Category Archives: Orthodox Unity

Fourteen into Twenty-Four: The Patriarchs and First Hierarchs of the Fourteen Local Churches Meet on Mt Athos, 8 February 2026

On 6, 7 and 8 February 2026 the Patriarchs of Constantinople, New Jerusalem, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Tbilisi, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, and the First Hierarchs of the five other Local Churches, of Skopje, Warsaw, Nicosia, Prague and Tirana, together with Metropolitan Tikhon of the OCA, the Metropolitans of Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Uzhhorod and Kampala, the Metropolitans of the two Metropolias in Moldova, and senior hierarchs from the Diaspora, together with their delegations, met in the Skete of St Andrew. This church, built by the Russian Tsar Alexander II, is the largest church on the multinational Holy Mountain, which is under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

They were at last able to meet in freedom to resolve the only two issues which have troubled and divided the Church for generations. Firstly, they met to put an end to the schisms between the Patriarchates of New Jerusalem, Constantinople and Alexandria. Secondly, they met to grant canonical status to the many millions of Orthodox living in, and to Orthodox who for generations have been born in, Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, entrusting their destiny in each case to organisation by the Patriarchate with the most Orthodox living on those territories, with the guidance of the Mother-Churches of the minorities.

By repentance for past errors, including allowing the CIA to penetrate the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria and New Jerusalem, directly through allowing its agents to be planted inside them, and indirectly through adopting its oligarchic mentality, and by the prayers of those present and of the monastics of the Holy Mountain of Athos, they reached the following resolutions:

New Jerusalem

As many will know, before this meeting the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Rus had been renamed the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus and its headquarters had been moved to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. It also refrocked all Russian Orthodox clergy who had been defrocked for political reasons since 24 February 2022 in Russia, Lithuania, Western Europe and elsewhere.

In accord with the Church of Constantinople, the newly-appointed Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod granted autocephaly to three new Local Churches, whose faithful had for centuries lived on its canonical territory. These are:

The Kievan Rus Orthodox Church (Kievan Rus is the new country established last year, whose territory corresponds to most of the western and central parts of the old Soviet Ukraine), headed by Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev. All Orthodox in Kievan Rus are called on to join this new Church, as the Patriarchate of Constantinople has now given up its jurisdiction there.

The Belarussian Orthodox Church, headed by the Metropolitan of Minsk.

The Baltic Orthodox Church (covering the territories of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland), headed by the new Metropolitan of Riga. All Orthodox in Finland, Estonia and Lithuania are called on to join these new Churches, as the Patriarchate of Constantinople has now given up its jurisdiction there.

Additionally, in accord with the other Patriarchs present, the new Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod granted autocephaly to a fourth new Local Church, the Carpatho-Rus and Hungarian Orthodox Church, whose territory covers the Zakarpattia province of the old Soviet Ukraine and Hungary. It is headed by the Metropolitan of Uzhhorod and Budapest, but has deaneries for Greeks, Serbs and other Orthodox nationalities present in Hungary under the new Church.

Constantinople

As many will know, before this meeting the new Patriarch of Constantinople, previously the Archbishop of Athens, and his Synod had moved the headquarters of the Patriarchate from Istanbul in Turkiye to Thessaloniki in Greece, with the absorption of the Greek Orthodox Church. This move was financed by a very generous donation made by the government of the Russian Federation for its infrastructure costs. However, Turkiye, together with Greece, remain the canonical territories of the now Greece-based Patriarchate of Constantinople and a bishop remains in Istanbul.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople recognised the (North) Macedonian Orthodox Church as an autocephalous Local Church.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople recognised the autocephaly granted by the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem to the four new Churches on the territories of Kievan Rus, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, Carpatho-Rus and Hungary, and will recognise any autocephaly granted in the future, if necessary, to Orthodox in Central Asia, Japan, China and Korea by the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus. All Non-Russian Orthodox on those territories must already join the local jurisdictions of the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem there in their own deaneries.

It recognised that the Patriarchate of Bucharest has sole authority to establish a Western European Orthodox Church for Orthodox living in its at present 21 countries of Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Monaco, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Italy, San Marino, Malta, since Bucharest has by far the largest number of Orthodox on those territories. It will be headed by the Romanian Metropolitan of Paris and Western Europe, but will have dioceses and deaneries for Greeks, Russians of all three Russian groups, Kievan Russians, Moldovans, Serbs, Bulgarians, Georgians and other Orthodox nationalities in Western Europe.

In return, all Local Orthodox Churches recognised that the Patriarchate of Constantinople has sole authority to establish a new Northern America Orthodox Church (USA, Canada, Greenland, Bermuda and St Pierre et Miquelon) and a new Local Oceanian Orthodox Church, in concert with all the Local Churches represented on those territories, since it has by far the largest flock there. Notably the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem cedes jurisdiction of its own parishes, withdraws the Tomos of Autocephaly of the OCA, and cedes jurisdiction of the churches of the OCA and ROCOR in Northern America, including the abolition of the OCA Synod in Washington and the ROCOR Synod in New York, to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. However, the first First Hierarch of the Northern American Orthodox Church will be Metr Tikhon, formerly of the OCA. Orthodox of Non-Greek nationality both in Northern America and Oceania, under the Metropolitan of Sydney and All Oceania, will be cared for in their own dioceses and deaneries under the new Local Church.

Alexandria

The new Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and his Synod ceded jurisdiction of all African countries, except for Egypt, to the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem, thus returning to its Patriarchal territory of 100 years ago. All clergy defrocked by the Patriarchate of Alexandra for political reasons since 2019 were refrocked. In return, the government of the Russian Federation made a very generous donation to the Patriarchate of Alexandria and to St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai to continue Church life in Egypt and Sinai.

In accord with the other Patriarchs present, the Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod jointly granted autocephaly to all Orthodox on the territory of Africa, outside Egypt, founding the African Orthodox Church, headed by the Metropolitan of Kampala and his Synod of African bishops.

Antioch

The Patriarch of Antioch and his Synod was granted sole authority to establish a Latin America and Caribbean Orthodox Church, as it has by far the largest flock there. Orthodox of Non-Arab nationality in Latin America and the Caribbean will be cared for in their own dioceses and deaneries under the new Local Church.

Bucharest

The Patriarch of Bucharest and his Synod and the Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod jointly granted autocephaly to all Orthodox on the territory of Moldova, forming the Moldovan Orthodox Church. The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem refrocked all Orthodox clergy, who had been defrocked for political reasons for joining the former Metropolia of Bessarabia.

As mentioned above, the Patriarch of Bucharest and his Synod was granted sole authority to establish a new Local Church of the 21 countries of Western Europe (see above). Orthodox of Non-Romanian nationality will be cared for by self-governing dioceses and deaneries of their respective Local Churches, but under the new Western European Orthodox Church.

In this way, the number of Autocephalous Orthodox Churches, now standing at 20 after the absorption of the Greek Orthodox Church into the Patriarchate of Constantinople and of the OCA into the Northern American Orthodox Church, and the foundation of the six new Autocephalous Churches, will be brought to 24 Local Churches, once the four new Diaspora Churches have been established within the next twelve months.

The ending of the schism between New Jerusalem, Constantinople and Alexandria was confirmed in the church of St Andrew by the concelebration of all those present on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, 8 February 2026. This meeting is already being called ‘The First Athonite Council’ and ‘The Bread and Water Council’, since that was the only food and drink provided during the three days for the participants in the Council.

 

 

 

 

Twelve Questions and Answers on the Ukraine January 2025

Foreword

The conflict in the Ukraine has been reshaping the world ever since 2022. First of all, there was mass emigration from the Ukraine to Europe by both genuine refugees (millions of these were evacuated to or fled to Russia) and others who just wanted to take advantage of Western political ideology and propaganda. Paying for them was bankrupting for Western European countries. Even more bankrupting were the suicidal, self-imposed, anti-Russian, in fact anti-Western, sanctions. Then it became apparent that the Western world was now isolated – China, India, Latin America and Africa, which know all about Western colonialism, either directly took the Russian side, or gave no support to the West. The old ‘Third World’, called by the politically correct name pf the ‘Global South’, became the Global Majority, the 87% of the world supporting Russia.

The development of the Russian-founded BRICS, now with Indonesia, was vastly accelerated after Western sanctions and illegal confiscations in 2022. Suicidal Western sanctions against Russia also vastly accelerated the boom of the powerful Russian economy, which soon became the fourth largest economy in the world, overtaking both Germany and Japan. It was clear that the post-1945 settlement, the world led by the US and Western-dominated, was over. This was confirmed by the US election results, which chose the nationalist, but not imperialist, Trump, who had survived two assassination attempts. As a result of the self-imposed collapse of Western European economies, unable to print dollars like the US, whose governments, after depriving themselves of cheap Russian gas, oil, fertilisers, cereals and minerals, began to collapse.

The latest disastrously managed Establishment regime to collapse is the Canadian, notorious for supporting Ukrainian Nazis. The propagandised and brainwashed peoples of the Western world are finally waking up and refusing to vote for their corrupt and authoritarian oligarchic elites, from which they no longer receive any benefit. Instead of Russia being regime-changed, which is what the Western elite falsely claimed was to happen at the beginning of 2022, Western regimes regime-changed themselves, starting with the rejected Biden. These regime changes were due to the curse of their support for Kiev, which seems to have the Midas touch in reverse. Now national-patriotic parties of left and right are taking over Europe, with the agenda of the overthrow of EU tyranny and the reset of relations with Russia after its victory in the Ukraine.

  1. Why does Trump want to end Biden’s Ukraine project?

Like most Americans, and like all successful American businessmen, Donald Trump does not like losers. That is why he got the US out of the war it had lost in Afghanistan. And this is why he is ending Washington’s next losing and bankrupting project in Kiev. He is a dealmaker, not a loser, especially not in a distant and notoriously corrupt country, in which the US has no strategic interest. Biden was surrounded with people who had an ideology to impose. As a pragmatist, Trump now has to manage the defeat of the Biden ‘Project Ukraine’, making it look as far as possible like a triumph for himself. Whatever we may think of Trump with his many obvious faults, he is a pragmatist. The Biden ideologists are now leaving the sinking ship.

Trump’s pragmatism and America First nationalism are the strategic logic why he wants to control his side of the Arctic. He would like to get the ten provinces and three territories of Canada to join the USA. To some that seems like a fantasy for the moment, especially in the form of one single state, but it may happen. Canada is only just over a tenth of the USA in terms of population. And Trump may very well purchase Greenland, just as the USA purchased Alaska before. How much would Greenland’s 50,000 people want to vote yes to US rule in a referendum? $100,000 each? $5 billion in all? This is a fraction of the $177 billion that the US taxpayer has been forced to waste in the Ukraine. Tiny Denmark’s colonial claims are totally irrelevant here and Greenland long ago left the EU.

Greenland with Canada could create 64 states in the USA and consolidate Northern America into one single geographical, political, economic and cultural entity, the largest country in the world, with US ownership of the Panama Canal and ‘The Gulf of America’ reinforcing that nationalism. This Trumpian policy of US national security behind a sphere of influence is exactly what President Putin is doing – securing his borders. And Trump, not Biden, is already the de facto President, ruling from Florida. In effect, whether he realises it or not, Trump is preparing Northern America to enter the multipolar world of BRICS, as one of six Great Powers: China, India, Russia, Brazil and Latin America, South Africa and Africa, and then Northern America/USA.

Finally, there is the humanitarian side of this immense post-Soviet tragedy. Knowing that the Kiev Ukrainians have lost over a million troops, killed and wounded, and the eastern Ukrainians, Chechens and Russians have lost over 100,000 troops  killed and wounded, who would not want an end to the conflict? There will be so many Ukrainian (called ‘Russian’) brides, as there is no-one to marry. The men are dead and crippled.

The country has been destroyed, all on account of the West Ukrainian-Hitlerite fantasy that the Ukraine could win a conflict launched against a Superpower, a conflict that the Ukrainian people had clearly rejected before it even began, just as they had rejected NATO, both then and now. Only the panicking EU and UK elites and Zelensky and his gang in Kiev want the conflict to continue. Neither Putin, nor Trump wants this. Above all, the Ukrainian people do not want to be, and never wanted to be, victims of this obscene tragedy of power politics. 84% of them want peace talks to begin now.

  1. Once Trump hands over the Ukraine project to Europe, why don’t the EU and the UK simply take the place of the US as sponsors of the Kiev regime?

There are two reasons why they cannot do this.

Firstly, Western Europe is financially bankrupt. It has no more to give, neither from its depleted arms stocks, nor from its empty bank vaults, especially not the UK.

Secondly, it is morally bankrupt. On its conscience, together with that of the Biden regime, is the war crime of having had killed or maimed over a million Ukrainian men, soon from the age of eighteen up, told to fight and die for the West by their racist masters ‘to the last Ukrainian’, and all for nothing, certainly not for the Ukraine. What does it matter to them if Slavs die? They are subhuman anyway….

The Western world is going to get a new elite for whom the conquest of Kiev is not existential, unlike for the present elite of the legacy parties and the legacy media. They have staked everything on the loser in Kiev in their desperate attempt to expand their ramshackle EU empire eastwards. Instead, the prosperous Russian Federation is consolidating Eurasia, moving westwards, retaking Orthodox land, and other countries will soon come into Russia’s economic orbit, including Germany, whose now faltered success is dependent on Russia. Victory in the Ukraine is only the start. The new European elite will, like Trump, be composed of those who are opposed to the Globalists’ proxy war in the Ukraine.

This is already happening with leaders like Orban, Fico, Meloni, Georgescu, Le Pen, Weidel of the AfD (supported by Musk), and Farage. It is exactly the same process Europewide. For good or for ill, the national-patriotic parties in Western Europe have grown from support of 5% to 10%, from 15% to 20% and are now polling 25% to 30%. Who knows how far they will expand further? In most Western European countries, these new parties are already the second biggest parties in their respective countries, like the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK. These are at present heading towards becoming the biggest parties.

The anti-English Starmer regime will collapse, just as the hated Scholz regime and that of ‘Governor’ Trudeau have collapsed and then that of Macron will also collapse. All were supported by only about 20% of the electorate, though by 100% of the heavily censored legacy media, which has told the most outrageous lies from the start. The other regimes will fall in Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland, which have all betrayed their neutrality. Ultimately the US puppet regimes in Poland and the depopulated Baltics will fall, once the Washington and Brussels string-pullers of the puppets fall, as their proxy war against Russia is defeated.

  1. Why are the Russian armed forces making a frontal attack on the Ukrainian forces? Why do they not take the easy and fast way and simply go round the side, invading the Ukraine from Russian territory in the north, going round the back of the very strong Ukrainian fortifications, built up by NATO for eight years since 2014? This is what the Germans did in 1940, when they went round the side of the impregnable Maginot Line and so took France within a few days, instead of within a few years and with relatively few losses.

The frontal attack is taking place because of Russia’s three clear aims, none of which includes taking large amounts of Ukrainian territory, unlike the German aim in France in 1940. (When you are by far the largest country in the world, as Russia is, nearly thirty times the size of the Ukraine, you have no interest in taking a little more territory). Let us recall what the three Russian aims are, as they were clearly stated on 24 February 2022 and have been restated ad nauseam, though few have listened. These three aims are: the liberation of the two Russian provinces of the Donbass, which had been genocided by Kiev for eight years before 2022, and the demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukraine.

True, the first aim had to be expanded from two eastern provinces to the liberation of the four easternmost Russian provinces. This occurred after the Kiev regime illegally tried to cut off water supplies to the Crimea which go through those two additional provinces. (The Crimea was part of Russia until 1954 and voted massively to rejoin it by internationally-observed referendum in 2014). In order to ensure those water supplies and because of the massive support for Russia in the two additional south-eastern provinces, which had been part of Russia until 1922, in 2022 they too returned to Russia.

True, the second aim of demilitarising the Ukraine was achieved in just a few months in 2022, but then NATO modified it into the aim of Russia having to demilitarise the whole of NATO. This was because NATO supplied Kiev with massive amounts of NATO equipment and half-trained huge numbers of Kiev troops in using that equipment in Western countries. This is why the conflict has taken three years, and not three months.

The third aim of denazifying the Ukraine, that is of ensuring the freedom there to use the Russian language, to live according to Russian culture and to practise the Orthodox Faith of the majority of Ukrainians, has been occurring in a tragically different and cruel way to that hoped for. It has been occurring through the deaths of tens of thousands of Neo-Nazi, Kiev regime, elite troops, like those of the Azov battalion. This is denazification, the Nazis are literally dying out.

  1. Will there be a stalemate in the Ukraine?

This is delusional, a fantasy, wishful thinking, propaganda, a ‘narrative’, or in plain English, a lie. There can only be a stalemate in the Ukraine, if Russia wants one. And it does not. Since the Kiev regime is crumbling and heading for collapse, there is and there can be no stalemate, only Russian military victory. Russia decides the military outcome, not Western fantasy-writers and politicians who only talk to each other, never to Russia, which alone will decide the outcome.

  1. Why does Moscow not assassinate Zelensky?

Moscow does not act like the CIA, assassinating leaders of other countries. Apart from the immorality and illegality of such an act (President Putin is a lawyer by training and always acts very cautiously and legally, in self-defence), why assassinate your greatest ally? Zelensky’s foul-mouthed incompetence has been the guarantee of Russian unity and success. He was selected by the CIA for his acting ability as a talented PR frontman and to deliver the Western scripts provided to him. He has no grasp of either political or military matters, as we can see from his disastrous PR-motivated, British-planned ‘offensives’ in Kherson and invasion of Russia via the tip of the Kursk province. He is therefore the CIA’s greatest gift to Russia. His fierce opposition to peace talks means that Russian forces will continue to advance for as long as they want.

  1. Will Moscow enter into peace talks with Kiev?

This question is purely theoretical, since in 2022 the Kiev regime outlawed negotiations with Russia under pressure from Western countries, notably from the USA and the UK. The disgraced ex-Prime Minister of the UK, Johnson, a proven liar, played a crucial role as Washington’s errand boy in forcing Kiev to break off the nearly successful talks in Istanbul and then forbidding negotiations in early April 2022.

Let us recall that the Ukrainian leaders of the Donbass in eastern Ukraine tried to negotiate with the Western-installed regime in Kiev for eight years between 2014 and 2022, but US and EU-controlled Kiev always refused to talk seriously and failed to honour any agreements. The last Russian peace offer, made in June 2024 on behalf of the eastern Ukrainians, was as generous as it will get (see below). The longer Kiev refuses to negotiate, the harsher the Russian conditions will become.

  1. What are Russia’s current peace terms?  i The people of the Crimea and the four Russian provinces, which have already officially been taken into Russia, must be recognised as for ever Russian citizens. (Condition one). ii The Ukraine can never join NATO and can only have very limited armed forces. (Condition two – demilitarisation). iii The authorities in Kiev must cease all persecution of the Russian people, language and culture and also of the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, returning its churches, seized by violent thugs. (Condition three – denazification). iv Illegal Western sanctions against Russia and trumped-up criminal charges against Russian politicians must be withdrawn immediately. v Democracy and freedom must be restored on all remaining Ukrainian territory, with free political parties, free elections and an end to censorship and the reign of terror of the CIA-trained SBU secret police.
  2. What will happen if Kiev refuses these conditions and continues the conflict to the end?

In this case, Russia will take back the whole of the formerly Russian eastern and southern half of the Ukraine, including cities like Kharkov, Poltava, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa. This will cut Kiev off from the Black Sea coast, making what remains of the Ukraine into a landlocked country, and linking Russia to Transdnistria. This could create pro-Russian protests in Moldova and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. The hated, US-installed regimes and elites there may be pushed out by popular pressure, just like the anti-Russian French puppet government in Georgia, which has already been pushed out. Russian victory is going to encourage a lot of suppressed pro-independence and anti-NATO feeling throughout Eastern and Central Europe.

  1. In that case, will there appear a new Ukrainian state?

Definitely, and possibly even two Ukrainian states. Once the two small Romanian and Hungarian parts of the western Ukraine have been returned to Romania and Hungary, there will remain Eastern Galicia. This consists of the provinces of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and the western half of Ternopil (the rest of that province belongs historically to Volyn). This could either become part of Poland again, or else even become a new independent Roman Catholic state of some four and a half million people, called Galicia, and belonging to the EU. It is not part of the Orthodox world.

The rest of the old ‘Ukraine’, a name invented by Austrians at the end of the century before last together with the Ukrainian flag, will perhaps return to its dignified and historic name of ‘Kievan Rus’. This country could be similar in size to Belarus to the north, though with a population two times larger, of 18 million. This will be quite independent of NATO and NATO’s economic arm, the EU, neither of which, in any case, will last long in Trump’s Western world. That is a minimum. It could be bigger.

  1. What will the future of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the schismatic groups be after the Russian military victory?

This is the question which concerns us far more. As for the rest, we are just outside observers of the political and military facts, however tragic they may be.

The schismatic sects will wither and die. The small but very violent, State-created and US-financed Constantinople group under the puppet Dumenko and the tiny group under Filaret will both die out. They will both have to return the churches that they stole from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. And this real Church, under Metropolitan Onufry, will have to receive autocephaly from Moscow. Ukrainian hatred for Russia and Patriarch Kyrill, who has appeared to support this tragic war and then uncanonically ‘defrocked’ some 60 members of the clergy who were opposed to it, is now such that the gross insensitivity and chauvinism of Muscovites have made this autocephaly inevitable. There must be a truly independent Ukraine, not a Western puppet.

As we have said from the outset, winning the war is not the same as winning the peace. Hence the need for a real Ukrainian State, where people can live in peace and democracy, speak Ukrainian, and live freely, without fear of Zelensky’s censorship and secret police. By backing this war, the tragic events of which we have been observers, the administration of the Russian Church has compromised itself before the faithful clergy and people of the Church of all nationalities, not least Russian. Naturally, this autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church will then look after its Diaspora in Western Europe and elsewhere, which already has 100 parishes.

  1. If Moscow has to cede autocephaly to the Church under Metropolitan Onufry, what consequences could that have for the rest of the Russian Church?

Firstly, the Russian Church still has to undergo full ‘destatisation’. This word does not mean independence from the State – the Church received that in 1992 after the collapse of Communism. Then the attitude of the Russian State to the Church became one of indifference, rather than hostility. ‘Destatisation’ means the end of a mentality of dependence on the State. This mentality gradually evolved after the Church was deprived its own Patriarch in 1700.

Then it became an Imperial Church, with its caste of paid clergy and professional choirs, leading to clericalism, and the destruction of eucharistic life and resulting community/parish life, replaced by private services of intercession and memorial. Membership of the Church is by definition voluntary. An attitude towards the Church as some kind of welfare state, for which the people have no responsibility, is not healthy. This mentality of dependence has in one way or another lasted ever since then.

However, it is also true that this mentality of reliance on the State had appeared even before that, as is shown by the Old Ritualist schism in the 17th century. The fact that the schism was about a State-imposed ritual, is highly significant, for it is the State that divides through rituals and ritualisation, because ritual, like the State, is all about the outward, not about the inward and Faith. The Faith of the Old Ritualists was identical to those who followed the new ritual, which in any case was identical in 99% of its acts.

Such destatisation today means decentralisation, that is, the granting of autonomy or rather autocephaly to others. Others means any Orthodox group numbering 100,000 or more, which lives on territories outside the Russian Federation and has at least four bishops and monastic life. The Russian Church administration in Moscow has to catch up with the division of the Soviet State, which over thirty-three years ago divided into fifteen independent republics. In other words, the Moscow administration is still thinking in centralised Soviet terms.

The second consequence is that the Church administration, which is responsible, must cleanse itself of the wave of corruption and homosexuality, which has come to infiltrate certain senior groups among the clergy, especially since the fall of the USSR. From then on Russia became the victim of ‘Wild East’ capitalism, characterised by the Western-style oligarch mentality. This was promoted both inside and outside Russia by the CIA and its subdepartments. This mentality came to affect the Church administration. My friend and colleague, the late Fr Vsevolod Chaplin, who died in mysterious circumstances in Moscow in 2020, was of the same opinion.

Here is the harsh truth about what has become necessary after the Russian Church administration has so discredited itself over the last thirty years. The Church administration now has to regain the lost trust of the Orthodox people, clergy and monastics everywhere.

  1. How could the Russian military and political victory in the Ukraine affect the rest of the Orthodox Church?

If the concerned elements in the Moscow Church administration are ‘destatised’, then the same freedom of destatisation can at last come to Constantinople, which suffers from the same dependence on politicians (only in its case on US politicians) and an equal level of corruption and homosexuality. As Trump abandons the Ukraine, he abandons Constantinople. Trump is a disaster for Constantinople, just as he is for the unelected EU Commissars who detest him. At that point, with both Moscow and Constantinople deservedly humbled, a real and very welcome and long overdue Unity Council of the whole Orthodox Church and a return to the canons become not only possible, but, at last, real.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Right Makes Might: On the Emerging Post-Western New World Order

Introduction: In the Ukraine

The only question here is if the Kiev regime will collapse and capitulate before 1 January 2025 or afterwards. Western media still practise ‘editorial control’ (= censorship) and distraction (= talk about something else which is petty, irrelevant and of no importance). However, they affect only the fairy-tale ‘narrative’, not the reality of, for example, 100,000 desertions from the NATO-directed, Kiev regime Army. These press-ganged soldiers are refusing to fight because they do not want to commit suicide in the utterly corrupt armed forces.

There is nothing to fight for. They want to go home to their families. Conversely, in Russia they are talking not about Western delusions, which they ignore, but about reality, for example, reparations to be paid by Kiev and war crime trials for the Nazi Kiev regime leaders, who have in fact murdered their own people. They are the true anti-Ukrainians, together with Western leaders who want to fight against Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’. It is their version of genocide. Such Western leaders too should be tried in war crimes courts.

In the Russian Federation

As regards today’s Russia, some silly people ask if it will revert to the Imperialism of Peter I of 1721 to 1917 or to the very similar Imperialism of the Soviets 1922-1991 (the Soviets adored Peter I), as obviously Russia will not revert to the catastrophes of Western oligarchism (1991-2022).

Clearly, Russia will return to no form of Imperialism because they all by definition failed. The Western academics who propose such fantasies have no understanding. Russia is reverting to itself, which is what Tsar Nicholas II wanted, before he was removed by the Western plotters in 1917, who prevented him from doing so.

The problem is that this truth has not yet been told about the 1917 tragedy. Once the diaries of the Tsarina Alexandra, concealed for so many years, are finally published, all will know and all the Western ‘narratives’ about 1917 will then collapse.

In Europe

The EU has clearly become a vassal of the Washington neocon elite – just as the UK has long been. The EU elite, like the UK elite, is no longer pro-European, but pro-NATO, that is, pro-Washington, that is, anti-European. This is why when Germany’s Nordstream lifeline to Russian energy was blown up by the USA and its proxies and the country went into serious economic decline, the German ruling class was silent. Europe’s rulers hate their own countries and peoples, whom they ignore, even when the people vote them out, as in France. The elitists are anti-national because they are globalists.

The oligarchic nomenklatura of unelected European Union Commissioners, some of them the grandchildren of Nazi officers, are silent. In any case, the elite of the Brussels Politburo has little concept of the lives of ordinary Europeans. It is only an imitation of the unelected oligarchy who rule in Washington, and who also have no concept of the lives of ordinary Americans. They too are anti-national because they too are globalists. The solution to Europe’s self-inflicted woes is neither to be found in being pro-US, nor in being pro-Russian.

The solution is to be found in being pro-European, that is, pro-Hungarian, pro-Slovak, now pro-Georgian (after the failure there of US/’NGO’ and EU electoral fraud under its French puppet President) and, one day, perhaps even pro-French, pro-German, pro-Italian and pro-English. But that means liberation from the yoke of the globalist corporatism which rules us. This means not only liberation from their political yoke, but also from the ideological yoke of the ‘journalists’ paid by that elite, the mere propagandist-mercenaries of the oligarchs. None of them has ever heard the word ‘Truth’.

The World

The West has been defeated, not by millions of Vietnamese or Afghan peasants, but by the Russian Superpower against the (US-supplied and US-trained) largest army in NATO, that of the Kiev regime. The only way that the US could ever have won in the Ukraine is by launching a nuclear war against Russia, which would have meant the utter destruction of the USA itself, since Russia has better nuclear arms than the USA. The defeat of the Western Establishment in the Ukraine means that Might does not make Right. This is why the New World Order is about multilateralism, multipolarity, countries working together for their mutual benefit.

We are no longer talking about being dominated and exploited by one imperialist power. Imperialism, which caused World War I, World War II and nearly World War III, is being replaced by Sovereignism, the co-operation of nation-states. The multilateral or multipolar BRICS is now replacing the Western World Order and its Western-controlled UN and other puppet organisations. This is because those who join BRICS enhance their sovereignty, instead of handing it over to some new Washington or Brussels. It will be up to the West to eat humble pie and enter BRICS, as an equal among many, merely part of the World Community, for it is Right that makes Might, not the other way round. This is the millennial revelation to the Western world. The days of its Supremacy and its G7 club are over.

BRICS includes all Non-Western continents, Asia (China, India), Europe (Russia), Africa (South Africa) and South America (Brazil). Now with ten core members (true, Saudi Arabia has not yet formalised its membership as Number 10), there are twenty-five more countries which are sooner or later going to become full members or partner-states, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Algeria, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tadzhikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Syria, Turkey, Belarus and Serbia. BRICS has gone from a Non-Western Alliance to a true International Community, far more representative of the world than the US puppet, which is called the failed UN.

Conclusion: The Church

Right is Might is in fact the principle of the canon law of the Orthodox Church. And that is why all those who promote nationalist politics in Church administrations, that is, who proclaim that Might is Right against the law of the Gospel, the primacy of the Kingdom of Heaven, forfeit all spiritual and moral right to their positions.

Those who place racist politics and their nationalist ‘protocols’ above the pastoral care of souls do not qualify. They will disappear and, at best, be forgotten by history – at worst, they will die like Arius. The future is with those who clearly have a universal message, which can appeal to all. The paths of the sect lead but to inglory.

 

 

 

 

 

The Ukraine: Winning the War, Winning the Peace and Winning the Church

Introduction

The world has been contorted by the catastrophic conflict in the Ukraine, which in turn has led to the genocidal massacres around the US proxy of Israel. But what if the first conflict ended? Surely the second conflict would also end, and the third conflict, threatened by the US against China through its proxies in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the Philippines, would never even begin? Ever since losing its war in Korea in 1953, when it was driven back into the south of the Korean Peninsula, and then, much more disastrously, since losing its war in Vietnam in 1975, when it was entirely ejected, the US has conducted proxy wars. In such wars, others are paid to do the dying on its behalf, just as Non-Romans were paid to die for the pagan Roman Empire on its behalf.

Proxies are convenient because they are expendable, but, as in Afghanistan, proxies can always turn and take the side of their own people against US and Western occupiers. If we may draw a parallel, in the Ukraine we are now in January 1945. Hitler has just disastrously lost his Ardennes offensive, just as Zelensky has just disastrously lost the NATO-planned Kursk offensive. The delusional Hitler, like the delusional Zelensky, is in his bunker, refusing to negotiate because of his wishful thinking. So delusional that he drew up a ‘victory plan’, which was in fact a defeat plan, since NATO countries do not want their soldiers to die for the comedian in Kiev, which is what the ‘victory plan’ entailed.

When that did not work, Zelensky decided to tell everyone that North Korean troops are fighting for Russia and so therefore NATO troops should officially fight for Kiev!  When this was laughed down, he said that he wanted a ceasefire. Of course, he does – just like Hitler’s lieutenants wanted a ceasefire when Soviet troops were at the gates of Berlin in 1945. There was no ceasefire then, and there will not be this time either. After all, last week Zelensky was talking about dropping non-existent nuclear bombs on Russia. The delusion is clear – except to the delusional. The Ukrainian Army is crumbling – few in it even want to fight, the collapse is inevitable, though many Western politicians are still, even now, in delusional denial, believing their own PR lies.

Winning the War

In the Ukraine the US has actually publicly proclaimed that it will fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’ (soldier). They are now close to achieving that catastrophic aim. This tragic conflict between fellow-Slavs was never a territorial war. When you are by far the largest country in the world and one of the least populated, as Russia is, territory is totally irrelevant to you.

This is a conflict being fought because the US and its puppets threatened the Russian population both in Russia and in the Ukraine with genocide through conventional, nuclear and biological arms. This is a conflict which is therefore all about Russian security and national identity.

The Russian Army, now greatly expanded in number through enthusiastic volunteers, has been advancing for over two years in a war of attrition and encirclement in the Ukraine. At the latest, this conflict will end in 2025, perhaps in early 2025, given the present Ukrainian situation, exactly as the then Russian Minster of Defence announced in 2023. This deeply tragic conflict in the Ukraine is now drawing to its end, with Russia militarily victorious against NATO, but with Ukrainian military manpower bled to death.

Winning the Peace

As is well-known, it is one thing to win a war, but what happens after the war is over? How do you win the peace? It is clear that the Russian Army has never wanted to invade the whole of the Ukraine or harm Ukrainian civilians. In that sense it is pro-Ukrainian – unlike the Kiev junta, which has been destroying the Ukraine and Ukrainians. The only territories of interest are the formerly Russian east and south, where a majority of the oppressed population has always considered itself to be Russian, ever since their families were forcibly transferred to the Ukraine by Bolshevik tyranny in 1922. The only enemy has been the military. What then will happen in the north and west of the old, Soviet-created, Ukraine in conditions of peace? In other words, what will happen after the Ukraine has been decommunised, returned to the pre-Communist situation?

It appears that the Russian policy here has always been to wait for a popular Ukrainian revolt, perhaps by a group of disaffected soldiers and officers, tired of being used as cannon fodder for the Neo-Nazis, and the disaffected will overthrow the murderous, US-created junta in Kiev. This would allow them to establish a popular and once more democratic government of the New Ukraine. This would in effect unite at least ten, perhaps more, provinces of the north and west of the old Soviet Ukraine into a neutral country, a southern Belarus, demilitarised and denazified, as Russia and all want. Its capital would remain in Kiev and it would have its sovereignty and defence guaranteed by Russia against NATO imperialism and its economy rebuilt by BRICS.

The old Ukraine was the most prosperous part of the USSR. It is potentially very wealthy. The New Ukraine, Ukrainian-speaking and independent, but Non-Nazi and demilitarised, would also be a country of freedom for the Church, with all the 1500 churches stolen so far by the thugs of the US-organised fake Church restored to the canonical Church. The fake Church would then collapse and disappear. Then also would come the end of absurd and illegal Western sanctions against Russia and Russians, which have effectively bankrupted not Russia, but Western Europe.

Winning the Church

All of this would do nothing to create peace inside the Orthodox Church, that is, to resolve the five-year long schism within the Confederation of the 16 Local Orthodox Churches. This is the schism between the largest and the once most prestigious Churches, between the Russian Patriarchate in Moscow and the US-controlled Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul (Constantinople), backed by its small colony in Alexandria. This situation echoes once again how the last century was, in Europe especially, the age of Imperialisms, when Europe and the Orthodox Church found themselves crushed between the Imperialisms of Nazism and Communism. Spain was the early example of a country caught between the two Imperialisms in the late 1930s, but it was Central and Eastern Europe which were affected even more profoundly.

For example, in the 1930s and 1940s Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece were in particular tragically caught up in the geopolitical bloodshed of the Nazi and Communist powerbrokers and had to switch sides very swiftly. Today, it is the Orthodox Churches precisely in Central and Eastern Europe, which find themselves caught between the nationalist power politics of Moscow and Constantinople. They are caught between Russian and Greek and their completely unspiritual battle for imperialistic territorial control. These Orthodox Churches in Central and Eastern Europe, which stand between those ecclesiastical Imperialisms, mean specifically the ten Local Churches of Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, together with (North) Macedonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Albania, Georgia, and even, screaming and kicking from Greek nationalism, those of Greece and Cyprus.

They will be joined by the many millions of the still not autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church and of Orthodox in Moldova and elsewhere, who have all long been victims, third class citizens, of either Greek or else Russian imperialism, and their territorial battles and jealousies. Nobody recognises the ‘defrockings’ of clergy for purely political and schismatic reasons. Thus, wronged and ‘defrocked’ but genuine pastors from the Russian Church have had to flee sociopathic or morally corrupt bishops to the Constantinople and Romanian Churches, while others have fled the politicking of Constantinople for the Russian Church. It is an international scandal, so-called Christians practising hatred.

Conclusion

It is the above ten Local Churches, a majority, most probably supported by three Non-European Local Churches, those of Antioch, Jerusalem and America, which will be left to meet at a Council. Here they will have to call on the Churches of Moscow and Constantinople, the latter supported by the aggrieved Church of Alexandria, to resolve their differences. These differences relate directly to the imperialistic attitudes taken by the administrations of these Churches. These effeminately vengeful attitudes have caused them to dispute territorial control and leading them into schism and mutual, uncanonical and unrecognised ‘defrockings’.

These three Churches of Moscow, Constantinople and Alexandria are going to find themselves under pressure to reach canonical agreements. These would include the granting of full independence (autocephaly) to Non-Greeks and Non-Russians at present suffering inside them, who are, naturally, concerned neither by Greek, nor by Russian nationalism. Directly these would include at the very least the peoples of the New Ukraine and Moldova. However, the fates of Orthodox in the Baltic States, in Africa and the Diasporas of Western Europe, the Americas and Australia, must also be taken into account and autocephaly granted to them. Here is the opportunity for the purely political and centennial anti-canonical scandal of ‘jurisdictions’ to be overcome, caused only by those who are clinging on to power and money.

Then we shall at last begin to live in a normal Orthodox Church, which has suffered so much since 1917 from the abnormal situation in which we have been forced to live because of bishop-politicians and not bishop-pastors. The bishop-pastors, from St Nectarios of Aegina to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, have, with their disciples, always been slandered and persecuted by the former. Enough. The careerist wolves in shepherd’s clothing, who deceive sincere but untutored neophytes are to be cast out. There are plenty there to defrock.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May God’s Will be done.

 

 

 

Our Future after the Defeat of Millennial Nazism in the Ukraine

 Introduction

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

In the Ukraine Now

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

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

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

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

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

BRICS

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

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

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

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

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

The Sinking Millennial Titanic

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Western Europe, Russia and the Orthodox Church

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

 

 

 

 

 

Towards a Council of the Orthodox Churches

Introduction

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

Universal Church Councils

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

Consultations

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

The Need for a Consultation

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

Who Could Call a Consultation?

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

Two Initial Stages of Consultation

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

The Third Stage

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

An Agenda

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

The Dogmatic Agenda

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

The Pastoral Agenda

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

Conclusion: The Alternative

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

 

 

 

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

Introduction: Centralisation and Decentralisation: Unity in Diversity

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

The Two Struggles of My Life

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

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

The Struggle for Catholicity Against the Papism of Constantinople and Moscow

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

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

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

The Novel and Aggressive American Heresy of Rebaptism

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

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

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

Conclusion: The Dangers of Centralisation and Sectarianism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Now It Can Be Told: Reminiscences II: The ROCOR Tragedy: How It Entered into Communion with the Moscow Patriarchate and Then De Facto Left It

Introduction: The Background

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, large numbers of ex-Soviet citizens settled in the West. The Orthodox among them, then about 1% of the total, went to wherever there was a Russian-speaking church. By 1990 the parishes of the old and dying ROCOR were almost empty, as the emigres had almost totally failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants. In 1992 I even had to set up a completely new parish in Lisbon for the new ex-Soviet emigres, though still under ROCOR. By 2000 all ROCOR parishes had been revitalised, but with ex-Soviet Russians. Moreover, the ROCOR bishops at the top, now almost all of the second generation or converts, had to ordain many of the ‘Soviets’ priests – there was nobody else left to ordain.

As a result, it gradually dawned even on the strongly anti-Soviet, often rather dry and cold, ROCOR bishops that there would have to be a reconciliation with Moscow. Moscow was, after all, 99% of the whole Russian Orthodox Church, and, by then, ex-Soviet Russians already formed 90% of their tiny émigré Church. Ex-Soviet clergy and parishioners understood nothing of the hair-splitting arguments against Moscow of the old émigrés and their descendants and converts.

They simply concelebrated with Moscow whenever they wanted and the people took communion freely in Moscow churches. Clearly, ROCOR bishops were losing control. The split between Moscow and the ROCOR group had been outlived. It was totally irrelevant to the post-Soviet masses, ‘the mob’, as one aristocratic and monocled (!) ROCOR bishop insultingly called them on the Russian Church website pravoslavie.ru, to the scandal of all!

To Moscow

Thus, the bishops were gradually forced by weight of numbers to lead the few remaining children of ROCOR emigres to concelebrate with Moscow. Having usurped the very elderly Metropolitan Vitaly in New York, who for them had outlived his age and who anyway had dementia, in 2001, ambitious bishops began to move towards talks with Moscow. These talks finally resulted in the historic Patriarchal and émigré concelebration in Moscow in 2007, where I was, I believe, the only Non-Russian priest present. However, even this reconciliation did not stop the bullying and intimidation of the non-aristocratic, not to say peasant, bishop-victims inside the Synod by the ‘princes of the Church’, the political wing of the utterly divided ROCOR Synod.

Their victims ranged from the meek and saintly Slovak Metr Laurus to the equally meek and mild Ukrainian Metr Hilarion, who feared the ‘politicos’, as he openly told us, almost trembling, and to Patriarch Kyrill himself. The latter was astonished and very, very upset by the categorical refusal of the politico bishops to accept the Patriarch’s very generous, canonical and utterly logical suggestion (it was in 2012 or soon after) to restructure ROCOR into Metropolia, in the USA, in Oceania and in Western Europe.

They even rejected his generous offer for a ROCOR bishop to become Metropolitan of a united Russian Orthodox Church of Western Europe, the foundation of the future Local Church. Rarely has there been such a tragic rejection of Divine destiny towards forming new Local Churches. This rejection, some ten years ago now, was in fact the turning-point for ROCOR. From that moment on, it reverted to control by its ‘princes of the Church’ political wing, concerned only with money and property, abandoning its spiritual, ‘Johannite’ (St John of Shanghai) tradition. Their predecessors had persecuted St John, now they would continue, persecuting St John’s spiritual descendants.

Underlying Sectarianism Returns

With this tragic refusal to accept its destiny, ROCOR had preferred suicidal, elitist, exclusivist isolation to playing the leading role in forming future Local Churches in Western Europe and elsewhere. The offer had been made on a golden plate and been rejected. The offer would not be made by offended Moscow again. It was clear that others would now have to play that role. ROCOR had sidelined itself, making itself irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, due to its nationalist exclusivism and pharisaic superiority complex, much, much developed by recent and unintegrated fanatical converts of a Protestant background. Moscow was at a loss, since it simply did not have the candidates with the linguistic, administrative and moral ability to lead its Churches outside Russia.

Thus, ROCOR lost the opportunity to head the establishment of three Metropolias: one to lead to the long-overdue Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Western Europe; in North America to merge positively with the OCA; finally, to set up a new Metropolia for the Continent of Oceania. The task of establishing just a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Western Europe now went to Moscow, eventually through the efficient Metropolitan Nestor, supported by the very small, Paris-based Archdiocese of Western Europe, led by its Metropolitan Jean (Renneteau).

In 2021, ROCOR decided to take part in the American-led schism against the Moscow Metropolitan Jean, leading the emigres to split from that part of Moscow and so even further into self-isolation. The only occasional concelebrations would now be with highly conservative Antiochian, ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’, converts. The rest of the Orthodox Church was rejected. Moscow was secretly, and increasingly openly, despised; Greeks, Romanians and Moldovans openly hated; and in 2024, when the Serbian Orthodox Church invited a delegation from New York to try and bring ROCOR back from the brink, it also failed. No Church can be founded on hatred.

Conclusion: The Future

As one Russian Orthodox Metropolitan said to me of one ROCOR hierarch in 2012: ‘His Russian is superb, better than that of Russians, his liturgical knowledge second to none, but where is his love’? Thanks to sectarianism, ROCOR is rapidly losing its jurisdiction in Western Europe, just as it lost that in Vlasovite ROCOR South America. Now that Moscow is at last starting to send out competent, non-corrupt and non-homosexual bishops to Western Europe, ROCOR is increasingly looking like a small, right-wing American sect, with little influence outside its sectarian converts and their ghettoes.

Today, with the tragic conflict in the Ukraine ongoing, Moscow is isolated by Russian nationalism, but the emigres are isolated by convert exclusivism. The pro-Zelensky attitude of ROCOR since 2022, even demanding that Russian troops stop liberating the Donbass from Kiev-led genocide (!), is not in fact pro-Ukrainian, but pro-CIA. Unsurprisingly, ROCOR is now seen as treasonous by Moscow, but with its Russian-ness it is also seen as totally unacceptable by the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metr Onufry, just as it was by post-1945 Ukrainian (and Belarussian) emigres.

As a result, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has over the last two years opened up a hundred parishes in Western Europe, which have nothing to do with ROCOR. As for Moldovans, they have been leaving the Russian Church for the Romanian Church, offended by Russian racism, just like the Ukrainians and so nearly all other Non-Russians. It is clear that other Local Churches will have to take on the mantle of establishing a multinational Local Church of Western Europe. Tragically, the dream of the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II of Moscow of forming a Local Church in Western Europe is for now dead. In the future only a radical change of policy and repentance could bring the constituent parts of the Russian Church in the Diaspora, now in schism, back to contributing to that great project, which others have now been put in charge of.