for the Ukraine, of which country few in the UK had even heard until six months ago. The result of the UK government’s refusal to buy Russian gas and other commodities and to arm the Ukraine, without consulting the electorate, which is not even allowed to elect the next Prime Minister, is soaring inflation, social disruption, strikes and grinding poverty, which will probably topple the UK government in the near future. Here is the difference with Russia. Nobody in the UK wants to suffer, let alone die, for an unknown country.

Local Consequences: What Does the Future Ukraine Look Like?

It looks something like the following – something that could have happened without any bloodshed, had democratic referenda been allowed back in 2014:

The Real Ukraine of Ukrainian speakers, the ‘Kyiv Protectorate’, or whatever it will come to be called, may take 11 demilitarised central and western provinces of the former Soviet Ukraine: Sumy, Poltava, Kirovohrad, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, Ternopil. Population: 11.2 million. This will be a landlocked nation, in effect a Second Belarus, with a population of just over a quarter of the 1991 Soviet Ukraine.

Russia may take the 9 Russian-speaking eastern and southern provinces: Lugansk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhe, Kherson, Crimea (Crimea of course already rejoined Russia in 2014), Nikolaev, Odessa. Population: 14.2 million.

Poland may, with Russia’s permission, take back the 3 far western ‘Habsburg’ provinces: Volyn (though a small number in the north of Volyn might want to join Belarus), Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk. Population: 3.2 million. This is the historic ‘Ukraina’ – the word that simply means the borderlands (that are next to Poland). Clearly, this real Ukraine would have to receive some sort of autonomy within the NATO-ruled Polish Republic as a demilitarised buffer-zone.

Hungary may take 1 province: Zakarpattia. Population: 0.85 million. This is providing that its mainly Carpatho-Russian people vote for this by referendum, though, true, many have already accepted Hungarian passports. This region would also have to receive some sort of autonomy within Hungary.

Romania may take 1 province: Chernivtsy. Population: 0.6 million. This is providing that its largely Romanian-speaking people vote for it by referendum, which seems highly likely.

  1. Global Consequences: Western Sanctions Cause Chaos in Western Europe

Why is the Russian campaign taking so long, why did Russia not use 25% or even 50% of its armed forces and take the whole of the Ukraine within a few weeks? Because that is not its strategy. By its own admission Russia has never had any intention of occupying the whole of the Ukraine and its capital Kiev. Therefore, only 5%-10% of the highly professional Russian Armed Forces have been engaged in order to take back the Russian-speaking areas, which were separated from it by Marxist diktat exactly 100 years ago. In any case, most of the fighting is being done by the local anti-Kiev Eastern Ukrainians and Chechen allies, who have suffered most of the casualties.

Then there is no hurry – the Russians want to conserve the lives of their own troops and of Ukrainian civilians and to conserve infrastructure. Time in any case is on the Russian side: their greatest ally is, as is usual in Russia, General Winter. By deliberately stretching the conflict out by agreeing to provide arms ‘until the last Ukrainian is dead’, Western European governments have foolishly fallen into the trap of extending the war into the winter. In this way they will have to suffer a winter with little fuel and face national emergencies, probable popular uprisings and riots and the fall of governments. The West has been completely outwitted – by its own stupidity.

Nowhere in Western Europe is the situation as grim as in the UK. With its privatised utilities, which are in reality unregulated, the law of the jungle prevails. For example the energy price cap imposed by the French government on its State energy monopolies is 4%. In the deregulated UK, prices by January will probably have increased by 400%. This is unsustainable. Expect a universal bill boycott, already started, and food riots. In the UK, Johnson’s words of 25 August, ‘You (note, ‘you’ not ‘we’) must endure to defeat Putin’ do not work. Nobody in the UK voted for this. Moreover, in the ‘democratic’ UK, 160,000 mainly elderly, wealthier people are taking two months just to choose the next Prime Minister, the fourth in six years. The UK used to mock political instability in Italy; it had better look at itself.

Global Consequences: Sanctions and Dedollarisation

Europe’s own anti-Russian sanctions, even though forced on it by the USA, are suicidal. Bankruptcy stares it in the face. The rouble has stabilised at a very healthy 60 to the dollar (before the conflict it was over 90 and briefly went up to 120) and money is flooding into Russian coffers as the whole Non-Western world wants its oil, gas, grain, fertilisers, rare earth metals, not to mention its highly effective arms. They are available to anyone in Western Europe who does not sanction them, as long as they pay for them in the Russian currency. On the other hand, the euro has sunk to parity with, or is even below, the dollar. The conspiracy theorists are even saying that the whole conflict was created by the USA to destroy, not Russia or even the Ukraine, but the EU, notably the German economy. Probably crazy, but actually quite logical.

China, India and indeed over 85% of the world have no sanctions against Russia, indeed they basically support Russia. The West is isolated, with its manufacturing dependent on China, which will soon claim back Taiwan. And Russia and other countries are now insisting on payment for their essential commodities in roubles or in their own currencies. The world economy is being dedollarised – that is a disaster for the USA.

  1. Church Consequences

Now we come to the second half of this article, what interests us most. What are the Church consequences of the conflict in the Ukraine, especially, what is happening to the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox Church? Here the situation is grim indeed. On 25 August the Russian Church was forced to abandon plans for its Patriarch Kyrill, already sanctioned and banned from visiting the UK and Canada, to meet the Pope of Rome in Kazakhstan in September. Centralised Church authorities in Moscow had totally misread the public mood and the proposition had led to a huge scandal.

However, the misreading, or just plain non-understanding of the views of the local Orthodox grassroots, is far more generalised than this mere detail. The authorities of the formerly multinational Russian Orthodox Church has tried to impose the political views of Russia on its multinational flock. The result? Its Non-Russian flock has largely left it. This is a repeat of what happened in the 1920s when the leader of the Church then, Metropolitan Sergius, tried to enforce loyalty to the atheist Soviet State on his flock outside Russia. Result? He lost his flock outside the Soviet Union. We can see exactly the same result, all over again, in many regions of the world. For instance:

a) The Ukraine.

Few can describe the hatred felt by Ukrainians, mostly from central and western Ukraine, for Russia and Russians. They are simply boycotting the churches where the name of Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned. I speak from what I have seen. Even here, for example, Ukrainian refugees come to us and ask who our Patriarch is. When I reply that last February we were issued with letters of leave to quit the Moscow Patriarchate (its Western European Archdiocese) for Patriarch Daniel of Romania because of political persecution, they smile and say they will return to us. They feel at home with us; we are neutral. However, wherever the name Patriarch Kyrill is mentioned in church services, Ukrainian refugees, like many other Ukrainians who have already been here for some time, vote with their feet and leave. Understandably so.

Even Autonomy for the only canonical Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, that which is led by Metropolitan Onufry, is now no longer enough. It is too late. Moscow has totally lost control. It is Autocephaly that has to be granted, exactly as the saintly Serbian Patriarch Porfiry recently granted to the Church of North Macedonia. This simple message has yet to get through to Moscow, but it is a fact. Otherwise, the Ukrainian Church will simply be an empty shell. This need for Autocephaly is not a top-down case of political manoeuvrings by a nationalistic elite who want their ‘own’ National Church to command and control, as was the case of the Protestant Churches in Western Europe (e.g. the Church of England or those in Scandinavia) or the purely political group founded in the Ukraine in 2018 under the Church of Constantinople.  This is a case of the people demanding Autocephaly, it is a ‘down-top’ movement.

b. The Baltic States

Russophobia here is virulent. There are already two Churches in Estonia and there are about to be two in Lithuania because of nationalism and hatred for Russia. The US-sponsored Patriarchate of Constantinople stands behind both breakaway groups in Estonia and Lithuania. It seems to me that at the very least the three Baltic States must have their own Local, Autonomous, if not Autocephalous, Orthodox Church. Only that will stop the schisms. Again the message is clear to everyone, except to Moscow. Does Moscow really think it can weather the storms and hold on?

The situation in Lithuania is especially disastrous, where priests have been defrocked for a purely political disagreement with Moscow. This is an abuse of the canons. As our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, said to us in a recent conversation, defrocking happens to clergy for moral, financial or criminal reasons, not because the clergy disagree with their bishop about politics or, as missionaries, are defending their churches from predatory and anti-missionary bishops. Nobody in the free Orthodox world recognises political defrockings. They are not only uncanonical, they are anti-canonical. They are particularly ironical, when those who should be defrocked for molesting women parishioners or stealing money from parish funds are not only not defrocked, but receive all manner of awards!

c. Moldova

Already 20% of churches in Moldova have left the Russian Church for the Patriarchate of Romania. The conflict in the Ukraine is making Moldovans shudder. Will we be next? The tiny Russian Transdnestria was of course long ago lost to Moldova, but what about Moldova itself? It seems inevitable that Moscow will lose the remaining 80% of its parishes there to the Romanian Church. Large parts of the Russian Diaspora are also composed of Moldovans, for example some 70 of the 72 Moscow Patriarchate parishes in Italy are Moldovan. Surely they too will leave for the Romanian Church?

Already in England most Moldovans have had to leave the Russian Church because of Slav nationalism and, sadly, a certain corruption. Here too, Russian nationalism appears to have destroyed the Russian Church’s once multinational character, as everywhere in the Western world. One nationalist bishop of the Russian Church in the Diaspora actually said in public: ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. That seemed to amuse him: it did not amuse the Romanians and Moldovans, or any of the Non-Russians, present. Here there is cause for the suspension of the bishop, if not for his actual defrocking. As far as I know, Christ never commanded us to hate other races.

d. The Western European Exarchate

In 2018 Moscow at last set up a Western European Exarchate, its centre in its brand-new, purpose-built Cathedral and centre in the most prestigious part of Paris, rumoured to have cost 50 million euros. Today, the Exarchate too is shattered, seemingly destroyed by Russian nationalism. Its first head lived in the Cathedral with his wife and child, and had another vice. He was duly sent away. (Though not sent so far as their Bishop Gury in the 1990s, who did something so serious that he ‘had to go’ and freeze in Magadan, opposite the Sea of Japan). The second head, a very politically-minded and very ecumenically-minded and very young man, who has not spent any time in a monastery and who speaks no French and poor English, now lives in Moscow and does administrative things.

Meanwhile, the Moscow Patriarchate Diocese in the UK no longer has a bishop, he is in Moscow. Few even remember who was the last Englishman to be ordained to the Russian Orthodox clergy in the UK. And the Moscow Patriarchate bishop in the Netherlands also seems to have disappeared. He got into great trouble with the Dutch government for threatening the clergy of his huge church in Amsterdam with ‘the Russian Embassy’, because, as Non-Russians, they had expressed purely political disagreement with the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the parish and about 70% of the people transferred to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as did a parish in Italy and another in Germany. Frankly, it appears as if the Western European Exarchate had its chance and failed. Does it have any future after the events in the Ukraine? That it might become the foundation to set up a future Western European Orthodox Church, as Patriarch Alexiy II wanted twenty years ago, now sounds like a bad joke. Hopes have been dashed by those who have betrayed their pastoral duties.

e. North America and ROCOR

In the USA the Moscow Patriarchate has also lost its bishop. Its forty or so parishes are left without a leader and, it seems perhaps without any possibility of even survival through new ordinations, let alone expansion. However, in general, all parts of the Orthodox Church in North America are in chaos. The largest group by far, the Greek Archdiocese, is facing scandal and disorder with the probable deposition of its new, highly political and secularising Archbishop Elpidiphoros. The second largest group, the OCA, which has Russian origins, is facing many difficulties, mot least the behaviour of its administration in over-zealously closing churches and persecuting clergy during lockdowns. The third largest group, Antioch, sometimes called ‘The Church of the Four Families’, faces a scandal involving allegations against its Metropolitan Joseph.

The fourth largest group, quite small in fact, a Russian group, ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), faces very embarrassing accusations of defamation, precisely from a Ukrainian priest, Fr Alexander Belya. The US courts will clearly favour him, though they must first justify his allegations to find out if they are true. Several other scandals in the USA involving properties and Russian clergy who have fled it for the Greek Church are also left unanswered. On top of all this, questions have been raised about the use of the electronic signature of the late Metropolitan Hilarion of ROCOR. He was clearly very ill for quite some time, at least for a year, if not for several years, before his death in May 2022, and yet all manner of very serious documents were being issued in his name by others. His death also leaves his Western Rite group, already dissolved in England, all at sea.

Moreover, ROCOR faces huge difficulties outside the USA. In Western Europe it lost half its English Diocese, 12 clergy, 5,000 people and two million pounds worth of Church buildings, ultimately to the Church of Romania, which canonically received them all, with the blessing of Patriarch Daniel himself. In 2007 they had already lost their only two monasteries in England to an Old Calendarist Church only because their analysis of the degree of the deSovietisation of the Church inside Russia varied with that of their bishop. On top of that, that English diocese then lost another four clergy to various other jurisdictions. Although still (!!) in complete denial of this reality, ROCOR here has now largely become an internet presence. The churches that left it for the Romanian Church are full and growing in clergy and people. Its very few remaining churches are very small. Meanwhile, in Geneva it also faces yet another court case on internal matters concerning administration and very embarrassing sackings, allegedly illegal, involving its appointment of freemasons.

From 1917-1991 ROCOR existed as the free and unpersecuted branch of the Russian Church outside the Soviet Union. After the atheist Soviet Union fell in 1991, and even more after ROCOR’s long-awaited reconciliation with the post-Soviet Russian Church in 2007, many began to question the reason for its continued existence. Some felt that Providence had given it a chance to justify its continued existence as the missionary part of the Russian Church outside Russia. It had the chance to prove itself as such from 2007 to 2017. Then all was still possible. Sadly, it failed to realise its potential and openly abandoned missionary work in whole areas of the world, such as Latin America, Indonesia and most of Western Europe, and instead concentrated on trying to amass money and striving to obtain impossible-to-obtain properties gained by previous unsupported missionary work. It seems as though the once persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church.

At the same time, some of its members turned inwards and selected Trumpism, and not Christ, as their ideology. It was clear that some in ROCOR had lost their way. Having chosen not faith, but a political ideology, and one which fails to work outside narrow US Republican ghettos, and lost most of itself outside North America, ROCOR may now be obliged to retreat to North America and lick its wounds. A well-known Russian Orthodox Metropolitan wrote to me only last week and told me that he does not think that it can survive at all; ROCOR risks becoming an embarrassment to the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia. This is a Church Titanic, of which Fr Alexander Belya is only the tip of the iceberg.

Conclusion: Lose-Lose?

The curse of nationalism has been lose-lose for all who have taken that particular acid bath. The Kiev government has lost by persecuting its own people and playing with several different nationalist and schismatic ‘Glory to the Ukraine churches’ and persecuting its only canonical Glory to God Church. Its false ‘churches’ have not only not created unity, but they have destroyed all remaining unity by persecuting and striving to seize the properties of the canonical Church (more parallels with the situation in the Diaspora). The Church of Constantinople has lost by playing with Greek and then Ukrainian nationalism. Western Europe has lost by playing with European nationalism (its ‘freedom and democracy’ myths) and enforcing Russophobic sanctions to cut off its nose to spite its face. ROCOR has lost by playing with American nationalism, exactly as the much persecuted St John of Shanghai prophesied. And the once multinational Russian Church has lost most of all by betraying its multinational vocation, that very vocation set by Tsar Nicholas II, with Russian nationalism, thus wrecking its multinational reputation. It will not recover from that for at least a generation.

Everyone is a loser. However, Divine Providence can and does make good out of bad. You will see and are already seeing it. Here is the possible end of schisms in the Ukraine and its opportunity, shorn of its Russian territories, to find its true identity and unite around a liberated and demilitarised Kiev. Here is the opportunity for scandal-ridden Constantinople to become a missionary Church, having understood that nobody is interested in a secular-minded, political and racist Church. Here is the opportunity for Europe, including the UK, to make peace with Russia after nearly 1,000 years of hatred based on jealousy and intolerance. Here is the opportunity for the two parts of the Russian Church in North America, the OCA and ROCOR, together with the bishopless Moscow parishes, to unite and love one another, instead of hating one another. (The apparently still unknown commandment of loving one another is to be found in the Gospels). It is all so simple. Here is the opportunity for the Russian Church, having for now lost Europe, to turn to serious missionary work in Asia and in Africa. God always gives opportunities. Sadly, men do not always take them.

 

The Orthodox Church in the Future?

The Martyr-Emperor Nicholas led the renewal of then decadent Church architecture and iconography in the early 1900s. His vision was also that every European Capital would have its own Russian Church. Perhaps he thought of a world where there would be new many Local Churches with Autonomy from the Russian Church – not Autocephaly, because that comes only after long generations of maturity. Premature autocephaly always leads to spiritual catastrophes. Today it seems that the Russian Church, on the verge of victory in late 1916 and discussing the future of the Patriarchate of Constantinople even then, does not wish to repeat the mistakes of the past.

The disloyal are being removed Inside the Russian Church or else they are removing themselves.

Outside the Russian Church, the conflict in the Ukraine is revealing exactly who is who and who will renounce communion with the Russian Church.

An Orthodox friend asked a monk:

When will it all end?

He received this answer:

When the Russian Orthodox Patriarch reconsecrates the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople.

The Parish Problem

Christianity has always been spread by monastics and monasteries. This is universal. In normal conditions, what happens is that after their mission has been completed, monastics (some of whom are bishops – real bishops are always monastics) delegate the everyday running of churches to married clergy. These either run the local parishes founded from monasteries or else, in the absence of any support from monasteries or bishops, found parishes themselves.

For centuries and centuries this is how it worked, whether with St Nina in Georgia, St Martin of Tours in Gaul, St Patrick in Ireland, St Augustine in England, St Boniface in the German Lands, St Cyril and Methodius in Moravia, St Stefan of Perm, St Job of Pochaev in what is now the western Ukraine, St Cosmas of Aitolia in Greece or St Herman and St Innocent in Alaska. Today, this age-old system is in crisis everywhere, perhaps especially in the Russian Orthodox Church.

There are not only the massive dysfunctions of episcopal, monastic and parish life, mainly caused by 75 years of vicious Soviet persecution inside the ex-Soviet Union. Outside the ex-Soviet Union the situation is not much better in many places. The decadence in parts of the Russian Church before the Revolution, the chaos of emigration, the scattering of the flock, and the catastrophic lack of finance and infrastructure, have caused enormous problems. Thus, I can remember over 40 years ago the then rector of the Rue Daru Cathedral in Paris, where thousands would gather at Easter, telling me that they had only 25 registered parishioners. The number of people who took communion on Easter Night was similar – 25.

Many, though not all, Russian churches inside Russia and in capital cities outside Russia resemble little more than railway stations. Orthodox Russians call the passers-by who you may never see again ‘prokhozhane’ (as opposed to ‘prikhozhane’, the word for parishioners). Then there are the people who call in from time to time – ‘zakhozhane’. These people you may see only half a dozen times a year. An example: as a parish we have some 4,000 people who are attached to us, but our list of parishioners is just under than 600 and that includes children. And yet all 4,000 would claim to be parishioners!

Another problem, worse in some countries than others, but still common in Russia and the Ukraine, despite recent welcome changes, is the massive imbalance in age and gender. For every 100 women standing in church, there may only be 15 men (at most) and two children. I can remember at the old ROCOR Cathedral in London 40 years ago, there would perhaps be 400 people (average age 75) at the Sunday Liturgy, out of whom three-quarters were elderly women and the only children our own. Where are the men? Where are the young people? Why have the grandparents not passed on the Faith to their children and grandchildren? The situation of the Greek Church in this country today is very similar and very critical. Expect many of their churches to close over the next 20 years.

In the old ROCOR of the time, I can remember one elderly and prominent woman parishioner boasting that the children in their church never made a noise. I politely pointed out that there were no children in her church (and also no baptisms). She then boasted that they never had any divorces in her church. Again I politely pointed out there were no weddings either (the last had been thirty years ago) and that the average age of the parishioners was about 75. She then boasted that they had never had any problem with their clergy. Once more I politely pointed out that that must be because they had no clergy….The last one had died a decade or so before.

As one relatively young archbishop said to me in the 1980s: the fewer parishes we have, the better it is, because the fewer the parishes, the fewer the problems. He died soon afterwards.

Why is it that there are still  many churches (especially in Russia and Eastern Europe) which it is impossible to enter with a pram or a pushchair (let alone a wheelchair)? Is it because children (and young people in general) are not welcome and not wanted? (As also in so many churches outside Russia?).

Why are there no contemporary toilets (for children) and no changing facilities, attached to the majority of churches?

Why are there so few meeting places for parishioners to get to know each other and support each other, where children can play together and make friends, and where young people can meet (and perhaps marry)? Or do you want to die out?

Children are our future. That statement is neither new nor original, but blatantly obvious, and yet many people still do not understand it.

A parish is not a cow to be milked for money. A parish is a local community to which people have a sense of belonging, to which they want to belong, so important for a flock which is scattered.

A parish is a community (not a racist ghetto, as in the old emigration), where all are welcome and a community which will stand up to the frequent injustices, persecution, meddling and bullying from outside, and support its clergy both morally and financially. Where does that exist?

Until we have many more parishes, we will not make progress.

The Main Problem of the Contemporary Orthodox World

Introduction

From time to time over the decades I have heard conversations among Orthodox about ‘What the problem with the Orthodox world is’. Some I have heard say: ‘The episcopate’. Others say: ‘Lack of leadership’. Others: ‘Lack of pastors’. Others: ‘Uneducated clergy’. Others: ‘Infrequent communion’. Others: ‘There are not enough churches’. Others: ‘Politics’. Others: ‘There’s not enough money’. Others: ‘Too much money’. Others: ‘Ecumenism’ (how old-fashioned that word sounds now). Listening to such conversations among those older than myself, many years ago I came to my own much more radical, but perhaps also much more obvious, conclusion which I present below. Let me give some examples.

The Problem of the Episcopate

Here one of the great problems is that, with very weak monastic life, Orthodox bishops are drawn from a very small pool of candidates. Here we must also recall that, even if there were strong monastic life, most monks are in any case not at all suitable to become bishops: the very ‘monastic’ monk makes a disastrous bishop, as he has no concept of family life and the general realities of life in the world. If they do become bishops they make the most crass decisions out of naivety, ordaining bandits and perverts and not ordaining the suitable.

Indeed, real monks flee even the possibility of the episcopate and have to be taken kicking and screaming for consecration. In some Local Churches, the situation is so dire that just any celibate can become a bishop, especially if he belongs to the right local wealthy family (one of four?). His faith is not very important, but being celibate and being from the right local wealthy family are. As a result, there are a lot of bishops who are bureaucrats, diplomats or just academics. Faith in Christ really does not count very much with them at all.

The main aim of the bishop-bureaucrat, ‘administrator’ or ‘effective manager’ (the Russian jargon) is to collect money and property, so gathering power into his hands. After all, marble, gold and flashy vestments, flats and cars need hard cash. How else can you show off how prestigious and powerful you are? A few years ago we saw one who had been appointed to another diocese. His first act was to buy himself a very fancy car.

That was him finished. Half the flock turned away at once and never returned. And frankly, why should they have? The previous bishop had travelled by public transport and had been respected for that, though admittedly he had travelled very little. The new bishop still could not understand how he had alienated half his flock in his first week (he only realised this about a year afterwards). Some years later he was removed after a large amount of money had disappeared……Another failure in a long line in that particular diocese, which appears to have a suicide wish, ordaining the incompetent and banishing the competent.

But why does a bishop need a chauffeur or a cook or a chancellery and to issue decrees (which are usually ignored anyway)? Ordinary people do not have a chauffeur or a cook or a chancellery and does not issue decrees. If they did, they too would soon find themselves as despised and ignored as their bishops.

Bishops are given power, which some of them think means suspending, depriving of living and home or defrocking righteous priests (and others) and ordaining their corrupt yes-men favourites in their place. Some cultivate this power into a kind of feudal arbitrary rule, the ability to strike terror and intimidate. It is impossible to pray with such bishops because they are bullies who simply traumatise. Little wonder that in one Local Church there is actually a trade-union for priests to defend themselves against such bullies.

The fear of some Synods of bishops to stand up to such bullies whom they themselves appointed discredits the episcopate because there are whole Synods which fall into cowardice and let the corrupt go on for years. There has to be another way, the way of justice. Let us make clear that we are not talking about those who deserve suspension and defrocking according to the canons. The very real fear of priests of being utterly unjustly suspended and defrocked is not their fault. It is the fault of tyrannical and unChristian bishops, who do not know the word Love. Trauma reigns. As for trust, that went out of the window decades ago.

Then there are the bishops who are mere diplomats or book-lovers, who hide in their cathedrals, never visiting their crumbling dioceses, and remain unknown to their flocks. They prefer speaking at conferences for intellectuals.

We have witnessed the conduct of certain bishops in the last year in relation to covid. Terrorised by the vague possibility of death with covid, they have closed themselves down and closed down their dioceses, threatening their priests with suspension and defrocking, if they so much as serve the liturgy or visit the sick, as in one group in one Diaspora country.  These conformists are those who, wishing to swim with the atheist State tide, go over and above even the demands of the atheist State in closing down their churches. The concept of churches in the catacombs is totally alien to such bishops, as they are totally integrated into the local Establishment (and local masonic lodge). I have had people asking if such bishops have any faith at all. In answer, I shrug my shoulders and look to the heavens. The fact is, I just don’t know.

On ordination 36 years ago I was told by an elderly Russian priest that ‘whatever you do, don’t contact the bishop unless it’s an emergency, you will annoy him’. Indeed, there are bishops I have heard of who actually forbid their clergy to contact them or make contact impossible because they refuse to answer any form of communication. They don’t want problems, and yet they are happy to interfere in the details of pastoral life and upset clergy and people alike, thus creating problems. Their heavy-handedness defies definition. One new and power-crazy bishop we know managed to alienate his whole diocese in just nine months. A quite remarkable feat. Surely a record? Unless you know better….

The Problem of the Priesthood

There are priest-careerists. You can tell them a mile off. Even the most unchurched person knows them. It is as though they carry an odour about them. And the odour is not that of eau-de-cologne, but the foul stench of money.

On the other hand, if you allow a married priesthood, as Christ did, it is only natural that the priest should earn enough money to look after his family. There are Orthodox bishops who condemn the cash-saving Roman Catholic solution, that is, imposing celibates only (sometimes homosexuals, sometimes worse). And that is exactly what some bishops do: ordain a 22-year-old, make him archimandrite and there you have it: a cheap parish priest.

Only, as happens quite often (I have known many examples), by the time they are 30 they want to get married. And they do. Not so far from here, we know a married archimandrite with two children, though his bishop left him priest. And actually I don’t blame him for doing so, but the bishop who ordained the married archimandrite at an uncanonical age. Another bishop we met would only ordain priests with two children or fewer. Those who did not use contraception could not be ordained: they were too expensive.

The problem is that such events do nothing to create respect for the clergy and parish life. The simple solution: in a small parish with 100 wage-earners, ask them to contribute 1% of their salary to the priest’s salary. This would mean that the priest would earn exactly the average salary of all his parishioners. If it is a medium-sized parish with 200 wage-earners, they will contribute 0.5% of their salary. Etc.

This brings us to the next and massive problem.

That is the lack of parishes. There are quite a few (though probably only a fifth of the number required) church buildings, but a parish is a different matter. A church is a building you ‘go to’ as often or as rarely as you want, for five minutes once a year (like the thousands who, I am told, ‘go to…’ (a church where there are never more than 200 present at any one time). There are others who attend a church at least three times a week and come before the start and leave after the end. Only they are parishioners. A parish is a community to which you belong, of which you are a member. And parishioners are people who socialise and help each other outside Sundays.

In Russia and most of ex-Communist Eastern Europe, parish life was almost completely destroyed by the Communists. Though, in truth, often parish life was very often very weak even before the Communists came. Which is precisely why the Communists came…..

To create a Church family, which is what a parish is, is not easy. It takes years. There are different nationalities, different ages, people live in different places, often far apart. And this brings us to our next section.

The Problem of the People

Most Orthodox Christians the world over are only nominal. This nominalism is the ‘hatch, match, dispatch’ variety. In other words, they go (at best) to church three times in a lifetime, for baptism, wedding and funeral. They are not Churched Orthodox, who belonged to the Church, whose priority is the Church. Some people ask why a Revolution in ‘Orthodox Russia’ took place. It was because of nominalism. When there is an attack on the Faith, the first people to lapse and even overnight become enemies of the Church are the nominal. Thus, in Soviet Russia, most of the militant Communists, from Stalin downwards, were baptised Orthodox. They were obviously not Churched Orthodox. Thus, we can see the fragility of ‘Orthodox countries’, where the majority are only nominal Orthodox. We can see the same fragility today where  clergy are State-paid. A fragility which worries. Those countries hang by a thread.

Nominalism is precisely why confession and communion are infrequent. Confession and communion, though two separate sacraments, together form a statement that we are Christians, that we repent and that we partake of Christ, the Head of the Church. Both are equally important, which is why they are so frequent and so closely linked. Some common questions of the baptised but unChurched are: What is confession? What is communion? I have never had them. Why can’t you give communion to my (unbaptised) baby? We now have the extraordinary Roman Catholic practice in some churches of communion always, but confession never. And they actually justify that as normal! What is this world that we live in?

Many people like to blame ‘the Church’ for everything. This sounds like a blasphemy, as the Church is Christ’s, His Mother’s (Who is the Mother of the Church), His saints’ and His angels’. However, by ‘the Church’, they do not actually mean Christ (which is what ‘Church’ means), but the clergy.

Yes, we are aware of the faults of the clergy (see the extensive lists above), but what about the faults of the people? The people statistically make up 2,444 out of every 2,445 Orthodox (90,000 bishops, priests and deacons out of 220 million), 99.945% of the Church. Where is the responsibility for the Faith of the people, their consciousness of belonging to ‘the royal priesthood’? Why this passive, consumerist attitude? This is not the attitude of Church people.

Some people blame the clergy for the obvious lack of missionary work. But it is much more their responsibility, as they are the vast majority. If nothing is done inside parishes, in internal missionary work, nothing can be done outside parishes, in external missionary work. Why is that we have to wait for bishops and priests to set up parishes, buy church buildings, do missionary work? All should start at the grassroots. And where do the clergy come from? They come from the people. Clergy are not born clergy! Is there truth in the old and harsh saying that: ‘The people get the clergy they deserve?’ The lack of zeal among the people for upright bishops surely results in what we have. We should not complain about our situation when it is our own fault.

Conclusion

What is the main problem of the Orthodox world? In my view, it is undoubtedly its sheer lack of Orthodoxy. At all three levels, as described above. This means the lack of dogmatic understanding and the lack of works of love, in other words, the lack of love, which in fact are the result of each other. For if you do not love God, you will not love your neighbour or yourself. Put simply: No respect for God = no respect for others = no self-respect.

Whenever in Church history the faithful people, most parish priests and monastics and the freely-appointed bishops have combined to defend the Faith against tyrants and monsters, they have created an unstoppable force, a force which radically changes the course of history. Why? Because they realise that they, only together, are the Church.

 

Together in Life, Together in Heaven: Ten Questions and Answers on Martyrdom of the Russian Imperial Family

  1. Who ordered the murder of the Russian Imperial Family in 1918?

The seven members of the Imperial Family and their four faithful servants were shot and bayoneted to death in the very early morning, probably just before 1 a.m., of 17 July 1918. This took place in the requisitioned house of a military engineer called Nikolai N. Ipatiev in the city of Ekaterinburg in the Urals on the very limits of Europe and Asia. This house had been built on the site of the Church of the Ascension, which had stood there in the eighteenth century.

From studies in post-Soviet Russia, for example those by the senior official investigator,  V. N. Soloviov, it seems that the murder of the Imperial Family was carried out only on the initiative of the local Urals Regional Soviet. The Bolsheviks in the industrial city of ‘Red Ekaterinburg’ were particularly militant, hateful and also powerful, showing great independence from Moscow. In any case, no proof has been found of co-ordination between the local Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg and Lenin in Moscow or anyone else.

However, it is clear that Lenin would have had the Imperial Family murdered in any case and with the backing of his financial and political sponsors abroad, for example in New York. However, Lenin had wanted some sort of show trial first. It is also clear that the Soviet leaders and ordinary Bolsheviks who did not actually order the murder were not upset when it did occur. Thus, although they did not order it, they were quite capable of doing so and would have done it anyway in time. Probably they even felt relief that others had done the dirty work for them so soon.

  1. Were their murderers Jews?

Although the top Bolshevik elite in 1917 was 90% Jewish by race (but militant atheists by religion and mocking their ancestral religion and mercilessly slaughtering Non-Bolshevik Jews), ordinary Bolsheviks were overwhelmingly Russian. As the Old Bolsheviks, largely Jewish, died (Lenin was only a quarter Jewish) or were murdered (like Trotsky), they were replaced by Russians or those of other nationalities, like the Georgians Stalin and Beria, or later the Ukrainian Khushchov. Of the ten murderers (not ‘executioners’, as the secular West calls them) of the Imperial Family, eight were Russian, one was, probably, Latvian and only one was Jewish, although he was in charge of the other killers. However, this latter, Yankel Yurovsky, was a Jew who had long before been baptised a Protestant and had nothing to do with his Jewish family or religion. Therefore, he was Jewish only by race.

Indeed, several foreign soldiers, perhaps Latvians or Austro-Hungarians, had categorically refused to pull the trigger and murder the Family, especially the children. The fact – however terrible – is that the ten murderers were all baptised Christians, eight of them Russians. Their names were: Yurovsky, Kabanov, M. Medvedev, P. Medvedev, Netrebin, Nikulin, Strekotin, Tselms (probably, and probably Latvian), Vaganov and Yermakov. This fact that they were all officially Christians should be reflected on.

This is also why the Church Outside Russia canonised the Imperial Family and their servants as martyrs, whereas in 2000 the Church inside Russia canonised only the Family as Passion-Bearers. The difference here is only that the term ‘Passion-Bearer’ is used only when the murderers are nominal Christians and not pagans. However, in reality the terms are largely interchangeable.

  1. Was their murder a ritual murder?

There is no such thing as a ’ritual murder’. This whole Non-Orthodox myth was invented in the Roman Catholic Middle Ages. It began in Norman England, with the notorious case of the murder of ‘William of Norwich’ in 1144, the first such case. The myth, based largely on jealousy of the wealth of certain elite-connected Jews, finally spread from Catholic Poland into the western Ukraine only in the late nineteenth century. Anyone who reads about the chaos of the murders at the Ipatiev House, carried out by militant atheists and Non-Jews, can see that there was no system (rituals are by definition always systematic) and had no connection with any religion whatsoever. The myth of ‘ritual murders’ is pure anti-Semitism, as is the myth of ‘kabbalistic’ signs on an inside wall of the Ipatiev House. They were simple scribbles.

  1. Why did many not believe that the remains of the nine victims, found in 1979, and those of the two victims, Alexei and Maria, found in 2007, were those of the Imperial Family and their servants?

The second early investigator of the murder, N. A. Sokolov, (well before him the first investigator, I. A. Sergiev, had done nearly all the work) was appointed by the White Army in 1919. He could not find the remains of the Imperial Family and therefore concluded that the victims’ bodies had been consumed by fire, petroleum and sulphuric acid. In reality, only the martyrs’ clothing and shoes had been burned on bonfires. His ‘conclusion’ – although in fairness it was only a preliminary conclusion because he had not had time to finish his investigation – came about simply because he could not find the remains, even though he had passed by their site. Many, if not all, at the time and for long afterwards, believed in his conclusions/suppositions for lack of any other information, and a few still do believe in him today.

Sokolov was not a chemist or a forensic scientist, just a legal man – and also a convinced anti-Semite – and did not realise that you need very high temperatures – about 1,000 C – and huge amounts of sulphuric acid in order to destroy eleven human bodies. These had not been available. Others blindly repeated his suppositions, even adding the speculation that the bodies had been burned to cinders and their heads had been sent to Moscow. This latter wild and proofless speculation was made only because the investigators had found no teeth – by far the most difficult part of a human body to destroy. In reality, there were no teeth, simply because the bodies with their heads and therefore teeth had not been found. However, there are still a few who believe these suppositions, even today, though probably for ideological (anti-Semitic) reasons or out of personal vanity and wish for publicity.

  1. How can we be sure that ‘the Ekaterinburg Remains’ are indeed the relics of the Imperial Family?

We are 99.999999% sure of this just from the two sets of extremely thorough genetic studies on the unique remains, conducted internationally. If you add to this the locations and the number of bodies (eleven), the post-Revolutionary period when they were killed, their ages, the way they were killed, the type of bullets and other fragments found with them, as well as the dental records showing very clearly that the victims’ teeth had been treated by world-class dentists, I can see no rational way in which there can be any doubt about their identity.

  1. In that case, why have the Church authorities been so slow in recognising the remains as the Imperial Family’s relics?

The first genetic tests were carried out in the 1990s under the Yeltsin government, which of course no-one trusted, as it was notorious for its lies, just as all the Communist governments before it had been notorious for their lies. After all, Yeltsin himself had ordered the destruction of the Ipatiev House less than twenty years earlier, in September 1977, for the sixtieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Since the remains could eventually be venerated as holy relics, the Church authorities, also distrusting Yeltsin, had to be absolutely certain of their identity. You cannot make a mistake if you are going to present remains as relics. This is why a second batch of genetic tests were made on the basis of even more advanced DNA science, their results being released on the centenary of the martyrdom in 2018. The findings coincided with the first ones.

Secondly, perhaps more importantly still, the Church authorities have had to face the opposition of sectarian elements inside Russia, who are largely anti-Semitic. Only now are the Church authorities dealing with them. The bishops have always feared a schism, however small, on the subject of the identification of the remains.

Thirdly, the Church authorities know that in post-Soviet Russia there are those of the other extreme, opposed to the far right anti-Semites. These are the liberal and atheist elements opposed to the enshrinement of the relics, just as they were – and are – opposed to the very canonisation of the Imperial Martyrs. Indeed, inside Russia itself, the Church authorities have still not canonised three of the four servants of the Seven Imperial Martyrs (see below).

Outside Russia we should not be surprised at this or, even worse, feel smug. Even the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), supposedly free, only made up its mind about canonising the Imperial Martyrs and four of their servants in 1981, 63 years late! This is scandalous. And even here there were some members of the Church Outside Russia who opposed the canonisation, as I well remember. Anyone who remembers the very hostile reactions to the 1981 canonisation outside ROCOR, on the part of the liberal Paris Russian Jurisdiction (founded by the very Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar) and the Parisian-influenced OCA, let alone the mocking reactions of the secular media, will recall just how virulent the opposition to the canonisation was.

  1. Why are there no miracles from the relics, which do not give out myrrh or perfume?

I think there are many miracles from them. The fall of the Soviet Union was only the first one.

As regards the actual relics, not all relics give off fragrance or myrrh. In any case, relics need faith to work miracles. This we can see time and again from Christ’s words in the Gospels – ‘according to your faith be it unto you’ (Matt. 9, 29). Christ Himself could not work miracles in Nazareth, where he had spent most of his life, precisely because of the faithlessness of the inhabitants (Matt 13, 58 and Mark 6, 5-6). In the Gospels Christ says time and again: ‘Thy faith has healed thee’. In other words, there is no healing without faith. At this moment, nine sets of relics, which lie in the St Catherine’s chapel in the Church of St Peter and Paul in its Fortress in Saint Petersburg, are closed off and cannot be venerated by the faithful. Disgracefully, the relics of St Alexei and St Maria are not even enshrined in the church. We cannot even venerate these relics physically.

  1. In Moscow the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate has not canonised three of the servants of the Family, though it did recently canonise one of them, Dr Eugene Botkin. Many say that it cannot canonise all of them in any case, since one was a Roman Catholic and another was a Protestant.

These four servants were all canonised by the Church Outside Russia in 1981 together with the Imperial Family. I questioned the very conservative Archbishop Antony of Los Angeles about this matter, when I accompanied him to visit Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich in Paris in autumn 1991. He explained to me that this issue had been discussed by the ROCOR Synod in New York well before the 1981 canonisation. The Synod had accepted the age-old practice of the Church that anyone who was martyred for the Faith, even though unbaptised, was considered to have been baptised in their blood.

There are many such examples of baptism in blood in Church history. The fact that of two Orthodox martyrs, one was a Roman Catholic and another was a Protestant, should surely be considered as Providential: this is a call to the Non-Orthodox world to follow in the footsteps of the Imperial servants, as indeed is the canonisation of the converted Tsarina Alexandra herself, though she had been chrismated into the Orthodox Faith before her wedding in 1894. We are all called to be Imperial servants, servants of the Christian Empire, the Empire of Christ.

  1. If the remains are eventually accepted by the whole Church as holy relics, should the relics be enshrined at Porosionkov Log, where they were found?

The area a few miles to the north of Ekaterinburg where the relics were found in 1979 and, 67 metres away, in 2007, was renamed Porosionkov Log (‘Piglet’s Ravine’) only in the nineteenth century, as a result of the amount of mud there which attracted pigs. Originally there had been a large lake here, but when the railway was built across this area, the land around the large pond became very boggy with no drainage. It would not be possible to build a large stone church here, but only a small wooden church on piles. This is the case four and a half miles away at Ganina Yama (‘Gabriel’s Pit’), where the murderers burned the victims’ clothes and belongings and first and unsuccessfully tried to dispose of the relics in the early morning of 17 July 1918. Here there now stand wooden churches dedicated to each of the Imperial Martyrs.

  1. In your view what should happen to the relics now?

Tsar Nicholas II repeatedly said that he wanted to be buried in Saint Petersburg. He spent most of his life as Tsar at Tsarskoe Selo (‘The Tsar’s Village’), just outside Saint Petersburg. Here the whole family was happy, rather than among the mean-minded gossip, criminal slander and treasonous intrigues of jealous aristocrats in Saint Petersburg. Surely, it is here in the spacious grounds of Tsarskoe Selo, where the Family spent so many happy times together, that a huge Cathedral dedicated to the Imperial Martyrs could be raised up, with the relics of all of them at last reunited and enshrined inside. This would become a pilgrimage centre for Orthodox the world over. The Imperial Family: Together in life, together in heaven. From here tiny splinters of relics could be sent out all over the world, so that their veneration could be confirmed as worldwide, as indeed it already is, and for the repentance of all. Then clearly visible miracles would begin, including the transfiguration of Post-Soviet Russia into Orthodox Russia and the beginning of the realisation in Western countries that they cannot continue as they are now, in their state of apostasy from Christ.

Holy Imperial Martyrs, Pray to God for us!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

St John of Shanghai Church, Colchester, England

 

Blessed Xenia of Saint Petersburg

24 January/6 February 2021

 

Two Questions and Answers on the Contemporary Russian Orthodox Church

Questions: I have two questions.

Firstly: As you surely know, there are several currents in the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church. For example, you mentioned elsewhere the recent defrockings of two diametrically opposed personalities, Sergei Romanov and Andrei Kurayev, who represented two extreme currents. Which current do you belong to?

Secondly: Do you think there has there been mass repentance in Russia with the hundred million baptisms that followed the fall of the Soviet Union?

Answers: I am not keen on the word ‘current’, it suggests ‘school’, as though the Church were divided into different groups or subcultures. The Church has no need to be not divided and can still be broad on non-dogmatic questions. In other words, there is always diversity and different interpretations exist in the Church on non-essential issues. This is because we are not a sect, where only those with very narrow and intolerant minds are allowed. As long as we understand that these ‘currents’ overlap and are not rigidly self-exclusive, which would be sectarian and lead outside the Church, like the groups represented by the two extremists you mention above, then I can reply to your first question.

I can identify eight different ‘currents’ in the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church, in four groups of two. The first six currents are minority, even dying, currents, the last two are the majority currents.

A: Political Currents from the Past:

  1. Pre-Soviet Nationalist Nostalgia

Though they have now died, there used to be many aristocratic émigrés with their children who proclaimed that the pre-Revolutionary State was almost ideal. This was often really cultural nostalgia for a privileged childhood. It was precisely mainly the aristocrats and bureaucrats, often corrupt and some of whom emigrated, who betrayed and overthrew the Tsar. Once in the emigration, many of these people were more anti-Communists than Orthodox, all they wanted was their money and lands back from the Bolsheviks. The destiny and mission of the Church did not interest them. There was no theology here, just psychology.

Today, some of the descendants of those emigres follow in their footsteps, as well as some insecure converts in the ex-Soviet Union, who also suffer from nostalgia for an idealised past, which provides them with psychological security. They never ask themselves the question why the Revolution took place and why it was at least passively accepted by so many, if everybody had been so happy before it. If they studied the pre-Revolutionary Church in its 200-year state of enslavement to Germanic State bureaucracy, they would understand much. But many do not want to know about this because that would entail repentance on their part. They prefer to demand repentance from others, in the spirit of the Pharisees.

  1. Soviet Nationalist Nostalgia

There are still quite a few elderly or even middle-aged people inside the ex-Soviet Union who, though now baptised, have constructed a myth that the Soviet Union was Orthodox. This can even go to the extreme of idolising Stalin, whom they oppose to the foreign enemies of national Russia, Lenin and Trotsky (overlooking that Stalin was also a foreign enemy). This is largely nationalism, together with childhood nostalgia for the security and imagined prestige they had in the Soviet Union.

They forget the interminable queues, shortages, wastage, injustices and above all the red terror, genocides and Gulag, which were all inherent parts of Soviet ideology from Lenin onwards. Ultimately, such ‘Stalinist Orthodox’ are simply the victims of Soviet brainwashing. Their refusal to acknowledge the facts of history and the anti-Christian and other genocides carried out by the criminal monsters who ran the anti-Russian Soviet State from 1917 on is astounding. As usual with people like this, they do not want to know the truth because otherwise they would have to re-evaluate everything, above all their own lives.

B: Political Currents from the Present:

  1. Post-Soviet Russian Nationalism

There are those who are nominally Orthodox, but only because they are Russian and feel threatened by the wave of Westernisation that has unfurled on the ex-Soviet Union since 1991. You can read articles and books written by such people but they rarely attend Church services. Some of them revere imagined Slav paganism. For them the Church is often just an ideology which they try and use for their own ideological purposes and for defensive self-justification.

  1. Post-Soviet Euro-Americanism

Unlike the above, there are the rootless elitists who hate Russia. They are the spiritual descendants of the Westernisers of the nineteenth century. These modern Westernisers, like the CIA agent Navalny, want Russia to become just more American colonies, divided into various ‘protectorates’, as Hitler had intended, with the natives herded onto reservations, as the elite did to the natives of North America. They descend spiritually from the aristocratic and middle-class Europhile traitors who overthrew the Tsar in 1917 and had him and his family murdered, imagining they would retain their power and riches as Western puppets. They have clearly learned nothing from the recent Ukrainian catastrophe. For them the Church is irrelevant and has nothing to say to the world, but must instead slavishly ape the spiritually bankrupt West.

C: The Two Neophyte Currents:

  1. The Ritualist Neophytes

There are those who, new to the Faith, become very attached to external rituals to an almost superstitious or magical degree, that of folklore. They often elevate purely local customs such as bathing in holes in the ice on 19th January to some kind of obligation, far higher than holy communion. Sometimes this results in a certain phariseeism. In Greece such would be inclined to old calendarism, in the Russian context this comes out as an inclination to old ritualism. It is difficult to dissuade such narrow and closed neophytes that ritualism is to be avoided as we are saved not by rituals, but by Christ. This is because they are so emotional and irrational that they do not lend themselves to rational persuasion.

  1. The Modernist Neophytes

There are those who, new to the Faith, become very attached to a merely intellectual knowledge of the Faith. They are the modern saducees, renovationists, liberals and westernisers, intellectual neophytes – rationalists, who do not believe in very much, except their own intellectual concepts. Many of them follow the Moscow renovationist Kochetkov, whom the ex-Bishop Basil (Osborne) wanted to appoint rector of his London Cathedral before his Sourozh schism and who was adored by the late French modernist philosopher Olivier Clement, who so heartily detested the Russian Church. Such people may well read the CIA newspaper The Moscow Echo or listen to the CIA Radio Liberty and read books written by the notorious ‘Paris’ philosophers, whether they lived in France, England or the USA.

D: The Two Main Currents:

  1. The Bureaucrats

There are the bureaucrats, centralisers, careerists, who love money, power and protocols far more than Christ, who always slavishly follow the State, whether it is in Russia, Romania, Greece or, in England, the Anglican Establishment. These are the sort who put St John of Shanghai on trial because they hated the Truth. The diplomacy of lies prevails amongst them, for they have little sense of reality, for they have never suffered, living in clouds of naïve unreality, surrounded by flattering yes-men favourites. These are the anti-missionaries, who destroy Church life instead of spreading it, who suspend and defrock good priests and promote grasping bandits, discrediting the Church among the faithful.

These are the sort who, obsessed by paperwork, implement covid rules with more zeal than even the unbelieving Anglican elite. They refuse to understand that covid was sent to them to bring them to repentance. These are the anti-pastors, the anti-missionaries, the dessicated bishops, the dried-out and formalist monks, who have no love, especially hating married clergy and families. They have little pastoral understanding or sympathy, for they hate the truth about themselves and their persecuting jealousy. They prefer to fill their few churches with gold and marble, as hard as their souls, for they do not love the poor, even if they do understand that the poor exist; they prefer rituals. This is the type of dried-up bishop who was exactly portrayed by Paul Chavchavadze in his novel ‘Father Vikenty’ (London 1957).

  1. The Orthodox

We belong not to Paul, or to Apollos or to Cephas, but to Christ and His Saints and Martyrs, in the spirit of St John of Shanghai. We Orthodox are those whom the secular world calls ‘the mystically aware’, to whom Christ said, ‘As the world hated me, it will hate you’. Despite their very mean persecution for this faithfulness and even their censorship, we venerate all the saints, ancient and contemporary, including the recent saints, the Tsar, his Family and all his servants, together with all the New Martyrs and New Confessors, for the Church is founded on the blood of the martyrs and the faithfulness of the confessors.

However, the world and the worldly hate the saints and permanently rebuke us for our zeal. We follow the miracle-working St John of Kronstadt, whose bureaucrat-bishop appointed him rector of the parish that he had founded and built only after 40 years. We follow the holy elder Fr Nikolai Guryanov, alone on his island and ignored until great old age. We believe in the international mission and destiny of the Orthodox Church to bring to Christ willing people from all the nations, regardless of nationality and tongue. We will always be persecuted by the truth-hating bureaucrats who have no love for us and our worldwide missionary work.

In reply to your second question:

In the ex-Soviet Union there has been mass superficial conversion, but no deep mass repentance. The latter has concerned perhaps only 5% of the population. This has been made clear by the facts that Lenin’s rotten corpse still lies by the Moscow Kremlin, where stands a monument to Stalin, and the whole Russian Federation is littered with statues and place-names celebrating the atheist brutes who murdered tens of millions of baptised Orthodox and other innocents. The refusal of many to discover and venerate the Royal Martyrs, to read and love the Lives of the New Martyrs in general, the failure to stop mass abortion and divorce, the existence of mass corruption, cremation and other pagan practices prove that Orthodox Russia does not yet exist.

This is why there can be no restoration of the Orthodox monarchy and so re-creation of the Orthodox Empire yet. The existence of nationalist schisms in the Ukraine, the failure to bring to Christ millions of the peoples of the former Russian Empire, Kazakhs, Latvians, Yakuts, Mongols and so on, shows that all that exists is post-Soviet Russia, not Orthodox Russia. If Russia were Orthodox, its neighbours would also be Orthodox. They are not. There is far to go. The calls to repentance are to be repeated for long until the long-awaited day of justice and restoration comes.

 

How Will the Church in the Diaspora Survive Covid?

Introduction: The Orthodox Diaspora

Although the Orthodox Diaspora in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia has existed for well over a century, it represented little more than embassy churches until 1917. Then, after the overthrow of the Russian Empire by Westernised aristocratic atheists and then Westernised middle-class atheists, it grew enormously. Without the Russian Empire to protect them, there followed the political and economic collapse of Greece, Cyprus, Orthodox communities under the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem and more immigration, especially after 1945.

More recently the Diaspora greatly expanded after the fall of  the post-1945 Stalinist Empire all over Eastern Europe and, in 1991, the Soviet Union. This collapse has especially affected now EU countries, with Orthodox populations, like Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltics. But what spiritual, and therefore real, identity and significance does the Diaspora have? Does it have any long-term future or will it inevitably disappear into the Western atheist melting-pot of assimilation? What identity can the Orthodox Diaspora have in a spiritually alien and hostile environment?

Two Negative Identities

On the one hand, some look on the Diaspora as merely nationalistic entities. They see it as a mere conduit for cultural nostalgia for a distant and long-abandoned ‘old country’, for flag-waving. But those who hold processions headed by flags, and not by the Cross, are doomed to die out. It comes as no surprise that, generally, the more nationalistic the community, the more its churches closed during covid. After all, one can wave flags at home; why take risks by going to church? Only those who live by faith do not fear death and take communion. The rest, who live by nationalism, disappeared ‘for fear of the Jews’. Moreover, many of them may never return.

On the other hand, some look on the Diaspora as a set of groups which will be assimilated – inevitably. Diaspora-born children and succeeding generations lose their parents’ language and culture; what possible interest can they have in the cultures of countries which they do not know and whose languages they can barely speak? Either the children and grandchildren have adopted another language and another flag, or else they are indifferent to any language except the one they use at school and to all flags. Covid will hardly bring them back to church. If they have been given no spiritual identity, they assimilate.

Conclusion: A Positive Identity

The Church in the Diaspora can only survive, especially after covid, if it is a Local Church. This means a Church which brings together all the Orthodox of whatever nationality and language in the local area and gives them the Orthodox Christian spiritual  and therefore cultural – not nationalistic – identity. Moreover, such ‘local’ Orthodox can only be brought together on the basis of real Faith, on the basis of uncompromised Orthodoxy, and not on the basis of the lowest common denominators of a hotchpotch of folklore. That only produces the escapism of fakery, the irrelevant fairy-tale pretence of being something you are not.

If any jurisdiction is to survive in the post-covid Diaspora (and many are already dying out or have died out), it will be the one which by origin is multinational and also uses the local language – though not exclusively. Such a jurisdiction will give a spiritual identity to its people as the exclusive bearers of local and universal real Christianity, not of folklore or a foreign language – though many may speak one – but of the unique Christian Civilisation, of the unique Christian values which only Orthodox who go to Church hold and live by. Our Orthodox Christianity is a way of life, not an exotic hobby.