Category Archives: Orthodox Unity

In the Week of St Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas was born in Constantinople in about 1296, where his father was a courtier of Emperor Andronikos II. When Gregory was still a child, his father died and the Emperor took part in the education of the orphan. He hoped that the gifted boy would devote himself to imperial service. Instead, he chose monastic life on Mt Athos and the Christian tradition of unceasing prayer, known in Greek as ‘hesychasm’.

Gregory received a good education and even studied the pagan Greek Aristotle, but in 1316 he left to become an Athonite monk. In 1326, aged thirty, because of the threat of Turkish attacks he and others took refuge in Thessaloniki where he was ordained priest. Spending his time in prayerful service to the people, he also founded a small community of hermits near Thessaloniki in Veria. The cave where he lived and prayed can still be visited.

Later Fr Gregory served for a short time as Abbot of Esphigmenou on Mt Athos. Here he was asked by monks to defend the tradition of unceasing prayer from the attacks of a Catholic-trained Greek called Barlaam. Gregory wrote a number of works in defence and stood up for the practice of unceasing prayer at six different Councils in Constantinople. Like all later Greek Catholics, Barlaam asserted that it was impossible to determine from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds and Gregory naturally viewed Barlaam’s argument as agnostic. In his response titled ‘Apodictic Treatises’, Gregory proved that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, but not from the Son.

In response to Barlaam’s attacks, Gregory wrote nine treatises entitled ‘Triads in Defence of Those Who Practise Hesychia’ (Unceasing Prayer). The first Triad was written in the second half of the 1330s and was based on discussions between Gregory and Barlaam. Gregory’s teaching was affirmed by monks of Mount Athos, who met in a Council in 1340–1. In early 1341, the monasteries composed ‘The Tome of the Holy Mountain’. This was a presentation of Gregory’s teaching and it became a textbook of Christian theology.

As an apostate Orthodox without spiritual experience, Barlaam viewed any claim of the real and conscious experience of God ‘as a heresy’. He also rejected the Christian teaching on the uncreated nature of the Divine Light, the experience of which is the result of unceasing prayer. Deprived of the Holy Spirit, he regarded that experience as ‘heretical and blasphemous’. The Divine Light was maintained by Christians to be identical to the Light seen by Christ’s disciples at the Transfiguration.

The second Triad quoted some of Barlaam’s writings. In response to this, Barlaam composed a treatise called ‘Against the Messalians’, which linked the hesychasts to a proud, materialist, Protestant-style sect called the Messalians, thus accusing Christians of heresy! In the third Triad, Gregory refuted Barlaam’s charge, showing that Orthodox Christians are not anti-sacramentalist and do not claim to see the essence of God. Gregory oriented the Orthodox teaching against Barlaam on the issue of pagan intellectualism, that is, the Hellenism of such as Aristotle, which he considered to be the main source of the heresies of the Scholastic Barlaam.

Six Patriarchal Councils were held in Constantinople between 1341 and 1351 to consider Barlaam’s attacks against Orthodox Christianity. These are accepted as having universal status by many Orthodox. Some call them the Fifth Council of Constantinople or the Ninth Universal Council. The Council of May 1341 condemned Barlaam and the Patriarch insisted that all Barlaam’s writings be destroyed. Barlaam realised that he could not promote his errors among Orthodox Christians and went to Italy, where he was soon appointed Roman Catholic Bishop of Gerace.

After Barlaam’s departure, a pro-Catholic Aristotelian intellectual called Gregory Akindynos became the chief critic of the Christian teaching on unceasing prayer and the Divine Light. However, the second Council in Constantinople in August 1341 condemned Akindynos and affirmed the findings of the earlier Council. Nevertheless, Akindynos and his supporters gained a brief victory at a rogue Council held in 1344, which excommunicated Gregory. Here his opponents spread slanderous accusations against him and in 1344 the corrupt Patriarch John XIV imprisoned Gregory for four years.

Nevertheless, the last of the Six Councils in 1351 supported Gregory and finally condemned his opponents. This Council ordered that his enemies, the Metropolitans of Ephesus and Ganos, be defrocked and jailed. All those who were unwilling to accept Christian teachings were excommunicated. A series of anathemas were pronounced against Barlaam, Akindynos and their followers. At the same time, a series of acclamations was made in favour of Gregory and the adherents of the Christian teaching, which he had expressed.

In 1347, when a new and non-corrupt Patriarch was appointed, Gregory was released from prison and consecrated Archbishop of Thessaloniki. He probably reposed in 1359 and his last words were: ‘To the heights! To the heights!’ He was canonised only nine years later, in 1368, and his life was written and a service was composed to him. His feast is celebrated twice a year, on 14 November, the anniversary of his repose, and on the Second Sunday of Lent. This is because St Gregory’s victory over Barlaam is a continuation of the victory of the Church over heresy, which is celebrated on the first Sunday of Lent. St Gregory’s relics are venerated in the church dedicated to him in Thessaloniki. In 2009 Gregory’s mother and four siblings also embraced the monastic life and the whole family was canonised.

Persecution is the norm for those in the Church who oppose politically-motivated corruption and intimidation. Christ was slandered and crucified. St John Chrysostom was deposed and twice exiled. St Gregory Palamas was excommunicated from the Church, slandered and imprisoned. In the last century St Nectarius of Pentapolis was slandered and exiled by jealous Greek bishops of his own Synod. St John of Shanghai was slandered, put on trial and suspended by jealous Russian bishops of his own Synod. Today, nothing has changed. Those who propose the Gospel model of the Church and not the corrupt one, which is all about money, power and so links with States, are also persecuted, just as we have been persecuted for 2,000 years already.

 

 

 

 

 

On the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Two Questions on Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and Russia and the Ukraine

Q: I am Catholic, initially because I was born into a Catholic family of Irish origin. But I have been going to Orthodox churches and travelling in countries where there are lots of Orthodox for twenty years. I have also read a lot, starting off with Timothy Ware’s The Orthodox Church. I am familiar with all the Orthodox views about the Catholic Church. I am myself against the filioque and against compulsory celibacy for clergy, though I have remained Catholic. I also know about the pedophile scandals in Catholicism.

I have a question, but will you have the courage to answer it and then publish it? If you will, I shall respect you, but if you do not, I don’t think I will ever read anything Orthodox again. Now I come to my question:

In the last six months I have read about a pedophile Orthodox bishop in Canada, who was sent to prison, a Greek Orthodox bishop in France involved in homosexual orgies and an Orthodox bishop in Britain who spent the night in a hotel with his boyfriend, but did not know that the manager of the hotel was Orthodox and so was caught out. None of this is hearsay, it is all facts. I have checked them several times. So what is the real difference between Catholics and Orthodox? Do not mention the word ‘filioque’ in your answer.

A: The difference? Simple:

In Catholicism corruption is systematic, institutional, ingrained among the clergy. True, there are many ordinary Catholics, including some priests (usually secretly married) who are very good people, but this is because they defied the system. The Hungarian Fr Gabriel Patacsi, who was a teacher of mine in Paris 44 years ago, was an example, though he later joined the Orthodox Church.

On the other hand, in the Orthodox Church corruption among the clergy is personal. For every bishop you find like those you mention above or who is a CIA spy, and I have come across them all and so can confirm what you say, you will find another who is not only normal, but also pious.

In Russian there is a popular saying that when a man is ordained, and even more so, when he is consecrated bishop, a demon enters into him. Some are shocked by this saying, because theologically it is the Holy Spirit that enters into him. However, there is profound truth here. The theological fact is that when a man is ordained/consecrated, whatever is inside him gets reinforced because of the presence of the Holy Spirit – or else because of that man’s resistance to the Holy Spirit, in other words, because of demonic activity in him. If he is pious, then piety will become stronger. If he is wicked and can only think about money or perversion, then that tendency will also get worse. Here is the great danger of ordaining/consecrating the corrupt or the perverted.

Thus, we know of one bishop who loves trying to close churches, which are the fruits of decades of missionary work. All the people who visit those churches which have remained open despite him, and there are thousands of those people, are disgusted with him. But because he is a careerist and was never interested in authentic Church life, he does the devil’s work instead.

If you read Fr Tikhon’s best-selling books, Everyday Saints (when he asked me before it was translated what the English title should be, my suggestion was Saints and Sinners), there is the story from the Prologue about an awful bishop. When people asked as to why he was a bishop, the answer was: ‘Because we could not find anyone worse’. Here is the reality. Here is why the main task of pastors today is to protect the flocks entrusted to them from wolves in sheep’s clothing and also from wolves in shepherd’s clothing.

Q: Does Russia have a future after what has happened in the Ukraine? Surely the Russian Patriarch Kyrill is finished?

A: Your question seems to confuse three different things, Russia, Patriarch Kyrill, and the Russian Orthodox Church.

As regards Russia, I think it ultimately has a great future, unlike Europe, which is in a huge mess, even more since the US sabotaged its economies by blowing up the Nordstream pipelines and forcing it to impose on itself suicidal sanctions against cheap Russian oil, gas and cereals. Russia, China, India Iran and, frankly, nearly all of Africa, Asia and Latin America, seven-eighths of the world together, can be unbeatable. The sooner Western Europe abandons its exceptionalism and joins them, the better for it.

As for Patriarch Kyrill, let us leave persons aside. He is only a Patriarch, not the Church, so that is not important and any views just end up being speculative. Let us look at the third matter, the Russian Orthodox Church, which is a different matter from Russia.  Here we have to go back into history.

The Russian Church has been betrayed for over 300 years.

Read about what Peter I and the German Catherine II did to the Church 250-300 years ago. Then the Patriarch was replaced by an Erastian, State-worshipping, Protestant-style, German-named minister, who sometimes was an atheist or a freemason, nearly always anti-monastic, anti-Tradition, anti-Patriarchal and so anti-canonical. That Church enslavement to the Russian State was typical of the situation for 200 years, until 1917. They betrayed the Church.

After 1917 Russia was for a few months dominated by the ‘Whites’. The first and main ‘Revolution’ in February 1917 was a palace revolt, carried out by Great Britain with help from other Western countries, above all by incompetent, aristocratic ‘White’ Russian traitors, ones who today would be called oligarchs.  The Whites, for the most part so-called Whites, betrayed the Church. Perhaps 90% of them committed atrocities in the Civil War and abandoned the Church. The 90% were only really interested in getting back their properties and their wealth. They betrayed the Church – and the Tsar and therefore the people, whom he represented. Incompetent, they lost power to the ‘Reds’.

The Reds took everything that was anti-Russian before the two 1917 Revolutions and multiplied it by ten. They betrayed the Church. The second ‘Revolution’, in October 1917, was a Bolshevik mob takeover, carried out by atheist Jews like Trotsky, financed from New York, and they were even more anti-Russian, killing millions of Russians (though a lot fewer than the CIA claimed), destroying Russian churches and Russian values for decades.

After the collapse of all that in 1991, for thirty years, post-Soviet Russia was created and ruled by Western-controlled, money-grubbing Russian oligarchs and traitors. They betrayed the Church, but from inside, through oligarchs in cassocks.

Only since the turning-point of 24 February 2022, exactly 100 years since the USSR was established and exactly 300 years since the foundation of the Russian Empire, has change begun. Then traitors began to flee abroad to their masters and post-Soviet Russia at last began to crumble. For the West’s actions in the Ukraine since 2014 has made all Russians at last face up to the question, which question they wanted to avoid answering, so they could continue living in the illusions of their fools’ paradise. This question was:

Do you support the real Orthodox Russia or do you support the anti-Russian West?

Now this Western-imposed question is a providential sword which forces all Russians to take up a position. And that includes the Russian Church. Here the question is:

Do you side with historic Orthodox Christianity, or with the Western-created decadence of post-Soviet Russia with its adoration of the CIA values of money and luxury, with centralised bureaucracy and nationalism, superstition and ritualism, homosexuality and modernism, mindless ignorance and heartless formalism, which sees the Church as a mere Business.

If you side with the latter, then the Church will return to what it was before the Revolution. And if this is so, then there will be another Revolution. Only in the first case does the Russian Church have a future.

All this is quite independent of the Ukraine problem, which is only a symptom, not the cause. Let me explain:

Since 2007 I have travelled a lot in the Ukraine and in Russia. My last visit to the Ukraine was in October 2021. I have seen both saints and sinners among the clergy. So much is superficial there, all about careerism, awards and money. Buy yourself a mitre, make a nice present to your bishop and after ten years of priesthood, he will award you the mitre, even if you are a rascal. That is so typically Ukrainian, though common in Russia too. I remember at one concelebration with about forty priests in the Ukraine, where I was by far the oldest priest, half of the priests had mitres. The average age? About 40. How can a Church like that survive? It is all so superficial. God is not mocked. Here there is simply a lack of love, it is a Church for show.

The point is that you cannot be a ‘post-Soviet’ Church, just as you could not be a ‘Soviet Church’ or, for that matter, ‘a ‘CIA Church’. If so, then you are siding with hell on earth and that means that you are bent on self-destruction. I am not talking about some personal theory. I have seen this. It is factual.

Or else post-Soviet can mean ‘pre-Orthodox’. And that means that a Tsar is coming and he will cleanse the Russian Church of its wicked clergy. Which way will it go with the Church? I do not know and I have been saying that since 2007. If a Tsar is not coming, then Antichrist will come instead. And that is exactly what is happening in the Ukraine now. That is why I say that is a symptom, not a cause, a symptom of the lack of faith. The war is there because God is not mocked. They mocked Him, so there is war.

In the end the apostles, prophets and fools for Christ who preach of the Holy Spirit will win against the bureaucrats and formalists, against Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, who have no love, who only have self-interest in their careers and bank accounts, in the ‘system’, like the pharisees of old. They always do win. Here is what I mean by the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The war in the Ukraine is the Judgement of God. The Russian Church in Russia and in the Ukraine is being judged NOW for the heartless formalism of its Spirit-quenchers, just as it was in 1917. This judgement is happening now at the Front in the Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have died over the last year. Now is the Judgement of the Nations. The outcome? Don’t ask me, I am not a prophet.

 

 

On the First Anniversary

The following wide-ranging compilation of nearly 4,000 words provides answers to several questions posed over the last twelve months by various correspondents. Here those answers are made public on this, the first anniversary of our life within the Patriarchate of Romania and among its saints.

 

Q: Was it difficult for all your parishes to transfer to the Romanian Orthodox Church on 16 February 2022?

A: No, it was very simple, very straightforward. The negotiations with the Metropolitan and the Patriarchal canonists took only four hours. The letters of reception were issued two days later and are available for all to see and the antimensia singed by Vladyka were issued ten days later. All was clear and the correctness of our reception was only confirmed by the contrary reactions and astonishing untruths told by certain individuals in ROCOR and even in the MP after our departure in the two weeks that followed, namely that we had not in fact been received! Metr Joseph was very shocked by that. Those untruths totally discredited their authors and the websites they operate.

I am afraid to say that ROCOR now does not have a good reputation among the Local Churches. Other Local Churches know what it has become and are happy to accept persecuted clergy and churches from ROCOR, providing that the vast majority of the people in the parishes want such a transfer. Our vast majority was 4,853 for and 15 (very naïve) people against. Of those 15, most only came to church from time to time and were not listed as parishioners. Tragically, one was persuaded not to come because a certain bishop, under political control, told her not to come here. The result of this is that she has deprived herself of Church life.

Q: Has anyone come back after leaving you?

A: Only one person. She said that she had been misled and was very regretful. But we welcomed her back with open arms and do not mention her mistake to her.

Q: Has the loss of 15 people affected you financially?

A: Collections have increased by over 20% since they left. This is probably because they have been replaced by 47 new parishioners. In order of numbers and nationality these are Russians, Moldovans, Romanians and Ukrainians.

Q: Had you thought of transferring to other Local Churches other than the Romanian?

A: We had not, but they had! We received various offers, but there was only one place we wanted to go after being forced to leave the Russian Church, and that was the Romanian Church, which is outside both Greek/American Democrat politics and Russian/American Republican politics.

Q: What fundamentally forced over half of the English Diocese of the Russian Church Outside Russia to leave it after decades of faithfulness? Was it a question of keeping your property, as some have said?

A: The last straw was its uncanonical actions and schism even with part of the Russian Orthodox Church. Now all that is left is the London Russian parish and a tiny set of mainly convert-run groups outside London with a total of under 200 people in them all told.

Q: Who forced you to leave the Russian Church?

A: Our departure happened through, but not because of, our old family friend, the then 78-year old Metr Jean Renneteau in Paris, although he himself very much wanted to keep us, as he has confirmed in several phone-calls over the last six months. He was very sad to lose us and wants us back. It was all against his will. Let you remind you that it was Metr Jean, whom we backed to the hilt, who finally brought 57%, the non-masonic part, of his Archdiocese, the part where we always had family, close friends and allies, out of schism back to the Russian Orthodox Church. His feat has gone down in history and we greeted it enthusiastically at the time in 2018, as you can read on this site.

However, to get back to the answer to your question, the problem was his superior, who is younger than our three eldest children! It was he who forced Metr Jean to abandon us against the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church, for purely political reasons. When he was informed that if he forced all 16 clerics and their parishes out, we would all go to the Patriarchate of Romania, he replied: ‘Too bad for them’. He had no interest in keeping us because we were not Russian. That is very significant.

For it means that the Russian Church in its present form does not want to do missionary work, does not respect or want to keep its clergy and people, even after a lifetime of unpaid service. It wants to disunite and scatter, rather than to gather together, to destruct rather than to construct. This is suicidal on its part because it means that there is no point in anyone joining or being part of the authentic millennial Russian Orthodox Church, especially those who follow its real Tradition, speak fluent Russian and are its greatest friends!

This is the end for the Russian Orthodox Church anywhere outside Russia and, for the moment, Belarus, for many years to come, depending on the new Patriarch. The Church as it is now will only attract the naïve, who will soon fall away once they see through it, or else right-wing converts with illusions. They were not even born when we were living Orthodoxy in the times of Martyrdom for the Faith and Confession of the Faith in the Soviet Union.

Q: 16 February marks the first anniversary of the transfer of the ‘mini-diocese’ of which you are part, from the Russian Church to the Patriarchate of Romania. Apart from no longer being in schism, what are the differences you have noticed?

A: I think I can sum it all up in just one word: Freedom. For example, in order of the least important to the most important:

Firstly, we can now use our own liturgical English and do not have to use American. So we are no longer being forced to use a foreign language and can carry on using the same liturgical language as we have always used for the last fifty years before others were even born! So we are not being forced to renounce the Tradition, as was definitely the case before.

Secondly, all our websites can operate freely, without censorship. Censorship and threats to free speech are over.

Thirdly, we can now do missionary activity, we are no longer prevented from doing so, with the result that we have already opened two new parishes in the past year and have hopes of opening others elsewhere, especially in the Midlands. Our main problem is lack of funds, so here we appeal to all those who support us to help with fund-raising.

Fourthly, we can now follow in everything the legacy of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who ordained me to the priesthood in 1991 after seven years serving as a deacon and which represents the old multinational ROCOR, the ROCOR of Orthodox Tradition, the Russian Orthodox Church, and not some administrative divisions of it made up over the last century. We so knew and loved the real Russian Orthodox Church so well, but it no longer exists. Archbishop Antony had under him the then only Romanian parish in Paris, which of course was on the new calendar. (In those days, there were several new calendar Orthodox parishes in ROCOR, even in the USA, and that raised no problems).

Now the favour is being returned with what is basically a multinational Russian/Moldovan deanery under the Romanian Church. This means that we are on the old calendar, but if some want to do services on the new calendar, that is possible. Though it does not interest me personally, I can understand that for some it may be important and I say: Please go ahead. It is a pastoral matter. We have Vladyka Joseph’s blessing. All this expresses the spirit of the future Local Church, and not of some ghetto-sect. There is no room for micro-management in such situations, you have to be broader-minded.

In general, I think this freedom to live as normal Orthodox comes from the fact that we are no longer held under by converts, who have only been Orthodox for a few years and are so insecure in the faith that they hold to rigid manmade rules, which nobody else holds to, including in the Moscow Patriarchate. One of the things that recent and inexperienced converts do not realise is that Love is much greater than narrow manmade rules, which are only guidelines.

Their disease is called convertitis, you know that defensive narrowness and headborne dryness of spirit that can also come from doctorates. That disease belongs to the pharisees, who think too much. It has become common in parts of ROCOR, where before it never existed, especially since about 2016. It is what Fr Seraphim Rose fought against in California – for that was and is where the evil began and is spreading from – in the 1970s, quite rightly calling it ‘super-correctness’. It is sounding brass. Now we are in communion with all and are not threatened by the sectarian trends and schismatic pressures of before.

Then, of course, already by Divine Providence in the Romanian Patriarchate, we avoided all the politics connected with the American-Russian war in the Ukraine, which reflects so badly on the Russian Orthodox Church because of its political involvement through its centralisation. At the time several of us said that we had ‘got the last flight out of Kabul’. We have Russians and Ukrainians in our churches, as well as many other nationalities. We can welcome all to our churches. You don’t have to belong to the grim and depressing, right-wing, Protestant-style, pseudo-Russian group of people who do not speak Russian.

Another thing that worries me is that aggressive Western governments may ban the Russian Church in their countries, as those governments have already done in the Ukraine and Latvia, where the local Orthodox have accepted a de facto (though highly providential) autocephaly of the Church, an independence from the highly centralised Russian Church, even though it may not officially be called ‘autocephaly’. If such a ban does happen in the future, at least we are already out of the mess and so will have been saved from such unpleasant problems and political manipulations. God saved us before time.

Q: What do you think the Russian hierarchy should have done on 24 February 2022?

A: Today is the feast day of St Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to the-Apostles. His icon is one of the twelve on the Colchester church iconostasis. He is the key. When in 1904 Japan, armed to the teeth by the Russophobic Western Powers, attacked an unprepared and unmilitarised Russia, Bishop Nicholas, a Russian living in Tokyo, simply locked himself away and prayed for peace. Here is our model. The Russian Church has to return to its multinational itself.

Q: Do you regret anything in the events around you and ROCOR?

A: For us, not at all. All this was the best possible thing that could have happened in those circumstances and all on the eve of that terrible war. For ROCOR, however, I regret greatly.

After the reconciliation with the rest of the Russian Church in 2007, which I witnessed and I had worked towards for decades, ROCOR for a period of about ten years enjoyed unprecedented global prestige in the Orthodox world. We were the Church which had canonised the New Martyrs, the Church which had been the politically-free voice of the Russian Church during its Soviet captivity, we were the Church of the Faithful Confessors, of St John of Shanghai, we had returned to communion with all and were welcomed and thanked for our witness. We received grace. The potential to help develop missions and work towards Local Churches, co-operating with other politically-free Orthodox, was there. Icons gave off myrrh in those days. Today it is a very different story. The acquisition of grace, which St Seraphim of Sarov explained is our aim, has been replaced by the acquisition of money, power and property.

Instead of nurturing that grace and co-operating with others, the grace was step by step misused and abused amid the sectarian spirit of exclusivism. This excluded even the then First Hierarch Metr Hilarion, well before his dementia. As a result, ROCOR is now mainly becoming a historical footnote as the American Synod, which is being even further discredited by the Belya affair, yet another affair of forged signatures. ROCOR has voluntarily Sovietised itself. It is very important to understand that this was all voluntary, it was never forced on ROCOR by Moscow. Certain figures are not so much interested in humility, fasting, poverty and prayer, as in power, luxury, money and property. The problem is lack of pastors. Some have been replaced by bureaucrats, ‘effective managers’, as the Russian jargon goes.

Its hope of survival in Northern America today is in being absorbed into the Moscow-founded OCA, which is about five times bigger. That is what Moscow wants and it is logical. Outside Northern America, ROCOR hardly exists in Latin America, where forty years ago it had, if I remember rightly, six dioceses. As for the thirty or so parishes of Australian ROCOR, they will now have to follow the fate of the Indonesian Mission which ROCOR handed over wholesale to Moscow. It abandoned its mission there, the same as it did here, only here to the Romanians. Australian ROCOR may as well become part of a new Autonomous Church, but under Moscow and linked up with its South-East Asian Exarchate.

Q: What about the ROCOR churches in Western Europe? There are still nearly 90 parishes or small communities there.

A: In Western Europe ROCOR is only really present in Western Germany and Switzerland. In the other Western European countries there is only a handful of parishes and communities, one, two or at most three in each country, if any at all. There is nothing in Scandinavia and Portugal has now been abandoned. In Spain there is one tiny convert group, in Italy there are two parishes on the French border and hardly anything is left in the Netherlands and France. Logically, the ROCOR parishes in Germany, which are in any case mainly peopled and clergied by expatriates from the ex-Soviet Union (and a few convert groups, with often fewer than 10 or at most 20 members) should join Moscow.

This is what Moscow asked for five years ago in exchange for its parishes in the Americas to be given to ROCOR. Sadly, ROCOR refused, missing the boat, the once in a lifetime offer, which will probably not be made again. Then it claimed that it will not join up with Moscow for 50-100 years! Moscow was very angry with the individual who said that. Moscow looks on Western Europe as its territory, as an integral part of Eurasia.

However, the situation has become very complex in Western Europe since the war in the Ukraine, as most of the Moscow parishes are themselves peopled by Ukrainians and especially Moldovans, as in Italy (70 out of 72 parishes). With over thirty new canonical Ukrainian parishes independent of Moscow in Western Europe founded in the last nine months and the possible mass defection of Moldovans to the Romanian Church, as is beginning to happen in Moldova itself and has in fact happened in England, it is difficult to see a future for the Moscow Exarchate. Russian nationalism rules and that means isolationism, being in communion with no-one. It is returning to the times of its tiny Exarchate of Soviet patriots of the 60s and 70s and the war in the Ukraine has isolated Most of the faithful have left its new Cathedral in Paris. Security men frisk you as you go in, as in an airport. I am told that congregations number about thirty. Even my friend Nikita, the very Russian nephew of the late Archbishop Basil Krivoshein, has left.

Q: Surely you regret having to leave the Russian Orthodox Church after nearly fifty years?

A: You misunderstand. We never left the Russian Orthodox Church, that is, we never left the spiritual world of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is part of the whole Orthodox world. All that happened is that we were forced to leave the administrative world, the bureaucracy, of the Russian Church. We are exactly the same as before and continue as before. Nothing has changed. When the administrative world with its protocols frees itself of politics and the spiritual world takes over once more, as it will, and sooner than some think after President Putin, then we shall see what will be decided. The mess will end and the injustices will be sorted out, but not yet. Then those who swim with the tide will swim in the opposite direction, as we have seen so many times before. In Russia they still have many things to suffer in repentance for the Soviet period.

Q: Did you know that your faith would be challenged in this way?

A: In September 2020, we went to Mt Athos to see the clairvoyant Fr Evthimios, the closest disciple of St Paisios the Athonite, whom I met in 1979 together with the ever-memorable Fr Ephraim of Arizona. We met him at the skete where he had built the first ever church dedicated to St Paisios and asked him what we should do, given the internal persecution against us. He said he would send me an answer. In May 2021, after the ROCOR schism had begun, I received a message from him and that was: ‘Do not fear the courts of men. Your case will be decided in the highest court’. And this is exactly what we did and exactly what has happened.

Q: You set up a church in Norfolk and two churches in Cambridgeshire for the people there. So effectively the Colchester parish is for Orthodox in Essex and Suffolk, your home counties, the other two counties in the East of England. Do you still visit Orthodox outside these counties?

A: Of course, I do. I visit my parishioners in many parts of the country among all those rendered Churchless by the absence of Church life which pervades the spiritual desert of modern England. Not just the new and young, but also the old, including the grandchildren of those who came here after 1917, who as adults had known the old Russia. Their parents departed over the last generation, so these grandchildren of emigres are now themselves elderly. These are the people who, like me, knew the traditional ROCOR priests like Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), Fr Alexander Trubnikov (+ 1988) and Fr Mikhail Artsimovich (+ 2003). (Fr George was the one who advised the late Timothy Ware not to join ROCOR because it was being ‘taken over’.

Like them, my godfather, Nikolai Mikhailovich Zernov (+ 1980), however much I disagreed with him, would never have accepted the present situation. Even someone like the equally liberal, non-ROCOR Metr Antony Bloom (+ 2003), despite his well-known human weaknesses which scandalised so many, must be spinning in his grave at what is going on in the Russian Church today. Several of his disciples, for example in Amsterdam and Madrid, have actually left the Russian Church or been suspended by it and his disciple Metr Hilarion (Alfeev) has been exiled to Budapest. He would have been exiled also. As for the equally liberal, late Metr Kallistos (Ware), you can imagine….

In the days of the traditional ROCOR, there were no converts who wanted to rebaptise everyone. You know, the ones who are more Orthodox than the Orthodox, but have no idea that Orthodoxy is Christianity, just an exotic sectarian cult with its cultish podcast and zoom gurus. In the old days, there were few ill-educated, ritualist clergy with superstitions, money-grubbing, politics and phariseeism with as much spiritual refinement and subtlety as a Soviet tank, incapable of confessing or preaching. Lumps of cast iron against antique timepieces.

I recently visited and gave communion to just such a Russian daughter of White emigres in Esher in Surrey, who gave a lot of money in the 1990s to help build the church in Chiswick (like the late Golitsyns), but received bad treatment there. I knew her mother in Paris and have known her and her family for 35 years. Like so many rather aristocratic Russian émigré women, her mother, a child in pre-1917 Russia, became a seamstress in Paris in the 1930s. After the war she had opened her own fashion house and had the Audrey Hepburn elegance, style and class that no longer seems to exist anywhere today, though her daughter has inherited it:  ‘Elegance is the only beauty that never fades’. No botox and tooth-whitening for such people, unlike several Orthodox bishops and priests of all jurisdictions in California.

A spiritual daughter of the wonderful Fr Alexander Trubnikov from Tsarskoe Selo and Meudon, but now deprived of the Church, she talks to God in her garden. That is where she can pray. There are churches, but she cannot go to them, some people who control them are unChristian. But she remains Christian, Orthodox Christian.

Q: Were you hurt by the slanders against you?

A: No. Our first reaction was one of astonishment. Next came laughter at the attempts to manipulate the naive and ignorant who did not know us. These were so ridiculous. The came sadness that people who called themselves Christians could do such things, their souls full of hatred, covetousness and above all jealousy. All this only discredited their authors. It is called the boomerang effect. They reflect very badly on those who issued them. Did they really think that such novel New World manipulations could work among experienced Orthodox in old Europe?

Q: How would you sum up what happened to you last year?

A: I would say that ROCOR fell into a trap of its own making, it was put to the test and failed. In 2007 it was given an opportunity to behave like Christians, but instead, the culprits revealed who they are (both the ones in ROCOR and the few others elsewhere who repeated the untruths of ROCOR). We know their names. The internet knows their names. And above all God knows their names.

It is a tragic warning that if you desert God, He will desert you. And that is what is happening to it through its self-discrediting. The waste of potential is enormous. God gave them everything and they squandered it. What must St John of Shanghai be thinking of this spiritual suicide? Like the apostles, we have shaken the dust off our feet and moved on. May God grant them to know love for others before they reach their death-beds. I tremble in their place. But this is how the Church is cleansed.

Q: Do you feel as though this chapter is closed and you can slowly retire?

A: Now you make me laugh! That chapter was closed a year ago, but slowly retiring?! You haven’t seen anything yet. There is so much more to do. If God grants me life to do it all. The pastoral catastrophe in this country is such that I need another fifty years to contribute towards remedying it just in my little corner. I have only just started!

16 February 2023

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Russian Orthodox Church 2007-2023 and Peace in the Ukraine

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest….Instead of enquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon

Foreword

By the grace of God, all our international parishes, with their Romanian and Russian, Moldovan and Ukrainian, English and European parishioners, live safely within the second largest Local Church, the Patriarchate of Romania. Thus, we are shielded from Russian and Greek schisms and the tragic and divisive consequences of the bitter conflict in the Ukraine. Nevertheless, we cannot help observing the immense temptations that now beset the largest Local Orthodox Church, the Russian, and be concerned about its direction and the future after the Ukrainian conflict is over, which may be quite soon.

Introduction

In order to understand why there is a bloody conflict in the Ukraine today, strangely enough we first have to understand why the Russian Empire fell in 1917. Over a century on, the reason for that is quite clear. The multinational Russian Empire fell because most of its people had lost their Orthodox Faith, the underpinning foundation which had cemented everything together. For when you stop believing in the foundation, you end up in suicidal self-destruction and cynicism.

We can see this today with the Imperial failure of Western Empires, British, French, American etc, also fallen because most have stopped believing in their underpinning ideologies. The Russian crisis in 1917 had been created by a nominal, superficial attitude to the Orthodox Faith, which underpinned all. Most had signed up to the Faith on paper, but did not live by it. They had rejected the consequences and ramifications of the Faith and so lived in hypocritical contradictions, Orthodox but not Christian.

2007

In 2007 the émigré Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) was finally reconciled to the Patriarchal Church inside Russia. We personally considered that this was seven years late, but we had patiently waited for the inevitability, rather than leave for the Patriarchate as some did – better late than never. Having played an active part in the events of the 2006 ROCOR Council and reconciliation and attended the signing of the Act of Canonical Communion in Moscow, I have been asked if I regret it. The answer is crystal clear: Absolutely not. 2007 saved the Church, which kept a huge potential. The fact that it failed to exploit that potential has nothing to do with 2007.

Before 2007 ROCOR was on the verge of becoming a sect, which is why some had already left it. Certain individual ROCOR bishops had even allied themselves to schismatic old calendarist groups in Greece, Romania and Bulgaria! By allying ROCOR with the Patriarchal Church in Moscow, we delayed the possibility of schismatic sectarianism for a vital 14 years. We had gained a breathing space. Some object that ROCOR should not have reconciled with the Patriarchal Church, because it is ‘corrupt’. Of course, there were and still are problems in the Patriarchal Church, but only as there are today in the new ROCOR that has appeared in the last five years.

2023

In both parts of the Russian Church the causes of corruption are very similar: the lack of repentance, the lack of the spiritual. Specifically, there is superstitious ritualism, the vain belief that the sacraments are like magic and require no personal effort to work, only precise ritual observation. This vain belief is essentially materialistic and therefore superficial, for we are not saved by superstitious ritualism, but by the Holy Spirit. Then there is money-oriented careerism, the concept that the Church is a money-making business. This is the very active and very visible temptation of graspingness and love of bling in both parts of the Church. Then there is centralising bureaucracy which puts protocols and forms above the Word of God and Love for our fellow-men. Then there are nationalist political ideologies, the temptation to obey the State, whether the American or the Russian, in other words, you abandon your conscience, integrity and principles because you prefer to swim with the tide for personal advantage, against Christ. This was not the path of the New Martyrs and New Confessors, whom we follow.

This last temptation is especially great for ROCOR, since the political pressures of the declining American Empire could now force all of ROCOR, and not just part of it, into full schism; there the situation is far worse than before 2007, for the unhealthy direction that the New York-based ROCOR has taken since 2018 is the opposite to the healthy one taken before 2007. The danger in all this is that the majority in both parts of the Russian Church, in Moscow and New York, will return to the vices that prevailed before the Revolution – superstitious ritualism, money-oriented careerism, centralising bureaucracy and nationalist political ideologies, all those faults that were present then, as they are now. All of them can cut off from communion with other parts of the Church, destroying the Catholicity of the Church, resulting in isolation. We hope that our Introduction now makes sense, for we are precisely facing another crisis in the Russian Church, as in 1917, the conflict in the Ukraine.

The Conflict in the Ukraine

The manmade catastrophe in the Ukraine has come about because of the lack of Faith, nominalism, on both sides. Do real Christians kill each other? Since this war broke out in 2014, between 160,000 and 250,000 Kiev troops (several thousand of them foreign mercenaries, notably Poles) and 15,000 – 20,000 Russian-Ukrainians and Russians have been killed, together with nearly 14,000 Russian-Ukrainian civilians and nearly 7,000 Ukrainian civilians. In other words, between 200,000 and 290,000 are dead because Kiev was suicidally forced to refuse, to make peace last spring, again last summer and now, when all could have been ended with compromise.

Since 2014 16 million Ukrainians have been displaced – 10 million to various countries in Europe, the majority to Russia and 6 million internally. It is not clear what proportion of those 10 million will ever return to the Ukraine, whose population is now only 18-22 million, given that 4 million have preferred to live under Russian administration in the south-east, an area the size of England and Wales. Kiev has also had about 50 percent of its energy infrastructure destroyed. It requires at least $3 billion a month in outside borrowings just to keep its economy afloat. This debt will never be repaid. Meanwhile a surrounding army of nearly 700,000 Russian soldiers, with, if necessary, their 15,000 tanks, waits to occupy and rebuild the Ukraine. All that NATO could muster against them is 100,000 and 59 tanks though, in any case, it is too frightened to deploy a single one of them, as it knows that it would lose them.

Conclusion

In other words, the conflict in the Ukraine is a call to return to the Faith – to avoid this suicide. That is the choice. It is a Divine warning, as at Siloam: ‘Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish’ (Lk. 13, 5). It is no coincidence that this conflict began in February 2022, the centenary of the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922. For the origins of this conflict are precisely in the unatoned sins of the Soviet apostasy that created February 1917 and the greatest atheist State and persecution of Christianity in world history. After all, to create another Revolution, all you have to do is to repeat the same sins, the sins of those who sinned against the New Martyrs and Confessors.

And it is no coincidence either that the path to reconciliation is in the life of the great twentieth-century Ukrainian saint, the New Confessor, St John the Wonderworker, also known as St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, the Saint of the old, pre-sectarian, pre-schismatic, faithful Russian Emigration. It was he who was persecuted and put on trial by the sectarians and schismatics who claimed to be his own. It was he put the Faith above all their concerns, above their superstitious ritualism, their money-oriented careerism, their centralising bureaucracy and their nationalist political ideologies, which so trouble all parts of the Russian Church again today. Only when Russians and Ukrainians do as he did and put the Kingdom of God and His righteousness first, will there be peace in the Ukraine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus

Foreword

Of the fifteen universally-recognised Local Orthodox Churches, two are in great trouble, not to say in danger of being quite discredited. One was the most prestigious, the other is by far the largest, some 70% of the whole.

The first is the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Having accepted a lot of dollars from those who wish to destroy the Church, it has sponsored an entirely uncanonical ‘Church’ in the Ukraine, whose sponsors and gangsters and thugs, the worst of the worst, do violence to actual Christians and attempt to destroy the Church.

The second is the Patriarchate of Moscow. Outside Russia and Belarus, this is in danger of becoming a small network of nationalist ghettoes or tiny, semi-private groups, each with a few right-wing neophytes. To some it seems as though it has squandered its great, post-Soviet potential, just as it squandered its great Tsarist potential before 1917. Some even call its actions suicidal.

It has long been suggested that the first can repent by leaving its flock of fewer than 500 in Istanbul in the hands of one priest and moving to Athens. There, its leader would remain the Patriarch of Constantinople, though now with a real flock and real churches covering all Greece, just as the Patriarch of Antioch, who has long lived in Damascus and does not go to Antioch, which is in Turkey.

As for the second, like others, we too have a suggestion. Some will dismiss the following as fiction, not even faction. But suppose just 10% of it came true in the coming years? That would be a lot. We will never discount the possibility of repentance for anyone. We know how it transforms, from our own lives. See below:

 

The Synod

The meeting of the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church which began on 20 May 2024 culminated on 24 May, the Feast of Sts Cyril and Methodius, Apostles to the Slavs. Momentous decisions were announced on that day, including changing the legal name of the Russian Orthodox Church from ‘Patriarchate of Moscow’ to ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’. The change of name is connected with the radical decentralisation of the Patriarchate, described below, and the move of all Patriarchal offices to the historic New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. Even after the creation of two more Autocephalous Churches, the Russian Orthodox Church will still have over 130 million baptised, representing two-thirds of the whole Orthodox Church. As such the Russian Church has a huge responsibility to work together with other Local Churches in the Diaspora, shedding itself of any imperialistic tendencies.

Four Autocephalous Churches

The Polish Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia were already granted autocephaly by the Russian Church, respectively in 1948 and 1951. Now two new Autocephalous Churches have been created:

Ukrainian Orthodox Church

This covers the territory of the Ukraine, whose new borders were established on 5 May 2024. This numbers over 15 million baptised Orthodox.

Baltic Orthodox Church

This covers Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Finland and gathers all Orthodox in those countries who celebrate the canonical date of Orthodox Easter. They number some 400,000 baptised Orthodox.

Eight Autonomous Churches

The Chinese Orthodox Church and the Japanese Orthodox Church were already granted autonomy in 1957 and 1970, respectively. They have remained autonomous and not become autocephalous, simply because they have both remained small. At the Synodal meeting of the Russian Orthodox Church in May 2024 six new Autonomous Churches were created:

Moldovan Orthodox Church

This is destined to gather together all Orthodox in the Republic of Moldova, who are at present under the Russian and the Romanian Churches. If unity can be achieved through this autonomy, then this Church can become autocephalous.

Central Asian Orthodox Church

This gathers together Orthodox living in the five ‘stans’ of Central Asia. This Church could help bring Orthodoxy to other stans, such as Pakistan. Autocephaly is quite possible with time.

Northern American Orthodox Church (NAOC)

This replaces the old Autocephalous Orthodox Church in America, the OCA, founded in 1970. Its canonicity was always disputed as it was declared autocephalous, yet shared the same territory as other Orthodox, who were in fact far more numerous. Also the title ‘in America’ was very vague. Northern America is precise, meaning fundamentally the USA and Canada (with Greenland and Bermuda). Moreover, the NAOC has today received the addition of some 40 parishes from the former Moscow Patriarchate, which have now been transferred to it. (Only St Nicholas church in New York remains as a dependency under the Patriarchate). Furthermore, all bishops, clergy, parishes and monasteries of the old ROCOR in Northern America are invited to become part of the NAOC in order to avoid any uncanonical tendencies and extremes within itself. With time we hope that Orthodox of other ethnic backgrounds will join the NAOC and this Church will then become Autocephalous. However, on shared territory, such an Autocephaly can only be granted by several Patriarchates together, thus forming an authentic multinational Local Church.

Western European Orthodox Church (WEOC)

This replaces the old Western European Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate. It is hoped that with time the members of the old ROCOR in Western Europe and of the old Archdiocese of Western Europe, both officially within the Patriarchate, will come to take part in it in order to avoid any uncanonical tendencies and extremes within themselves. With time we hope that Orthodox of other ethnic backgrounds will join the WEOC and this Church will then become Autocephalous. However, on shared territory, such an Autocephaly can only be granted by several Patriarchates together, especially with the majority Patriarchate of Romania, thus forming an authentic multinational Local Church. Its territory at present covers the six Dioceses of: Germania (Germany, Austria, German Switzerland and Liechtenstein); the British Isles (England, Scotland and Wales) and Ireland; Iberia (Spain, Portugal and Andorra); Italia (Italy, Malta, San Marino and Swiss Ticino; Gallia (France, southern Belgium, French Switzerland and Monaco); the three countries of Benelux; Scandinavia – Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. This is 23 countries, with at present 9 bishops.

Hungarian Orthodox Church

This is led by Metropolitan Hilarion of Budapest and All Hungary. Most of its baptised live in the autonomous Carpatho-Russian province in the east, formerly part of the old Ukraine, now part of Hungary. In time it will become Autocephalous.

African Orthodox Church

Founded in 2021 under the present Metropolitan Leonid of Uganda, this now has four bishops, three of whom are Black Africans. Its territory covers all Africa and with expansion will become Autocephalous.

Four Exarchates

The Exarchates of Belarus and of South East Asia already exist. Now two missionary Exarchates have been created:

Exarchate of Oceania

Based on the old ROCOR Australian Diocese, this covers the Continent of Australia, New Zealand and Pacific islands. Its vocation is to work with other Orthodox to form a new Local Church.

Exarchate of Latin American and the Caribbean

This gathers Orthodox living in South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. Its vocation is to work with other Orthodox to form new Local Churches.

 

 

 

An Old New Year’s Q and A 2023

Q: Both Russians and Ukrainians are supposed to be Orthodox Christians and belong to exactly the same Church, so why is there this scandal of a war between them, with over 150,000 Ukrainian and over 15,000 Russian dead so far? All Orthodox, but killing each other? What is all this about?

A: First of all, if the dead and the living were actually Orthodox, I would agree with you, but that is not the case. First of all, many of the casualties on both sides are not even baptised. Secondly, on the Russian side, quite a few are Muslims and on the Ukrainian side thousands of the dead are Polish mercenaries and hundreds Canadian, American, British (well over 100 dead) and Croat mercenaries. Thirdly, about half of the Ukrainians are not Orthodox, but Catholics, Protestants or schismatics. And finally, most of the remaining ones, the Orthodox, are Orthodox in name only, that is, they are only baptised, not practising, just nominally Orthodox. This war reminds us of just how few real Orthodox there are. Yes, there are Orthodox, but how many are Christians? That is the key question.

Let us remember that in the First and Second World Wars, many Germans were Protestants, as were most of the British. They still slaughtered each other, just as Catholic Germans and Catholic Poles slaughtered one another in the Second War, or, long before, Catholic Englishmen and Catholic Frenchmen in the Hundred Years War.

And in 1912-1913 Serbs and Bulgarians were killing each other. Both were supposedly Orthodox. And in the Second World War, the Romanian government became Fascist and sided with Hitler, and so Romanian soldiers had to fight against Russians. However, the Russians were Communists. It was not so much a war between Romanian Orthodox and Russian Orthodox, as between a Fascist government and a Communist government. You have to remember that. So today, there is no war between the Ukraine and Russia. The war is between Washington and Moscow. The Ukrainians, like most Western Europeans, are just naïve pawns or proxies in the Great American Game to continue its world domination.

We live in the age of nominal Orthodoxy. The results are to be seen not just in the Ukraine and Russia, but all over Western Europe. There are large numbers of nominal Russian Orthodox of various nationalities, but very few churches for them. Thus, of the 140,000 Ukrainian refugees in the UK, there is only one community – of fewer than 40. Even supposing that half the Ukrainian refugees are not Orthodox anyway, fewer than 40 out of 70,000 is about 1 in 2,000 who go to church! The priest himself told me that he despairs. True, we have about 15 Ukrainians in Colchester, but we find ourselves obliged to teach them fundamentals like how to take a blessing. Some are not even baptised.

Many Orthodox in the Ukraine and Russia are only there for a career and money. There have been so many scandals – I have seen it in the many visits I have made to both countries over the last fifteen years. It is clear that several clergy are probably atheists.

Q: What is the main pastoral problem in the Orthodox Church in general?

A: I think it is the fact that there are hardly any parishes, in the sense of Christian communities. This is a problem all over the world, except in villages, but we can take two examples locally. Russians who attend the two Russian churches in London say one resembles a busy railway station, the other a gloomy and exclusive ghetto. As a result, there is a huge turnover of parishioners, with an almost entirely different group of parishioners every few years. Huge numbers have been through both churches over the last 30 years, but only once or twice in that time. They do not stay. The constant core is tiny.

As a result of this absence of community life, there are huge losses. Many Russians from the Baltics, as well as from the Ukraine, have left both those churches. One of the problems here is mixed marriages. English husbands do not want to attend churches where they cannot understand a word. Some Russians now even attend Anglican churches and tell me that at least they are treated like human-beings there and do not have to endure nasty comments from Russian nationalists and (sometimes) Non-Russian sectarian converts. It seems as though these churches can only keep and only want Russians from Russia or those who want to pretend to be Russian. They live in a ghetto, where the persecution of Russians from outside Russia, by Russians from inside Russia, seems to be allowed.

Q: In that case, the case of ghettos and nationalism, missionary work has become impossible. Who will take up the mission?

A: Missionary work in churches which behave like this is at an end. They are anti-pastoral. It is very sad. It is the total rejection of the work of St Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, who gathered all Orthodox together in the USA at the start of the twentieth century. It is the total rejection of the great and holy legacy of St John of Shanghai and of the authentic old ROCOR outside Russia after the time of St Tikhon. It is the total rejection of the spirit of the New Martyrs and Confessors inside Russia.

Who will take up the mission, since both Russians and Greeks appear to have have cancelled and eliminated themselves for the moment? The Ukrainians? The Romanians? The Moldovans? All have nominal faithful in the millions in Western Europe. That makes them easily the majority of nominal Orthodox, both in the UK and in Western Europe. But do they have faith? And do they have the necessary leadership? All I know is that we shall continue to do missionary work in our own parishes. The rest will have to solve their own problems.

Q: How does the Orthodox Church cope with the assimilation of children born to immigrants in the Diaspora?

A: Sadly, it does not. I remember 30 years ago meeting a youngish man, whose grandparents had been White Russians and come to England in 1919. The youngish man, then in his thirties, had just been circumcised, i.e. become a Jew. He said he had been attracted by Jewish spirituality. Nothing new here, remember Fr/St Sophrony Sakharov, who already before the Revolution had left his upper middle-class family background and become a Hindu for the same reason. He had found no spiritual food in the nominal Russian Orthodoxy around him. He had to be converted by a semi-literate peasant, the future St Silvanus.

Virtually all the descendants of White Russians from after 1917 (and remember that only 10% of them were practising Orthodox) have been assimilated and lost to the Church everywhere. The only older ones you sometimes meet are descendants of the post-1945 immigration. All the rest are from the Soviet emigration, post-1991. This is the case in both the MP and the ROCOR churches in London. Both would have died out completely had the USSR not collapsed and new Russians moved here from all over the old USSR. But already many of their children, who speak to me in English, have lapsed. They have been assimilated and are lost to the Church.

Today in the UK exactly the same has happened to the descendants of Greek Cypriots who settled here in the 50s and 60s. Their parishes are dying out and the clergy are nearly all very old. There are now over twenty Greek Cypriot Anglican vicars. I met one about twenty years ago and asked why he had done this. His first answer was that he did not understand a word of Greek and then on top of that the Anglicans gave their vicars a free house and a good salary. He said: ‘Why not?’

Q: Why are Orthodox so different? Why don’t you have pews and organs like we do?

A: Your question reminds me of someone who came to visit us eighteen months ago and asked us why we don’t have any VIPs or rich people in our church! I answered him that we don’t have VIPs or rich people, but we do have Christ. Similarly, we don’t have pews and organs, we have the Tradition. Nor do we have converts, we have Orthodox.

Q: Why did Communism spread mainly in Orthodox countries?

A: As one Romanian said to me some 20 years ago: ‘Communism is Orthodox Christianity without Christ’. In the same way we can say that: Fascism is Catholicism without the Pope and Capitalism is Protestantism without morality.

Q: What is the difference between the sacramental theologies of Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants?

A: To be very brief and very general:

Protestantism has no sacramental theology because it has no sacraments. (Exceptionally, the sacrament of baptism, by water in the Name of the Holy Spirit, is the only one which can be conferred by a layman).

Catholicism believes that sacraments are conferred only by clergy who have the authority to do so from the Pope, as he alone holds the Holy Spirit. (Some ‘Papist’ Orthodox like to imitate this!). For them there is no Christ and therefore no Church and therefore Holy Spirit and therefore no sacraments without the Papacy.

Orthodoxy believes that any priest who confesses the Creed, established in the fourth century, and has been ordained by an Orthodox bishop who has canonical apostolic succession, that is, who is in communion with all the other bishops of His Local Orthodox Church, can transfer the grace of the Holy Spirit and so confer the sacraments. Hence the grave spiritual danger of being out of communion with other bishops of the same Local Church and even more the danger if he denies the sacraments of the other bishops of his own Local Church., let alone other Local Churches. That is called schism because it denies the catholicity of the Church and isolates from the Holy Spirit.

Q: What practical differences did leaving ROCOR make to your churches?

A: The first and immediate difference was that we could put out for public veneration the icon of St Sophrony, whom I knew very well. Before that we had been banned from putting it out for those who wished to venerate him. But, far more importantly, the difference is the fact that we can now concelebrate with other priests and other priests can concelebrate with us, notably Romanians, Antiochians and Greeks. Previously, that too had been banned by the sectarian and schismatic mentality in charge. As I have worked all my life for the catholicity of the Church and against the spirit of sects, cults and schism, that has been vitally rewarding to me.

Q: Why does homosexuality penetrate Church life?

A: This always happens in periods of decadence, whether in the first century or in the twenty-first century. There is nothing new in it. The Apostle Paul warns of it. Homosexuality and, perhaps even more often, bisexuality, become the norm among the clergy in periods of decadence. The problem always begins among the episcopate, as with the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the twentieth century (Archbishop Athenagoras, for example), as such bishops ordain their friends, homosexuals and bisexuals, to the clergy, and so form a self-protective mafia. In the USA this problem is enormous.

It is curious how these people call themselves ‘gay’, when in fact they are sad. It is rather like those who call themselves ‘woke’, which means (spiritually) asleep (if not actually dead), not ‘awake’ at all. What is also curious is that the open homosexuals are generally associated with syncretism, left-wing liberalism and modernism (Archbishop Athenagoras), and the repressed and angry homosexuals are generally associated with ultra-conservative right-wingery, phariseeism, misogyny, conspiracy theories and even Fascism. Both witness to a total lack of Love, jealousy and hatred.

Q: Do you feel bitter against the Russian Church for the way they treated you after your nearly 50 years of unpaid missionary service on its behalf?

A: Not in the slightest! What concerns me is what is popularly called ‘karma’, or ‘what goes round, comes round’. As Newton said in his third law: ‘To every action there is always an equal reaction’. All those individuals who persecuted us have died, fallen ill, lost their careers or otherwise been punished. And there is more to come for them. As the Apostle wrote nearly 2,000 years ago, ‘God is not mocked’ and ‘Our God is a consuming fire’. You just cannot get away with it. I have seen it so very often down the decades. Sadly, they will all be punished, or rather, punish themselves, and well before the Last Judgement. This is why we pray for them all. I tremble in their place. If you act without integrity, without a conscience, without principles, against the spiritual and moral law, only out of self-interest, you will suffer. It is inevitable. People like that always end up outside the Church.

Our mistreatment is a loss for the Russian Church, but not for Orthodox Christianity. However, the damage the Russian Church has done to itself is incalculable. Everybody now says: Look at Fr Andrew, he sacrificed his life and career and learned to speak almost perfect Russian and they, who spoke Russian very badly, if at all, mistreated him and all his in that way. Such people will say: ‘There’s no way I will ever have anything to do with the Russian Church, especially not with ROCOR, given the way they treated him’. It was all a spiritual death-wish. The point is that if people really want to commit suicide in the Russian Church, you cannot stop them. I know, I tried to stop them – and failed!

If others who call themselves Russian Orthodox, but who are not, lapse from Orthodoxy, we, on the other hand, do not and will not lapse. When the Russian Church is free again after this terrible political war in the Ukraine is over, we shall see. How is it ever going to rebuild itself? Only on the foundations of St Seraphim of Sarov, St John of Kronstadt, St John of Shanghai and the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Imperial Martyrs, who are why I am part of the real Russian Church, the Universal Church. It will mean rejecting politics, careerism, love of money and luxury, big black cars and bling, that the Church is not a business. It will mean understanding that money is for doing good, not for filling churches with gold and marble and sewing vestments with gold thread. The tragedy is that some have repeated exactly the same mistakes as before the Revolution. You can join the prophets or join those who stone the prophets. It is your choice. I know where I stand.

In any case, we have always served and will always serve Christ and His Orthodox Church first and foremost, not some manmade branch of it and all its corruption. We believe in the ‘Orthodox Catholic Church’, not some political and nationalist outlier, however big it may be on paper. Quality, not quantity!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The World and the Church after 2022

Introduction: After the Military Campaign

The date of 24 February 2022 has already gone down in world history. We come to the end of a vital crossroads year and a revolution that happens only once every 500 years. With the end of Western Conquistador Civilisation, we try to peer over the horizon into 2023 and beyond. What will come after the Ukrainian war is over? Some who follow Western reporting of that conflict may be surprised by this statement. However, that reporting has been a strange mixture of delusional fantasies/wishful thinking and straightforward propaganda organised by the secret services, omitting truth, logic and reality. Journalists have been ordered to report such nonsense from on high (otherwise, they would have lost their careers and their income). Such reporting has essentially been destined to try and keep Western peoples under control in the hardships they are facing as a result of the suicidal decisions of their pro-US political elites. The US elite is making use of the meagre resources of its NATO vassals (so-called ‘allies’), using as its battlefield the Ukraine and as its cannon fodder Ukrainians and mercenaries. But Russian victory is inevitable, even if delayed because the US wants to make the Ukraine into its Second Vietnam.

The Western elite wants to fight ‘to the last Ukrainian’. (“We don’t care how many Ukrainians will die. How many women, children, civilians and military. We don’t care. Ukraine cannot take the peace decision. The peace decision can only be taken in Washington. But for now we want to continue this war, we will fight to the last Ukrainian.” Former US Senator Richard Blake). Therefore it is supplying all sorts of lethal arms for hundreds of thousands more of them to die and be wounded. Even if some in NATO dare to send more tens of thousands of their ‘willing’ to the slaughter in the Ukraine directly, and not in Ukrainian uniform, as with the tens of thousands of mainly Polish mercenaries at present, many of them already dead, that victory is still inevitable. Russia has been preparing for a full-scale Continental war ever since 2014. Even if next year the 200,000 strong Polish Army and reservists attack, armed to the teeth by the USA, Russia is ready. Although the prophecies of the saints and elders indicate May 2024 as the end of this ten-year long war (the US elite started it through their Ukrainian puppets in 2014), prophecies are always conditional on repentance and we should not try to determine exact details from them. Whatever happens, the next few years are going to see revolutionary transformations worldwide as a result of this war.

The New World Order

The most dramatic event after its defeat in the Ukraine will surely be the retreat of the USA, as it is expelled from Eurasia, a process which began in Vietnam and then continued in Iraq and Afghanistan. The nationalist Trump wanted to withdraw voluntarily, but he was not allowed to, therefore the humiliating US withdrawal will happen by force, as it did in Kabul. ‘Yanks, go home’, chants the whole world, including many in Western Europe, tired of US tyranny. In Eurasia the US now occupies only a few islands (Taiwan, Japan, Singapore), the tips of two peninsulas (Korea and Western Europe) and the seaboard edge Israel. It will have to leave all of these, except for the Non-Palestinian parts of Israel. Taiwan will naturally return to China, Japan will have to find its own way, reconciling itself to a reunited Korea and submitting itself to China economically. For Western Europe, see below.

Once home, the USA will have to lick its wounds and be deoligarchised by popular revolt. The dedollarisation of the world economy is already under way, with very serious consequences for the deindustrialised US economy. The American Empire will undergo deimperialisation, like the European Empires after 1945, and, if at all possible, have to find some sort of unity, identity and sovereignty in its highly polarised, highly indebted and highly fragilised situation. Outside the US, the world chants ‘Yanks, go home’, but inside the US, ordinary Americans chant: ‘Feds, go home’. It is the same thing. The swamp must be drained. The departure of the USA from Western Europe after its eighty-year long occupation will mean the end of the already much disarmed and futile NATO. The suicidal bankruptcy of the European countries will also lead to the end of NATO’s political and economic arm, the EU.

This will mean the reconfiguration of the tip of the European peninsula and its resovereignisation, a process which has already begun in Hungary. In the Western Balkans, Camp Bondsteel, the second largest US base in the world, will be abandoned, and Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia will rearrange themselves in the post-American world, the world of long-awaited justice. The future of Europe is not thousands of miles across the Atlantic, but eastwards, next door, in its natural sources of energy, food, fertiliser and manufactures. Europe as a separate Continent is after all a pure fiction, an artificial construct which was created from and cut off from the Eurasian landmass for purely political reasons. Europe is about to learn this, as it returns to its roots, which Russia alone has kept. A Russian-led Europe provides the prospect of a unity of sovereign but confederal Northern Eurasia ‘from sea to shining sea’, in fact, from Reykjavik to Tokyo. It is the future, in which the USA is utterly irrelevant. Its ‘lies-based order’ of genocidal chaos is over.

Inside Russia itself the transformation has already begun, with treacherous members of the ‘creative class’ gone to their spiritual home in Israel, with Pugachova and Zelensky, as well as across the borders to Georgia and Finland. This cleansing process and the ensuing Re-Russification of Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus will go far. After the deviations of 200 years of Imperial Russia – and there were very serious deviations then – otherwise Tsar Nicholas II would not have wanted to return to pre-Imperial Russia, to ‘Rus’ and there would never have been 1917 – 75 years of Marxist Sovietisation and 30 corrupt years of the Americanisation and so oligarchisation, the transformation has far to go. There will be a great and radical refreshing and cleansing of national identity after this unheard-of period of decadence and corruption, which ultimately stretches back over 300 years. All Russian institutions, including the still Sovietised Church, together with its small branches founded by post-1917 emigres, will be transformed. The uncompromised Russian Church, freed from the moneychangers, will arise from the embarrassing ruins of the past. The past is over. The arrival of the future in 2022 has made it all so irrelevant.

The New Christian Order

As regards the current versions of Western Christianity, Protestantism (1517-2017) is largely a spent force within the Western world, its 500-year best before date is up. Just as it was launched by printing technology, it has been ended by internet technology. Puritanism preached ‘Hate the sin and especially hate the sinner’, now its just as aggressive descendant, Wokeism, preaches, ‘Love the sinner and especially love the sin’. In other words, all is permitted. The once full churches of Protestantism close down in their hundreds every year in the Western world. It was what it was, a moralising and White Supremacist blip in history, both for good, as in keeping promises, honesty, integrity and moral uprightness, and for bad, as in the ruthless and unsustainable exploitation of human and natural resources, including slavery, the obsession with money and saving money, as well as boring and iconoclastic philistinism caused by narrow-minded bigotry, and the tragic, rigid, literalist, moralising, unnatural and pharisaical repression of human nature, causing crass hypocrisy and misogyny, to the point of the slaughter of women as ‘witches’.

As for Roman Catholicism, throwing out the baby with the bathwater, it was taken over by the CIA in the early sixties to be used as a political battering ram against the USSR. And it too is also largely a spent force (1054-2054?) in the Western world. Covered-up pedophilia and the misogyny of compulsorily unmarried and frustrated clerics, some of them perverts, now exposed, are killing it off. Little wonder that some say that the present Pope is the last one. However, if Catholicism can be freed of American and European political stooges and cleansed of its inherent millennial secularism, it at least can return to roots (Protestantism as a schismatic, splintering protest opinion movement has in itself no roots to return to). Liberated from Rome, the people now called ‘Catholics’ can reflourish in new forms, especially in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia, providing that Catholicism goes native, yet remains traditional, and the Global South’s clergy’s almost universal, but hypocritically concealed marriages can be recognised officially. This will mean Catholicism divesting itself of the secularist and corrupt Western Middle Ages and returning to the spirit of the pre-Roman Catholic Faith of first millennium Western Europe.

As regards the Non-Western, Orthodox Church, the 200 million in the at present fifteen local branches of the Orthodox Church, the Dewesternisation revolution will be just as radical. At present there is the 7%, the 14 million of the Greek Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Once the US Establishment, which stands behind them all and meddles intensively in their affairs, has retreated, freedom will come to them at last. As for the Russian Church, the 70% or 140 million, just as for the 23% or 46 million of the other Non-Greek Churches, in Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Macedonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Albania, the revolution will also necessarily be radical. They are all going to have to be freed from the Western disease of worldliness:

‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all those who sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said to them: It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves’.

The Future of the Russian Church outside the Western World

The whole Russian political campaign over the last twenty-two years to move towards a multipolar/polycentric world is now coming to fruition. The Big Four, Russian, China, India and Iran, are being joined by many countries from all Continents in the Global South in huge and powerful Non-Western organisations like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), the SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organisation) and the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), to form a new G20 to replace the failed American vassal one. Now this multipolar/polycentric world, inherently anti-centralist, will be reflected in Church life. The old and failed centralisation of Constantinople and Moscow especially, which has always brought corruption in its wake, will eventually disappear in the global internet age of transparency and diversity, where people are seen for what they are. This is a warning to all tyrants and bullies. Your secrets are being found out. Your time is up.

Russian nationalists and old-fashioned centralisers believe that once Russia has taken over the Ukraine, the Church in the Ukraine will return to being part of the Russian Church. This is absurd. The Russian campaign has made most real Ukrainians into disaffected enemies of everything Russian. A military and political victory is only military and political. In the New Ukraine (or whatever it will be called), with a majority Orthodox population of between 10 and 20 million, inhabited by real Ukrainians, the people will simply refuse to attend Russian churches. There are already over thirty independent Ukrainian parishes under Metr Onufry in the Diaspora. The insistence on Soviet-style centralism that has caused the appalling mess in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, as also in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and in the Western world, will have to be remedied. Just as new Autocephalous Churches were eventually founded (as late as the 1950 and 1970s) in Poland, Czechoslovakia and ‘America’ (as well as Autonomous Churches for the very small flocks in Japan and China), Autocephalous Churches will inevitably be founded as a result of the break-up of the Soviet Union. Thirty years have passed. It is high time.

The many dioceses of the Russian Church outside the Union State of the Russian Federation and Belarus have lost their multinationalism. That has finally been destroyed in the last ten months in the Ukraine. Exarchates like that already in Belarus will not be enough elsewhere, though no doubt new Exarchates will be founded in countries like Kazakhstan. The Church in Moldova, already 20% under the Romanian Patriarchate, may perhaps not even become an Exarchate, but rather an autonomous part of the Romanian Orthodox Church, using the old calendar and with its own customs, just as our own Moldovan/Russian/ Romanian group of parishes in England already does.

The Russian Church is set to become a Family of Autocephalous Churches, perhaps relatively close to the Mother-Church, like the Church of Poland, the Church of the Czechs and Slovaks and the OCA in America, but still fully independent of it. This is the best left-behind Moscow can hope for now. The process has already long been under way. Moscow will just have to recognise reality as a fait accompli. Reality will dawn. The grassroots have voted. You cannot force people to belong to an alien Church. Thus, there will be formed a new ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’, not just of the Russian, Polish and Czechoslovak Churches, but, we think, perhaps with as many as eight more new Local Churches. This could bring the total number of Local Churches, recognised by all, from fifteen to twenty-three. We suggest that new Autocephalous, not Autonomous, Churches, because the numbers are too great for that, will be founded in the Non-Western world in:

  1. The Ukraine. Nobody knows what will become of the former 25 provinces of the typically Soviet-centralised, because wholly Communist-invented, Ukraine. It seems likely that between 7 and 12 of them will return to Russia, as 5 already have by large democratic majorities, 3 may return to Poland, 1 to Romania and 1 to Hungary. (The latter could in turn become the foundation for a future Hungarian Orthodox Church). But whatever the New Ukraine will look like, it will have its own, Ukrainian-speaking, Autocephalous Church.
  2. The Baltics. Finland (that is, all the Orthodox in Finland who want to live on the Orthodox Paschalia, which is a definition of canonical Orthodoxy), Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania together have a large enough Orthodox population and enough bishops to form their own Autocephalous Church. A Church for these Four Nations will put paid to any petty, provincial nationalism.
  3. South-East Asia. The present Exarchate of South-East Asia will in time become at least one Autocephalous Church, though its territory may be defined differently from now.
  4. Africa. Whatever may be thought of the recent Russian initiative there, it is now too late for the Russian Church to give up its Exarchate of some 200 parishes and clergy in Africa – even if it wanted too. The colonial Greek Church of Alexandria has had little future for a long time. It had many missionary chances and dismissed most of them over the centuries. A nominal flock of perhaps one million out of a population of one billion Africans is not convincing as a missionary effort. The at present Russian Exarchate in Africa will relatively soon have native African bishops – candidates are already studying in Russia – and it will in time become an Autocephalous, and genuine, African Orthodox Church, albeit 1,700 years late.

The Future of the Russian Church inside the Western World

At present the CIA and its daughter-agencies manipulate much of the Russian Orthodox Church in the Western world, just as it does the Patriarchate of Constantinople. It interferes in Orthodoxy, just as it does in Catholicism, there using the Papacy as its stooge, here bishops. Divide and rule is the slogan and it has successfully done that, polarising into liberal Greeks and conservative Russians. Both groups are manipulated and infiltrated by exactly the same secularism, according to their inherent political weaknesses. It is time to solve the Diaspora problem at last. 100 years late. We suggest that new Autocephalous Churches will be founded in the Western world in:

  1. Northern America. Unlike the term ‘North America’, this geographical term means the USA and Canada, together with some northern islands like Bermuda. Here missionaries can build on the OCA, renaming it the NAOC (North American Orthodox Church). The OCA was vital and brave, yet flawed, because of the Cold War and because it despised parts of the Tradition. If co-operation between Greeks, Russians, Arabs, Serbs, Romanians, Bulgarians, Albanians and others can be achieved without imperialist condescension and political and nationalist meddling from Greeks and Russians in particular, there is real hope that a new Local Church can be founded.
  2. Latin America. Stretching over a vast territory from Argentina to Mexico and including the Caribbean, here there is a great need for a new Local Church, though much input must come from the Arab Orthodox world.
  3.  Oceania. Centred in Australia, here there is a great need for a new Local Church, though much input must come from the Greek Orthodox world.
  4. Western Europe. This has far more Orthodox than any other part of the Western world. Now 80% are Romanians/Moldovans (a quarter of Romania, over 4,000,000 Orthodox, and a third of Moldova, 1,400,000 Orthodox, live in Western Europe, especially in Spain, Italy, Germany and England. There are also over 1,000,000 Greeks, Russians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Arabs, Ukrainians and others. It is really scandalous that there is not already a Local Church – the WEOC. First Greeks and then Russians have lacked the courage and will to follow the canons. The hopes we once had in them have been dashed by their nationalist politics. The great responsibility for the future now appears to lie in the hands of by far the largest and by far the most recent immigrant group, the Romanians and Moldovans.

Conclusion: Build Up the Church of God or Die in Irrelevance

New Local Churches are going to appear outside the Western world. This, outside the Western world, may be a fairly straightforward matter for the Russian Church. Inside the Western world, it is a far more complex matter because of the present multi-jurisdictional situation. It does not depend on Russians. They lost their chance. The solution will demand diplomatic talent and co-operation, between Romanian, Greek, Russian, Arab, Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Georgian Orthodox. All of them have diasporas. National dioceses and deaneries can be set up within a multinational structure not dominated by any one nationality, as to a large extent Northern America lived under the future St Tikhon of Moscow some 120 years ago. So much time has been wasted through political meddling and nationalist despotism and it is still being wasted now. Russians refused to learn from the mistakes of Greeks and Greeks refused to learn from the mistakes of Russians.

Any extremists who do not want to co-operate because they are flag-waving nationalists (that is, secularists) will be left to one side. Any ecumenist modernists who do not even want to celebrate Easter on the Orthodox calendar will also be left to one side. The same goes for right-wing sectarian groups like the new ROCOR (the old ROCOR was sadly killed off in infamy by love of the dollar and greed for power) and other old calendarist groups who do not want to belong to the Church of 200 million, but only to tiny exclusivist ghettos. They too will be left to one side. The exclusivists who refuse to co-operate with other Local Churches, in the pharisees’ imagination of their proud hearts thinking themselves superior to them, have lost their purpose, their raison d’etre. As sectarians, they have made themselves irrelevant, discrediting themselves with cultish and hypocritical practices and attempts at intimidation, threats and guru-style mind control. As for us, we simply ignore them and continue to build!

 

Chaos or Order?

Over the last generation we have seen canonical chaos unfolding in Church life and over the last four years this chaos has grown exponentially. For example:

Twenty-eight years ago the Patriarchate of Constantinople opens for political reasons a jurisdiction on Russian canonical territory in Estonia.

Four years ago Constantinople takes on unordained clergy in the Ukraine, in another’s canonical territory, and those clergy start stealing church buildings from the Local Church with the support of violent and brutal atheist thugs (with the blessing of Constantinople?).

A fraction of the Russian Church in Western Europe starts taking priests and parishes from Constantinople uncanonically.

The same fraction of the Russian Church cuts off communion with another fraction of the same Russian Church. A schism begins within the Russian Church. There is no attempt to unresolve it after two years.

Two different sets of bishops appear in the once united Czech Republic, the new group is under Constantinople.

Russia takes some 200 clergy and parishes in Africa from the Patriarchate of Alexandria. Those clergy are threatened with losing their homes and food for their families if they do not return to those who threaten them.

We have come so far from the time of St Nicholas of Tokyo and St Tikhon of Alaska/New York/Moscow, yet both lived only a century ago. Both created unity in their respective jurisdictions, in Japan and Northern America. Why all these divisions?

All divide because they try and impose something alien – nationalism, Greek, American or other.

Chaos comes about because of a lack of authority. Here we speak about authority, which comes from the Holy Spirit. Authoritarianism with its hatred, bullying threats and harsh punishments is not authority, even though some bishops confuse the two. Authoritarianism come from the lack of the spiritual, it divides. It is precisely the opposite from authority, which unites because the Holy Spirit unites.

Here is the result:

No Holy Spirit means no authority and so chaos. Politics instead of the canons. Authoritarianism and bullying threats instead of authority.

Whether in the Ukraine, in Africa, in the Netherlands, in Lithuania, or in England, it is always the same story. Division caused by hatred for the clergy and the people. Lack of love.

 

 

 

 

December 2018-December 2022: On Becoming a Local Church

After the Liturgy for the Feast of the Entrance into the Temple of the Mother of God on Sunday 4th December, Fr Andrew was interviewed informally about the present situation of the Orthodox Church. Below is the slightly edited interview.

 

Q: What would you say about the events in the Orthodox Churches over the last four years?

A: The present very tragic situation of the Local Orthodox Churches is such that I almost feel nostalgic for the first third of my Orthodox life, before 1989, during the Cold War. In those days there were two groups of Local Churches: those in front of the Berlin Wall and those behind the Berlin Wall. All was clear. You knew exactly why some spoke in one way (because they had a Communist gun in their backs) and why others spoke in another way (because they had an anti-Communist gun in their backs). The first were involuntary hostages, the second were voluntary hostages.

I did not think I would live to see the present chaos, which has accumulated as a result of the errors over the last thirty-three years. First of all, precisely in December 2018, exactly four years ago, the Church of Constantinople, backed by the USA, for purely political and financial reasons started a major schism with the Russian Church in the Ukraine (it had already started a minor one in Estonia, back, I think, in 1994). This 2018 event was the foundation of the OCU, or ‘Poroshenko’s Orthodox Church’ (PCU), as it is called in Ukrainian. Result? The Russian Church refused to concelebrate or have anything to do with the Church of Constantinople and all those who supported it, for example, the Church of Alexandria. In so doing, however, it locked itself into isolation.

Then, in 2019, the small New-York-based Diaspora part of the Russian Church began taking numerous clergy and churches from Constantinople. This caused even more division and controversy. Then, exactly two years ago, in December 2020, the same fraction started a schism with the other Diaspora part of the same Russian Church, which is based in Paris. So there developed a still unresolved schism inside the Russian Church itself! A Church in schism with itself. What have we come to? Then, a year later, in December 2021, the Russian Church formed a schism in Africa, taking nearly 200 clergy and parishes from the Patriarchate of Alexandria, nearly half of its total number of missions there.

As if that was not enough, on 24 February 2022 the Russian Federation invaded the Ukraine and most of the hierarchy of the Russian Church backed the action. From this highly divisive moment on, the once multinational Russian Church started splitting into different Churches, the Russian, the Ukrainian, the Latvian, and perhaps tomorrow the Estonian, the Moldovan and the Lithuanian (where the situation is already dire after the uncanonical defrockings of clergy for merely expressing a different political viewpoint from the Russian Patriarch).

As a result, the Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe are cruelly affected, for a majority of their clergy and people are not Russians from Russia, but Baltic Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans etc. So people have left those parishes, many of which are now undermined. Therefore new parishes of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (not the tiny and uncanonical OCU) have been opened for the (so far) four million Ukrainian refugees in Western Europe. The situation is catastrophically divisive.

Oh, for the good old days of the Cold War! It was all so simple then.

The whole situation is in an out of control spiral. Where will it end? What has happened over the last four years – most of the events taking place every December – is that the century-old uncanonical chaos of the Diaspora, with its multiple jurisdictions, has been spread to Estonia, the Ukraine and Africa and may very well spread elsewhere. For example, it now looks as though Cyprus is going to be affected in the same way, with two jurisdictions developing there too.

This is all due to a problem of lack of authority in the Church, caused by those who are more interested in politics than in Christ. And here authority is very different from bullying authoritarianism. Authority comes from the Holy Spirit, whereas authoritarianism comes from a perverted human spirit.

Little wonder that the Vatican is looking on and saying: ‘What do you expect, look at the chaos of the Orthodox Churches, always at each others’ throats, because they do not have the Pope in control and guaranteeing unity’. Of course, that is nonsense. Anyone who knows anything about the schismatic situations within the Roman Catholic Church knows it to be nonsense. Nevertheless, there is a problem and that problem can only be solved by the highest organ of authority in the Church, a real Orthodox Council, free of politics. Sadly, at the present time the chances of that are probably as small as they were fifty years ago. We have not moved forwards at all. However, miracles do happen.

Q: What do you think will happen in the Ukraine?

A: The arms and army of Russia will win against the very weak and now even weaker NATO in the very risky war that the US began there in 2014. For there has never been a war between Russia and the Ukraine. The latter is just a location for the NATO battles. The war has always been purely between Russia and NATO. The Ukrainians and the huge number of mainly Polish mercenaries there have only been pawns and cannon fodder for the USA, just like the now increasingly arm-less NATO. The new cemetery for them in Poland has 1,200 dead so far.

However, the coming Russian victory in the face of the lack of real support for Kiev on the part of the now bankrupt West, does not solve the pastoral problem. You can conquer a country, but you cannot force its people to attend your churches. There will have to be an Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, without mention of a Russian Patriarch. The only very unlikely chance of unity would be if there were to be a Ukrainian Patriarch of the whole Russian Church and the ‘Moscow’ title was dropped from it altogether. Then the once multinational Russian Church might be restored.

Q: But surely this is just another Cold War situation, with the Church divided as before into two, East and West?

A: Not at all. It is far more complex than that. There are now three groups of Local Orthodox Churches. There is the Russian Church all by itself in the first ‘group’ and the US-backed Constantinople/Alexandrian Churches in the second group. Those two groups are at daggers drawn. Then, there is the third group, the thirteen other Local Churches. The thirteen others are the only ones that are in communion with everyone, Greek and Russian alike, but still independent of both of them.

True, the Cypriot and Greek Churches may well be forced by political pressure from the local US ambassadors to join the Constantinople/Alexandria group. This would leave only eleven in the third group, independent of both Russian and American politics. However, it seems as if more new Local Churches will also be founded and increase the number of those eleven. Certainly, Autocephalous Ukrainian and Latvian Churches would join that group and any others that might come into existence, for example, perhaps in Moldova. Quite simply, nobody wants to be too close to the Russian or Constantinople Churches at the present time, but all want to remain distant from them and any schismatic actions.

Q: So there is great disunity in the Church?

A: Tragically, yes. For instance, if I think about the Russian-French parish where I used to serve in Meudon, a suburb of Paris, I can clearly see this disunity. In Meudon there used to be only one church, the one where I served. It united everyone locally. Now there are three small parishes in the same small suburb and none of them is in communion with each other! There is the one where I served, which sadly has become very closed, almost club-like and very much Russian only, excluding Non-Russians and even Russians who do not have a certain spirit. Secondly, there is a very modernist Greek parish, which mainly uses French, and finally there is an old calendarist Greek parish, which also mainly uses French. It is so sad to see this quite unnecessary disunity. This is not a local church, but three anti-local churches.

Q: How do you see your own situation in Colchester?

A: In Colchester we defended the church against the evil one. Let me explain.

I remember in 1976 the Belarussian priest in Cambridge, a dear friend, Fr John Piekarsky (Eternal Memory to him), telling us how in the late 60s all the people in his home village in Belarus near Dokshitsy, gathered together and stood around their village church which the atheists, instructed by the crazy Ukrainian Khrushchov, wanted to destroy. An armed militia faced them. The people made it clear that the soldiers would have to gun everyone of them down in order to close their church. The militia backed off and the church was saved.

We also have a Ukrainian parishioner, whose grandmother, Galina, also in the 60s, just lay down in front of the bulldozer which the atheists were going to use to destroy the village church. She made it clear they would have to murder her, the most respected person in the village, to close the church. The atheists backed off and the church still stands today.

Well, we did the same, using English Trust law as our defence. We too had to defend our church from those who wanted to take it away from us, demanded the keys (which we refused to hand over), persecuted and slandered us (only the weak in faith believed such nonsense), and then wanted to close it, just as the atheist nationalists of the OCU do in the Ukraine. We won with the support of many.

Now is the time to confess the faith, there is no need for martyrdom, that is not yet required. But we have to confess the faith against aggressive bullies, those with hatred and not love in their souls, whether Communist or Capitalist. They will have to kill us to steal our churches. We made that clear to them despite, and because of, their aggressiveness and they backed down and lost everything. That was visible to all.

Q: What sort of churches do you have in your group, which since last February has been inside the Romanian Church?

A: I suppose we are rather like Moldovan churches, not just in the sense that we all have Moldovans, but in the sense that we are Russian and Romanian. However, we are also more than that in Colchester, as we have 25 nationalities and our other churches, in Coventry, Little Abington just outside Cambridge, Wisbech, Bradford and Felixstowe, are all still multinational.

Q: Do you have any Greeks among your parishioners?

A: We have very few Greeks, only four in fact, for the simple reason that there are hardly any practising Greeks in any of those places.

Q: How would you characterise the Colchester parish?

A: As you know, our patron saint is in effect a Ukrainian from Poltava who lived all over the world and was multinational in his outlook, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. He also accepted the Western rite, which at that time, over sixty years ago, was still a reality.

Now, all my life I have worked and prayed that we might be able to build a Local Church. Be careful what you pray for, because you might get it! Well, towards the end of my life, we have managed to avoid all ghettos, both ethnic and ideological, and have been given what we prayed for, a local church.

In the home countries of Orthodoxy, inevitably churches will be mononational. That is normal. In capital cities like London, Paris and Berlin, centres of immigration, you will also have embassy churches, that is, mononational churches. That is not the case here outside London. Here we have to go with the flow, to go with the majority. God sends you a flock of all nationalities, who knock at your door. You behave as the Good Samaritan, not like the priest who walked by on the other side. You have to accept them all, with all their diversity, but it is logical to be with the majority, providing that their hierarchy behaves canonically, and not schismatically.

Q: Isn’t it difficult to have different nationalities together?

A: It can be, but it does not need to be. Nationalists and racists do not come to us (but nationalists and racists tend not to be Christians and, if nominally Orthodox, do not set foot in church anyway), but those with a little tolerance do come. And they learn to accept each other, with the result that you end up with mixed marriages, mixed in the positive sense of inter-Orthodox. For instance, our second priest who is Romanian is married to a Latvian and that is only the tip of the iceberg. We have couples who are Scottish-Cypriot (yes, he did get married in his kilt), Estonian-Nigerian, Moldovan-Guinea-Bissau (that must be unique!), Romanian-Slovak, Ukrainian-South-African, Lithuanian-Serbian, as well as the really rather ordinary English-Russian.

Sad to say, I have seen very many Orthodox parishes all over Europe closing in my lifetime. Why? Because their flocks died out. The original immigrant-parents, the first generation, died and as their children were assimilated and gave up attending a church which to them was foreign, the parishes died out. We must not do the same here. We have hordes of children at our church, between 50 and 100 at every liturgy. I am told that this is more children than in any other church in this country. They are our future. We must not lose them to narrow, bigoted, right-wing ideologies, relating to the past or to the present, or lose them to attempts by exclusivists to grab our properties, as they are the properties which belong to all the local Orthodox of all nationalities, or to some ethnic narrowness, which refuses to preach Christ in the local language.

In the last three months we have chrismated two English people (former Protestants) and baptised another one (who had not previously been baptised) into the Church. May this continue. So, despite the great changes and the chaos caused by politics over the last four years, we continue. We continue despite them all and despite their opposition.

 

 

Is There any Future for the Russian Orthodox Church in the Western World?

Foreword: The Wages of Sin Are Death

In the old days, the hierarchy of the Persecuted Church inside the Soviet Union (called the Moscow Patriarchate) was held hostage by compromises with militant atheism, whereas the Persecuted Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) was the surviving free remnant of Russian Orthodoxy, largely clean of the stains of either form of atheism, both Communist and the perhaps even worse Capitalist atheism. Since 2007, when the two parts of the Russian Church linked together, their potential to transform themselves into one worldwide missionary Church has continually been pointed out. But also, again and again, people warned of the dangerous temptations of money and power, which could poison them both.

The last four years in particular have seen that poison spread very, very rapidly. And so, very sadly, their potential has not been realised and both have fallen to the temptations of Mammon. The heritage of St Seraphim of Sarov, St John of Kronstadt and St John of Shanghai have alike been falsely accused, put on trial once more and unjustly condemned. In reality, however, only those who have carried out these uncanonical acts have been condemned, or rather have condemned themselves. As a result of these grave sins, spiritual crimes, the faithful of the Church have been deprived of grace and are, literally, at war. And the blood spilt divides them cruelly. Once more the Russian Church has lost its freedom to the State, as before the Revolution, so after the Revolution, so also today.

The dead hand of the State is, as always, killing spiritual life, reducing all to a mere right-wing, State-controlled Protestant denomination with rituals. Bureaucratisation, centralisation and politicisation mean that many have once more put the State above Christ and harshly punish all who witness to Christ. Protocols above the Holy Spirit! When, long before the Revolution, St Seraphim was asked why Russia would fall, he answered that it was because Orthodox no longer kept the fasts, including Wednesdays and Fridays. For St John of Kronstadt, who prophesied the consequences of the imminent Revolution in detail, it was the refusal to prepare for and take communion, reinforced by the clericalist hypocrisy opposed to frequent communion, scandalously depriving the people of the Body and Blood of Christ.

For St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, the Ukrainian Saint who after the Revolution lived all over the world, hounded and put on trial in San Francisco by pharisaical Statist bishops, even though they had no State, and who so hastened his repose, it was the ethnically-based refusal of the racist ghetto to tell the Non-Orthodox world about Christ which was destroying Church life. Today’s disastrous and tragic war in the Ukraine illustrates the consequences. All are being chastised in the Russian Church for their sin of not loving one another. Here are the consequences of sin – lack of love and so war. Where in the Gospel does it say that we should destroy or close churches and kill each other? The wages of sin are indeed death, both spiritual and physical death.

Introduction: The Conflict in the Ukraine

After nine months of its present and second phase, the conflict in the Ukraine is about to enter a third and far more intense phase. So far it has largely been fought between Russian-backed Ukrainian militias with their Chechen and contracted allies and the Western-backed Kiev Army with their NATO training and immense amounts of arms and tens of thousands of Polish troops and mercenaries, dressed in Ukrainian uniforms. Over 100,000 have been killed and 400,000 injured, just on the Kiev/NATO side, and at least another 10,000 killed and 40,000 injured on the other side. Millions of young men have fled the Ukraine to avoid conscription and almost certain death or mutilation. Now the actual Russian Army is preparing to enter the fray with its winter campaign. There is going to be a real war.

The Ever-Smaller Russian Church in the West

As a result of the first phase, the Western elite’s choice between February 2014 and February 2022 to take over, arm and train the Kiev forces, nearly 14,000 Ukrainians were massacred in the Eastern Ukraine by Nazi elements from Kiev and the rest of the population were told to leave. As a result of the second phase since February 2022 and the ensuing sanctions, it is clear that in the future only very few Russian Orthodox from Russia will be allowed to settle in the Western world. In the Ukraine Ukrainians refuse to attend churches where the Russian Patriarch’s name is mentioned. Like them, very, very few of the, for the moment, 3.5 million newly-arrived Ukrainians in Western Europe, unlike the Orthodox among the 6 million Ukrainians who have been forced to flee to Russia since 2014, wish to attend Russian churches.

During the Cold War, when citizens of the USSR were also not allowed to settle in the West, Russian Orthodox clergy, like those in the tiny Moscow Patriarchal Sourozh Diocese in England, run by the late Metropolitan Antony Bloom, turned their attentions to missionary work, to bring Orthodoxy to the native people. They had to attract local people into the Diocese simply in order for their group to survive. This too is now not an option, for a free Church no longer exists. The old freedom has gone. Missionary work is being stopped and even hounded by harsh and compassionless ritualists and bureaucrats, who take pleasure in trying to steal and then close the most popular churches. Today, no Western people are attracted to the politicised, centralised and bureaucratised Russian Orthodox Church, which appears to persecute its own faithful openly and quite shamelessly, on the internet for the whole world to see. And even if people were attracted to such, would they be allowed to join it?

Russian Orthodox churches under the Russian Patriarch are now banned in much of the Ukraine and completely in Latvia, and perhaps soon in Lithuania and Estonia, where government interference in Church matters is becoming ever more aggressive. In the UK and the USA all Russian bishops from Russia are banned and they are now in exile. Their churches have no bishop. In the UK, USA and Canada you are not allowed to belong to the Russian Orthodox church if you work for the local ‘security services’. In addition, the Russian Patriarch is physically banned by personal sanction from the UK, as also from Lithuania and Canada. It is also very difficult to obtain insurance for Russian church buildings in the UK. And without insurance, you cannot legally operate.

Over fifty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, a way out for Russian Orthodox who were long settled in Northern America was found. This was in the ideological heart of the then Cold War. This took the form of autocephaly (full independence), given to them in the form of a new Local Church, the ‘OCA’ (Orthodox Church in America). Thus, they had their own Church, independent of any political or other connection with the Russian Church in Moscow, which was then held hostage by the Soviet regime. But today, with unheard-of Soviet-style centralisation, no such autocephaly is being given to Russian Orthodox in Western countries. The results are ever smaller churches, as there is no possibility of doing missionary work: the centralised, ethnic Russian authorities will not allow it. They do not want ‘foreigners’ in their Church. The Russian Church in the Western world is closing down, or rather, closing itself down and being closed down.

Once the Russian Orthodox Church was rightly seen as the Persecuted Church, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors. It was the bearer of the multinational ideal of Holy Rus. As such it attracted sympathy, prayer and members. The faithful wanted to stand together with the New Martyrs and Confessors. However, today, as a result of careerist power structures many see the Russian Orthodox Church as a single Persecuting ‘Church’.

Thus, many see it as the secular and political ideology of a ‘Church-Business’. Their ‘executives’, or ‘effective managers’, scandalously task their clergy with extracting as much money as possible from the faithful. Complaints are swept under the carpet and whistle-blowers absurdly and uncanonically punished. Naturally, principled clergy and faithful refuse to take part in this and have gone into exile. Loyal to the old Russian Church, its martyrs, saints and its spiritual values, they have left because of their principled refusal to accept the ideology of a money-making ‘Church-Business’, which is the moral low ground, where Caiaphas and Judas live.

Others left for a totally different reason – they were political disciples of the liberal Parisian Metr Antony Bloom, as in, for example, the Netherlands and Italy, where they have gone to Constantinople, and in Spain. (In the 1970s Metr Antony Bloom was himself demoted by the Moscow Patriarchate for his support of Solzhenitsyn, which led him to requesting admission into ROCOR. That was turned down by ROCOR, as he was considered to be a liberal, among other things).

In any case, the new structures, concerned with careerist power politics and money, the sin of Judas, no longer seem to represent the old Russian Orthodox Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, which we knew and loved. Faithful clergy and people always belonged to it in the past, spiritually belong to it now, and spiritually will always belong to it in the future.

Three Paths

When you are cut off, because the central Church structure in another country has temporarily been taken captive by a Non-Orthodox ideology, whichever it may be, and there is no chance of independence or autocephaly from that Centre, you can take one of two secular paths:

You can go outwards to the secular left, taking the path of new calendarism, ecumenism, liberalism and modernism, assimilating into the secular world and disappearing into it. This is happening now. However, this wholly outward-looking path sooner or later leads to assimilation and disappearance into the woke sects of liberal pseudo-intellectuals. So they die out.

Or you can go inwards to the secular right, taking the path of old calendarism, extreme conservatism, ‘catacombism’ and ghettoism, cutting yourself off from all others and so becoming disembodied. However, this wholly inward-looking path sooner or later leads to Protestant-style right-wing sects of apocalyptic judgemental pharisees. So they die out.

We have personally lived through and seen both these above tragic paths and seen specifically various different parts of the Russian Church of the émigré past of two generations gradually disappear almost completely into both these black holes. Thus, we witnessed the agonising suicidal deaths of the groups that took those paths. Just as we did not go there then, we are hardly going to go there now. Suicide is not part of our mentality. We prefer life to death.

The Third Way

There is another path, a third way. If you wish to survive as a Church, you must follow this path. This is the path of the saints of all the Local Churches, ancient and modern, of the whole Church. This is the path of the Church which is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. These four words stand for the Four Pillars of the Church, the Martyrs, the Confessors, the real Monastics and the real Pastors:

The Church is One because of the Unity of her Martyrs. The Church is Holy because of the Holiness of her Confessors. The Church is Catholic because of the Catholicity of her real Monastics. The Church is Apostolic because of the Apostolicity of her real Pastors. These are the Four Pillars of the Church on Earth, as in Heaven. We follow them.

If you live in the Western world and you refuse either of the two secular paths and follow this third path, you will inevitably find yourself developing into part of a new Local Church. As the saints have no nationality, no passport, you will find yourself in a multinational parish and network of parishes, an international Deanery and even Diocese. You will find the children of immigrants turning to you, for they no longer identify as citizens of the countries which their parents emigrated from, but as local and speaking the local language. This is a foundation stone of a new Local Church. For we look forwards to local enrootment, not backwards to the past and dependence on the elsewhere. Local Churches define and embody the Dogma of the Incarnation and also the Teaching of the Holy Spirit, which means the spreading and enrootment of the Church to countries where once it was not.

And if you are not allowed to take the path of the saints, which is the only future for the Russian Orthodox Church in the Western world, what do you do? You leave it and take refuge in the jurisdiction of, and under the canonical protection of, another Local Church until new times. This is called Divine Providence, which is the salvation of the Holy Spirit and keeps the flame of hope alive.

Conclusion: A Future?

Is there any future for the Russian Orthodox Church in the Western world? Yes, there is, but only for the Russian Orthodox Church of the New Martyrs and New Confessors, the Church of the saints and the fools for Christ, the Church of the ignored Spirit-driven prophets and the persecuted elders, and their multinational ideal of Holy Rus and charismatic universal missionary work. This was witnessed to by the Three Saints of the Russian Emigration, St Jonah of Hankou, St Seraphim of Boguchar and St John of Shanghai. Thus, there is a future, but only for the authentic Russian Orthodox Church, the Church of the Saints of God, of the Martyrs, the Confessors, the real Monastics and the real Pastors. The Holy Spirit is greater than all the narrowness and nasty politics of mere men. Victory awaits the faithful for their patience.