Category Archives: Restoration

The Situation of English Orthodoxy and a Vision for the Future of Russian Orthodoxy in Europe

God is not in Might, but in Right.

St Alexander of the Neva

Introduction

I have been told that, ‘I tell it as it is’. Perhaps as a result, I have been asked to write of the contemporary situation of English Orthodoxy, with particular emphasis on the tragic legacy of the late Metr Antony (Bloom) and the resulting Sourozh schism. This I will do, as I knew the Metropolitan well, some forty years ago between 1974 and 1982, and in January 1981 he tonsured me reader. I also think it is worthwhile because the past and present situation in England reflects much that is true in the broader European picture. However, I still do this reluctantly as I dislike talking about the sad past and would much prefer to talk about the future. On the other hand, how can we have a vision of the future, if we do not first understand the past and the present?

True, I have few good memories of the past. However, apart from hundreds of young parishioners, of whose children I baptize up to fifty a year, I have six adult children as well as grandchildren and it is for their future, not for my past, that I live. This is why I think we should put the situation of English Orthodoxy into the general situation of all us Russian Orthodox in Western Europe. In so doing I also wish to avoid the common English (and not so English) disease of parochialism and insularity. The past is a dead country, all we can and must do is pray with compassion for those weak human beings like us who took part in it. One day we shall all stand side by side at the Dread Judgement. Let us look to the future, where all is possible. However, before we can do this I must do my duty and start at the beginning.

Part One: The Past and Present: English Orthodoxy

Today, around two thousand English Orthodox (the numbers of Scottish, Irish and Welsh Orthodox are even tinier – there being only a few dozen of each at most) and some seventy English clergy are divided among three main jurisdictions or dioceses. The other four jurisdictions present in England, as elsewhere, the Romanian, Serbian and tiny Bulgarian and Georgian Orthodox jurisdictions, are almost wholly mononational and have hardly any English members. The three jurisdictions or dioceses with English members are: the Patriarchate of Antioch, the Patriarchate of Constantinople (two groups) and the Russian Orthodox Church (two groups).

1. The Patriarchate of Antioch

Some twenty years ago about 300 dissatisfied Anglicans were received with their own agenda into this Patriarchate. They had previously been turned away by the Patriarchate of Constantinople and by the Sourozh Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, which were both bound by their ecumenical ties with Canterbury. As Antioch had hardly existed in England until then, basically a new jurisdiction and so a further division were born. All the priests except for one now in this group were once Anglican priests, ordained as Orthodox priests with little training. One now suspended man was ordained within three days of being received.

Given this history, today the group seems to form a rather isolated ex-Anglican club, holding less attraction to the vast majority of English people. Indeed, some in the group seem to reject Non-Anglicans, one parish even banning the use of any language except English, and some call this group ‘Anglioch’. These ex-Anglican parishes appear to have little to do with Arab Orthodox and seem to avoid concelebrating with other jurisdictions, though they dress as Russian clergy. One person, perhaps unfairly, put it to me that: ‘Anti-Russian and Anti-Greek = Anti-och’.

Such a view represents only the negative half of the reality. On a positive side, this group is very dynamic, some parishes have their own properties and there are some younger clergy, over fifteen altogether now. Its larger parishes attract mainly Eastern Europeans, who are deprived of services in their own languages, or of once lapsed Greeks. Some of these people know their Faith and are able to educate the Antiochian clergy. The recent appointment for them, 20 years late, of an Antiochian bishop, who may get a visa to come to England this November, could at last mean the introduction of liturgical discipline and an entry into the mainstream of the Church from the margins. This should include teaching clergy how to serve, teaching people how to sing (at present Anglicanized ‘Russian-style’ singing is used), as well as stopping intercommunion, ‘charismatic’ and other alien practices, such as the commemoration of the Armenians and Ethiopians as Orthodox, using girl acolytes or making communion compulsory for all, as does happen in some parishes.

Antiochian services I have attended resemble a mixture of Anglicanism and a very confused knowledge of the Orthodox typicon with invented services, a kind of ‘make it up as you go’ approach. This style has discredited the Antiochian group. In conclusion, the Antiochians have zeal, which is admirable, but not knowledge, which is not admirable. The question is if they want the knowledge and have the humility to accept the discipline and traditions of the Orthodox Church and an Orthodox bishop, instead of imposing Anglican agendas on the faithful. Retired Anglican priests whose hobby is the ‘Eastern rite’ are one thing, the Orthodox Church is another.

2. The Patriarchate of Constantinople

a. The Archdiocese of Thyateira

This is a large and mostly Greek Cypriot Diocese, whose ruling hierarch must have either a Greek or Cypriot or Turkish passport. However, as the Greek Cypriots mainly moved to England from Commonwealth Cyprus between 1945 and 1975, they are now dying out. Nationalism is rife and English enquirers into Orthodoxy (as well as Romanians and others) are typically turned away from parishes and told to go and join the Anglican Church because they ‘are not Greeks’. The loss of young Cypriots is such that no fewer than six ethnic Cypriots are priests in the Anglican Diocese of London. At least there they can understand the services.

The hellenization of the few Anglicans who have been received and ordained is obligatory. Ultra-Greek names like Kallistos, Meliton, Aristobulos, Athanasios, Eleutherios, Dionysios, Christodoulos, Pankratios, Ephraim, Panteleimon, Palamas, Kosmas etc are placed on ex-Anglican vicars with perfectly good Orthodox names and they are ordained as cheap (unpaid) Greek Orthodox clergy. One of them is so hellenized that he even changed his surname to a Greek name. The best-known example of this group is the former Oxford academic, Timothy (Metr Kallistos) Ware, who lives very much as a retired parish priest and has never been a diocesan bishop, but rather a ‘conference bishop’. These hellenized ex-Anglicans use Russian-style singing in their services, probably because of the difficulty of using foreign-sounding Greek chant in any language other than Greek.

b. The Deanery of the Exarchate

As elsewhere in the world, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has for political reasons also taken into its jurisdiction dissidents such as Ukrainian nationalists and the Paris Exarchate. The latter group has again been present in England since 2006, refounded by 300 mainly ex-Anglican ‘Bloomites’, including over ten clergy. In other words, these were dissidents from the Sourozh Diocese of the then Moscow Patriarchate (MP), previously run by Metr Antony Bloom (see below, Paragraph 3b). After the death in 2004 of Metr Antony, their leader and protector, these did not want to adhere to the discipline and traditions of the real Russian Orthodox Church, which were then being reintroduced into their Diocese. Thus, they left for the Paris Exarchate, at first under the controversial Bishop Basil (Osborne), then after his defrocking becoming a small Deanery.

Here, under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, they would be allowed to do anything they wanted, including keeping the personal practices of Metr Antony (Bloom), without interference from either Constantinople or Thyateira or Paris, as one of their clergy proudly told me. For example, they could have communion without confession, give intercommunion (as their Amphipolis website used to proclaim, though now they tell me that intercommunion is limited to Monophysites), use the new calendar, celebrate the Proskomidia in the middle of the Church, wear Greek vestments (strange when you claim to be of the Russian Tradition) or shout out names during the service in Anglican ‘charismatic’ style, or make communion compulsory for all.

This group is very small, with several communities of ten or fewer people. Where it is bigger, it is because of the presence of Eastern Europeans, for example Church-deprived Romanians, who have no loyalty to or knowledge of Bloomite ideology. The Deanery has virtually no property of its own and although it has in recent years ordained several retired Anglican clergy virtually without any training, it seems to be dying out. The average age of its clergy is about 70 and many of the original laypeople are of the same generation.

It seems difficult to understand, if they wish to survive at all, why they do not simply join the ex-Anglican Antiochian group or at least join the ex-Anglicans in the mainstream Thyateira Diocese. Some have suggested that their isolation is to do with their ferocious Russophobia, which Antioch does not share. Indeed, some of their statements about other Christians makes it difficult to believe that they are Christians. Interestingly, their cause was backed to the hilt at the time by the Establishment Times and the MI5-fed Daily Telegraph. Others have suggested that there is a class reason, that it is because the Exarchate is largely composed of upper-class Anglicans, whereas the other ex-Anglicans are middle-class. Some call this group, like the Antiochian group, ‘Anglicans with icons’ or ‘Anglodox’, rather than Orthodox.

3. The Russian Church

a. The ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland

Having established the first ROCOR parish in England in 1919, ROCOR established a diocese in England in 1929 under Bishop Nicholas (Karpov), who uniquely was not given a fictitious title like ‘of Thyateira’ or ‘of Sourozh’, as given to other dioceses, but the real title ‘of London’. It was also the first Orthodox diocese to have any monastic life in England and the first diocese to use English, from the 1930s on. The diocese expanded after 1945 with a wave of new immigrants. However, after the departure of Archbishop John (Maksimovich) (now St John of Shanghai) in 1962, the diocese fell into nationalistic and sectarian currents and for a time became isolated.

From the 1970s on, a small group of unintegrated Anglo-Catholic converts began to impose old calendarism, imported from the USA under the influence of Bishop Gregory (Grabbe) in New York. Their views were marked by anti-Anglicanism rather than Orthodoxy, a negativity that came from spiritual pride. Given the failure of nationalistic Russians to pass on the Faith to their children and grandchildren and these sectarian trends, once far larger than the new Diocese of Sourozh, in the 70s and 80s the ROCOR Diocese began to die out. In the late 1970s and 1980s, in quick succession it lost its last two elderly and ill bishops, its London priest and its London church building. English people were turned away from the Russian parishes or were deterred by the sectarian old calendarism trying to take over diocesan life. It seemed as though the ROCOR Diocese would disappear altogether.

This period must be understood in the context of the then general internal battle in ROCOR between New York and Jordanville, that is, between the political, nationalist and sectarian wing of ROCOR and the spiritual wing, which saw in St John of Shanghai its figurehead. (Sadly, it is also true that when St John was in England, he was never frequented by personalities such as Metr Antony (Bloom) or Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), by both of whom he was at best ignored). In his later life in San Francisco, St John was much persecuted by this political wing of ROCOR because he was a missionary to Non-Russians, because he prayed for the captive Patriarchs of Moscow and because, like the mainstream in ROCOR, he knew that Church unity would come as soon as the Church inside Russia was free from atheist tyranny. This was denied by the political sectarians, who from the 1970s began to assert in justification for their sectarianism that the MP was ‘without grace’ and that somehow ROCOR was the last True Church on earth!

As the elderly Russians died out in the ROCOR British Diocese, in the 1990s it was providentially renewed by new arrivals from Russia, who found the same underlying ethos in it as in the MP inside Russia (unlike in the Sourozh Diocese, which, ironically, was officially part of the MP!). These new arrivals paid for the building of the small, Russian-style ROCOR Cathedral in London. As unity between ROCOR, under the ever-memorable Metr Laurus, and the MP, under the former émigré Patriarch Alexis II, approached in 2007, the long predicted schism occurred. Some forty mainly Anglo-Catholic converts and a few very right-wing individuals of Russian extraction (including even pro-Nazis) lapsed from ROCOR. This mirrored exactly the Sourozh schism (see Paragraph 3b below).

This was a spiritual tragedy for them but the relief felt by the faithful was palpable – the abscess which had been growing since the infiltration of sectarianism from the USA in the 1970s had at last burst. Peripheral and other problems also solved themselves as a few other individuals left and by 2009 all the extremes had fallen away, normal Church life could continue from a now healthy centre and the Church was ready to grow again. ROCOR was able to return to its destiny and pioneering historic path of being the integrated and bilingual Russian Orthodox Diocese, faithful to the Tradition, culturally at ease in the British Isles, and without fear of interference from outside forces. Having been through its adolescent growing pains, the ROCOR Diocese had overcome the crisis and become much stronger and adult.

What is the situation today? Today most members of ROCOR are people who have settled in England (and also in Wales and Ireland) from the ex-Soviet Union. In other words, the flock is virtually identical to the flock of the new Sourozh Diocese (see Paragraph 3b below). However, eight of the clergy are English, though there is also a Romanian deacon and two excellent Russian clergy from the ex-Soviet Union. In 2006 the future Archbishop Elisei of Sourozh was actually nominated to the Patriarchate in Moscow (then faced with the Sourozh schism) by the ROCOR ruling bishop, Archbishop Mark of Berlin.

Although most members of ROCOR come from the ex-Soviet Union, unlike Sourozh, the ROCOR Diocese has a long history, with memories going back before the Second World War and the Revolution to the time of the Tsar, a long and deep pastoral experience, including the use of English, its own church buildings and therefore a voice independent of heterodox organizations. In other words, ROCOR could certainly never be accused of being dependent on one personality or being ‘Soviet’, as the Sourozh Diocese sometimes is, and it is much better established than that Diocese. However, the weakness of the ROCOR Diocese is definitely its shortage of priests, especially in Wales and Ireland, and its lack of a resident ruling bishop. The main issue now is further growth.

b. The Diocese of Sourozh – the former Moscow Patriarchate (MP)

Several hundred English Orthodox find themselves in the Sourozh Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, which used to be known as the MP. Some go back to the time when that Diocese was ruled by Metr Antony (Bloom) (+ 2004), others have come more recently. I have been asked to set down a record of Metr Antony’s tragic legacy. This will be long, as it is complex.

When the small Paris Exarchate parish in London returned to the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) jurisdiction after the Second World War (following its leader in Paris, Metr Eulogius), Fr Antony (Bloom), a beardless hieromonk without theological education, was sent by Moscow from Paris to look after the group in question. The vast majority of Russian emigres in England, whether arrivals after 1917 or after 1945, would have nothing to do with the Moscow Patriarchate or the modernist-looking Fr Antony, and continued to belong to the far larger parishes of the Diocese of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).

Therefore, virtually without a flock, the very talented Fr Antony learned English and began to do missionary work among Anglicans, attracting several hundred into the former Anglican church he used in London. Over the years, their numbers swelled, perhaps to over 2,000, and he was able to form a tiny diocese which was given the title of Sourozh. This looked good in theory; the reality was quite different. The Sourozh Diocese was a paper diocese, an empire of the imagination. There were three reasons for this.

Firstly, Metr Antony, as he had become by the early 60s, anxious to create a diocese, would take people without preparation, that is, without relieving them of their Anglican baggage and so spiritual impurity first. As they had little idea of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, most of them lapsed very quickly, often within a few weeks or months. As an example of this, I will relate what five years ago one of the new Russian subdeacons from the Sourozh Cathedral in London told me about a weekend visit of the new ruling hierarch, Archbishop Elisei of Sourozh, to a provincial community.

When Archbishop Elisei got up on the Sunday morning, the priest’s wife asked him whether he would like bacon and eggs for breakfast. Now that is a normal question in the Church of England (or even in parts of the Catholic Church today), where communion, if it is given at all, is simply a memorial of bread and wine and there is no fasting before it. For an Orthodox of course it is shocking that an Orthodox priest would have bacon and eggs before the Liturgy and communion. In fact, I was shocked by the subdeacon and said: ‘You mean to say that you did not know that that was how the whole Sourozh Diocese was run for decades?’ I was amazed by his naivety and told him: ‘Now you understand why serious Orthodox joined ROCOR’.

In 1976, falling foul of the Soviet government’s anti-Solzhenitsyn line (which it also forced onto the MP) and looking for political freedom from Soviet political pressure (especially distasteful to the upper-class Establishment Anglicans in his London Cathedral), Metr Antony asked to join ROCOR. As a result of his unOrthodox attitudes, illustrated above, he was refused. ROCOR did not want a bishop with unOrthodox practices; if ROCOR had accepted him, it would all have resulted in scandals.

Secondly, Metr Antony never reached out to the mass of English people, to whom he remained completely unknown despite his TV appearances (at a time when only the wealthier half of society had TV) and radio interviews. He concentrated on the upper class, especially wealthy academics, artists, novelists, musicians and poets, many of whom lived around his former Anglican Cathedral in the richest part of London. Metr Antony seemed to have little time for ordinary English people, if ever he knew we existed.

He was also notorious for never visiting his parishes and flock. Most of these had never seen him there and had no idea what an episcopal visit or service was. (Metr Antony usually served as a priest, refusing to celebrate episcopal services, if he knew how to do them). He was not a liturgist and did not teach anyone how to celebrate the services. His was a religion of the elite and it was often difficult to know exactly what he said – it all seemed to be the French philosophical style and not substance. In the 1970s and early 1980s, as I know only too well from personal experience, he had no time at all for the veneration of local saints, though he was later forced to change this attitude. And he also had no space in his Cathedral for icons of the New Martyrs, even after their later canonization in Moscow in 2000.

We should not forget that Metr Antony was himself from the Russian upper class and, partly as a result, his convert group seemed to be an upper-class Anglican club or clique. Conversations that I heard at his Cathedral revolved around villas in Tuscany and on Patmos which belonged to these people: hardly typical English people, who felt excluded by such snobbery. All this was combined with Metr Antony’s marked emotionalism, his strong psychic abilities and affectations, which lacked the sobriety of the Orthodox Tradition. Some middle-aged women fell in love with him and, with his good looks and exotic and exaggerated Russian-Parisian accent, by the 1970s his nicknames included ‘the guru’ and ‘the romantic bishop’. I remember one such tragic case very clearly. For us who came from solid and pragmatic English backgrounds, this was all nonsense. We would see through this act from miles away.

This brings us to the problem of Metr Antony’s personality cult. As we have said, he was an immensely talented man with a very strong personality. Indeed, his father, Boris Bloom (buried in Meudon outside Paris), a Tsarist diplomat who was well-known in Paris, had delved into the occult and taught his son how to hypnotize. I knew two women whom Metr Antony tried to hypnotize in the 1970s. For what reason I do not know. In such a Diocese there could be room for only one personality. This is why in 1965 an equally unusual Parisian personality, the former Hindu, Art Nouveau painter, personalist philosopher and one-time monk of Mt Athos, where he had met a saint, Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), left the Diocese of Sourozh. With his three monks. he switched back to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the new calendar and introduced some very unusual and indeed unique practices. The fact that Metr Antony was notoriously anti-monastic did not help.

The cult of Metr Antony was also why his ordinations were generally controversial, often being those of men who for canonical reasons would never have been ordained by another bishop. This created a dependency of such clergy on Metr Antony, a misplaced sense of gratitude and idolization among weak personalities. This was also why Metr Antony strongly discouraged English people from visiting other parishes and travelling to Orthodox countries, especially Russia and Mt Athos; he did not want them to be exposed to the broader reality, which would raise awkward questions about his peculiar style and values.

Here I do not wish to go into the painful details and I would rather quote the Establishment figure of Metr Kallistos (Ware), who is now in his eighties. Known as ‘o anglikanos’ (the Anglican) by certain of his Greek brother bishops, Metr Kallistos is known for his caution in speaking. Although he has very curious and Phanariot views of the Diaspora, he is well-known for this Anglican-style diplomacy. In an interview with the liberal ‘Pravmir’ site, he has expressed the situation around Metr Antony as mildly as is possible:

‘Now the main criticism that I would make of Bishop (sic) Antony is that he would allow people to become colossally dependent upon him. They would idolize him. Perhaps that was not entirely his fault that they came to feel such ardent devotion towards him. But I felt there was something unhealthy here. It was too personal in the wrong sense, that they saw him almost as a god on earth. And he would allow people, particularly women, to become very closely dependent upon him. And then he would suddenly abandon them. I don’t think I am indulging here in malicious gossip, but I know a number of cases where he had spent a lot of time with people, particular people, and then suddenly he would cut off, not see them any more, not respond to their letters or telephone calls. Now I don’t know why he allowed such a close relationship to be built up and then abandoned them. But if I was to criticize his work, I would think there was the weakest point’.

In other words, it could be said that Metr Antony was the London equivalent of Bishop Jean (Evgraf) (Kovalevsky) in Paris, a bishop who set up a kind of fringe diocese on the edge of the Church and which also collapsed after his death. (However, many clergy and laity also left the Sourozh Diocese during Metr Antony’s lifetime, having seen through it). True, Bishop Jean attracted guenonists, occultists, freemasons and other marginals, ordaining them within days, whereas Metr Antony attracted those who fell in love with his personality and pseudo-mysticism. Sadly, Metr Antony’s existentialist personalism (mid-twentieth century French intellectual philosophy rather than the Church Fathers, whom Metr Antony hardly ever mentioned) had led to the construction of a mini-diocese ‘centred on his personality and not on the Church’. These are the exact words used to me by the present ruling bishop of Sourozh, Archbishop Elisei, soon after his appointment in 2006.

Now anything built on a personality, even more on a dead personality, is extremely fragile. People who idolize a personality are unable to pass on anything to their children, who cannot get to know the personality because he is dead, and so the members simply get old and die out, becoming historical sidelines, alienated from the mainstream. A diocese centred on a personality is a paper diocese. Thus, Sourozh still has hardly any Church property because everyone, as I was told in 1981, was expected to go to London and worship at the feet of the personality. So, nothing got built up. Tragically, the Sourozh Diocese still only has a fairly small Cathedral in west London (far too small for the flock) and four chapels in Oxford, Nottingham, Manchester and London, which can only contain a few dozen Orthodox. For the rest, the Sourozh Diocese is still dependent on borrowing mainly Anglican churches which it can occasionally use, often only once a month on a Saturday.

On top of this it suffers from a chronic shortage of priests with training. The average age is about 63. The disastrous personality cult in other words completely failed to set up the infrastructure necessary for a real diocese, however small. Everything had to be centred around the Cathedral in London because that is where ‘the personality’ was. This is the tragic legacy of Metr Antony, an utter lack of vision because there was no Tradition, only a personality. It contrasts very sadly with the radiant legacy of a saint in another island archipelago on the other side of Eurasia, St Nicholas of Japan, who built on the Tradition.

In 1982, a senior priest, the American Fr (later as Metr Antony’s successor, Bishop) Basil Osborne told me that ‘as soon as Metr Antony is dead, we’ll go to the Greeks’. This statement as well as the personality cult and renovationist practices (no confession before communion – as in Anglicanism – , the introduction of the new calendar, no Third and Sixth Hours before the Liturgy, no attempt to ask women to dress as Russian Orthodox etc.), caused us to leave the Diocese of Sourozh for good. I had wanted to be part of the Russian Orthodox Church, not of an émigré cocktail of modernist practices and fantasies, which had nothing to do with the Russian Orthodox Tradition. In such a way the Sourozh Diocese chased away those who were the most devoted to the Russian Orthodox Church. People were ready to die for the Church, for ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’, but in Sourozh the seed of the faithful was rejected – and so the Church did not grow. This was no way to treat the faithful.

In response to my view that the Church was failing to preach the Gospel to ordinary English people and was not providing food for the soul, but only intellectual philosophy, Fr Basil also told me that ‘there is no such thing as ordinary people’. Clearly, this said a great deal about him who became Metr Antony’s successor. Living in the ivory towers of Oxford, Fr Basil simply had no contact with the vast masses of English people. Later, an aristocratic priest-colleague of his, also ordained by Metr Antony, told me exactly the same thing. In 2005 it was Bishop Basil who provocatively invited the notorious neo-renovationist, Fr George Kochetkov, once suspended by Patriarch Alexis II, to come from Moscow and become the main priest at the London Sourozh Cathedral. This makes clear that the Sourozh schism was indeed a renovationist schism and it is indeed renovationists who revere Metr Antony’s memory.

Apart from his English convert adepts, it is true that Metr Antony was also idolized by some naïve Soviet convert dissidents, mainly of Jewish origin. These ‘intelligenty’ of the third wave started to arrive in London in the 1970s and fell in love with Metr Antony. I remember one of them telling me how he had first seen the Metropolitan cleaning the Cathedral floor, dressed in a simple undercassock. The dissident at once took him for a saint! I told him that all bishops and priests in the Diaspora lived like this and that if that was a criterion of sainthood, then we were all saints. Conditioned by Soviet practices of distant and unknown bishops sweeping past the people in big black cars under KGB surveillance, he could not make the cultural jump to Diaspora reality. Culture shock totally distorted his judgement.

From the 1990s, in the last years of Metr Antony’s life, as immigrants flooded in from the ex-Soviet Union, a virtual civil war began in his London Cathedral. The immigrants expected Russian Orthodoxy, not some pseudo-mystical convert personality cult. Apart from the small ROCOR Cathedral, there was no other church they could go to in London. Inevitably, only two years after Metr Antony’s death, with the young Bishop Hilarion expelled, the Sourozh Diocese collapsed. The bubble had finally burst. Metr Antony’s divisiveness and pastoral failure had led in turn to the divisiveness and pastoral failure of his pupil, Bishop Basil (Osborne).

Just as the Paris Exarchate’s modernist experiment failed (and Metr Antony was 100% Parisian), Metr Antony’s experiment failed because he had tried to build a Diocese on the divisive sand of a personality cult instead of on the collective rock of Russian Orthodox Tradition. This all came as no surprise to us who had known how it would all end since 1982 and had been pleading with the Moscow Patriarchate since 2000 to do something about the catastrophic pastoral situation in London. Nevertheless, we can at least learn from such failures.

Part Two: The Future: European Orthodoxy

I have done my duty in answering questions about the past and present situation of English Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy in England. I hope that this will help us to avoid repeating the errors and extremes of the past and will also help us to pray for those involved, whether living or departed. That is our duty, for we are no better than they. I would now like to speak of something much more positive, much closer to my heart, the future.

1. The European Dimension of the Orthodox Church

In this context of the future people ask me about the possibility of there one day being a ‘British’ Orthodox Church. Since the 1990s I have written about such a possibility – and always negatively, even though I have since 1975 championed the use of local languages in services, whether English or French, and at great personal cost from hostile clergy. Why, this refusal of even the concept of a ‘British Orthodox Church’?

Firstly, it is because there is no such thing as ‘British’. Just as we do not talk about a ‘Soviet’ Orthodox Church, so we do not talk about a ‘British’ Orthodox Church. The word ‘British’ has only been used on three occasions in history and always by foreign invaders. Once by the Romans, then by the Normans and lastly by the Hanoverians and their Germanic followers among the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Victorians and those nostalgic for their imperialism like Thatcher, Blair and Cameron. In other words, ‘British’ is a word for an artificial, colonial conglomerate of countries and as such is used by London imperialists; the Irish rightly long ago rejected it as a dirty word and the Scots are now in open revolt against it. Personally, like everyone I grew up with in the English countryside, I have never recognized myself as ‘British’, but as English, and I hope that the Irish, Scots, Welsh and we English will soon gain complete freedom from the ‘British’ and their tyrannical and foreign Establishment, to which the alien ‘British’ alone belong.

Secondly, all European countries, including Britain, are in any case far too small to have their own Local Orthodox Churches and, thirdly, Europe has anyway suffered quite enough from nationalism. We do not want any more insularity and nationalism in the Church – there is enough of that in the Balkans. What we need today is vision. Now, in this context, nearly thirty years ago, in 1986, I wrote a paper at the request of Archbishop George (Wagner) of the Rue Daru Paris Jurisdiction (Patriarchate of Constantinople) entitled, ‘Une Eglise Orthodoxe pour l’Europe: Vision ou Reve’ (‘An Orthodox Church for Europe: Vision or Dream’). As he was German, I thought he might be interested, especially as I had envisioned the Rue Daru jurisdiction as the possible kernel of such a future Local Church – in 2004 Patriarch Alexis II was to make the same mistake. I later found the paper thrown away into his kitchen wastepaper bin. Such were those visionless days – and he was by far from being the only bishop who had no vision for an Orthodox Europe.

Since that time it is true that we have seen the development of the pompously-named ‘Pan-Orthodox Episcopal Assemblies’ (= bishops’ meetings) in Western Europe. This is the imperialistic concept of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, rather naively promoted by Metr Kallistos (Ware) and Metr Athenagoras (Peckstadt) in Belgium. Of course, it is good that now the Orthodox bishops of any territory actually meet each other and know what each other looks like, but we all know that these meetings are going nowhere; they are often talking shops which occasionally meet, but at which no decisions of any consequence are ever taken. They just give a superficial prestige to Constantinople.

What I am saying from both the above examples is that we can expect nothing for the future of Orthodoxy in Western Europe from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has never freely given any Church autocephaly and has continually tried to take back autocephaly even when political circumstances forced it to grant it – as in the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia etc. In this way Constantinople, fallen since 1453, politically captive since 1948, and through Greek nationalism totally failing to recognize that Church leadership long ago passed to the Russian Church, today resembles the other Balkan Churches. None of them has the vision, is big enough, is missionary-minded enough or is unphyletist and mutinational enough to set up the Pan-European Metropolitan structure necessary for the foundation of any future Orthodox Church in Europe.

2. The Duty of Care of the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe

This leaves the Russian Orthodox Church, fifty times larger than the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as the only Local Orthodox Church which can do anything for European Orthodoxy. After all, of all the Local Churches only the Russian Orthodox Church is large and supra-national. Its name in Russian is ‘Russkaya’, meaning ‘of Rus’, not ‘Rossiyskaya’, meaning ‘of the Russian Federation’. In other words, it alone is multinational – like its Patriarch, the Russian Orthodox Church is the Church of All Rus and this means not just Russia, the Orthodox Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Carpatho-Russia, but any part of the world where Russian Orthodox faithful live. It alone has kept the old multinational Orthodox ideal of ‘romaiosini’, of the unity in diversity of the Christian Empire. Indeed, in 2004 Patriarch Alexis II at last spoke precisely of the need to establish a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Western Europe. However, in 2004 the proposition of Patriarch Alexis II could only be theoretical. Only since 2007 has the Russian Orthodox Church even been in a theoretical position to establish such a Metropolia. Why?

a. Russian Orthodox Church Unity

In May 2007, the MP and ROCOR signed the Act of Canonical Communion in Moscow. With this one act, the division that began after the Russian Revolution between the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the Church Inside Russia (then called the MP) and was forced onto the Church by atheist persecution inside the Soviet Union ceased. According to the 2007 agreement, ROCOR was gradually to give up its few small temporary communities on the territory of the ex-Soviet Union (the canonical territory of the Church Inside Russia) and in return, in time, the Church Inside Russia would, as is only logical, cede its relatively few but sometimes large communities outside Russia to ROCOR.

The first part of this agreement took place fairly swiftly, but the second part of the agreement, for perfectly good pastoral reasons, can only be implemented with time. This situation concerns above all the shared territories of Western Europe and Latin America, since the vast majority of Russian Orthodox parishes in its other territories in Oceania and North America are in any case under ROCOR. Thus, for the moment, we still have the absurd situation of two Russian Orthodox bishops of Berlin, Archbishop Theophan and Archbishop Mark. However, all agree that this will not last.

In effect, both the old MP and the old ROCOR ceased to exist on that day in May 2007. What came into being was a reunited and worldwide Russian Orthodox Church, three-quarters of the whole Orthodox Church, with the same Faith and under the same Patriarch, politically free but administratively in two parts, inside Russia and outside Russia, so that both parts are Patriarchal, but one is based in Moscow and the other, much smaller, is based in New York. The unique canonical territory of the Church inside Russia covers all the countries of the former Soviet Union (except Georgia) and countries where all the missions were founded by it, officially only China and Japan, but in reality also Thailand, Iran, Cuba and North Korea.

The territories of the Church Outside Russia, and these are territories mainly shared with other Orthodox, include Western Europe, North America, Latin America and Oceania (including Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia). Thus the new ROCOR has the potential to become again (as it was in the beginning) a multi-Metropolia Church, with four Metropolias, one in Western Europe, one in North America, one in Latin America and one in Oceania. Perhaps one day it could also include Alaska as a fifth Metropolia, but only if that territory returns to the Russian Orthodox Church from its present American administration.

b. The Territory of Europe to be United in a Metropolia

Europe, that is Western Europe, is a cultural ensemble, because it is all basically ex-Orthodox (1,000 years ago) and now, as it has largely lapsed into its Gadarene secularism, ex-Catholic (historically ex-Protestant also means ex-Catholic). I am speaking of the following 25 countries: Iceland, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, England, Norway, Denmark (with the Faeroes), Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Hungary, Portugal, Spain (and the part of Spain called Gibraltar), Andorra, Italy, San Marino and Malta. I exclude from this definition of Western Europe Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, as they already have their own Local Churches and canonical territory. Similarly, I also exclude Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, since, like Montenegro and Macedonia, they are part of the canonical territory of the Serbian Church. As for Albania, like Romania, Greece, Bulgaria and Cyprus, it already has its own Local Church.

It is true that Finland, which is in this list of 25 countries, has over 20 parishes and other communities that at present belong to the Patriarchate of Constantinople and celebrate Easter on the Catholic calendar (similar to a non-canonical group in Estonia). However, Russian Orthodox do not frequent such churches, whose Faith has been called ‘Lutheranism with icons’. They prefer to attend the quite separate and canonical Russian Orthodox churches in Finland, which are growing. Also there are those who consider that Hungary, also in the list of 25 countries, should have its own Local Church, like the Poles and the Czechs and Slovaks. However, we live in the world as it is now, not as it may be one day. For the moment, therefore, Hungary must be included in the territory of a European Metropolia, as defined above.

3. A Future Metropolia

a. Structure

Now as regards a future European Metropolia under the Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), it is clear that this will be a real Metropolia with several hundred real parishes and real churches and, very importantly, real monasteries. This will not be like the Paris Exarchate or the old Sourozh Diocese, a paper empire, a series of modernistic, semo-Uniat communities often fewer than ten or twenty in number, celebrating in front rooms and garden sheds, or composed of clergy who were ordained with little training because no-one else would ordain them or even who use blackmail against their Archbishop in Paris: ‘If you do not allow me to do what I want, I will join the Greeks’. (Or the Romanians or someone else. Much more rarely, this blackmail may involve a threat of passage to ‘the Russians’. However, this threat is rarely used because those who today remain in the Exarchate generally believe in Russophobia – the ideology which justifies the continued existence of the Exarchate).

Where should the geographical centre of such a Metropolia be? Until recently I had always thought of it as Paris, the historical centre of the Russian emigration, where there is, in temporary premises, a Russian Orthodox seminary and where a Cathedral complex has long been planned. However, as a Metropolitan centre this choice is threatened by two things, the ecumenism and modernism apparently ingrained in the Paris air and the Russophobic policies of the present US-controlled French government. Today France is in a state of social chaos and disintegration. It may therefore be that we should think more radically. Indeed, two other possible centres for a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe exist: they are Berlin (there are large numbers of Russian Orthodox in Germany) and Rome (where there is the large Russian church of St Catherine’s and above all which is the historical centre of the Western Patriarchate. After all, the initials of the English words ‘Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe’ spell R.O.M.E.).

It now seems to me that there should initially be seven dioceses in such a Metropolia. These are: Germania (Germany, German-speaking Switzerland and the Netherlands, including Flemish-speaking Belgium); Gallia (France, French-speaking Belgium, French-speaking Switzerland, Luxembourg and Monaco); Iberia (Spain, Gibraltar, Portugal and Andorra); the Isles (the British Isles and Ireland); Italia (Italy, San Marino, Italian-speaking Switzerland and Malta); Scandinavia (Iceland, the Faeroes, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland); Austria-Hungaria (Austria and Hungary). With time two or three bishops could be appointed to such large dioceses, under an archbishop. For example, Germania could have an archbishop in Berlin, a bishop for western Germany, a bishop for the Dutch-speaking areas and a fourth for Switzerland. Scandinavia could have an archbishop in Stockholm who would also look after Denmark, a bishop in Helsinki and another for Norway and Iceland. These are mere possible examples for two dioceses or future archdioceses. Who knows the future?

At present the episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe is not organized as one and some members are elderly. ROCOR is concentrated in Western Germany and Switzerland, though with several parishes in France, Belgium, Denmark and England, but it has virtually no existence in Italy, Spain and Portugal or in the rest of Scandinavia, in which countries the Church Inside Russia has over 100 parishes. ROCOR has three bishops, the youngest of whom is aged about sixty. ROCOR certainly has experience, but it will need new bishops. Some of the dioceses in Europe, which are still for the moment dependent on the Church Inside Russia, will also need new bishops in the future. Episcopal candidates must speak languages apart from Russian, know the cultures and cultural references of the countries where they will live and have a dynamic and missionary view of their episcopate. In other words, they must realize that their task is not just to look after immigrants from the ex-Soviet Union. They must be able to communicate with the children and grandchildren of such immigrants, as well as with the descendants of the centennial emigration, now in its fifth generation, and the native people of European countries, both Orthodox and Non-Orthodox.

For example, we know of one episcopal appointee whose first act was to buy an expensive black car. On that day he lost the confidence of his diocese. He did not understand that being a Russian Orthodox bishop in Europe is not at all the same as being a Russian Orthodox bishop in the former Soviet Union. Secondly, any diocesan bishop must also be a uniter – in Europe we still have bad memories of the late Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov) who was an ecumenist and intercommunionist (in Rome) and did not want to do missionary work among native Europeans. Such figures were ultimately partly responsible for the Sourozh schism and the lack of trust among European Orthodox in bishops who were visiting them from the Soviet Union. On the other hand, we have an excellent memory of Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) who warned Metr Nikodim precisely against his political policies. Who then could be the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe? We believe that there is already at least one suitable candidate, at present an Archbishop.

It is now becoming urgent to establish such a Metropolitan structure. Millions of Orthodox have had to flee Orthodox Eastern Europe in the last 25 years for economic reasons. Since the fall of Communism, Eastern Europe has been seized by a wave of post-Communist corruption. Combined with the deindustrialization forced onto Eastern European countries when they joined the EU, millions of young people have been forced to leave their homes and families to take on mainly menial jobs in the building sites, factories and offices of Western Europe. There are now more Orthodox in Western Europe, the territory of the future Metropolia, than there are in the four ancient Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, combined. How then can this Metropolia be organized?

b. Organization

Before such a Metropolia could come into existence, all kinds of groundwork have to be laid. First of all, who should be the patron saint of such a Metropolia? To our mind, there can only be one candidate, the only saint of the Russian Orthodox Church who in the twentieth century lived for well over a decade in Western Europe – St John of Shanghai. He is the only canonized member of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe. He stands head and shoulders above all the personalities, intellectuals, artists, writers and philosophers of the emigration, for he was a saint and a universal saint at that. Strictly faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, for which he was much despised by modernists, he was also open to the pastoral needs of local people, encouraged the veneration of the historical saints of Europe and was the inspiration for Fr Seraphim of Platina, for which he was much despised by nationalists. In my view, St John has no rivals. However, the appointment of such a patron saint must be made by the Russian Orthodox bishops in Europe. We are not an anti-episcopal organization like the ‘Fraternite Orthodoxe’ in Paris, so we can only suggest to our bishops.

Secondly, we need a Metropolia website, run by people who have the skills and time to devote to this. Their skills must not only be technological but also linguistic. The website should, we believe, be in Russian, Romanian for our many Moldovan parishioners, English (as the international language) and, in the appropriate sections, in one of the other thirteen local languages of the Metropolia (German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Maltese and Icelandic). Perhaps, eventually, as pastoral need dictates, there could be pages in minority languages like Basque, Gaelic, Sorbian, Breton, Welsh etc. Who are the Russian Orthodox bishops in Europe? Such a website could present them with their photos. How many Russian Orthodox priests are there in Europe today? 200? That is only our guess; we do not have the information. The website could provide it.

Such a website could provide a calendar including the local saints of Europe, for example, Clotilde, Alban, Agnes, Ursula, Eulalia, Senhorina, Leander, Columba, Blandine, Olaf, Maurice, Kevin, Willibrord, Anschar, Sigfrid, Audrey, Corbinian, Illtyd, Odile, Devota, Publius, Gertrude, little known outside their own countries and regions, whose prayers can bind us together. There is a practical and a mystical necessity to link ourselves to them for it is ultimately on their noble Orthodoxy that European culture was built. The fact that modern Europe in its ignoble rush for self-destruction has turned its back on them only means that we should venerate them all the more. The website could present such information along with parish profiles, the addresses and phone numbers of individual parishes, their websites, histories, pictures of their church buildings, their clergy and parishioners, details of languages used in services, timetables and other activities and publications. And all our vital monasteries must have their place there too. There should also be some kind of resource of services in the many languages of the Metropolia and a simple vocabulary in the sixteen languages. How do you say ‘Orthodox Church’ in Hungarian, ‘priest’ in Finnish, ‘confession’ in Maltese or ‘candle’ in Norwegian? The website could tell us. Again, all this can only be done with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox bishops in Europe.

Thirdly, we need to hold a conference of Russian Orthodox clergy in Europe. We do not know each other. Initially, there could be a small conference with, say, two representatives from each country. One priest from Italy has already suggested the excellent idea of twinning parishes. Knowledge of one another could also be obtained from pilgrimages to local saints or relics or on the basis of visits to priests or laypeople who are already linked. Europe is rich in shrines, in Bari, in Rome, in Turin, in Milan, in Compostella, in Cologne, in Paris, in Lyons: Why not organize Europe-wide Russian Orthodox pilgrimages to such shrines? Alternatively, there could be pilgrimages to some of our wonderful churches in Europe, built under Tsar Nicholas II, in Wiesbaden, Geneva, Nice etc., or others built more recently in Brussels, Rome and Madrid. In such a way, by meeting, we can begin the most important task of praying for one another. Again, all this can only be done with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox bishops in Europe.

Two years ago I was contacted by a Russian woman in a province of France. She was in tears, very upset. She had been to a so-called monastery of the Paris Exarchate, where she had been refused confession because ‘she had not murdered anyone’. This meant that she had also been deprived of communion. She had found me on the internet, not knowing any priest in France. She told me her story on the telephone, how she and her son had been abandoned by her French husband and how she desperately needed a priest to talk to. Now, such things are happening all over Europe. The duty of care of the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe is to its faithful of all nationalities, to people like her. Let us begin by appointing a priest or priests whose duty it will be to look after the Russian Orthodox flock in any particular region of Europe. Since the above 25 European countries are divided into some eighty regions and there are a lot more than 80 Russian Orthodox priests in Europe, this can be done and the sort of incident that I have related above can be avoided. Everyone must have a priest to go to.

Some, reading the above, might ask about the role of Non-Orthodox in this. We believe in good-neighbourly relations with those who do not belong to the Orthodox Church. After a thousand years outside the Orthodox Church, many of them still believe in the Holy Trinity and the Divinity of Christ. Some, especially Catholics, go further than this and believe in the Virgin Birth, the Mother of God, the saints and the sacraments. Some share our moral views on such issues as abortion and euthanasia. The fact that the faith they have inherited is deficient in the understanding of the Holy Spirit, and therefore lacks an authentic spiritual and ascetic life, only means that it is remarkable how close some of them are to us. We have no reason not to be on good terms with them. However, this does not mean that we do not freely practise our Faith without compromise. Most Europeans have in the last generation or so decided to be atheists or at least agnostics, Europe today is a mission territory open to all. Conversely, most in the Russian Lands have in the last generation or so chosen to be baptized Orthodox. We should respect each other’s differences. We may be Europeans, but we are also firmly Christian and follow the Russian Orthodox Church in full.

Some, reading the above, might ask about the role of other jurisdictions in the shared territory of Europe, such as Constantinople’s Greeks and its political dissidents. In our view, the establishment of a Russian Metropolia in no way means that they cannot continue just as now. They could even establish their own international structures if they wish. The difference will always be that the Russian Orthodox Metropolia will alone be Europe-wide and multinational, not mononational, and therefore with the potential of growing into a new Local Church, as Patriarch Alexis II hoped. In the long term, as we know from experience, the jurisdiction that will survive in Europe will be the spiritually serious one, not the ones that wave nationalistic or ideological flags and so automatically alienate others and lose the second and following generations, who find such nationalism and ideologism foreign and irrelevant. Just as the fringes attract the fringes, vagantes attract vagantes, sectarians attract sectarians, personality cults attract personality cultists, so serious jurisdictions will attract serious people.

Conclusion

In recent years I have visited Russian Orthodox in Austria, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Sweden and Finland, as well as receiving visits from Russian Orthodox from many of these countries and from Norway, Ireland, Spain and Italy. In all of them I have noticed the consistent ability of many Russian Orthodox to keep the best of Russian culture and to absorb the best of Western culture at the same time. This is because of our ability to see and live European life and culture through the correcting prism and filter of Orthodox Christianity. It is the pastoral duty of the Russian Orthodox Church to its own flock and to all European Orthodox to live like this, keeping faith and yet being European, not repeating the errors of either sectarian nationalists or of the equally sectarian modernists of the Paris Jurisdiction and the old Sourozh Diocese.

We European Orthodox have four layers of identity: local, national and continental (= cultural) and spiritual. In my own case, this means the East of England, England, Europe and Russian Orthodoxy (= Rus). All of these layers of identity can be combined by saying that I belong to the East of England Rus (Vostochnoangliyskaya Rus’), to the Russian Orthodox world that is planted in the East of England. Others can say the same thing, that in Sweden they belong to Scanian Rus, in Spain to Catalan Rus or Galician Rus, in Italy to Sub-alpine Rus or Sardinian Rus, in the Netherlands to Frisian Rus, in Scotland to Hebridean Rus, in Germany to Bavarian Rus or Saxon Rus, in France to Breton Rus or Occitan Rus, in Austria to Carinthian Rus or Tyrolean Rus etc. This is the unity on which our future Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe (R.O.M.E.) can be built, from Iceland to the plains of Hungary, from Lapland to the islands of Malta, in the local regions of the 25 nations of the continent of Europe where we live, and on our complete faithfulness to the integral Russian Orthodox Faith and Tradition.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
ROCOR Missionary Representative for Western Europe

Brittany, 24 July 2015

The Dissolution of Europe

Anyone who knew European society fifty years ago, then fell asleep and returned today would say that he is visiting another planet. So radical are the changes that have taken place in the last fifty years in the Civilization that underpinned that society that it has now dissolved. These changes can be seen every day by just looking at the way modern Europeans dress, listening to their politicians or their singers, seeing their lack of reverence and good manners, listening to their conversations in which they reveal their values and informality, watching their television and films or hearing of their bestsellers like ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. We Orthodox Christians who lived here fifty years ago and remember it as it was then, find that we do not belong to it now, even less that we did before; for the most part most modern Europeans come from a different planet to us. Little wonder that we write of the ‘Dissolution’ of European Civilization; what then was has dissolved into the hurricane of ugly and vulgar atheism and Gadarene lunacy from which all nobility has fled away.

However, it is no good being nostalgic and wishing back something that existed fifty years ago. Apart from the fact that this is impossible, any solution must be far more radical since the compromises that have undermined European Civilization began much more than fifty years ago. The seeds of the present fall and destruction of Europe go back a great deal further, for they were inside it from the start. For the thousand years of its existence European Civilization has always been an alien amalgam of ruthlessly aggressive and bullying paganism, both Roman and Germanic, together with Christianity. Gradually, as we can already see from the feudal enslavement, sinister castle-building and blood-soaked crusades which lie at the foundation of Europe in the eleventh century, paganism triumphed over Christianity, Babylon triumphed over Jerusalem. And so today an American President can assert that sodomy is an integral ‘Western value’, and nobody is shocked. The crisis is therefore not a matter of fifty years, it is not even centennial, it is millennial.

Europe is a puzzle to be solved. Europe needs a solution to counter its present dissolution, a Divine glue to put all its pieces back together again. All the pieces are there, but there is no glue. There are Peter and Paul, Ignatius and Laurence, Sebastian and Alexis, Leo and Gregory, Anastasia and Agnes in Rome, Boniface in Ferentino, Ambrose in Milan, Benedict in Montecassino, Irinaeus in Lyon, Hilary in Poitiers, John Cassian in Marseille, Victor in Lerins, Julian in Le Mans, Ursula in Cologne, Willibrord in the Netherlands, Maurice in Switzerland, Senorhina in Portugal, Boniface in Germany, Anschar in Denmark, Lucy in Syracuse, Vincent in Valencia, Eulalia in Barcelona, Alban outside London, Olaf in Norway, Sigfrid in Sweden, David in Wales, Patrick in Ireland, Columba in Scotland, Denis and Genevieve in Paris and many, many more. All the pieces are all there, but they cannot be joined together. Europe cannot join them together by itself; It needs help from outside, it needs the forest to even see its trees, the overview to understand its holiness. Then all will fall into place.

Europe denies that it needs help from outside because it is technologically progressive and therefore ‘superior’; Europe has so long relied on itself for its successful material progress that it is too proud to ask for help, even when it realizes that it needs help and that material progress is a secondary thing. On account of this lack of humility it has again and again adopted many substitutes, false messiahs instead of Christ, from Papism to Lutheranism, from ‘Enlightenment’ to Revolution, from ‘Democracy’ to Marxism, from Fascism to Consumerism. But these have only proved to be failures and also shown the failure of material progress to satisfy human needs. Power, wealth and technology, however developed, are all deathly without the spiritual vitality of Faith. We have always known that they are false, but at the time Europe adopted each of them and believed in them wholeheartedly. Why? Because of its lack of humility, its inability to accept Christ precisely because He is not ‘European’, but Universal, uniting all, whereas Europe divides all.

And so Europe is spiritually regressive and cannot solve the puzzle it has set itself and glue the pieces back together again. Although it needs humility to accept from outside its deficient culture the glue which it is so sorely lacking, it is too proud to accept help from a ‘foreign’ (= Christian) culture. However, fifty years ago even the most smug and self-satisfied had begun to realize that Europe was in crisis. Thus, when at that time the Church of Christ returned to Western societies and started to become known, some Europeans were interested. However, history has shown us that some of those who were interested in reality did not want the Church; they wanted rather to ‘change the Church’, to impose their own agendas on the Church, they wanted a Westernized substitute for the real thing. So was born ‘Halfodoxy’, ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, ‘Orthodoxy Lite’, an emasculated and degutted religion. But this deathly fantasy that feeds the proud intellect but starves the humble heart, is already dying out, together with those who have promoted it.

The false messiahs of the West have included many spiritual deviations which deny the simple truth that real faith is a way of life. It is a system of beliefs and practices, sacramental and mystical, through Christ and the Holy Spirit, by which our life is brought into harmony with the Threefold Life Who created and rules the life of the whole universe. And that Life is called Love; hence St John says ‘He who does not love, does not know God, for God is love’. These spiritual deviations range from Origen-loving gnostic intellectualism, which announces that only the philosophers of the academy will be saved, to condemnation-loving pharisaic sectarianism, which announces that only the moralists of the ghetto will be saved, to sentimentalism-loving pietistic guruism, which announces that only those who do not know ascetic struggle will be saved. Essentially, however, the delusion of Europe is simply primitive paganism, a force once rejected as dead, but now reinvented and glorified with the illusory trappings of the immense power, wealth and technology of today.

It is profoundly sad that Europe has learned nothing from the fall of Communism. All that Europe can do is gloat over the fall of the Soviet Union; it cannot even see its own defeat, the recipe for its regeneration. Europe has missed the point. For Communism was the very essence of Western materialism and its downfall was therefore the triumph of Christ and the Cross over the West. Therefore only the heroic effort of Orthodoxy that conquered the Soviet Empire can now save the West. Yes, Europe has the pieces to its puzzle, but it is unable to stick them together. For that it needs Orthodoxy. Only Christ and true Christianity, which is what Orthodoxy means, can help it. Heresies of Christianity, produced again and again and again by Europeans, will not help – they, not really Christian, that is, not Orthodox, are responsible for the present crisis, the cause of the problems, not part of the solution. In any case, the heresies of Christianity have been utterly rejected by Europeans; their places of worship are neglected except by Asian and other tourists.

Pedophile-ridden European Establishments have lied to us for a thousand years; they have told us that, God-like, they have all the solutions, that they were the best, better than ‘the rest’. That was a lie, the lie. With only technological leadership but no spiritual leadership, Europe has enslaved itself and, through its New World colonies, the Western world enslaved all mankind to Mammon. So Europe has produced an inhuman and anti-spiritual order worldwide, which is nothing but the kingdom of Antichrist, waiting only for its Temple to be built and its King to be enthroned inside it. However, just as the apostles used Roman roads and all the imperial infrastructure to proclaim the kingdom of Christ, we use European infrastructure and technology to do so once again, thus providing that missing spiritual leadership to call the whole Europeanized and European world back from its delusions to repentance. Like St John the Baptist of old, the prophetic and visionary voices in the Church of God have been calling to repentance for years: now is the time.

A Unique Opportunity

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Matt. 10,34

In its hubris the Western world, Euroamerica, has most foolishly been destroying its own power base. Having carefully taken over Eastern Europe, including Non-Catholic/Protestant Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria, not to mention bombing Serbia and trying to operate coups d’etat in Georgia and now Moldova, Macedonia and Armenia, it has had mixed success. It has tried to prise the present territory of the Ukraine, inhabited by 80% of Russian speakers, from its national and historical identity through a violent coup d’etat, installing a corrupt puppet regime there and then starting a bloody civil war.

Now Euroamerica has set Greece against it by bankrupting its people and humiliating them. Backed by their spiritual leaders on Mt Athos, the Greek people have staged a democratic revolt against its feudal Western leaders. They want freedom. And the only way of obtaining freedom, whether in the Ukraine or in Greece, is by allying themselves with the Russian Federation and so the Eurasian Economic Union and BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. For it is these countries which have now set up their own International Bank against the Western run IMF and also rejected universal sodomy as preached by the Western freemasons.

In other words, we may now be seeing the end of the EU Fourth Reich, the end of post-Cold War US hegemony and its promotion of sodomy. The US and the EU between them have thrown both the Ukraine and Greece into the arms of the only country in the world that can recreate the only Christian Empire, which the West firstly overthrew in New Rome in 1204 (which led directly to its final fall in 1453) and secondly overthrew in the Third Rome in 1917. The West did not expect the Christian Roman Empire to make a comeback; the resurgence of the Third and Final Rome was not part of the pagan Western script.

The pagan Western script said that after the fall of Communism, Russians would become so Westernized, so zombified by bread and circus consumerism, that they would give up their Christian Civilization. Therefore, pro-Western bandits, disguised under the names of privatizers and oligarchs, would steal the riches of the country and its drunkard President would ensure its penetration by Protestant robot-missionaries, freemasons and ‘Non-Governmental Organizations’ (= CIA fronts). As for Greece, in decadence ever since the Western overthrow of the Christian Empire in 1917, it was already falling like a ripe fruit, showing the way to the fall of Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and the other fringes of the Christian world.

However, the pagan Western script failed to take into account the sword of the monasteries, the parish clergy, the people and their Faith. Yes, it is possible to install pro-Western patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops and bishops, oiled with sufficient sums of money, false diplomas, new palaces and flash cars, shave their beards and dress them as fallen Christians, but the Church does not depend on a corrupted elite; it depends on the Holy Spirit Who inspires and informs the Faith. And for this reason Greece, like the Ukraine, now have a unique opportunity, to escape the clutches of the US and its vassal EU and return to their destiny as vital parts of the restored Christian empire, centred in Moscow, Roma-Nova. The West proposes but Almighty God disposes.

An Athonite Monk in Paris

There are idealists who have not read the works of Orthodox authors (like the writings of Metr Antony Khrapovitsky) or are too young to have talked with those who were adults in pre-Revolutionary Russia and also do not know contemporary Russia. They often think that all was well in the Russian Church before the Revolution. This is wrong. Apart from a huge number of saints, sadly, the negative phenomena of spiritual impurity also came out of the Russian Church after the Revolution.

Firstly, there was the treachery that betrayed the Tsar (the same spirit that had rejected the restoration of the Patriarchate which Tsar Nicholas II had proposed in 1905) and greeted the new, anti-Church government of Kerensky. Secondly, there was the servile Protestant State-Churchism or erastianism that Peter I had imposed 200 years earlier, so that when the new Soviet atheist government put the Church under its control after 1917, it found some in the Church who were weak enough to obey. This servility was given the name sergianism. Thirdly, there was renovationism, a movement of intellectuals who wanted to protestantize the Church, imagining that the stones of their dry rationalism and intellectualism could feed the souls of pious Orthodox, hungry for spiritual bread. This caused a terrible schism inside Russia and a terrible schism outside Russia, where modernizers, freemasons and occultists, mainly from Saint Petersburg, detested the Russian Church so much that they left it for the Western-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople.

None of the above is imagined. These three vices were exactly those which Tsar Nicholas referred to after his overthrow, when he spoke of ‘all around treachery, cowardice and deceit’. For the first group showed treachery, the second group, sergianists, showed cowardice and the third group, renovationists, calling themselves Orthodox when they were inwardly not, showed deceit, indeed, self-deceit. Each of the three groups represented unfaithfulness to each of the three foundation stones of the Orthodox Empire: Orthodoxy, Sovereign Independence and the People. The first were traitors to Orthodoxy, the second were cowards with regard to the Sovereign Independence of Church and State, the third deceived the People. As a result the Orthodox Empire fell, just as the Tsar described.

In history the three groups were represented by three separate groups in the Russian Church. The first group, some actually calling themselves ‘monarchists’, assassinated Rasputin and claimed to be ‘White’, but in fact they had little time for the real Church or the real Tsar or the real People, rather they played right-wing politics, wanted money and power and used the Church, the Tsar and the People as flags to conceal their real motives. Without the noble cause of the Tsar, they lost the war against Bolshevism and had to emigrate. These are exemplified by the nationalist and nominal Orthodox on the fringes of the Church of the Diaspora who later put the great saint of the emigration, St John of Shanghai, on trial and persecuted him.

The second group are those inside Russia who did not have the courage of the New Martyrs and Confessors and were not faithful to the Sovereign Independence (of the Tsar or of the Church), outwardly enslaving the latter to the atheist State. The third group, defeated inside Russia, are those who deceived the simple Orthodox people, turning their backs on the Russian Church entirely, though claiming to be of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, they were protestantizing philosophers and freemasons. Their centre was in Paris where they formed ‘the Paris Jurisdiction’ and from where they tried to colonize New York, where now they have lost many of their positions as reality dawns and fantasy fails.

The first two groups have shed the spiritual impurity of the past and are joined together as one. Now we await the repentance of the third and smallest group in Paris, whose doctrinal and practical eccentricities are immediately apparent to all but themselves and some of whom are still justifying themselves. Unlike his four predecessors, all of them well known to me, an outsider, a new Archpastor of the Paris Jurisdiction, Archbishop Job, also an outsider, has had the opportunity and the courage to confront the renovationists. He wants to restore Orthodoxy there, stopping the renovationist persecution of the faithful of whom so many have been forced to leave his ever smaller jurisdiction, a persecution that began in earnest in the 1980s and has lasted off and on for well over thirty years.

Now the St Sergius Institute has closed, ninety years after its foundation. Ironically, the Institute was the very reason why in 1925 the Paris group first fell into schism and quit the Church Outside Russia, soon after that leaving the Russian Church altogether. Its first dean, Fr Sergius Bulgakov, turned out to be a heresiarch, his fantastic theories condemned by the whole Russian Church. Now 90 years on it has fallen into schism even with its own Archbishop!

It is our impression that Archbishop Job realizes that if his tiny jurisdiction has a destiny, indeed if it has any future at all, then it must return to the canonicity after over thirty years of drifting away from the Russian Orthodox Tradition altogether. The Russian Church is preparing to establish a Metropolia in Western Europe, the foundation of a future new Local Church, far bigger than the small and increasingly irrelevant Paris group and with a large number of bishops, clergy, people and real churches. It is time for the fantasies of the isolated Paris group to cease and time for them to come back to earth. The Paris Jurisdiction is now like a huddle of castaways on a desert island, not sure whether to join the last boat that is leaving or to remain stranded in self-imposed isolation.

Of course, the Archbishop, an Athonite monk attached to a dependency of Simonopetra, is facing slander and intimidation from French nationalism (the oldest trick of the Parisians against outsiders), and the accusation that he is stopping ‘free thought’ and ‘creativity’ in the atheist Republic. In fact, he is supported by a great many who see through all the absurd accusations. Our task now, as before, is to pray for him in his task of restoring the Paris Jurisdiction to the mainstream of canonical Orthodoxy and the authentic Russian Tradition. Otherwise it will simply disappear and be forgotten, like other fringe phenomena of Church history and become a mere archaeological curiosity.

The Mystery of Iniquity

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

Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, August 1914

On 15 May 1014 the filioque error was for the first time proclaimed in the seat of the Western Patriarchate in Rome, as it was ever after to be proclaimed. This act of spiritual impurity was due to the loss of the Holy Spirit. Forty years in 1054 this act was to condemn the Western world to spiritual captivity, a future outside the Church of Christ the God-man. This loss of spiritual freedom meant that the Faith had become a mere institutional religion. And, in due course, 900 years later, in 1914, Western Europe set out on its final act of suicide. And in 2014 the ever-aggressive and ever-covetous West yet again invaded the Russian Lands (the fifth time in just over 200 years), once more choosing the route via Kiev as in earlier times.

Indeed, ever since 1914 the world has not known peace, nothing has been the same again. 1914 reminds us of Noah’s Flood, but this time it has not been a Flood of Water, but a Flood of Iniquity. The world has indeed been turned upside down, all has become abnormal in an ever-increasing spiral of violence and death. What was normal and natural is now abnormal and unnatural, what was abnormal and unnatural is now normal and natural. What happened? Why has there been no peace ever since? Why has evil spread without ceasing? Why have the flood waters not receded? Why has the dove that has gone forth from the Ark found no resting-place?

The waters of the Flood have not gone back because in 1918 the last true Christian Emperor, he who restrained iniquity, was finally removed, like a lamb to the slaughter. The Emperor, or Tsar, of by far the world’s largest country was murdered by evil men on the orders of evil men. Already, nearly two centuries ago, one of Russia’s enemies had written that: ‘No revolution in Europe or anywhere in the world can altogether attain its aims as long as the present Russian State exists’ (1). Thus was fulfilled the prophecy: ‘For the mystery of iniquity is already at work; only he who now restrains it will do so until he is removed (2 Thess 2, 7).

The Universal Protector, the Orthodox Christian Consciousness, guided by the restraining Holy Spirit, he who canonized the Universal Prophet Seraphim, he who wanted to restore the Patriarchate in Russia but whose offer was rejected by the unready and unvisionary, he who gifted so much to every Orthodox people, he who protected the outraged peoples of the world, the Boers, the Tibetans, the Thais, the Ethiopians, the Armenians, the Carpatho-Russians, he who, mocked, proposed World Peace and disarmament, he who built thousands of churches and monasteries, including seventeen magnificent houses of God in Western Europe and another in New York, was removed by ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’.

Why have the waters not receded? Because there has not been repentance by all, for all betrayed him. The Non-Orthodox who removed him and ordered his slaying, British, French, Germans, Americans together with traitors in Eastern Europe and Russia who refused to fight for the Tsar, have not repented and continue and even justify their deviations and deviance. The Non-Russian Orthodox who have since surrendered to the bribes and blackmail of Western politicians and have taken advantage to plot against the peace and unity of the Church because the Emperor is no longer there to restrain them, intriguing behind his back as it were, have not repented and continue and even justify their deviations and deviance. And those who accepted and accept his removal, without resisting, unfaithful and apostate Russians, have not repented and continue and even justify their deviations and deviance. And the Flood will not recede until repentance.

When will we know that they have repented? When they are ready to accept the new Christian Orthodox Emperor, who will be appointed by Divine Providence, and will wholeheartedly obey him. And most are still far from that, their hearts filled with spiritual impurity and their minds clouded by foolishness, by the education of the beast, not by the education of the heart, not by spiritual intelligence, by deeper understanding, by the incarnate ideals of the Church. Their minds are clouded by petty, narrow, anti-universal nationalism or else by the idolatrous universal consumerism of the Western golden calf. Most today want the unity of Babel, of apostasy, of material things, they want the unity of iniquity; but what we want is unity in Christ, the unity of the Church, diverse in language and custom, but united in spirit and soul and heart, united by the same desires and aims, a universal Christian Orthodox consciousness, the ideals of Holy Rus. And this is what we have struggled for, are struggling for and will always struggle for – until Kingdom come.

Note
1. Friedrich Engels in ‘Karl Marx and the Revolutionary Movement in Russia’, Moscow 1933, p. 15

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (May 2015)

Q: Your writing seems to have become less apocalyptic and more optimistic in the last 10-15 years or so, why is that?

A: In the 70s, 80s and 90s, we thought that was probably it, that there was little hope for any revival of Orthodoxy inside Russia and that therefore outside Russia, little ROCOR would just have to hold on to the end, which could only be a few generations away at most. For example, I remember meeting in 1977 the elderly widowed matushka of the philosopher and inventor of ‘eucharistic theology’, Fr Nikolai Afanasiev, from Paris (she was much more Orthodox than he was). She told me despairingly, ‘Russia is finished’. Of course, many in her generation who had lived through the Revolution and exile thought exactly that.

Indeed, I too had great doubts as to whether I would see a revival in my lifetime. The 90s under Yeltsin brought little hope; it seemed as though after the obscenities of atheism Russia was just going to copy the West in terms of continuing apostasy. And yet we have, ever since the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors, begun to see the long-awaited transfiguration. Everything changed on that day as was seen in the miracle of the Cross in the sky that appeared then. Russia is the key, if Russia is restored, then the restoration of the rest of the Orthodox world from decadence and Halfodoxy will follow. It is the signs of this process that we are so eagerly following now.

Q: Are you not over-optimistic? Look at all the problems in Russia, abortion, alcoholism, crime, mass nominalism, the Ukraine.

A: I have always said that the revival on Russia is on a knife-edge. Everything can still go one way or another. The Ukraine is a huge warning that shows just how fragile the situation is. What lies behind the civil war in the Ukraine is the spiritual crisis of nominalism which shows that fragility. So-called Orthodox Ukrainians are defending statues of Lenin, the monster who created the Ukraine! What sort of Orthodoxy is that? It is no more Orthodox than the Uniats who want to put up statues of Hitler.

Washington can still undermine everything, as we have seen in Constantinople since 1948 when its agents deposed the Orthodox Patriarch and replaced him with their puppet. Now, throughout the Balkans and the Middle East, Washington, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through its EU vassal, is attacking the soft underbelly of the Orthodox world. Whether in decadent Syria, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine, it is trying to destroy the Orthodox Church as the last bastion against Antichrist, whom neocon Washington is aiming to enthrone in its Israeli client-state. Wherever there is decadence in the Orthodox Church, there Washington and its colonies are attacking and intimidating. We have to be strong and consciously resist – then they cannot attack us.

Q: Does this explain the present situation in Macedonia?

A: Yes. Washington was so angered when Russia freed Bishop Jovan from his Macedonian prison and when Russia proposed to send a pipeline through Turkey, Greece and Macedonia (since Washington had bribed corrupt Bulgarian politicians not to accept it there) that it decided to organize a coloured revolution in Macedonia using its Albanian mafia clients from Kosovo. That is what is happening there now.

Q: How is the Serbian Church reacting?

A: It is in a dilemma. The Americans had already vetoed the election of Metr Amfilochije of Montenegro as Serbian Patriarch, but not everything is going their way, just as in the Romanian and Greek Churches, despite their manipulations there. Notably in Greece, the veneration of the relics of St Barbara by hundreds of thousands is greatly irritating the Americans. Anything traditionally Orthodox annoys them immensely because it automatically shows solidarity with the Russian Church, which it is desperate to destroy, as its neocon leaders openly proclaim. However, they have been annoyed above all by the resistance of Ukrainians to their puppet show in Kiev and its mass murder. The Orthodox seem to be winning there. That is a miracle. We are hopeful that the prophecy of Elder Jonah of Odessa will yet come true. But like all prophecies, it will need mass repentance to come true.

Q: What prophecy?

A: That victory for Orthodoxy will come in the Ukraine, but only after a bloody Easter (in 2014) and a hungry Easter (in 2015), at Easter 2016.

Q: All of these events are happening far away, in the Balkans or the Middle East, surely it does not affect us here in the West?

A: Oh, yes it does. For instance, the Russian Church faces immense opposition to the establishment of even a single new parish in the Western world. On the other hand, the West supports the establishment of parishes of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Why? Because it fully controls them through freemasonry etc. This is the case locally in the east of England, as all over the Western world. Beware of the fifth column. Look at how many years we have had to wait for the new Russian Cathedral in Paris. The foundation stone has just been laid – five years late, twelve years after it was first mooted with sorts of delays, some created by the homosexual former mayor of Paris.

Q: How do you resist? How do you achieve anything against the establishment of a masonic Orthodoxy which has been promoted in the West? Why has an ‘Establishment Western Church’ not appeared, when so much has been done to create it?

A: Thanks to the immigration of real Orthodox from Eastern Europe, a ‘Eurochurch’ has not been formed. Immigrants have come to the West in the last 15 years and saved the situation, supporting us, the once small minority, on whom the Establishment used to spit and turn its back in contempt and condemnation. Real Orthodox can no longer be ignored in the West – much to the fury of the Halfodox. They had counted on establishing a kind of degutted ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, an ‘Orthodoxy Lite’, a Constantinople-controlled (that is, US State Department-controlled) Finnish Orthodoxy throughout Western Europe. This was to be built on protestantizing half-converted Europeans and on lapsed second and third generation Orthodox. This was as crazy as a chain-smoker trying to build an American Orthodoxy on half-converted ex-Episcopalians and former Uniats.

Q: Why is the West so opposed to the Russian Church in particular?

A: Precisely because we do not represent some sort of Establishment-approved Balkan folklore or masonic lodge, but the uncompromised Church of God. The devil is angry with us and so uses his agents against us. Wherever there is compromise in matters of the Faith, there is the devil. He does not want integrity. As the old proverb says, ‘the devil always builds a chapel next to a church’. This became crystal clear in 2006 when the British Establishment and media so vigorously approved the schism in the Sourozh Diocese in this country and launched a vitriolic campaign against the Russian Church. Their hatred was really quite shocking, all for a tiny and spiritually irrelevant schism! But the Establishment always defends its own, as it is always shaken when it is resisted; this world does not want any witness to the other world.

The same situation prevails in all other Western countries, where certain senior clerics, academics and laypeople of the OCA in the USA and of the Paris Jurisdiction in France work for those countries’ Russophobic secret services. We must never lose our freedom in the Russian Church, as they have. Once you have lost your freedom, you are spiritually compromised. And let us be frank, this also happened to a few individuals in ROCOR between the 70s and the 90s. It can happen anywhere. As the secret services say: ‘Every man has his price’. That is the cynical level they work on.

Q: So how do we resist?

A: As a new Catholic acquaintance said to me only a few days ago, ‘Orthodoxy? That’s an advanced form of Catholicism, isn’t it?’ I was struck by this view from the outside. What is certainly true is that there are individuals on the fringes of the Orthodox Church who do not at all confess ‘an advanced form of Catholicism’, but confess a modern Catholicism, i.e. a debased form of Protestantism, in fact, more or less secularism.

Q: So what do we have to do?

A: We have to reverse the processes by which the Church in the West was debased into Catholicism and then the processes by which Catholicism in turn became debased. That means going back to before 1054.

Q: Can you explain that in more detail?

A: Growing up in England, the one historical date I knew even as a small child, like all children, was 1066, the Battle of Hastings. I realized that it was very important locally, but did not understand its general context until some years later through the Church. Later placing that date of 1066 in its historical context as an Orthodox, I realized that it was all linked with the processes that had taken place during the eleventh century, through which Catholicism had been founded and, through it, a Western European world quite independent of and separate from the Church of God, with its own fake Christian institutions.

In other words, I discovered that 1066 was not some isolated date unconnected with everything else, it was part of a much wider process, of which provincial England was just a part. Locally, it meant the final debasing of England as an Orthodox country, but this was the same thing that had happened elsewhere before, in ‘Frankland’, Northern France and Western Germany, then in southern Italy and Spain, and happened elsewhere later, in the Crusades in the Middle East and with the Teutonic Knights in Eastern Europe. The aim was to turn the whole world into ‘Frankland’ – which is what Washington is now trying to do in the Ukraine and Macedonia at this very moment, 950 years later.

Moreover, the situation that developed in 1066 in England has lasted until today; we are still occupied by the Normans because there has been no repentance. Incredibly, 1066 is still marked by Establishment types as some sort of progress or victory, the birth of England, instead of its death! That is the result of a total lack of repentance. Lack of repentance always justifies evil. Look at the neocons in the USA today as examples of lack of repentance and justification of evil! Remember Madeleine Albright who said that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children was ‘a price worth paying’. The Nazis said the same sort of thing. Little wonder that the neocons support Neo-Nazis in Kiev. They come from the same stable.

And no repentance means no restoration. So what do we have to do to restore Truth? We have to deNormanize or, to express it in its general European and world context, deFrankize, in other words, we have to return to the Church and the Church way of thinking. That is absolutely vital if we are ever to found a Metropolia in Western Europe, the basis for a new Local Church.
Q: You mention 1066, behind which hides 1054, are there any other concealed dates in history like that?

A: Definitely yes and many of them. You see, a correct understanding of the Church is the key to understanding the past, just as a correct understanding of the Church is the key to understanding the future. What makes no sense in secular terms always makes sense when it is put into the light of the Church – or into the darkness of the absence of the Church. 1066 makes no spiritual sense until you understand that 1054 lies behind it, that it was all part of the same process of spiritual degeneration in Western Europe that had begun with Charlemagne and has still not ended. For example, today’s civil war in Syria makes no sense until you understand the spiritual degradation that went on in Syria before it. Another example, much closer and more obvious to us, is 1918, behind which hides 1914.

Q: 1918? Can you explain that?

A: 1918 marked the killing and martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, a date which changed world history because it created the Soviet Union and all that that entailed, including Communist China. There is no going back to before that until repentance and so restoration. Behind 1918 is concealed 1914 with the German (or rather Prussian – ‘Prussia ruined Germany’ as the Hessian princess the Tsarina Alexandra said in 1914) declaration of war. And that meant the spiritual suicide of Europe.

Q: On this subject, Western sources more or less all assert that the fall of the Romanovs was their own fault, for instance that it was Tsar Nicholas’ weakness that led to the Romanovs’ downfall. Is this true?

A: Of course not, this is all just self-justifying propaganda. Yes, it is true that Tsar Nicholas II came to the throne young and unprepared after the totally unexpected death of his father, Alexander III. It is true that in the first years of his reign he suffered much from the cabal of his power-seeking uncles, the corrupt Grand Dukes, who took advantage of his youth and great kindness. But the real reason for the downfall of Imperial Russia was the treason of the aristocracy and the generals, including, it is true, of a great many of the extended Romanov family and many Grand Dukes, because of their apostasy from Orthodoxy, which caused jealousy, greed, gossip, slander and the murder of the peasant Rasputin.

These aristocrats wanted to overthrow Tsar Nicholas, the legitimate authority, because they wanted power for themselves. Seeing Tsar Nicholas’ strong will and resolution, they slandered him and carried out a coup d’etat, accusing him of a weak will and irresolution. This was mere self-justification. Their agreement to a Revolution that had been prepared by Buchanan, the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg, who soon regretted his foolishness, created the nightmare. Of course, they punished themselves because they lost everything. It was their own fault. The best of them understood it and had time to repent for it in the Bolshevik Gulag or else in exile, in Berlin, Belgrade, Paris, London (like Fr George Sheremetiev) and elsewhere. Others never repented of the blood on their hands.

Q: So are you saying that the West was responsible for the Revolution?

A: Directly, through its agents, and indirectly, through the westernized aristocrats, yes. Fopr example, directly because of German funding for the Bosheviks (just as the Japanese had funded the 1905 Revolution and the British and Americans had stood behind the Japanese, using them as vassals – as the USA still does). Directly because the British wanted revenge on Russia because Russia had supported the Boers and the Americans wanted revenge because the Russians had supported the Native Americans (as they still do), so they sent Trotsky. Directly because the British did not want to see Constantinople freed by Russia in 1917. But also indirectly because of the treason of the Russian aristocracy, blindly anglophile like the murderous Oxford graduate the transvestite drunkard and parasite Yusupov, one of the richest men in Russia. His ideal was not Holy Rus, but Oscar Wilde! What hope was there with such as Yusupov?

Q: What was Russia’s aim in the First World War?

A: It was, as Tsar Nicholas said to the treacherous French ambassador in 1914, the destruction of German militarism. The Tsar actually predicted that if it was not defeated, there would be another war. Tsar Nicholas had already targeted it in his proposed Hague peace and disarmament conference at the end of the 19th century. Russia knew that once militarism was defeated, peace could prevail in Europe and thus worldwide. However, the West, especially Berlin but also London, did not want peace, and so slaughtered its youth. And nor did the bankers of New York want peace. However, with Russia taken over by the Wall Street backed Bolsheviks, only war could prevail, which is exactly what has happened ever since 1918, indeed since 1914. The world has not known peace for 101 years. That is not Russia’s fault.

Q: What are the temptations which could stop Russia’s revival today?

A: On the one hand, there is westernization, such as that which infected the pre-Revolutionary aristocracy and today infects the US-controlled puppet oligarch-bandits, the modern aristocrats, who actually are mainly Jewish. On the other hand, there is the threat of a narrow Russian nationalism, such as that which prevailed in parts of ROCOR between the 1970s and the 1990s. This could prevent Russia taking imperial responsibility for the rest of the Orthodox world, parts of which have fallen into such great decadence since 1918. All is still on a knife-edge. We make no predictions. All we can say is what we have to do is clear – to fight for the Orthodox Truth without compromise; as to whether we can be successful and so delay the coming of Antichrist in the near future, that is not clear. All we have is hope, faith and love.

Budet Tsar’ v Rossii!

http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2015/05/15/budet_car_v_rossii/

There will be a Tsar in Russia!

Introduction: Eight Years

Eight years have passed since Ascension Day, 17 May 2007, and the long-awaited entry into canonical communion of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, of the vast majority in the Patriarchate centred in Moscow and of the small minority in the Church Outside Russia, centred in New York. Thus, ninety years after the catastrophic overthrow of the Lord’s Anointed, Tsar Nicholas II and the legitimate Russian government, since when the whole planet has been unbalanced and torn apart by unceasing war and terror, there came hope of restoration. This reconciliation was one of the first signs that the historic injustice of the overthrow by its enemies of the Russian Empire, which had been on the verge of victory in the First World War, could be righted and that the Orthodox Empire could at last be restored. But why were the two parts of the One Russian Church separated in the first place?

The Past

As is known, the separation came about only because of the seizure of power in 1917 by aristocratic Western-backed traitors and then by militant atheists who cruelly persecuted the Church in what remained of the former Russian Empire. Thus, when the Church inside Russia, just as outside Russia, fell under attack from renovationism, we stood together side by side, condemning both the heresies of Bulgakov in Paris and of Vvedensky in Russia. When Church representatives inside Russia were forced into lieing and saying that there was ‘no persecution of the Church’, we understood that they were hostages and spoke for them.

In freedom we refused to remain silent and spoke to the world of the persecution of the Russian Church. Understanding the enforced paralysis of the hierarchy of the Church inside Russia, we proceeded with the canonization of saints like St John of Kronstadt, St Xenia of Petersburg and finally the New Martyrs and Confessors. And when the hierarchy of the Church inside Russia was forced to accept unworthy representatives and renovationists abroad, in Vienna, Paris, Berlin, London, New York and elsewhere, and when they engaged in the ecumenist heresy, again we spoke and defended the Orthodox Church and Truth.

Of course, there were small numbers in the Church Outside Russia who also made mistakes. Even though we lived in political freedom we failed to canonize the New Martyrs and Confessors until 1981. St John of Shanghai had wanted it nearly fifty years before! Why did we have to wait for so long? Because of those on the political wing of the Church Outside Russia. These who were politically motivated, mainly on the fringes of the Church, were engaged in anti-Russian politics and schismatic attitudes, notably in the 1990s accepting into the Church individuals living outside our canonical territory in the former Soviet Union.

It was noteworthy that these tiny groups, the renovationist cults and ecumenists on the fringes of the Patriarchate and the schismatic sects and extremists on the fringes of the Church Outside Russia, had fallen away from the Church by 2007, the moment of our unity. Extremists could not stand unity and they lapsed, either crossing into the liberal, ecumenist, new calendarist Patriarchate of Constantinople or else fell away into various pharisaic, uncanonical, old calendarist groups. Thus, both masonic renovationists and politicized schismatics left the golden path of unity of the Russian Mother Church for isolation and separation.

Conclusion: The Future

In the last eight years we have continued to experience the deep spiritual unity of the Russian Church. Outside Russia we have been able to witness to the truths of our uncompromised Orthodox Faith far more deeply than before to the other Local Churches, to the heterodox world and to the apostate West. Inside Russia we have made friends with those who struggle for the Church and for the restoration of the Russian Orthodox State and society. Our united opposition to the onslaught on the Ukrainian people by the American junta in Kiev is evidence of this hope and prayer, as also is our loyalty to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, the symbol of our unity in freedom. Ultimately we seek the restoration of the monarchy inside Russia. Only an Orthodox Tsar for all the Russian Lands and indeed for all the Orthodox Lands can combat the apostate Western world and avert the Apocalypse, as ‘the rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’, as Yeats prophesied. There will be a Tsar in Russia!

An Interview with the Most Reverend Metropolitan John, First Hierarch of R.O.M.E., the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe

Q: Vladyko Metropolitan, this is the twentieth anniversary of the foundation of the Metropolia of Paris and Europe after the completion of the new Russian Cathedral in the centre of Paris. Can you say something about this moment?

A: Thank you. I have been asked to relate a few facts regarding our Metropolia in this interview. At this historic moment it is not only the twentieth anniversary of our Metropolia, but also 100 years since the Nazi-led European invasion of the Russian Lands – just as European and multinational an invasion as the 1812 invasion – on the feast of All the Russian Saints in 1941; 50 years since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991; and 25 years since the events in the then Ukraine and the 2016 Council – and we know how those ended.

And it is also 38 years since His Holiness Patriarch Alexei II announced – prophetically –remember this was before the 2007 reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church – the intention of establishing a Metropolia for Europe. This was to be built on the foundation laid by all those faithful to the Russian Church, then in three different jurisdictions, one completely outside the Russian Church, and as the foundation of a future new Local Church. As the now autonomous Metropolia, it is still towards this Local Church that we are working. It is not far away now – as the illusions and temptations of the past have fast receded.

Q: Which countries does the Metropolia cover?

A: Its territory covers all the European countries which are not already covered by a Local Church, such as the Serbian, Polish, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian Churches and the Church of the Czechs and Slovaks. This means 20 mainly Western European countries which all have small Orthodox minorities, less than 5% of the total population, namely: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and Italy.

Q: What were the most difficult tasks in establishing the Metropolia?

A: The two most difficult tasks were undoubtedly the struggle against provincialism and parochialism on the one hand and against disincarnate, intellectualized Orthodoxism on the other hand.

Q: Can you explain these words?

A: Provincialism and parochialism were in the twentieth century the bane of all the Local Churches. I remember how back in the early 2000s, Metr Amfilochie of Montenegro told us how when he had first become a bishop, he had decided to visit one of his remote parishes. Up in the mountains, where priests visiting parishioners used to wear a rifle strapped across their shoulders against marauding bears and wolves, there was one parish, which had not seen a bishop in years. In fact, when he got there, the first things the priest asked him was: ‘Who are you?’ He answered, ‘I am your bishop’. The priest asked: ‘What is a bishop?’

It turned out that the ‘priest’ was not a priest at all, he had become a ‘priest’ because his family had from father to son all become priests. The man had never even been ordained. Of course, the incident says much about the failure of bishops to visit their parishes – a common failing in Europe before the Metropolia came into existence – but the story illustrates a real problem – provincialism, even parochialism.

And provincialism and parochialism were always the bane of the Russian diaspora, whether in Paris or New York, with their strange fantasies, theories and cultish and sectarian mentalities, based around strong personalities who lived in isolation from the catholicity and wholeness of the Church. It was only after the fall of the atheist regime in the Soviet Union in 1991 that all the different parts of the broken Russian ship could come together again in synthesis, and by blood, sweat and tears we could overcome such parochialism and provincialism with all its sects and personality cults. Viewed from the Centre, spiritually speaking Europe is only a Western province, even further westwards than provincial Little Russia or Slovakia, far beyond the Carpathians. However, even though we are a province, that does not mean that we have to be provincial, even less parochial. We must value our spiritual attachment to the Centre.

Q: So much for provincialism and parochialism. But what do you mean by ‘a disincarnate, intellectualized Orthodoxism’? What was the difficulty there?

A: At the one extreme stood the provincials and parochials, basically phyletists, bigots and racists. However, on the other side of the same anti-Orthodox coin stood the self-important intellectuals. Their mistake was to imagine that they were important! They misunderstood, they imagined that the Church was based on brains and not on saints, on academia, not on holiness. The two things are quite different. In their way the intellectuals of Paris, like those of ancient Athens and Alexandria, were just as provincial and parochial as the uneducated because they missed the main point. They talked and philosophized, but did not do. Just so much hot air: Orthodoxism.

The uneducated provincials and parochials never understood that the Church is about the Holy Spirit and the transfiguration of fallen humanity despite nationalism, the attachment to this world. Earth is not to take over Heaven. However, the intellectuals never understood that the Church is about the Incarnation, that our Faith is not some vain private fantasy, a mere set of ideas or piece of idealism, but it is about incorporating the Faith into public life. Faith has consequences, it is not some Protestant-style Sunday ‘God-slot’ religion, an intellectual plaything, a hobby or amusement for those with overdeveloped brains and underdeveloped hearts. Faith embraces the whole of our life in all its aspects and inevitably moulds and reshapes the State, including the Western establishments with their idolatrous religion of secularism. Heaven is to be brought to earth.

Q: Twenty years ago did you have grassroots support in establishing the Metropolia?

A: Yes, there was keen and long-standing support from a network of many clergy and laypeople scattered throughout Europe, in all the European capitals and cities from Helsinki to Dublin, from Stockholm to Geneva, from Vienna to Brussels, from Amsterdam to Madrid, from Paris to Munich, from Lisbon to Budapest, from Oslo to London, from Edinburgh to Rome, as well as in many regional centres. However, since they had always lacked a central Metropolitan authority and the corresponding infrastructure, it was difficult to co-ordinate all those who had always shared the same though often unspoken fundamental Russian Orthodox Metropolia values. Many had been waiting for decades, even generations, for such a Metropolia. This is why our annual Metropolitan conferences are so important: they bring people together.

Q: Why does the Metropolia cover Finland? Surely there are parishes of the so-called autonomous Finnish Orthodox?

A: They are not autonomous, but depend entirely on the political situation in Istanbul and Helsinki and for generations there have been other parishes in Finland which have nothing to do with that so-called Finnish Orthodox group. We hold the Orthodox calendar and avoid all manner of Halfodox modernism, such as intercommunion, semi-Uniatism, concelebration with Lutheran bishops and bishopesses or absence of iconostases, the sort of practices that were commonplace only a few years ago among some of the ethnic jurisdictions, whose policies, just like those of the Catholics and Protestants, used to be dictated to them by the US State Department, rather than by the consensus of the Church Fathers.

We have built our Metropolia on this basis, on faithfulness to Orthodoxy. In any of the twenty countries where we have our multi-ethnic jurisdiction, we attract Orthodox of all nationalities. Of course we already have the multinational base of the Russian Church, parishioners originally from the Baltics, Moldova, Central Asia, Poland and Slovakia, as well as from the three Russian Lands themselves, and above all their European-born descendants. Other parishes are in any case composed of local people who for generations have been Orthodox within the Russian Orthodox Churches.

Others come to us as whole communities and parishes because they feel that their identity is fully Orthodox but also European and no longer wish to be attached to their grandparents’ countries and their original ethnic jurisdiction. Others come to us as individuals because they feel that their ethnic jurisdiction, whether, say Greek, Roman Catholic or Protestant – and the two latter are also ethnic jurisdictions, make no mistake about it – has been spiritually corrupted.

Q: But surely the Metropolia is also attached to ‘the grandparents’ country’, to Russia?

A: Spiritually yes, but we have full autonomy, which will develop in time into autocephaly. Everyone knows that and knows also of our commitment to the use of European languages in our services and missionary work. None of the ethnic jurisdictions has such a commitment or such an infrastructure as the Metropolia. The fact is that we are the only multi-ethnic jurisdiction. This is the distinctive identity of the Metropolia.

Q: As we know, there are still parishes in the twenty countries of Europe which are outside the Metropolia. Do you not want to bring them into the Metropolia?

A: Why? Everyone is free. There is no question of coercion. For example, there are embassy churches which are attached to their homelands. They will never be part of the Metropolia as they are basically dependencies, metochia in Greek, of their home countries. Then there are the old, dying ethnic parishes, founded in the 20th century and now closing down one by one, having failed to keep the children and grandchildren. Then there are recent immigrants who speak the local European language poorly; they are hardly ready to integrate the Metropolia and often lack the broad catholic vision, they are still provincial, parochial, they tend to cluster together in small ethnic groups.

And then of course there is still a tiny hard core who for ideological and political reasons do not wish the Metropolia well. They are mainly Halfodox modernists and Russophobes who have hatred and jealousy in their hearts; frankly it would be more honest of them simply to join the dying remnants of Catholicism or Protestantism. They really are on the fringes and margins of the Church and would only bring strife and conflict into the Church if they were allowed to join the Metropolia.

Q: So what proportion of Orthodox in Europe do you actually represent today?

A: Over three-quarters. This means that those who choose to remain outside the Metropolia are outside the mainstream, in fact, to be brutal, they are increasingly irrelevant.

Q: How do you see future structures developing in the Metropolia?

A: As you know, we now have over twenty diocesan archbishops and bishops in the Metropolia and seminaries in Paris, Munich, Madrid and Rome. We expect further developments with time. Without doubt autocephaly, the foundation of a European Orthodox Church, both European and fully Orthodox, is the next step.

Q: As we come to the end of this interview, would you like to say anything to our podcast listeners?

A: Glory to God in the Highest and on earth peace, goodwill among men!

+ John, Metropolitan of Paris and Western Europe

Paris, 7 May 2041

The Battle for European Civilization

Introduction

In history the manipulators who stand behind the official rulers of the world have gone under many different names, but their objective has always been the same: global domination under a single world leader come to power by the manipulated mob. Whether the puppets who officially rule have been evil fanatics (Hitler), captives (Merkel), simply stupid (for example, Bush Junior) or extremely vain and so self-deluded (for example, Blair, Cameron, Obama), the puppeteers (today called neocons) fear only one thing. This is the re-emergence of a Sovereign Ruler who denies them the world domination they so ardently seek for the one who deludes their vanity too. Such denial would come about by that Sovereign’s adherence to spiritual independence, spiritual values, spiritual resistance and popular support for him. This is why they have always sought the overthrow of Christian monarchs – at no time so obviously as since 1914.

Free Russia

Although today the puppeteers fear powerful Non-Western rulers, whether in China, the Muslim world or Latin America, their greatest fear by far is the re-emergence of a new Russian Empire. This is because it is the only possible Christian Empire in the world, ruled by a Christian Emperor, a Tsar. Thus, when President Putin two weeks ago in his regular phone-in programme to the public apologized for what the USSR did under Stalin in 1945, making captive the very Eastern Europe which Soviet forces had just liberated from Fascism, the pro-Fascist neocons were alarmed. This is because they have always tried to make out that President Putin is a new Stalin and that his policy is to recreate a Stalinist Soviet Union. If that fantasy were the case, they could easily discredit him.

They would be equally happy if the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is the spiritual backbone of any re-emergence of the Christian Empire, Tsardom, were limited to a tiny number of zealots or if the Church could be divided or ‘Balkanized’, as in Macedonia or the far western Ukraine. Alternatively, the Church could perhaps be CIA-controlled, as with the Vatican and the Phanar, or intellectualized, as in Paris, or divided into many warring sects like the Protestants (which is why the CIA funds old calendarist sects which feed on their neophyte and immigrant pathologies and self-justifying Russophobia). Then the Russian Orthodox Church could be dismissed as a piece of irrelevant folklore, the domain of a tiny and disincarnate minority, without any constructive, civilizational force. What they really fear is the revival of the Church’s incarnational values which spread to the masses and to the State, so resulting in the restoration of the Orthodox Emperor, the Christian Empire.

Free Europe

What they then fear is the next stage. This is that a Russian Orthodox Emperor, a new Tsar, would be recognized as Emperor by the rest of the Orthodox world. Already the neocons of the EU are turning Greece and Cyprus to Russia. And even though Bulgaria, Romania and increasingly Serbia (with Montenegro and Macedonia) are governed by EU-selected elites, many among the people there are also looking to Russia. Indeed, even in countries with only small Orthodox minorities but which neighbour Russia, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Lands, there are many who also look to Russia. Even in Poland many are now looking to Russia to protect Christians in the Middle East, given their abandonment by the anti-Christian West.

What the neocons fear next is the potential spread of Orthodoxy and the spirit of independence beyond Eastern Europe to Western Europe. One of the favourite accusations of such secularists is that Orthodox Christianity is anti-Civilization, anti-cultural, ‘obscurantist’. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Here are a few cases of Russian Orthodox Western Europeans whom I know or have known personally:

A Russian Orthodox Archbishop, the son of the last Minister of Culture in the Weimar Republic and so dismissed by the anti-culture Hitler.

An aristocratic friend in France who is a descendant of the French King Louis XV.

A Russian Orthodox priest’s wife who is the cousin of the Italian film star Claudia Cardinale.

An acquaintance, received into the Russian Orthodox Church, who was a renowned British composer and knight of the realm.

An Orthodox priest’s wife who was the niece of the Czech artist Alfons Mucha.

A Russian Orthodox Portuguese layman close to the former Portuguese Royal Family.

A Russian Orthodox Swedish priest, formerly a senior member of the Swedish Lutheran Church.

Why are there so many such examples? Because the Christian Faith in its uncompromised form, that is, its Russian Orthodox form, is at the root of the European culture of over 1,000 years ago and spiritually sensitive Western people know it. They have realized that if European culture, now being made atheist by secularization or being crushed by Islamization, is to be saved and rebuilt from the ruins of the great European suicide since 1914, this can only be done through Russian Orthodoxy.

Conclusion

Here is the nightmare of the puppeteer neocons, that all their long-held plans will be dashed, that there will once more be a Tsar in Russia, a restored and united Orthodox Empire and that a Europe of Patriots, of Free Nations, will see through their manipulation and abandon their EU project. Thus, they will throw off the US-cloned EU superstructure, the United States of Europe. Then Europe could spiritually revive with the help of the new Sovereign Ruler and Tsar of the resurgent Orthodox Empire centred in Russia. Thus, the outlying parts of the Orthodox world in the Balkans and elsewhere and through them the former outlying provinces of the Orthodox world in Western Europe will be spiritually united once more and the veneration of the ancient Western saints restored. A millennium of injustice overthrown? This is what is at stake.

Orthodox England

events 'blog

Category Archives: Restoration

The Situation of English Orthodoxy and a Vision for the Future of Russian Orthodoxy in Europe

The Dissolution of Europe

A Unique Opportunity

An Athonite Monk in Paris

The Mystery of Iniquity

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (May 2015)

Budet Tsar’ v Rossii!

There will be a Tsar in Russia!

An Interview with the Most Reverend Metropolitan John, First Hierarch of R.O.M.E., the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe

The Battle for European Civilization