Category Archives: Russian Church

My Fourth Pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania: 6-17 October 2025

It was then that falsehood came into our Russian land. The great misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of faith in the value of personal opinions. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing the same tune in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, the notions which were being crammed down everybody’s throats.

Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago, Chapter 13, Section 14

Foreword: Romania and the Universal Church

It was in May 1978 that I spoke to the late Marianna Greenan, a member of the Russian émigré Behr family, about her pilgrimage to Romania. (Both the English and the French branches of the Behrs of that generation were staunch supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate). She told me how she had visited a small embroidery workshop in Romania and realised that all the workers were nuns who had been forced to leave their Convent, as the Communists had closed it. One of them who spoke some Russian explained to Marianna that she said one Jesus Prayer for every stitch that she made.

Then the woman, or rather nun, whispered to Marianna that ‘our persecution is all the fault of you Russians’. Marianna, a member of the Patriarchate, was astonished and asked why. The nun told her: ‘Because you overthrew our Orthodox Tsar and so we are all suffering’. This story has remained with me these nearly fifty years. For the whole Orthodox world has indeed suffered ever since the great treason of the upper-class Russian aristocrats and generals, among them Romanovs, in 1917: ‘All around treason and cowardice and deceit’, as the Tsar wrote.

Introduction: Carpathia and Hesychasm

My latest pilgrimage here has reminded me of my 2004 pilgrimage to the Presov Rus homeland of the ever-memorable Carpatho-Rusyn Metropolitan Lavr (Shkurla) in north-eastern Slovakia. Just across the border from Moldova, eastern Slovakia and northern Romania, Carpatho-Rus, which is still under Ukrainian occupation and so goes by the Kievan name of Transcarpathia, still has hesychast hermits living in the forests on the mountain-slopes.

St Job of Ugolka (+ 1985) was such a one. He is the still living fruit of the Athonite tradition, defended theologically against secularist humanism by St Gregory Palamas. This tradition went north from Athos through Bulgaria and Rila, to Serbia and Romania, to the Russia of St Sergius of Radonezh and his 70 monasteries. Later it passed on to St Paisy (Velichkovsky) in Neamt, St Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina Elders and St John of Kronstadt. That tradition is alive today in such Carpathian lights as Metr Onufry of Kiev.

7 October: A Meeting with Metr Vladimir of Chisinau (Moscow Patriarchate)

Most of Moldova was in pre-Soviet times known as Bessarabia, as Pushkin described, and was an integral part of Romania. However, with the Soviet occupation that large province and its churches were forced to join the Moscow Patriarchate. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, when only some 380 churches remained open, the Church has been restored (nearly 1300 more churches repaired or built) and the people have been returning to the Romanian Church.

The return to the Romanian Church is a spontaneous movement of the people, followed, but not led, by the clergy, as several priests confirmed to me. As the elderly die out, this movement is inevitable, only those who recall Soviet times are staying with Moscow. It has become obvious that Moldova will disappear from the map of Europe within a few years and will be absorbed back into Romania, together with its Church.

Meeting at the Metropolia, Metr Vladimir told me that at present he still has 1,350 churches in this country of two and a half million, all of them using the old calendar. As for the Romanian Church in Moldova, known as the Autonomous Metropolia of Bessarabia (which mirrors the Autonomy given to the Romanian Church in Western Europe), it has taken 300 churches back from Metr Vladimir, all of them also using the old calendar.

The number returning to the Romanian Church has doubled in the last two years and is increasing every month. Other priests told me that the numbers of people leaving and taking their clergy with them, suggest that the Metropolia of Bessarabia, for now with 4 bishops, will be larger than the Moscow Patriarchate, for now with 11 bishops, within two years. The movement is one-way and has been much accelerated by the present events in the Ukraine.

Metr Vladimir admitted to me that the essence of the problem is that the Russians in Moscow treat Moldovans as ‘third-class Orthodox’ and refused to give it Autocephaly. Now it is too late for that. I told the Metropolitan that this is also exactly what Moscow does to most Moldovans in the Diaspora (apart from those under the enlightened Metr Nestor), as well as to English and French Orthodox and to other Non-Russian Orthodox in the Diaspora, stabbing us in the back. He did not know that there are now 30 Moldovan parishes under the Romanian Church in Italy, and 5 in England, with 3 which took refuge in the Romanian Church from ROCOR in 2022.

I said to him that the problem is that he is not allowed a Diaspora and that therefore he is losing most of his Diaspora Moldovans, in the same way as he is losing his churches inside Moldova. I added that we would have joined the Moldovan Church ten years ago, if it had had a Diaspora, rather than continue to be mistreated by politically-minded, Greek-hating Russians who to boot ‘dislike Romanians and only half-like Moldovans’ (and only half-like anyone who is not American), to quote one of their bishops. The Metropolitan looked as though he too had been living with that Cross for a long time. At present he cannot visit Britain or Ireland – the authorities will not grant him a visa.

Metr Vladimir asked me what our experience had been. I informed him that I had studied at St Serge in Paris with the last emigres from before the Revolution. I had spent 47 years in the Russian Church, battling for its unity and meeting two Patriarchs. I told him how a very young Metropolitan in Moscow, who has never spent any time in a monastery, literally told us, all six churches, to ‘go away’. When informed that after nearly fifty years of faithfulness to the Russian Church we would therefore be forced to join another canonical Local Church, the Romanian, the young Metropolitan had simply answered: ‘Too bad for you’.

Metr Vladimir invited us to concelebrate with him; he has no problem with the Romanian Church, despite the fact that the people are leaving him for it. You cannot go against the people when they act en masse, and he knows that. The people ask their priests: ‘We have joined the Romanian Church, will you come with us?’ The priests follow the fait accompli.

8 October: The Convent of Suruceni

Today we go to venerate the relics of St Dionysius of Bessarabia (1868-1943), a great hierarch. He did much to translate the liturgical texts into Romanian, was a patriot of Greater Romania, and his incorrupt relics lie in this beautiful convent, which is still under Metropolitan Vladimir. We venerated his relics, took part in the Akathist and spoke to the Abbess. We were impressed. One of the nuns, who had spent 20 years in the Ukraine, asked me about our views of Metr Onufry (‘a living saint’), and Metr Antony (Bloom) and St Sophrony (Sakharov) and my impressions of them both and why they had argued in 1965. I told her that our church is dedicated to St John (Maximovich), who stood above all such émigré personality disputes.

9 October: St Martha and Maria Convent

Today we went to one of the largest convents in Moldova, also still under Metropolitan Vladimir. A former Communist youth camp, it was founded in 1992 on 200 euros (!). It is a work of faith. It has three churches, one a magnificent large, frescoed church, some sixty nuns and many other very large buildings, including a boarding-school. It runs from the profits of its extensive farm. I met Fr Andrei, the elder, a most impressive spiritual father. We talked long and he spoke of his very poor childhood, when the Communists so oppressed the Church, and he described the Convent’s very, very close links with the monastery of Putna in Romania, which is a great centre of holiness. Putna donated a whole wooden church to the Convent, which stands as the third church.

11 October

Today we baptised a child and served a three-hour Vigil at the very large, brand-new church in Costinesti, a small town near Chisinau. A new Convent is being built alongside it.

12 October

Today we celebrated the Sunday liturgy in the same church. It was attended by about 150 people.

14 October

Today is the Feast of the Protection and we celebrate the liturgy in a church outside Chisinau. It is very pleasing to see most of the people, men and women alike, dressed in national costume.

15 October: Meetings with a Saint and two Bishops in Iasi

Today, my namesday, we leave at 3.30 am to go to Iasi in Romania, about three hours away. There are 500 churches in Iasi itself and another 500 outside this City of some 350,000. But the greatest glory of the Metropolia of Iasi is the relics of St Paraskeva. 200,000 pilgrims have gathered for her feast day before, on and after 14 October. We venerate her relics and can feel the warmth of her millennial hands.

We concelebrate the liturgy with the very young-looking Bishop Theofil from Bacau. Apart from all three priests and three parishioners from Colchester, there are another seventeen priests, four protodeacons and hundreds of people. A choir of young women sings magnificently with Russian chants. Communion is from three large chalices. The largest is 2.5 litres, whereas our largest Sunday chalice in Colchester is only 1.5 litres (a third of a gallon). But our altar is bigger! As is usual in the Romanian Church, this is a real concelebration, all are involved, all take an active part. This is the people’s Church. And of course the people understand everything, as the Romanian used for services is close to everyday Romanian. This is different from both the Greek and the Russian Churches.

After the Liturgy we are invited to eat with Bishop Nikifor, one of the two assistant bishops to Metropolitan Theofan of Iasi. We converse in French and Russian. He tells us that the Russian Church’s decision to go into schism and expel us, because we objected to its schism, is the Romanian Church’s gain. We reply to him that it is also our gain! Then we speak of Fr Raphael Noica, whom we both so love.

We compare the People’s Salvation Cathedral (named in typical Romanian fashion, for this is the Church of the People) in Bucharest with the main Russian Military Cathedral outside Moscow, which were both built at the same time. The People’s Salvation Cathedral is the world’s largest and tallest Orthodox Cathedral, with the largest mosaic collection in the world and the world’s largest iconostasis (407 m2). It can take 6,000 worshippers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Salvation_Cathedral

The Russian Military Church outside Moscow, with its Communist emblems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces

The comparison is between light and dark, between the beauty of the Ascension (which is the dedication) and an attempt to intimidate by military victory.

Leadership in today’s Romanian Church is under the influence of the new saints. They are the glory of the Romanian Church, its New Martyrs and Confessors, St Arsenie Boca, St Arsenie Papacioc, St Sofian Boghiu, St Dumitru Stăniloae, my own favourite, St Cleopa Ilie, the Shepherd of the Carpathians, and many others. Fr Cleopa was a living saint, a living icon, the people’s shepherd. These saints are the guarantee of the independence and freedom of the Church from politicians. They have the Tradition of life.

Why are the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow not also under the influence of their Saints? Both have plenty of new and great saints and pastors, Athonite Elders like St Paisios and St Porphyrios, or New Martyrs and Confessors, but somehow their politically-minded episcopates seem to have sidelined these pastors and the veneration of the new saints is often nominal.

16 October: Back in Moldova

In a town outside Chisinau I meet one of the most senior priests in Moldova, a theologian, born in Romanian North Bukovina, which Stalin stole and added to the Ukraine in 1945, though this priest has lived in Moldova for decades. I will call him Fr X. We discuss our many mutual acquaintances, living and reposed: Patriarch Alexiy II, Patriarch Kyrill, Metr Onufry of Kiev (who is so similar to the ever-memorable Metr Lavr (Shkurla)), Metr Tikhon (Shevkunov), Metr Antony (Bloom), St Sophrony (Sakharov), Fr Alexander Schmemann.

Interestingly, Fr X. wears his mitre and two crosses only at Easter. I have the same custom, wearing them only ‘for the sake of the feast’, ‘radi prazdnika’. We have the same attitude to such pompous awards. He gives me an icon of St Alexander, a local New Martyr, martyred by the Soviets in Kazan in 1943.

He tells me that several of the local Moscow Patriarchate bishops are either married or else divorced, one is a politician in a cassock, only one is a monk. I tell him that the situation is no different from in Russia, but that I prefer the ones who are still married, at least they are normal. Those who could not live with their wife may have some personality flaw and, unmarried, they may have other vices. It is what the Apostle Paul recommended, that candidates be ‘the husband of one wife’. There are of course the homosexuals, of whom there is only one notorious case in Moldova, though quite a minority of the episcopate in Russia and elsewhere is, as the Budapest affair publicly proved, even to the naïve and the liberals.

I suggest that Moscow, like Constantinople, spends too much time consorting with the Pope of Rome and that his Papism has rubbed off on them. Fr X. corrects me and says that the Pope of Rome would love to have as much power and money as they have in Moscow and Constantinople.

Fr X., who knows Metr Vladimir very well, both before and since transferring to the Romanian Church, once accompanied Metr Vladimir to Romania on a secret trip to negotiate the transfer of his Church to the Romanian Church. Fr X. commented that Metr Vladimir would like to take the whole of his Moldovan Church to the Romanian Church, instead of seeing batches of parishes go to the Romanian Church, one group at a time, the largest batch so far numbering sixty, which was just over a year ago. However, Metr Vladimir cannot transfer, for he is a prisoner, a political hostage. As for the pieces of paper ‘defrocking’ clergy who join the Romanian Church, the Metropolitan told everyone to ignore them – they are purely political documents, which he is forced to issue ‘by the powers that be’.

We agree that the problem is that so many in the Russian Church think in the Soviet categories of atheism and nationalism, as politicians and businessmen in cassocks, but not as pastors. After 1991 they changed from atheism to Orthodoxy overnight, but only in dress. Pastors would long ago have granted autocephaly to any Church which is present in any numbers in the thirteen independent Republics, apart from Russia and Georgia which already had autocephalous Churches, that the USSR broke up into. Now, through its Soviet centralisation, Moscow is losing everything. It is this purely secular and political centralisation of power which makes clericalist Moscow bishops into militaristic generals, who then bully, humiliate and intimidate priests as soldiers whose task is to carry out rituals (‘treboispolniteli’).

We come to the discussion of the conflict in the Ukraine and the delusional attitude of the West. I mention that Hitler in his last months was also delusional, as were his propaganda media. People are always delusional, when they are losing a war. This delusion comes from hubris, as was Hitler’s case, as is the EU’s case and that of all the other Globalists. Hubris comes from the need for victory instead of reconciliation, which friendly groups promote. Hubris in today’s case too indicates a loss of contact with reality and the huge overestimation of the West’s own competence, accomplishments and capabilities. As they say, ‘pride goes before the fall’. As for Narcissus, he rejected the advances of all who approached him, and instead fell in love with his own reflection in a swamp. The swamp in Washington?

Fr X. criticises President Putin. He said to me that the President does not like the martyred Tsar. President Putin considers that the Tsar was weak in 1917, he should have fought against his enemies, even if millions had died.  I comment that for me the Tsar is a criterion of Orthodoxy and that in this way President Putin shows that he is still a Soviet man, without understanding of Christian martyrdom, of the Sts Boris and Gleb attitude of Tsar Nicholas. This rejection of the Tsar’s attitude was precisely the error of the Whites, who created the Russian Civil War, in which perhaps four million people died. The Whites, led by anti-Bolshevik and also anti-Tsar generals and traitors, disobeyed the Tsar, who wanted only peace.

The Tsar knew that it would be useless to fight militarily against the Bolsheviks. Apostasy can only be cured by misfortune – you cannot halt it by force. Thus, Bolshevism was only stopped by the satanic intervention of Hitler, who murdered 27 million people of the old Russian Empire. The White Orthodox Emigration, from which I was issued, initially through the influence of the Benckendorffs 39 years after the Revolution, has prayed for 100 years and more for the coming of a new Tsar, like St Nicholas, and who will reverse the injustices of 1917. But that can only come through repentance and humility, when Russia is spiritually ready. It is still far from that.

I emphasise to him that the White Orthodox Emigration was only a small part of the whole White Emigration. This was composed for the most part of capitalists and traitors to Russia, greedy and grasping people who only hated the Communists because the latter had stolen their property from them, and not because they opposed Communist atheism – they themselves were atheists and as such also opposed the Church and the Tsar. From the Orthodox viewpoint, they were not White at all, rather they were Black, and in the Russian Civil War, which Tsar Nicholas had avoided, they carried out just as many atrocities as the Reds.

Fr X. asks me about the Russian Emigration and why it split into three parts. I tell him that all was determined by the attitudes of the key players, clergy and laity, to the Soviet State. Those who remained in the Patriarchate were coloured by their deep Soviet patriotism and even support of Stalin. Those who went to Paris, mainly very Westernised Saint Petersburg aristocrats, had overthrown the Tsar and wanted a Western-style Parliament, whereas those in ROCOR were simply anti-Communists, who wanted to restore the pre-Revolutionary State, despite all its social injustices and Church decadence (communion at best once a year) and careerism. Virtually no-one was creative and looked to recreating not the pre-Revolutionary Sate of nominal Orthodoxy, bureaucracy and corruption, but Holy Rus’, except perhaps for the repentant Kartashov.

16 October: Exhibition for Queen Marie

In the afternoon we are invited to the town of Straseni, where there is an exhibition at the Museum dedicated to Queen Marie of Romania (1875-1938). Queen Marie was a unique Anglo-Russian figure, the daughter of Prince Alfred (a son of Queen Victoria) and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of Tsar Alexander III of Russia, aunt of Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsarina. She married Ferdinand of Romania, who became King of Romania.  In 1926 Queen Marie adopted the Orthodox Faith (she did not remain Anglican, as some falsely claim on the internet and on AI, though she later had sentimental sympathies for Bahai). She is much loved here, as she played a great diplomatic role for Romania at the Versailles Peace Conference, wrote over 30 books and spoke poetically of her love for Romania, helping to create Greater Romania, of which she was the last Queen and best ambassadress:

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=maria+of+romania+film&&mid=8DF9E3904F0F41D6455E8DF9E3904F0F41D6455E&FORM=VAMGZC

Queen Marie, the cousin of King Charles’ great-grandfather, spoke very good Romanian, albeit with an English accent, and was immediately loved by Romanians, being renowned for her beauty, wisdom and love of her adopted country and its customs. Later Communist slanders are not believed. Below are some of her sayings:

Nothing is far when you want to get there.

Nothing is ours really, not even our own souls.

In much knowledge there is also much grief.

To be entirely happy in marriage, the same thing must be important to both.

Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding.

Photographs were taken of our international delegation to the Museum.

17 October

We return to England and hear the tragic but unsurprising news that the Anglican Communion has now officially split into two, with the woke side, led by Canterbury and numbering about 15% of the whole, falling away from the African-led orthodox majority.

On the other hand, we hear the good news that our Archdiocese has obtained a very large former church in Peterborough, which we will use, once we have spent £300,000 on needed repairs. We already have the money. This will further increase and strengthen our Orthodox presence in our native East of England. The Local Church is being constructed. This is God’s work.

 

The Tragedy of the Russian Church: From Multinational to Mononational

I have always maintained that the Russian State will be the great winner in the Ukraine, but that the great loser will be the Russian Church. This is because it is not run by monks and pastors, by nuns and faithful, but, instead, by bureaucrats and politicians, by ‘effective managers’ (before the Revolution they were contemptuously called ‘good administrators’), or as they say here now, by ‘lanyard bishops’. Money, power and lust are the three temptations for such, as they always have been.

After the beak-up of the Russian Empire in 1917, Orthodox in Finland, Poland and Czechoslovakia found their Church structures subject to Constantinople interference. Eventually, at least in Poland and Czechoslovakia, Orthodox received Autocephalous Churches. After the USSR broke up into 15 independent republics in 1991, a wave of matching autocephalies on the part of the Russian Church in Moscow would have forestalled Constantinople’s similar schismatic interference in several ex-Soviet republics.

That interference came among Orthodox in Estonia (1994), the Ukraine (2018), and, since 2022, in Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, the Diaspora, from where the Russian Patriarch and most of his bishops are banned, and to a lesser extent in Belarus and Central Asia, The Russian Church has missed the train, shooting itself in the foot by holding on to Soviet centralism. It has all been suicidal. The Russian Church has abandoned Non-Russians. It has gone from being a multinational Church to essentially a mononational Church.

The old Russian émigré Church, in which I was brought up, was multinational because its members were never going to return, or go, to Russia. Metr Antony of Sourozh, who tonsured me reader nearly 46 years ago, would never have accepted this nationalisation, the closing-off of the Russian Church to Non-Russians, nor would have St John of Shanghai and his successors, who ordained me. Nor would any of the best representatives of the Russian emigration. If it were possible to spin in your grave, they would be doing so.

Speaking to Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova in Chisinau today, he told me that he has now lost 300 parishes in Moldova to the Romanian Orthodox Church. Nobody ever returns to him. Some believe that he will find himself completely abandoned by his flock, with his remaining hundreds of others parishes leaving very quickly for the Romanian Church. He has publicly said so. The situation has been made far worse because in the Diaspora hundreds of thousands of Moldovan Orthodox are turned away by the Russian Church and are forced to go to the Romanian Church. He is betrayed by Moscow.

This is just like the Ukrainian Church, which has opened over 100 parishes in Western Europe in the last two years. As one senior Russian Metropolitan said to us in 2022, after 47 years of loyalty to the Russian Church, despite all the persecution there: ‘If you go to the Romanian Church, too bad for you’. This is the new Russian Church attitude to Non-Russians. It is not only racist, it displays incredible pride. With these words that young man renounced the whole missionary heritage of the canonical Russian Church between 1922 and 2022 and maligned the Catholicity of the Church.

 

From Feast to Feast: Nine Days in the Life of

Saturday 20 September

Today, the third Saturday of the month, we have our monthly English liturgy. As usual, the Liturgy is held in the little church and takes only one hour, ending at 10.20, though I do give a long instructional talk of 20 minutes afterwards. Then those who came, a mixture of English parishioners and Russian parishioners with their children – the parents want their children to understand the Liturgy – have tea together in the meeting room. We mix with those who attend the Saturday Russian School which takes place later in another room.

Sunday 21

I arrive at church, as usual, at about 7.15 am. Preparation and the Proskomidia take one and a half hours. We have many tens of thousands of names to commemorate, so we can only pray for all the names once a year. The second priest arrives at 7.30, but has to go to the hospital to give communion to a very sick elderly woman. He is back at 8.30. Then confessions begin at 8.45 with all three priests available and the two deacons helping. The Liturgy begins more or less on time at 9.20. After the Liturgy, I have a Russian memorial service, a Moldovan baptism, and then there are people to see individually. I get home at 3.30.

Monday 22

Today I am visiting Count and Countess Benckendorff at their rose-gardened thatched home in Suffolk. We have not seen one another for a good discussion for several months. First, we discuss what we need to do for next Sunday (see below). Countess Benckendorff will prepare some white roses (white because they are White Russians) for the graves, where the parish has erected new wooden crosses after nearly 100 years. Above all we speak of our favourite topic, the future of Russia and the Russian Church, against the background of the latest news from Russia.

Although both Benckendorffs were born, brought up and worked in the Soviet Union, they have worked through and understood the problems of the last century of Russian history. They are both appalled by the present civil war in the Ukraine and how the West has sponsored it against the interests of both peoples. But the peoples themselves are also responsible. We agree that all this horror is the result of the aftermath of both waves of Westernisation, the Marxist-Soviet one before the 1990s and, from the 1990s on, the Capitalist one of the oligarchs. Both were the result of the Western-organised regime change operation in 1917, known falsely as ‘The Russian Revolution’, that we should rather call ‘The Russian Degeneration’.

As regards the Military Operation in the east and south of the old Soviet Ukraine, it has always been clear to us from the outset that giant Russia would win militarily against small Ukraine, even with full NATO backing, rather as if in a conflict between Germany and Belgium, it would be clear that Germany would win, however much Belgium was backed by outside meddlers. However, from the outset it has equally always been clear that the Russian Church would lose. A Church, one third of whose members are Non-Russians, has lost one third of its members and been turned into an ever more centralised, clericalised and militarised ghetto, hostile to the people and to the spiritual. The violent and conscious rejection of Non-Russians and the Orthodox mission to Western Europe by the now nationalist Russian Church hierarchy for purely political reasons has been its huge loss.

Both the Count and Countess have a great fondness for their distant cousin, Count Paul Benckendorff, brother of Count Alexander, the last Imperial ambassador at the Court of St James (London). Count Paul was very close to the martyred Tsar, ready to die for him, and wrote the book ‘Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo.’ Their view is that in 1917 Russia committed suicide, betrayed by its corrupt aristocracy, the oligarchs of that age, and it still has not recovered from that suicide, even though we are now advancing on the road to recovery, especially compared to fifty years ago.

This can be seen very clearly in the Russian Church hierarchy, as it goes from one scandal to another, to the despairing patience of the faithful clergy and people, more and more of whom are boycotting it, as they have been let down. There is far to go to restore the original Russian Church, as it was before Peter I, the ensuing bureaucratisation and increased ritualisation. The problem is not that the State persecutes the Church or forces it into obedience, it is people inside the Church who think that the Church must imitate the State, just as in the Church of England.

Another thing we agree on is that the decadence in Russia in 1917 was shown by the fact that people no longer took communion, at best, only once a year, often indeed never after baptism. In effect, by 1917 Russia had fallen out of communion with Christ and into the ritualism of the pharisees who can express only hatred. Here is how the leaders of the once persecuted Church became persecutors.

Tuesday 23

Today I bless the home of an English Orthodox family in Bury St Edmunds. Afterwards N. comments that the alien British Establishment want us to rejoin the Globalist EU project (did we ever leave it?), continue the greedy Globalists’ war in the Ukraine in order to exploit all its natural resources, and increasingly control and censor us as they are authoritarians. N. adds that ‘the present Prime Minister claims that we have free speech and if anyone disagrees with him, they will be arrested’. I suggest that all may change, once the leaders of Germany, the UK and France fall, since they are all extremely unpopular, indeed are hated.

I listen to him with a smile, but change the subject to history and say how the problem of Western Europe is that it was conquered by barbarians like the Franks, Vikings and Normans.  As a result, the twentieth century was patterned by the descendants of these barbarians with their barbarian World Wars, fighting against neo-pagans – Communists and Nazis.

In the afternoon I collect the up-to-date statistics for our Church in Western Europe. Our two bishops in the British Isles and Ireland now have dioceses of 119 priests and 19 deacons in 95 parishes and 5 monasteries. We are part of the two Autonomous Metropolias of Western Europe, of Western and Southern Europe, and Central and Northen Europe. They include even our parishes and missions in Finland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland. We now have 10 bishops, 859 parish churches and 30 monasteries, with the number of churches increasing regularly.

We have come a long way from the days of liturgies in front rooms and sheds, with 10-20 huddlers in the catacomb churches of the 1970s. When there were more than 25 people present, they would say: ‘There were a lot of people at church today!’ However, these conditions still endure in the present Russian Church in the Diaspora, which still suffers so grievously from its past errors. Thus, the Russian Church in the Diaspora (ROCOR) may have up to 300 parishes altogether, but only about 50 of them have more than 100 parishioners for Sunday liturgies. Most have between 10 and 40 mainly converts. But we are now in the normal mainstream, in churches that have hundreds of parishioners present every Sunday.

Fr Ioan Nazarcu, our old friend, whom we have known for 15 years, and for some years now has been a priest, has just given the Economist magazine an interview. Although this Rothschild magazine is atheist in ideology, Fr Ioan, whose English is excellent, has been able to give them a first-rate interview.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/09/22/the-orthodox-church-is-thriving-in-britain-thanks-to-immigration

Wednesday 24

Today I have my day off and am at home, dealing with domestic matters and building work. 

Thursday 25

Today I bless a Ukrainian-Moldovan home in Basildon near east London. The parents are worried about transgender propaganda at school and are thinking of returning to Moldova to protect their children from it. I stop at church to get everything ready for the feast on Saturday. It takes me two hours. Then I bless the home of a Russian family in Colchester and stay for tea and conversation. They have just returned from Moscow, which is now very vibrant and generally more prosperous than Western cities, which have so many social problems and suffer from litter, graffiti and potholed roads and pavements.

Friday 26

Today I am seeing Moldovan and Romanian parishioners in Stowmarket in Suffolk and in Diss across the border in Norfolk. I will not make it to the canon this evening in Colchester, where 30-40 Romanian parishioners gather more or less every Friday evening or sometimes at midnight for a Liturgy. Fr Ioan will, as always, cope very well.

Saturday 27

Today is the Feast of the Exaltation for our Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan parishioners. About 50 people are in church. Afterwards I baptise an adult Russian. 

Sunday 28

 I head to church at 6.45. After the Liturgy, we have the meeting of St Alban’s Circle, our youth group. About sixty people attend. The subject is the life of St John of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Fr Ioan is doing baptisms in the main church, while Fr Sergey has a memorial service in the little church. At 1.20, I leave for Claydon cemetery outside Ipswich and the graves of Countess and Count Benckendorff, wife and son of the last Imperial ambassador, Count Alexander. They are distant cousins of the present Benckendorffs. People place roses on the graves of Countess Sophia, Count Konstantine and his wife Maria Korchinska. I get home at 3.30

At home I have to start getting ready for my pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania from 6 to 17 October.

 

 

Questions and Answers August 2025

Church Unity 

Q: How can we arrive at Church Unity, when all sixteen Local Churches are at last in communion with one another?

A: I can answer this on the basis of the achievement of Russian Church unity (2007-2021), in which I helped a little. This was achieved by the compromises made by all sides, which got rid of the extremes of the three Russian jurisdictions. The MP had to renounce, at least for a time, Sergianist Sovietism, ROCOR had to renounce, at least for a time, Russian Fascism, and Rue Daru had to renounce Western Liberalism. It will be the same in the question of the unity of the whole Church. Greek, Russian and other nationalisms (Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian and others) are responsible for the present divisions. Who will have the courage to renounce such nationalism?

A word of warning, however. Since 2021 when Russian Church unity was achieved, some powerful elements have renounced their compromises and gone back to their extremes, so unity has been lost. Thus, the fanatical and schismatic US convert elements in ROCOR broke communion with Rue Daru and centralising MP nationalists are pushing the Church back towards Stalinist Sovietism. Through nationalist fanaticism and schism the Persecuted Church has become once more the Persecuting Church, the Church of the Pharisees, thus scandalously renouncing the legacy of the New Martyrs and Confessors. And so regained internal Church unity has been lost, even inside the Russian Church.

Conversion to Orthodoxy and the Non-Orthodox World

Q: Why have so few Western Europeans joined and remained faithful to the Orthodox Church? I mean at most it can only be a few tens of thousands out of over 470 million.

A: In order to become a real and not a superficial Orthodox Christian, it is no good admiring ‘mystical’ monks, ‘pretty’ icons, ‘lovely’ singing, or the ‘traditional’ liturgy. That is all emotional, superficial. You have to renounce, spiritually, the anti-Christian historical and contemporary acts committed by your national elites in acts of repentance. This means renouncing blind nationalism, for we are called to be not of this world – blind nationalism, the attachment to artificial States and elites, cannot be part of our Faith. This is true for all nationalities.

For example, if you are an Orthodox Russian, you venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors who were persecuted by Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet regime, which you therefore renounce, as well as renouncing the anti-Church acts of the pre-Revolutionary governments which go back to the seventeenth century and the resulting Old Ritualist schism of that time. Then you renounce the serfdom copied and introduced by the Western-style Russian aristocracy, which led to the anti-aristocrat Pugachov revolt, suppressed by the German Empress Catherine II, and later to the 1917 revolt. This is renouncing parts of your ‘national tradition’ also.

If you are from Western Europe, you have to go back much further, rejecting not just the atheistic secularist woke modernism of contemporary post-Protestantism or post-Catholicism, but also the imperialism and colonialism of the nineteenth century, the iconoclasm of the Protestants, the Popish heresy of the filioque, which claimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Bishop of Rome, introduced feudalism with its castle and knight protection rackets and the barbarian plundering and massacring of the Crusades with their ideology of racial superiority over others. The vast majority of Western Europeans are unable to do this, consciously or, far more often, unconsciously. Yet, such repentance for a culture gone wrong is at the heart of conversion to Orthodoxy.

Q: You appear to be opposed to converts. Is that so?

A: Not at all! I am opposed only to crazy converts, the pathological types, as they are called in French, especially when they are made priests, or, horror of horrors, bishops! The downfall of ROCOR was not because of convert clergy, but crazy convert clergy.

Q: Where do moralism and intellectualism come from?

A: They are both deviations which come from a lack of spirituality, from those who have ‘quenched the Spirit’. Moralism generally produces conservatism and then phariseeism. Intellectualism generally produces liberalism and then homosexuality.

Q: Why should the Church be opposed to tithing when there was a Church of the Tithes in Kiev?

A: ‘Desyatinnaja Tserkov’, ‘the Church of the Tithes’, is a well-known church in Kiev in the history of Ancient Rus, precisely because it was unique, built by tithes imposed on rich people. No other examples of an Orthodox church built by tithes are recorded. It is always quoted by US converts from Protestantism in order to justify the tithes they want to impose on Orthodoxy. Tithes are a practice of the Old Testament, beloved by Protestant sects, and are not part of the practice of the Orthodox Church, except in exceptional missionary circumstances, and only then when they can be enforced on the rich by the secular authorities, as they were in Kiev. In other words, the Church is not opposed to tithes as such, it is opposed to them being made compulsory.

Q: If the Pope were found to be a homosexual or a pedophile, there would be an existential crisis in the Roman Catholic world. When we know that some leaders of Orthodox Churches are such, why is there not some huge crisis inside them?

A: The short answer is because we are not clericalists. In other words, the Head of our Church is Christ, not some man, who by some sort of magic, has inherited his title from St Peter. The sins of others, including of Patriarchs, are their affair for their personal repentance. The Church goes on without them. The Church belongs to all, not to some mere clerical elite. They are here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Are you shocked by the election of a new Protestant Archbishop of Wales who is a lesbian?

A: Stop the hypocrisy! That is none of our Orthodox business, it is theirs. Our business is that there are so many effeminate, homosexual Orthodox bishops, notorious for persecuting happily married parish priests, for their contempt for women and children, for their spiritually empty intellectualism and for their avarice. One small part of the Russian Church is increasingly looking like a Church of pedophiles and perverts, who ‘defrock’ all whistleblowers.

All these vices have the same origin – in their faithless lack of love. If Orthodox complain, then in the future, all Non-Orthodox engaged in ecumenical relations with Orthodox should demand to speak only to Orthodox clerics who are heterosexuals. The clericalist mafia always justifies itself. But the people know and they massively followed the ‘defrocked’ clergy, who before being ‘defrocked’ had transferred to a canonical, non-schismatic Local Church, where they concelebrate with all other Local Churches.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you compass sea and land to make one convert, and when he is made, you make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves (Matt: 23:15)

It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble (Lk: 17:2)

Q: What is the attitude of the Orthodox Church towards black people?

A: The same as its attitude to white people, or people of any other colour. All people were created in God’s image. In any case, Christ in His human nature was olive-skinned, not white. Look at any icon.

The only case of racism I have every come across was a white American convert bishop who said when George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman in the USA in 2020 that, ‘it does not matter because he was only a black’. Moreover, he said this in front of a mixed-race young woman, who never had anything to do with him again and when we left him, she was elated. And yet such a hateful bishop claimed to be canonical. It was one of the last straws, as he also publicly proclaimed that he disliked Greeks and Romanians and only half-liked Moldovans. That was in front of representatives of all those nationalities, to their faces. It really is time for those who consecrate new bishops to make sure that they are Christians first.

Q: How do you feel about no longer being in the Russian Church?

A: The only important thing for me is to belong to the Orthodox Church. The fact that a Russophobic agent, inspired by NATO, chased me and thousands of others out of the Russian Church and into another Local Church, in my own case after 47 years of faithfulness, is not on my conscience, but on the conscience of the authorities of the Russian Church who allowed this to happen for purely political reasons. This will go down in history. And I am quoting a Russian bishop who said precisely this to me.

Q: How can you belong to a Church that uses the new calendar when you use the old calendar?

A: Probably because I have always belonged to such a Church!

I distinguish between the dogmatic and the pastoral. I belong to a Local Church, just like the Russian Church also, that allows both calendars, according to pastoral need – as the old, pre-crazy convert, ROCOR also used to allow both. So many schisms and sects have been founded by confusions between issues that are dogmatic and issues that are merely pastoral, between primary issues and secondary issues. We reject that confusion.

Q: As you are an English nationalist, what do you think of illegal immigration? 

A: I am not an English nationalist. Nationalism is an ugly thing, as we can see from inhuman nationalist demonstrations, which create fear among poor refugees who have been chased out of their countries by Western-created wars. Nationalists are Little Englanders; Globalists are Great Britishers. I am a Great Englander. A patriot. I am English, more exactly East Anglian, and above all I am an Orthodox (not a heterodox) Christian.

In other words, I am a patriot of England, the real England of the saints and poets, of the spiritually sensitive. I am also a patriot of the real France before that horrible atheism began in 1789, and I am a patriot of the real Russia before corrupt aristocrats seized power and introduced serfdom and then when power was seized by atheists, Leninists and Stalinists. I have nothing in common with Masonic Russia, Fascist Russia or Stalinist Russia.

As for illegal immigration, I think it is illegal.

Q: Is it normal for Orthodox to write ‘the unworthy’ in front of your name?

A: Not at all. This is the false piety of pride of some converts. We are all unworthy and we know it. There is no need to display it. Stay modest, do not become proud, even of your unworthiness. Stop boasting!

The Russian Church 

Q: Since only 1-3% of the Orthodox population go to church in Russia, how can it be called ‘Orthodox Russia’?

A: This way of thinking, that going to a building on a Sunday makes you a Christian, is purely Protestant, moralising and abstract. Orthodox Christianity is our way of life, our culture, our values, our self-identification and nothing else.

Q: Where in your view did the Russian Church go wrong?

A: In 2003 His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II, whom I met in 2007, proposed to open a multinational Exarchate and Metropolia in Western Europe, centred in Paris, that would be the foundation of a future Autocephalous Western European Orthodox Church. Who here could not go along with that? We all did. However, in recent years that idea has been abolished in favour of a nationalist Russian Metropolia, on paper centred in Paris, but in reality in Moscow. It increasingly excludes all Non-Russians, including Ukrainians and Moldovans, let alone native Western Europeans, from itself.

This is exactly the same mistake, made decades ago, as that of the Greek nationalist Patriarchate of Constantinople. It seems that some people never learn! This is not only the complete renunciation of the apostolic call and promise of Christ in the last chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel, and also of Patriarch Alexiy II and of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. When the Russian Church renounces its saints on account of the same nationalism, bureaucracy, militaristic rigidity as the Greeks suffer from, then we know that we have to go elsewhere to live Church life.

Where did it all go wrong? Since the repose of Patriarch Alexiy II, especially from about 2016 on. Orthodox England rejoices in the Orthodoxy of Russia, but not in the rest.

Illustrations of this new political and anti-pastoral mentality include charging 100 roubles for holy water (as now in one Siberian Metropolia) or the recent Russian Church scandal in a former Soviet Republic. Here a youngish hieromonk, the secretary of the local bishop (who is a well-known active homosexual), asked to be defrocked in order to get married. He was granted his request. Some time later the defrocked man went to church with his wife, only to find a priest who, looking directly at him, said to all ‘some people here will not be saved’. This is sadly typical of the pure phariseeism that has become the norm in a few parts of the Russian Church in recent years. It has nothing to do with the Russian Church of the Emigration and of the New Martyrs and Confessors.

Q: Why do we not hear about Sergianism in the Russian Church any more?

A: I think we do hear about it, only much less. This is because it was always a purely political, anti-Communist, accusation from the Cold War, promoted by the CIA as a ‘heresy’. It was never a heresy, just a sin that come about from human weakness and cowardice, resisted by the vast majority of Russian Orthodox, and affecting only a few at the administrative head of the Russian Church.

The nature of this sin is to say in words, and sometimes in actions, that whatever the State, Communist or not Communist, proclaims, is true. This is known as erastianism and all the national Protestant Churches in Northern Europe have always suffered from it. However, we find it in the leadership of the Russian Church because since the age of Peter I, they have been protestantised in this respect. It could be said that the Russian Church reflects the error of the Church of England, whose bishops are all appointed by the Prime Minister of Great Britain and dare not contradict the Establishment, from which they profit and draw prestige.

Q: Why is the Russian Church sometimes very rigid, with many rules and regulations?

A: Firstly, the Russian State Church mentality, above all today with its militarisation, means that sometimes people give the impression that the Russian Church is an Army, not a Church. Secondly, neophytes/converts like to reduce everything to lists of rules on dress and outward conduct. This is not the Church, but a convert fantasy. Comparisons with other Local Churches immediately indicate how some are going astray from the mainstream. Moreover, the authentic émigré traditions of the Russian Church were of the mainstream.

Q: The life of St Antony the Roman states that he sailed from Italy to Novgorod on a stone. Do you really believe this?

A: I believe that he sailed from Italy to Novgorod on a merchant’s ship and at night he slept in a stone coffin, which he took with him. Many monks at that time slept in coffins, either wooden or, especially in the south of Europe, stone.

The Ukraine

Q: What do you think the war between Russia and the Ukraine is really about?

A: This conflict is not a war between Russia and the Ukraine. It is a proxy war between Russia and the Western world (the US and its Western European NATO vassals), which is taking place on a small part of the territory of the Soviet Ukraine and on all the other post-Soviet territories, where the US is trying to encircle Russia. In other words, it is a war between two different ideologies, between Globalism, the Western Oligarchic System of the 10%, and Nationalism, the National Systems of the Peoples of the 90%. The racist and Nazi West could not care less about the Ukrainians themselves, in fact, as they openly proclaim, they can ‘die to the last Ukrainian’ in defence of Western economic interests. As a result, the Russians are slowly going to demilitarise and denazify NATO, and not just the Ukraine.

This means conflict between the unipolar world of the West-centric woke ideology, led by the atheistic USA against the multipolar world of traditional cultures (cultures based on spiritual and moral values), led by Russia. The latter founded BRICS, an alliance for the co-operation of the multipolar world of sovereign countries, which all respect faith or morality (traditional forms of Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism). After military victory, the immediate task of Russia will be to refound and restore a Sovereign country with its own identity within its natural (= Non-Soviet, historical) borders, centred around Kiev, without its oligarchs. Only then will there be peace.

Q: Do you think the CIA is paying ROCOR for its anti-Russian stance on the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: I don’t know.

As you know, the ultra-right-wing Grabbe faction received large amounts of cash for ROCOR from the CIA from the 1960s right up until 1991, when it was abruptly cut off, as the Soviet Union had been dissolved. Today the ROCOR Synod in New York is dominated by Americans, one of whom has a father, who held a senior position in the CIA and NATO, and is a great lover of Tony Blair. The CIA loves to have dirt on such bishops.

Among the others, who all speak fluent American, are those who have received support from the American administration (even a Cathedral and other properties in former West Germany), which is why it is known as the American Synod. Since for many in the US administration the Russian Federation is Public Enemy No 1, maybe in a few years’ time your speculation about the virulently anti-Russian statements of most of its bishops will be shown to be correct. However, of this there is no proof at the present time, all is circumstantial, so you may be wrong.

Q: You have been criticised for being political. What would you answer?

A: I have often spoken about politics, but not about party politics, probably because I support no political party. We have to speak about politics, when one Greek nationalist Patriarch is installed by the CIA and another Patriarch refuses to say anything which counters Russian nationalist politics. Both are examples of those who put local nationalism above Christ. We are not of the world, but we do live in the world, and like the Church Fathers we have to show that we understand who is who in this world, who we can support and who not. We refuse, as ever, to work for the CIA (or for its branches in the Brussels Politburo and MI6) or for the FSB. Naivety and cowardice are not solutions! We have to be aware, wise but gentle, as Christ instructed His disciples. The fact is that all divisions from the Church are caused by politics, nationalist or left and right, CIA or KGB.

 

Church and State: Lessons from History for the Present Day

This is the Ukrainian Orthodox Viewpoint ( from the Society of Orthodox Journalists), which most Russian Orthodox also probably agree with. It begs the question as to why the once multinational Orthodox Church of All Rus, including the once free ROCOR Synod in New York which used to resist Sergianism (erastianism), has become dominated by Russian nationalist politicians, instead of Orthodox Christians, theologians and pastors. Nationalism is not the Church, but schismatic!

https://spzh.eu/en/zashhita-very/87544-church-and-state-lessons-from-history-for-the-present-day

05 August 11:06

Author: Nazar Golovko

In the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Church often co-operated too closely with the State.

From Peter’s reforms to the Revolution of 1917: how state dependence affected the Russian Church – and what lessons the UOC should draw from this today.

Many today wonder: how could it happen that the devout Orthodox people, the “God-bearing nation” as Dostoevsky called them, suddenly rose up against their Church after the 1917 revolution? How could those who once went to their deaths “for Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland” destroy the faith, kill the Tsar, and tear down that very Fatherland?

Indeed, what happened after 1917 defies human logic. Tens of thousands of churches were closed or wiped off the face of the earth, thousands of monasteries and sketes were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of believers were executed, thousands of priests and hundreds of bishops were murdered, and millions were buried alive behind the barbed wire of the Gulag.

How could this happen? And, more importantly – why?

To answer this question – which remains deeply relevant today – we must turn to history.

When the Church ceases to be the Body of Christ

As early as the era of Peter I, the religious life of the Russian Church was subjected to harsh and merciless criticism. On one hand, the Church was attacked for excessive attention to outward ritual forms; on the other, it had fallen under overwhelming state control. Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile and patriot well-versed in Church affairs, once wrote:

“Thus, in terms of administration, the Church now appears as a kind of colossal bureaucracy, applying – with the inevitable, alas, official bureaucratic falsehood – the methods of German bureaucracy to the salvation of Christ’s flock… Apparently, all the Church has been granted is outward order – a semblance of proper organization…

But one trifling thing is missing: the soul is gone. The ideal has been replaced – the Church’s ideal has been supplanted by a state ideal, inner truth replaced by formal, external correctness. A new measure has been substituted for the old – a governmental measure instead of a spiritual and moral one. Everything is now weighed and measured on the State’s official scale…

The worldview of the state has, like a subtle vapor, imperceptibly seeped into the mind and soul of nearly the entire ecclesiastical environment, with few exceptions, narrowing its understanding to the point where the living sense of the Church’s true mission has become barely accessible. Nowhere is truth so feared as in our Church administration; nowhere is there such flattery as among our hierarchy; nowhere is the spirit of Pharisaism so strong as among those who ought to hate falsehood the most.”

The Church and the Authorities: harm or benefit?

Indeed, it’s hard to deny that the Church of that era had surrendered itself to imperial will. For example, Peter I’s decree of April 22, 1722, required every cleric (including bishops) upon entering holy office to swear an oath “to be a faithful, good, and obedient servant and subject to the emperor and his lawful heirs,” to defend the emperor’s rights and dignity, “not sparing even their own life if necessary,” and to report any damage or threat to imperial interests – including “theft, treason, or rebellion revealed in confession,” as well as “any evil designs against the Tsar’s honour, health, or family.”

In other words, the secular authorities demanded that Orthodox clergy violate a foundational canonical rule: the inviolability of the sacramental confession. In effect, the Church became a mere “Department of Spiritual Affairs,” heavily influenced by the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod – a layman appointed by the Tsar.

As a result:

The Church in Russia was perceived as an extension of the state. And if the people’s hatred was directed at the state, the Church was inevitably caught in that hatred too – a sentiment that had been simmering long before 1917.

Prince Ivan Gagarin, who converted to Catholicism, wrote: “The Russian Church needs independence; it senses this itself.”

Understanding that the Church in Russia was inextricably tied to autocracy, Gagarin believed that an attack on the Tsar would inevitably strike the Church as well. Moreover, he saw the deepening schism with the Old Believers as another wellspring of discontent with autocratic rule. In his eyes, Catholicism could save Russia – because it had the spiritual freedom the Russian Church lacked. He famously wrote:

“Let us repeat: it is one or the other – Catholicism or revolution. The Russian Church is powerless; the Tsarist regime may only delay the explosion. The union of the schismatics with revolutionary movements becomes more and more inevitable. There is no time to lose. I see no other way to avert this threat than a national Russian-Catholic clergy.”

Thus, Gagarin understood that the Russian Church – having bound itself so tightly to the state – lacked the strength to confront the revolutionary currents rising among the Old Believers and even within the lower clergy.

Church and Revolution

Here is just a short list of well-known revolutionaries who came from clergy families:

  • Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), a major theorist of Russian revolution, son of a priest in the Saratov Eparchy; educated in a religious school and seminary.
  • Sergei Nechaev (1847–1882), organizer of the underground group “People’s Retribution” and a symbol of fanatical revolution; son of a deacon from Nizhny Novgorod province.
  • Nikolai Kibalchich (1853–1881), member of “Narodnaya Volya” and chief designer of the bomb that killed Alexander II; son of a priest in the Chernihiv Diocese.
  • Mikhail Novomirsky (Tikhomirov) (1850–1884), activist of “Narodnaya Volya”; son of a priest.
  • Alexander Mikhailov (1855–1884), one of the leaders of “Narodnaya Volya” and its Executive Committee; son of a rural priest.
  • Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) – came from a clerical estate.

Besides, let us not forget the failed seminarian Stalin.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of names of priest’s children who became revolutionaries. And many of them did not merely sympathize with revolutionary causes – they actively took part in terror and assassinations.

Why?

Because they saw the hypocrisy and servility that had become entrenched in the lives of their fathers.

Because they understood: the Church, subordinated to the state, had ceased to be a spiritual mother and had become a cog in the bureaucratic machine. And if that machine needed to be destroyed – so did its parts.

A Fatal Union

Thus, the revolution in Russia was not just a popular uprising. It was, in many ways, the outcome of an unhappy marriage between Church and state. A Church bound hand and foot by the government was unable to serve as the voice of conscience. In the end, it remained silent – or even offered its blessing – as the old order was dismantled.

For example, on March 5, 1917, just two days after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, the Holy Synod declared:

“The Holy Church of Christ greets the recent events as a mercy of God upon our people… May the Lord bless the Provisional Government and grant it strength to perform the work of serving the people.”

As a result, those forces that destroyed the Tsar turned their wrath on the Church as well. And the reason is clear: when the Church becomes part of the state, people see it as a target – not as the Body of Christ.

What about today?

Yes, the current situation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church seems unbearably difficult to many of us. We are forbidden to pray as our ancestors did for centuries. Our churches are being taken away. The authorities are doing everything in their power to erase the UOC from Ukraine’s religious landscape.

But—

Perhaps this is, in fact, a blessing from God. A blessing that the Church should be free from all state dependence, so that it may possess the inner liberty necessary to fulfill its true mission – the preaching of the Gospel.

It may seem that without the “roof” of state protection or official patronage, the Church is weak and exposed. But maybe this is precisely the path Christianity calls us to walk – not to please power, but to serve the people.

And perhaps, painful as it is, a Church free from State dependence is walking a blessed path.

 

Questions and Answers July 2025

The True Faith. The state of the various Orthodox jurisdictions in England today and fifty years ago. The moment when the Russian Church turned its back on Europe. The Oxford and London Russian parishes fifty years ago. Tsar Nicholas in England. The coming end of the war in the Ukraine. The consequent fall of the European elite and of its ideology versus Orthodoxy.

Q: What for you is the True Faith?

A: In my late childhood and early teenage years, I came to three conclusions about what must be the True Faith:

Firstly, the True Faith must be about Christ, as only Christ is God and man, combining East and West, North and South. The True Faith must therefore represent the spiritual reality of Him and not State manipulations of Religion and the Bible, based on nationalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism and all cultures of apostasy, like the White Supremacy Western world.

Secondly, the True Faith must be historical and not some recent invention, neither of the nineteenth century, nor of the sixteenth century, nor even of the eleventh century, for it must go back a thousand years before, to the Scriptures, to the Word of God Himself.

Thirdly, the True Faith must be universal, as is Christ. In other words, the True Faith must be for all races who seek it, accessible to all, that is, to all who are repentant and so seek Christ, and so is not some esoteric or obscurantist religion for one nationality, or for the select few or elite.

Q: Why did you not become members of the Antiochian Diocese when you left ROCOR in 2021, unlike the three Western riters who were purged by ROCOR and went to Antioch?

A: The short answer is that none of us twelve clergy, or any of our thousands of people, had ever been Anglicans, let alone Anglican vicars. You have to understand the Antiochian Diocese exists in this country for them. We have all always been Orthodox and have never known any other religion, so something for ex-Anglicans, however worthy and sincere they may be, has no interest for us. It is irrelevant to us.

Also, Antioch is not European, as we are, and cannot members of one of the four Arab families who operate it. The Church of Antioch here is tiny, consisting perhaps of only a thousand people, mainly ex-Anglicans or ex-Protestants, especially rather puritanical conservative evangelicals. (This puritanism is rather ironic given the behaviour of the former Antiochian Archbishop in the USA and also drives away normal Orthodox, who, like Arab Orthodox, are not puritans).

Another problem of Antioch being so small is that it is desperate to recruit clergy and people, with one recent disaster when they accepted a reject from the mainstream Churches, based in his front room in Liverpool, and another disaster, some years ago, in Belfast. I believe in the latter case that vicar-priest ended up in prison for fraud. Other Non-ex-Anglican clergy under Antioch eventually transfer back to the Local Churches they come from. They cannot take the Anglican mentality, however hard they try to deny their origins.

The long answer is that our first act after we learned, directly, (it was actually boasted of by the culprit!) of the ROCOR schism in April 2021 was to warn the ROCOR Synod of what was going on. As soon as we realised that the whole Synod in New York had been perverted into the new ROCOR, not leaving a shred of tradition and the old ROCOR, and misinformed, our second act was to report to Moscow. When they replied that, although they perfectly understood the insanity of the situation, for purely political reasons they could not receive us, our third act was to join the Paris Archdiocese under Moscow. This had largely been cleansed of liberal French intellectuals and we have many friends and family there.

After Paris was told by Moscow, which could not make up its mind at first, that it would not be allowed to keep us, as the Moscow aim was not to expand Paris but to close it down, our fourth act was to look at our other options. Although three different jurisdictions wanted us, the obvious and only correct option, which we adopted very quickly, was to go with our old friends in the Church of Romania. (Romania had been the original choice of the Paris Jurisdiction when they had quit Constantinople there years before, but occult forces had rejected that choice and it had joined Moscow. So we made the choice for them). The Romanian Church had been suggesting to us for years in case ROCOR turned schismatic and it was supported by Moscow for purely political reasons, we could transfer to them.

So we joined the Romanian Church with the tacit blessing of Moscow, and any other refugees who want to leave the schismatic ROCOR for the Romanian Church have been invited to do so too. We have simply paved the way for the others, who will follow us. The strangest thing about this was that there appeared a lie on the internet that the Romanian Church had not received us! There were actually people who believed this, though not in Moscow. But the lie only discredited him who invented it and those who believed it. Today the culprit for the lie is isolated, shunned and shamed as a liar.

Q: So Moscow is abandoning ROCOR behind their backs? Why did you not opt for the Russian or Greek Churches?

A: As I said, Moscow was not allowed to receive us for political reasons, even though it knew that ROCOR was engaged in its insane schism. As Moscow was not politically free (a very serious fault), it had to go along with the ROCOR schism. This was a turning point and next year, in 2026, all will see the significance of this. Later, Moscow was punished for this lack of principle and has since had to tolerate the recent horrible Russophobic attacks on the Moscow Patriarchate by both ROCOR bishops in Germany.

This is what happens when you compromise yourself with the positions of enemies of Church teaching, even if only once. It is a downward spiral, as you have to accept everything else they do later on. Moscow already regrets it, indeed it is the great loser in all of this, but that was its choice. It was clearly told what was going on, but Metr Antony Sevryuk suicidally rejected the warning and told us to join the Romanian Church. Thus, the Russian Church turned its back on Europe – I don’t think that even now he realises the scale and significance of his error. In one act he had handed over Western Europe, including the local Russians, to Romanian Orthodox jurisdiction.

As a result, the Moscow Diocese in this country is now programmed to become a small embassy ghetto, a dependency, with just its church in London and the small church in Oxford surviving, exactly as it was fifty years ago, the rest has literally been left to die out. Since the British Establishment, like the other Establishments in Europe, has blacklisted Moscow, Moscow has no hope of expansion or incarnation into Western society. Therefore, Moscow is for the time being closed down in Western Europe. There is no future for the Russian Church here. It has had to close its window on Europe, given European political hostility to it, and is looking towards Asia and Africa. It will take a generation for Moscow to turn back to Europe, if ever it does. 2022 will go down in Western European Church history as the moment when the Russian Church lost it.

As for the Greek Archdiocese, it has recently been renewed, as it was dying out. It now has several younger bishops, including one excellent one (if only he could be the next Patriarch!), still has excellent infrastructure and several big parishes in London and some outstanding priests, but it has huge problems. It is profoundly ethnically and politically Greek, compromised by its CIA Patriarch, and, like Antioch and the Moscow Church here, most of its priests are elderly and dying out.

As Archbishop Nikitas told us recently, he has 100 elderly priests to replace in the next ten years and only 3 candidates. It is now not possible to get lots of poorly-educated young archimandrites from Greece, like they did in the 60s and 70s. That source has dried up. Moreover, only one church, the newly-frescoed Thyateira chapel, actually belongs to the Greek Archdiocese. The others are all privately owned by Greek and Cypriot businessmen and restauranteurs, who do as they want.

Q: What then is the future of ROCOR?

A: In rejecting the mission of the Diaspora Church to gather all Orthodox together through its schism and racism towards Greeks, Romanians, Moldovans and rooted English Orthodox in particular, it refused to concelebrate with the mainstream and cut itself off from communion. It has instead concentrated on attracting extremists, the naïve, the vulnerable and the pathologically ill. This is the path of the sect and the cult. And that is what it has become.

Q: Did you know Fr Mark Meyrick and Metr Kallistos Ware?

A: Of course. I first met the then Fr Kallistos in September 1974. He was an old-style, upper middle-class High Church Anglican, with an incisive public school-trained intellect. I loved his lectures and learned a lot from him. But above all, he was a very kind and sincere man. I remember him and pray for him with gratitude, although I was on a quite different wavelength from him.

I first met Fr Mark in July 1976. The problem with Fr Mark, who came from a long line of Anglican vicars, is that he had chosen to live among Anglicans, cut off from the Orthodox mainstream. As a result, he had a tiny community in a Norfolk village, isolated from Orthodoxy. He mainly seemed to be interested in converting young Anglican men and encouraging them to grow extremely long beards! As I had no interest in either Anglicanism or long beards, that was not for me.

Fr Mark (later Archimandrite David), transferred from ROCOR to Moscow, I think, in 1981. This was because of the attempted Americanisation and sectarian fanaticisation of ROCOR, which began at that time and which ended in 2021 with the triumph of American convert ROCOR in Europe and its abolition as part of the mainstream. It is now an American crazy convert colony and has no future. Crazy convert Orthodoxy does not export, as it is culturally alien to Europeans.

Q: Are Orthodox bishops worse today than fifty years ago?

A: Absolutely not. Fifty years ago, I knew three of them. One was a homosexual bureaucrat who ordained his boyfriends. One of those he ordained became an alcoholic, another gave up the priesthood within two weeks. A second bishop was a lady’s man who spent time with his main mistress in a cottage on the south coast, or so I was told. I knew her. A third was an anthroposophist. So we decided to return to Paris, to people who knew the Tradition. Today’s crop of homosexuals and sociopathic narcissists created by being spoiled as children are no better, but also no worse.

Q: What do you remember of the University of Oxford in the 1970s and the Russian chapel, then inside the house in Canterbury Road in Oxford?

A: In those days (and I am told that it has not changed very much since then), there were three ways of getting into the University of Oxford as an undergraduate. In order of importance, these were: aristocratic privilege, wealth, and academic achievement. I was therefore automatically and distinctly third class from the outset. The first two types were there to complete their Norman education, so they could enter the Norman (British) Establishment.

Moreover, those aristocratic or wealthy types who had nearly always attended public schools were shockingly, to me an innocent aged 18, often suffered from Norman homosexuality, like William Rufus. Oxford was riddled with it. Another reason to keep well away. In any case, I was not there to enter the Norman Establishment, though many who had not been to public schools allowed it to happen to them, as they were venal careerists. I was there for exactly the opposite reason, to understand how to de-Normanise. By Divine Providence I studied in the Alfredian College, by tradition (even if not in reality), the only pre-Norman College in Oxford. All was right.

I attended the Russian chapel in Canterbury Road in October 1972 and again in February 1973, when I was sixteen, just before the modernistic, octagonal chapel was built in the garden. The old chapel inside the House is now the library, based on Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, which I helped put in there. That old chapel was charming.

On the other hand, the rather effete University chapel later built in the garden of 1, Canterbury Road was definitely not for the ordinary people of Oxford. The Serbs, who were ordinary people, kept well away, as did most of the Greeks. The few by then elderly Russian academics who were still alive went when they could to one or other of the two Russian churches in London.

Apart from the majority of normal people who went there, there were also wealthy Anglo-Catholic homosexuals, or else those who mistakenly thought that Church Tradition means the same as right-wing political conservatism.

Q: What was the London Russian Church in Ennismore Gardens like at the time fifty years ago in the mid-seventies? And the ROCOR Church?

A: The London Patriarchal church had been taken over by upper middle-class people from wealthy west London, owners of Cotswold cottages, villas in Tuscany or on Greek islands. These were intellectuals, Liberal Democrats, BBC directors, well-to-do academics, lawyers, journalists etc, so rich that they had the leisure time to be enthralled by ‘spirituality’, Orthodox or Buddhist, as spiritual tourists. In 2006 they left en masse for Constantinople, as their hero, Metr Antony Bloom, had died. He was the reason for them joining, so once he had gone, in 2004, it was all over. Their cliquish snobbery continues. Only five years ago I overheard one of these now elderly people saying about a very pious and simple Romanian man, who dared (once) to frequent his clubby (rented) church: ‘I hope he does not come back, but at least he has a degree’. Is that Christianity?

Fifty years ago the Emperor’s Gate ROCOR Church had twice as many people as the Bloomite church, but it was an old people’s home. Apart from two or three Anglican homosexuals, the average age of the parishioners, who were very nice, must have been about 80. The writing was on the wall. It was an ethnic club that had no future, as they had failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants.

Q: Is there anywhere you would go on to a pilgrimage to the Royal Martyrs in England?

A: There are two places: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Sandringham in Norfolk. Of the two I much prefer Sandringham, which is connected with the Tsar. He is still present there and he dreamed of becoming a Norfolk gentleman-farmer, if ever he had to leave Russia. Things will happen here.

For your interest, here is a full list of the five visits of the Tsar to England, with places and dates:

In 1873 the future Tsar first visited Queen Victoria as a five-year old child. He arrived on the Imperial Yacht at Woolwich on 16 June, stayed at Marlborough House on the Mall, visited Chiswick House on 28 June and on 28 July left for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, staying at Albert Cottage. On 8 August he went to Cowes Regatta, leaving England on 13 August, having spent nearly two months in England.

He visited London at the end of June 1893, having been met at Charing Cross Station, and staying at Marlborough House again. He went to Windsor on 1 July, visited Hurlingham on 4 July and Buckingham Palace on 5 July, attending the wedding of the future King George V on 6 July. He left the next day, having spent just over a week in England.

He arrived on 20 June 1894 to meet the future Tsarina. He arrived at Gravesend in Kent and travelled to Walton-on-Thames via Waterloo Station. He also visited Frogmore, Bagshot, Sandringham, Kings Lynn, London, Eton, Slough, Farnborough, Aldershot and Richmond-on-Thames. On 19 July he left for Portsmouth to cross to Osborne House and Albert Cottage, visiting Newport. He left on 23 July, after over a month in England.

1896 was his first visit as Tsar, with the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Olga. They arrived at Leith on 22 September and went to Balmoral by train via Ballater. Here he visited Braemar Castle. He then travelled by train via Preston and Oxford, taking the Imperial Yacht at Portsmouth on 3 October.

On Monday 2 August 1909 the Tsar and his family visited Cowes on the Isle of Wight for the Regatta. He stayed at Osborne House, visiting Barton Manor and leaving on 5 August, having given £1,000 to be distributed among the island’s poor.

Q: When will the war in the Ukraine end?

A: This US proxy war against Russia (as Marco Rubio has openly described it) is a war of attrition. First, the Russians ground down first the first Ukrainian Army, then the second Ukrainian Army with old Soviet equipment from Eastern Europe, and now it is finishing off the third Ukrainian Army, with its NATO equipment. Wars of attrition, like the American Civil War and the First and Second World Wars, can go on for years, but they always end very suddenly, as the Second War ended suddenly in Berlin.

We are now reaching that point in the Ukraine, as the Americans are getting rid of their actor-puppet Zelensky. He has got too big for his boots and is too corrupt, resists the puppet-master and has refused peace, which is want Trump wants. The end will come suddenly and, I think, fairly soon. This is why Trump gave him (not Putin) 50 days so Zelensky could be finished off. Either he will get out on a CIA plane or else he will finish with a bullet in his head. When will Kiev collapse? The German-led, Pan-European invasion of the USSR in the Second World War lasted three years and eleven months. So maybe the end to this war will come within the same time span. At present it has lasted three years and five months.

The only danger is that NATO may invade Russia, as it has threatened, then that will be full war. That is possible, if the crazies in NATO have their way. If so, they will be crushed, as NATO has already been demilitarised by Russia. Russia has defeated all the Western Coalitions that invaded it, that of Napoleon, that in the Crimea, that of Hitler, and now this American-led NATO one.

Q: What will happen to Western Europe, once it has been defeated in the Ukraine?

A: The consequences of the defeat of the Western puppet government in Kiev, created and used as a proxy battering ram against Russia, and so the defeat of the whole of NATO, will be tremendous. The West will never get its money back. Worse still, it will never get its prestige back. The West has gone, replaced by the multipolar BRICS world. This will feed through and the old governing elites in Europe will have to be replaced.

This is because all empires decline in depravity and perversion (from Roman emperors to the debauched King Edward VII and now the Mossad-Epstein orgies) or buffoonery (the leaders of Western Europe and Kiev today, if they are not also pedophiles and cocaine addicts). Decadence comes at the end and with it a total lack of sense of reality, as buffoons live in virtual reality, fantasy, just as Hitler did at the end. We can see this clearly in the last 35 years of US leaders, from Clinton-Lewinsky to Obama, ending with the demented Biden and the world’s greatest narcissist, the result of a materially spoilt childhood, Trump.

Q: Do you think that Europe could return to Orthodoxy?

A: Europe, no, but a small portion of Europeans, yes. In the Romanian Church we are preparing for this literally, as you will see next year. We already have ten bishops in the twenty-one countries of Western Europe and a flock of nearly five million. One of those bishops is French, all speak at least one Western European language, if not two or three.

Moreover, our bishops also have a conscience of the importance of the veneration of the local saints of Western Europe. This is unique. I remember the fierce and insulting opposition of the ROCOR bishops to their veneration until 2017, when they finally realised that the tide was too strong for them to swim against any longer and then they stopped persecuting me on that score at least.

It is clear that we are moving towards a post-American Europe, the post-1945 part of the history of Western Europe is over. The American invasion and occupation will soon end. Its old puppet governments, in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere, will fall. And Eurasia, Russian, India, China, India and Iran, north, south, east and west, the centres of the Heartland, are now co-operating in BRICS. Thus, the Western world, which was formed in the eleventh century has after a thousand years made itself spiritually irrelevant.

Q: Are the media censored in the UK?

A: Yes. The name of the official censor is Ofcom, but censorship relies above all on editorial control. Here news editors are appointed to carry out the censorship duties imposed by the State/Establishment and journalists who are completely mercenary, ‘presstitutes’ as they say. The BBC is a classic case of such censorship, of deliberate non-reporting, deliberate misreporting, and diversion (reporting irrelevant local stories of no interest instead of reporting the actual news).

 

 

 

 

When the Church is Taken Over by the State and Faith Becomes Religion

Introduction: The Roman Catholic-Protestant Model of Church Administration

What exactly happens when the Church becomes part of the State? This has happened many times in Western history and shaped that history. There is not only the case of the Church-State, known as Roman Catholicism, whose head started wars, commanded armies and ordered mass campaigns of inquisition, repression and torture. There have also been the cases in Protestant North-Western Europe and wherever that model has been imitated. This is the State-Church, where Churches hand themselves over to State control.

Thus, the Protestants founded National (and nationalist, ‘flag-driven’) Churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Finland etc. In the first and well-known case, the new Church was founded by a Welsh genocidal tyrant and wife-murderer, who stole huge numbers of monastic houses and their lands and handed out their immense riches to his cronies. As for the national riches he seized for himself, he wasted them on pointless wars against France, which he lost.

The Adoption of the Model by the Russian State

This Protestant model was imitated by Tsar Peter I in Russia. Between 1682 and 1725 he forced the Russian Church into the same Lutheran mould, abolishing the Patriarchate in 1700, appointing Lutheran-educated Ukrainian bishops, and an ‘Oberprokuror’ to rule over the episcopate, effectively creating a Ministry of Religion. Some of the ‘Oberprokurors’ were not Orthodox Christians, indeed, at least one was an atheist and worked to destroy the Church. This control, resisted by Tsar Nicholas who wanted to abolish it, was copied by the atheist Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks controlled the Church in a similar reformist (in fact ‘deformist’), way, appointing a Secret Police Commissar to control the bishops, working to destroy the Church, murdering hundreds of thousands of clergy and people and literally dynamiting churches or confiscating them for secular uses. It was in this way that over some 300 years since Peter I, a special ‘religiosity’ appeared among nominal Russian Orthodox, which has lasted to this day. What are the three characteristics of this particular form of religiosity?

  1. Nationalisation

A State takeover of a Church means confusing Caesar’s and God’s, despite Christ’s words in the Gospel which command us to separate them and not to confuse them. Since the Church does not by nature belong to the State, therefore when such a takeover occurs, it means that the Church unnaturally begins to resemble the State. This means the adoption of State attributes – a persecuting, nationalistic, militaristic and bureaucratic mentality. In this way, the Church begins to resemble the State, rather like Roman Catholicism.

Nationalism means an emphasis on a narrow, exclusive, racial identity and language. In the Russian context, this means Russification and the loss of loyalty of other nationalities to the once multinational Russian Church. Militarism means an emphasis on a literal uniformity, obedience and rigidity, which cancels freedom of thought, and also integration with the armed forces. Bureaucratisation means an emphasis on protocols, paperwork and administration against the sacramental and spiritual view of the world.

  1. Clericalisation

A State takeover of a Church means that the clergy become agents of the State, that is, State employees, who develop the careerist mentality of civil servants and their ranks of promotion, awards and pensions. This in turn means that the people are alienated from the clergy, who become a separate caste ‘behind the iconostasis’ and the people begin to consider that the clergy are ‘the Church’. This creates a passive, disengaged and irresponsible mentality among the people – ‘it is not for us to do this, let ‘the Church’, i.e. the clergy, do it for us’.

This passive attitude of non-participation means that professional choirs sing in churches and services increasingly become abstract concerts and spectacles. Even prayer is delegated to the clergy, as people stop praying for themselves and ask the clergy to pray for them, an attitude that can be called ‘pious consumerism’. This view of the clergy as State bureaucrats, civil servants, means that the people begin to look at the clergy as unable to resolve their real problems and so they turn to elders, ‘startsy’, who in turn are often charlatans.

  1. Ritualisation

This mentality leads inevitably to ritualisation, the understanding of worship as ‘ustav’ or rubrics, a series of outward rites, in which participation is passive, but which just have to be tolerated. Thus, communion becomes the privilege of the clergy who may control access to laypeople’s communion by weaponising confession. As a result, communion may take place perfunctorily only once a year (the obligation for all civil servants until 1917) and sacraments are replaced by semi-private services, which have nothing to do with the liturgical cycles.

These made-up services, contractions of historic ones, include molebens, panikhidas and akathists. The latter of these are popular because they are comprehensible, since they have been composed recently in a language closer to Russian than the less accessible Church Slavonic, which is seen as the private language of the clergy (‘the Church’). The primacy of private rites means weak parish life, little sense of community, churches are patterned by outward formalities. In turn, non-churchgoers then revert to superstition as their belief.

A Nominal Church and Real Church Life

Reading the above, some may be in despair. However, we have made it clear that all these trends are the norm for nominal Russian Orthodox. Practising Russian Orthodox resist these outward trends and are critical of them. We follow the lives of the saints, who emphasise prayer and the ascetic, inward struggle. The above three trends are not those of St Seraphim of Sarov and St John of Kronstadt, even less are they those of the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Imperial Martyrs, St Tikhon and St Matrona. They are ours.

Firstly, Orthodox oppose Nationalism through cultivating the sense of the catholicity of the Church, meaning cultivating good relations with the other Local Churches, which work in other countries, where the Russian State has no control. Secondly, Orthodox oppose Clericalism through developing the solidarity between clergy and people, which is what Orthodoxy is, and this means the clergy no longer living as State functionaries. And finally Orthodox oppose Ritualism through inner life, the life of the spirit, as in real monasteries.

Conclusion: The Last Tsar and the Coming Restoration

The last Tsar opposed all three deformations of Church life, Nationalism, Clericalism and Ritualism. Thus, his intention, not fully implemented, was to open a Russian Orthodox church in every capital of Western Europe. This opposed Nationalism. As for Clericalism, he was always shocked by the spiritual emptiness of ‘educated’ bishops and priests and their careerist rivalries, for example that of Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. To them he opposed St Seraphim of Sarov, whom he had had canonised, and the Martyr Gregory.

Tsar Nicholas II also ardently opposed Ritualism and wanted to restore the architecture, iconography and Church music from before Peter I, as can be seen in his design of the Tsarskoe Selo Cathedral. Already in 1905 he had proposed the restoration of the Patriarchate. Careerist bishops, all wanting to be Patriarch, opposed him and the Tsar understood that they were not ready for restoration. Indeed, after his overthrow in 1917, this became very clear. Soon another Tsar will come and carry out the unfinished restoration.

Winner Takes All: The Self-Destruction of the Church of the Russian Emigration

In the years following the so-called Russian Revolution in 1917, the Church of the resulting Russian Emigration split into three parts. A few, very few, remained under the Church centred in Moscow, which eventually became known as the Moscow Patriarchate. Most of the emigres considered that that was a ‘Soviet Church’, a Communist-controlled organisation and, since members of their families had died fighting against Communism and they had been exiled by it, they would have nothing to do with its Church. This vast majority of emigres themselves split into two, a smaller group and a larger group.

The smaller group, centred at its Cathedral on Rue Daru in Paris and existing mainly in France, was founded and led by Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar in order to introduce a pro-Western regime, either a Constitutional Monarchy or else a masonic Republic. The larger group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), centred at first in Germany and then in New York, and with parishes above all in Germany, the Americas and Australia, was founded and led by emigres who, whatever their politics, were united by a profound hatred of Communists, who had stolen their land and wealth.

Obviously, now 108 years on after 1917, both groups are dying out, even though the New York group was much reinforced by the anti-Communist Russian emigration of 1945. As a result, the last pre-Revolutionary Archbishop of the Paris group died in 1981, and the last pre-Revolutionary Metropolitan of the reinforced New York group was deposed by his fellow-bishops in 2001 and died in 2006. Since then both groups have staggered on, declining in every way.

Both groups have since then much contracted, largely having failed to pass on the Faith to the descendants of the emigres, who are now in their fifth generation. Those born in the Diaspora have overwhelmingly been assimilated and lost all their Russian heritage. All that has survived is the political liberalism of the Paris group and the political conservatism (sometimes extreme conservatism) of the New York group. In other words, despite their radical contraction and the radical changes in their composition, their political identities have survived. However, their spiritual identity has been greatly weakened.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, these political identities have largely become irrelevant, mere history. Moreover, both the ageing and ever-smaller groups were dwarfed by the post-1991 emigration of young people from the former Soviet Union, who automatically became part of the much-expanded Moscow Patriarchate. These young people found the two old émigré groups to be museum pieces and so irrelevant. As a result, both émigré groups had to join the Moscow Patriarchate, though keeping a measure of internal independence.

Today, both groups are being dismantled, or rather, are dismantling themselves, as both suffer from the same suicidal disease: a lack of bishops who know the canonical Russian Tradition and, as a result of this total lack of leadership and Christian example, a lack of money. The flock will not follow wolves. For example, after 1917 both groups built some churches, or much more often, converted buildings for Orthodox use, the majority of them very small, built for fewer than a hundred parishioners. However, they also inherited some splendid pre-Revolutionary church buildings, such as:

In Italy the two churches in Florence and San Remo, currently under ROCOR, but formerly under the Paris Archdiocese.

In Paris the Cathedral of the Paris Archdiocese.

In France the ruinous churches in Cannes, Biarritz and Pau. Although it is forbidden to enter the Cannes church, as it is too dangerous, the increasingly aggressive and increasingly small and impoverished ROCOR is paradoxically engaged in a court action against its own Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, in order to obtain property rights over this ruin.

In Switzerland the ROCOR churches in Geneva, Lausanne and Vevey.

In Germany, several ROCOR churches, such as those in Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Baden-Baden.

The two ROCOR convents in Jerusalem.

Most of these churches suffer from dwindling congregations and so dwindling income. Some are going to fall down, if they do not soon receive tens of millions of euros for repair and restoration. Clearly, in order to avoid this, only direct transfers of the buildings to the cash-rich Moscow Patriarchate can, as happened to the two former Paris Archdiocese churches in Nice and the former ROCOR church in Bari in Italy, solve the problem. In the matter of restoring historic buildings, the Moscow Patriarchate will be much aided by the Russian State, which is keen to recover pre-Revolutionary Russian historic monuments, even if they are in a ruinous state.

In this long game of chess between the 99%, the very large Mother-Church, and the 1%, the two tiny émigré fragments, there can only be one winner, the Mother-Church, the Moscow Patriarchate. It will take it all. As we said, this has already taken place in Nice and Bari, but also in Indonesia, where in 2016 ROCOR voluntarily handed over all its sixteen mission parishes to the Moscow Patriarchate, admitting that it could not cope with them. Once one of the last old, Russian-speaking ROCOR bishops has left the stage, many of the churches in Germany will certainly transfer to the Moscow Patriarchate, as their clergy and people come almost all from the ex-Soviet Union.

As one Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan told me recently: ‘Their churches are like ripe fruit hanging from a tree which will fall into our hands’. In other words, the Patriarchate does not have to do anything, except to wait patiently for the Church of the Emigration to dismantle itself, as the Emigration self-destructs after the deaths of educated, Russian-speaking bishops, who are faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and not to weird old calendarist or new calendarist pseudo-theologies, or rather fantasies.

We have descended a long, long way from the hopes expressed by the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexei II in 2003 (yes, already nearly a generation ago!) that the Western European Metropolia of the Moscow Patriarchate would become the foundation of a future Western European Local Church. That is now a mere daydream to be forgotten in the cold light of reality, the incompetence, corruption and immorality of various bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, the liberalism of a large minority in the Paris Archdiocese, who then left it, and the schismatic and sectarian isolation of the ROCOR bishops, who still have not left it and officially founded some weird pseudo-Russian old calendarist sect, which is what they are.

Anyone has the right to leave a Church which has broken communion with another Church. That is what was done when ROCOR broke communion with part of the Moscow Patriarchate. For anyone and everyone can leave a group which enters into schism. The floodgates are opened. Moscow went to the casino, bet all its money on the wrong number and the wheel has spun and chosen another. Russia has always been betrayed by the traitors of the fifth column. In the early 17th century, boyars betrayed it to the Poles, 1917 aristocrat-traitors destroyed the Russian Empire, in 1991 oligarch-traitors destroyed the Soviet Union, and today wealthy traitors have been allowed to undermine the Russian Church.

The results are the anti-Ukrainian, anti-Moldovan and anti-English actions of Moscow and its increasing centralisation, ritualisation, nationalisation and militarisation, as it has cut itself off from communion with other Local Churches. To return to even the situation of hope of 2003 will take decades. Just like the Patriarchate of Constantinople before it, Moscow has hit the ball into the court of others, who are busy constructing what Moscow failed to do. God gave Moscow an opportunity on a silver plate; it rejected it. Now it will have to deal with the suicidal consequences, exactly as we have been warning ever since 2003. The opportunity has been presented to others.

For the Orthodox Diaspora, does this matter? Probably not, because the policy of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Diaspora has increasingly become that of a nationalist ghetto. It lives in isolation from, and so is irrelevant to, the vast majority of Diaspora Orthodox, who are not Russian. The only hope is that the Moscow Patriarchate will cast off its present nationalist and racist isolationism, returning to communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church.

Only then will Moscow return to the glorious heritage of the two great Russian saints of the Diaspora, in the USA St Tikhon of New York and Moscow, and in Europe, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, the latter the greatest man of the Russian emigration. They did not listen to St John, they persecuted him, suspended him, put him on trial and have done exactly the same to his disciples. The price they are having to pay for that is already very heavy indeed. God is not mocked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Human Remains Found near Ekaterinburg and the Last Tsar

Introduction

On the night of 4/17 July 2018 I was fortunate enough to be able to take part in the centennial pilgrimage of 120,000 Orthodox in the Urals. For hours after the Divine liturgy, led by Patriarch Kyrill, which had ended at midnight, we marched swiftly from Ekaterinburg to Ganina Yama in honour of the martyrdom of the martyred Tsar Nicholas, His Family and their four retainers (the pilgrims also prayed to the martyred layman, Gregory Rasputin). As we arrived, day broke. But where are the relics of the Imperial Martyrs and their four retainers?

The Past

In May 1979 two amateur enthusiasts found human remains at Ganina Yama (‘Gabriel’s Pit’) near Ekaterinburg, the reputed burial place of Tsar Nicholas II, His Family and their four retainers. As the Soviet tyranny fell, in July 1991 the alleged remains of five family members (the Tsar, Tsarina and three daughters) and four retainers were exhumed. After forensic examination and positive DNA identification, the nine sets of remains were laid to rest with State honours in St Catherine’s Chapel of Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. In February 1998 the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church opposed the government’s decision to bury the remains, preferring a symbolic grave until their authenticity had been confirmed. Thus, when they were interred in July 1998, they were referred to by the priest conducting the service as ‘Christian victims of the Revolution’ rather than as the Imperial Family.

In 2007 the alleged remains of Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters, reckoned to be Maria by Russian anthropologists, were discovered at Porosjonkov Log (‘Piglets’ Ravine’), just a few hundred metres from Ganina Yama. These were positively DNA tested. In late 2015, at the insistence of the Church, Russian investigators took samples from the alleged remains of Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra for additional DNA testing, which appeared to reconfirm that the remains were those of the couple. However, very many serious Orthodox, Elder Nicholas (Guryanov), the historian Piotr Valentinovich Multatuli (the great-grandson of one of the martyrs) and many other medical specialists believed that the remains of the Romanovs had been destroyed at Ganina Yama during a ritual murder. Therefore, the alleged remains of the martyrs, as well as the place of one of the burials at Porosyonkov Log, are ignored by the faithful.

The Present

Why is there such opposition to the sets of DNA results, which clearly suggest that these are indeed the remains of the eleven victims of that dread night 107 years ago? Why has Patriarch Kyrill ‘kicked any official decision into the long grass’, as they say, by declaring that a Council of Bishops must be summoned in order to come to a decision? This is all the more a postponed decision, as no Council of Bishops could meet during the covid crisis or can meet now during the tragic conflict in the Ukraine, as the Ukrainian bishops, almost a quarter of the whole Russian Orthodox episcopate, cannot attend? The answer is because there is no unanimity within the Church or among the bishops. For the issue of ‘the Ekaterinburg Remains’ has been completely politicised, manipulated by politicians. This all began with the Western-installed Yeltsin State of the 1990s, which clearly wanted to dispose of the matter as soon as possible.

The Yeltsin regime, like its Western sponsors, wanted the DNA tests to be positive, so they could, literally, bury this painful subject. This was especially so given the Communist drunkard Yeltsin’s direct role in demolishing the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, where the slaying of the Imperial Family had taken place. Furthermore, in the 1990s, DNA testing was relatively very primitive. Moreover, it took place in the UK and the USA, so many Russians believe this allowed a further manipulation for the Western-backed Yeltsin regime. As for today, President Putin, a political strongman whose character was forged by the Soviet State, he rather despises Tsar Nicholas II as a weak ruler. As to the Church’s bishops, there is another problem. Much of the Church hierarchy is despised by many people (and many clergy). They are seen as ‘mini-oligarchs’ (to quote Russians inside Russia), who have no love for popular piety.

The Division

Thus, a gulf of distrust exists between the centralised, bureaucratised and tightly-controlled episcopate on the one hand and, on the other hand, the people, the parish clergy and the monastics. Sadly, today’s Russian Church has returned to exactly the same clericalist problems as in the pre-Revolutionary Church, by which Tsar Nicholas II was himself embarrassed and tried so despairingly to overcome. Furthermore, problems also arise from the sharp political divide within the episcopate itself. This is again just as there were before the Revolution, say between the arch-liberal Metr Anony (Vadkovsky) of Saint Petersburg and the arch-conservative Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev. Today, this political divide is again between what in secular language is called ‘left and right’, between liberals and conservatives, or in historic Church language, between Arians and Monophysites.

Thus, the Arians emphasise the human side of Church life, sometimes in a lax and modernist way, almost to the exclusion of Christ-God, whereas the Monophysites emphasise the clerical and the ascetic, sometimes harshly and mercilessly, almost to the exclusion of the human. Thus, today, of two very well-known bishops who support the DNA results, one severely compromised himself by supporting the State persecution of the Church in Russia during the covid restrictions and the other was involved in ecumenism, liberalism and a homosexual scandal, totally discrediting himself. However, some of those who oppose the recognition of the remains as those of the martyred Imperial Family and their retainers are marked by ultra-nationalism and anti-semitism. Usually, these people appear to be Non-Churchgoers, for whom Orthodoxy is a political and racist ideology, not the living Faith. What of the Orthodox?

Conclusion

In the Tradition, saints are revealed to us not by archaeologists or DNA, but by miracles. It is our belief that only when Russians have repented for the crimes of their ancestors and for their present practical atheism and changed their way of life, will the truth be revealed. However, this repentance concerns us all, for all Orthodox need to begin to live an Orthodox way of life for the truth to be revealed. For the truth of the past is only revealed when there is righteousness in the present. Only then shall we be worthy to know the Truth of God.

 

 

Come, Holy Spirit! Over 5,000 Words on over Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Church

Fifty Years of History; 2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia; The Ukraine; The Suicide of ROCOR; Eastern Papism; A New Local Church

Fifty Years of History

Q: Why is 2025 a significant year for you personally?

A: 2025 marks fifty years of faithfulness to the Orthodox Church and Faith, forty-seven of them in the Russian Church, three in the Romanian Church, and forty years as an Orthodox clergyman.

Q: When did you begin this journey?

A:  My conscious journey began in 1968, when I was twelve years old. I realised then that my destiny was in the Orthodox Church and set about studying Russian, though there had been contacts with two local White Russian families before that. However, as I was under age, I was not able to join the Church until I was eighteen. Six years of waiting. In 1973 I at last managed to visit an Orthodox church. This was the Russian émigré chapel inside the house on the corner of Canterbury Road in Oxford. Soon after, the chapel became a library with the late Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, as the new octagonal University chapel, now Greek, had been opened in the garden outside.

Q: Why did you join the Russian Church?

A: Hobson’s choice, as they say in Cambridge! The only other Local Churches present in this country then, the Greek and the Serbian, would just tell you to go away. ‘You are not one of us’. They were ethnic clubs. Therefore, you had no choice. Only the two Russian jurisdictions would accept you. Not that they were very gracious about it either. They gave you the impression that they would accept you, but they would have preferred not to. Only because the elderly Russian emigres had no political power or money and were dying out, did some of them accept you. Many told us they would sooner die out than accept ‘foreigners’. They also entertained bitter political divisions and polemics, which you just had to put up with and make sense of.

2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia

Q: In 2022 three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England, the so-called ‘Colchester Diocese’, though it stretches to Coventry and Manchester, that is, many ROCOR parishes, 5,000 people and 15 clergy, including three Western rite clergy, left ROCOR and 12 of you (all except for the Western riters) joined the Romanian Church. So do you regret that you had worked for forty-seven years for the unity of the divided three parts of the Russian Church?

A: No, not at all! To work for unity is always good. Without unity Churches fall out of communion and eventually become sects. This is my real experience, I have seen this and lived this. This is what began to happen to the two Russian émigré Churches, the smaller one based in Paris and the larger one based in New York, after the last emigres who had been adults and known the realities of Russia before 1917 had died out and direct contact with reality was lost.

After them, by the early 2000s, the sectarian fantasies, to the left and to the right, in both of them became ever stronger. The Paris group began falling away definitively towards liberal secularism under masonic sponsorship and the New York group began falling away definitively into old calendarist sectarianism under CIA sponsorship, like that of the elderly CIA Colonel Magerovsky. We were eyewitnesses to both and knew all the personalities involved, writing vigorously against both extremist tendencies. There was only one way out for them, to rejoin the broad Centre, which could hold everyone together.

Indeed, we finally got both parts into communion with the Centre in Moscow and so with each other, just in time, with many of the extremists falling away, 47% of the Paris group and 5% of the New York group. However, ironically, our triumph lasted only a little more than one year, for they fell out of communion with each other again. The fault here was entirely that of the very aggressive, old calendarist pharisee-bishops of New York, who had remained in ROCOR or infiltrated it after unity and were wreaking havoc. This took place after set in the dementia of the ever-memorable Metr Hilarion, who had no idea what they were doing in his name. The schism came in December 2020. Only one bishop resisted, the anti-sectarian and anti-rebaptiser Archbishop Peter of Chicago, who had been an altar boy to St John, but who has since died. His see is now without a permanent bishop and many there are now out of control.

Q: Why did the Centre in Moscow not try and hold the two émigré parts together?

A: As the Russians say of themselves, ‘We are slow to harness, but quick to ride’. In other words, Moscow is very passive, it does nothing for, say, twenty years despite all the warnings of the coming explosion from the grassroots, and then, too late, after the explosion, it overreacts to the extreme. This is the result of not working incrementally and being pastorally interested, only politically interested. Firstly, Moscow had, and refused to have, little or any understanding of the provincial Russian emigration and its petty political arguments. Secondly, Moscow was distracted from pastoral care by international politics, for by that time Moscow had itself fallen out of communion with the Greeks, after the grossly uncanonical actions of the Greeks in the Ukraine, breaking the first canons of the Apostles. Again, here too, Moscow overreacted.

Here we see how the fall from communion with the Greeks by the Centre affected the rest. Lack of communion is like an infection, a virus. So all our work for unity was undone by the Moscow error of overreaction to the Greek error, splitting off from the Church. Then, not having turned the other cheek, Moscow ‘did a Constantinople’, by interfering in the jurisdiction of Alexandria in Africa. Little wonder that people then began to say that ‘Moscow is as bad as Constantinople’.

Q: What do you do, if even the Centre is infected by the spirit of disunity and without principles tolerates sectarianism, and ignores schism and even the heresy of rebaptising Orthodox?

A: In such a case, you must transfer to a canonical Local Church which is not infected with the disease of schism and has a Diaspora structure. Today, that means neither the Russians, nor the Greeks. As I had been to seminary in the 1970s and a couple of the seminarians had become bishops, namely in the Serbian and Romanian Churches, and since I had been around for a long time and had met lots of other bishops since then and many had read the translations of my writings into Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, German and Czech, we had a choice of where to go. After the Russian betrayal of us in the Non-schismatic Diaspora, all the others offered to protect us from the new, brutal, sectarian, uncanonical and anti-pastoral ROCOR. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

The Ukraine

Q: What was the connection between your departure for the Romanian Patriarchate and the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: None, directly. We were received by our old friend, the very experienced Metr Joseph (Pop) of the four-million strong Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Romanian Orthodox Church on 16 February 2022, as proved by the documents issued on that day (despite the blatant lies of others on the internet who said that those documents were forged (!), much to the shock of Metr Joseph – he did not know that bishops can lie). Now that was eight days before the new phase of the Ukrainian conflict began on 24 February.

It was providential that we had left before that conflict, because then we did not have to face the deep and bitter divisions among the flock which the commemoration of Patriarch Kyrill has brought to all Russian parishes, especially in ROCOR, though it happens even inside Russia. There anti-war Orthodox are also boycotting the Church in very large numbers, not least after the ‘defrocking’ and exiling of liberal but popular priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky.

The reason why we left was the schism which occurred with the official introduction of the heresy of rebaptism of Orthodox under old calendarist pressure, not the problem of the Ukraine. Our departure was clearly not directly connected with the intensified conflict in the Ukraine eight days later, on 24 February, but there was still an indirect connection. This is because both the heresy of rebaptism and the scandalous support for a war against other Orthodox were caused by exactly the same lack of pastoral leadership. The chasm between the bishops on the one hand and the suffering priests and people on the other hand, whom the bishops have been persecuting, opened up for exactly the same reason.

Q: But you seem to support the Russian side in the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: Not at all, that is not true. No clergyman can support war and violence. However, as a political observer and cultural historian, who knows very well both Russia and the Ukraine, both officially and unofficially, and has met both recent Patriarchs and President Putin, and who also perfectly well knows the aggression and hypocrisy of the West, several things were obvious.

Firstly, it was obvious from the very outset that, as a Great Power, Russia would win that deeply tragic and catastrophic conflict. That is not support, it is just a recognition of an obvious fact. It was also clear that the Kiev regime was Fascist and atheist and was acting simply as a proxy of the highly aggressive USA and the EU. It was obvious that the anti-Ukrainian regime in Kiev existed only because NATO was using it to try and destroy Russia and grab its wealth, for the Ukraine is the last chance of the West to dominate the world and pay off its colossal debts. It was also plain for all to see that the Kiev regime had been persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and all the minorities there (and the Russians in the Ukraine are a minority of 40%!) for years. Blood is on their hands – the Russians did not start this.

Moreover, the CIA and Constantinople support for the fake Church, the OCU, under Dumenko, is an abuse of the canons, on the same level as the abuse of the canons by others, as is the present ‘defrocking’ of bishops of Cyprus for their faithfulness to Christ in refusing to recognise the fake Church. The latter has totally discredited the Church of Cyprus, which kowtows to discredited Constantinople and the local US ambassador. Frankly, there is something quite satanic in the Kiev regime, as it closes hundreds of churches, threatens to turn them into casinos and propagandises LGBT.

It was also obvious that the Ukrainian people, especially the real Orthodox there, were the victims of that war. And finally, it was manifest that the ignorant and arrogant Western mainstream media, financed by the CIA and MI6, which are themselves financed by the Military Financial Complex of the USA and the UK, supported the Kiev Nazis because they could make a lot of money out of such a conflict. They told plain lies. It was the same in Britain in the First World War, where the newspapers which were owned by millionaire arms merchants told the same type of lies.

The Suicide of ROCOR

Q: How did ROCOR come to discredit and destroy itself?

A: All too many in the Russian episcopate now appear to want to suck money out of the parishes in order to finance their ‘superior’, oligarchic lifestyle and then in return sadistically punish the selfsame priests and parishes for telling the truth and living as Christians, also trying to destroy their families. Such bishops, whether inside or outside Russia, claim that they are acting according to the canons and that any who refuse to accept their vicious persecutions and slanders are committing the ultimate sin of refusing to participate in their evil. That apparently is ‘uncanonical’!

Clearly, these people are not Christians. It would be laughable if it were not so sad. We are obedient to Christ, not to those who are de facto filioquists, that is, who claim to have replaced Christ and so put their clearly twisted interpretations of the canons above the Holy Spirit. Their lust for power and money is what has temporarily corrupted the Russian Church, just as it has Constantinople. The Russian émigré Churches had never suffered from that disease, as they had neither power, nor money, which was precisely their glory, but they had died out by the early 2000s. We saw their last generation between 1975 and 2000.

The local example of a recent convert was of one who suffered from narcissistic rages and tantrums, throwing his toys out of his pram and acting as a typical unprincipled bully. Uneducated and ignorant, humiliating those who had been in the Church before he was even born, he threatened all with a metaphorical baseball bat. He was a kind of ecclesiastical Trump, wanting only to ‘grab property’ (the words of our outraged solicitor who examined his shameless claims in astonishment – she had never seen anything like it, even in the secular world) and dominate, without any understanding of local languages, history, geography, customs etc. Moscow now knows all about him, since the scandal he caused in the altar of a church in Paris last year, when he had to be restrained by another bishop from his aggressive rage and threat of violence.

Q: Was ROCOR’s entry into schism and even heresy inevitable?

A: No, not at all. As far back as 1997, a friend of mine, the late Fr Roman Lukianov in Boston USA, warned that ROCOR risked becoming a sect, as the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, successor of St John, had reposed in 1993. For decades Vladyka Antony had been the great moderating influence inside ROCOR against the American crazies. He was rightly concerned, as were others of us.

I remember one old aristocratic émigré in London, who had worked for MI6 (so many of them did) in Iran in the 1950s (himself he just said that he had worked for ‘The Foreign Office’, which was well-understood code). He said that no unity between ROCOR and the MP was possible because ROCOR was like a glass of pure water and the MP was like a glass of dirty water. I asked him then why St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of the Crimea had been in the MP? Then I asked him why were there so many scandals in ROCOR, with the Grabbe affair, his ‘six million dollar’ son, and the defrocking for good canonical reasons of immoral priests and why there were so many ROCOR parishes that did not have priests? He simply answered that he had never heard of any of that! In other words, it was all ignorance and bigotry. It was the usual phariseeism of those who see the speck in others, but not the log in their own eye.

In fact, despite such people, ROCOR did not become a sect and ten years later it even entered back into communion with Moscow, then presided over by a former émigré, the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II. That was a miracle. I witnessed it. ROCOR through the ever-memorable Metr Laurus had received the most generous canonical agreement from the Patriarch, becoming a self-governing part of the Russian Church. ROCOR had basically become an Autonomous Church of the Diaspora. This had been exactly our hope all along. My only regret was that it had taken so long. Patriarch Alexis, whom I knew, had already made the same offer in about 1995! Seven years had been wasted after the revolutionary 2000 Jubilee Council in Moscow when all our just demands had been met.

With such an agreement to autonomy, ROCOR could therefore have avoided all the controversy of the later Russian schism with the Greeks and the conflict in the Ukraine and not broken communion with but co-operated with the other Local Churches. (By other Local Churches, I do not include the leadership of the Greek Churches, whose policies were purely political, dictated to them and paid for by the CIA).

But instead of using its autonomy and working with the concert of the politically free Local Churches, self-governing ROCOR showed no independence from Moscow at all, except to express CIA views of the Kiev regime! It not only entered into schism from the Greeks, but also took several priests from the Greek Church without letters of release, and accepted in silence the persecution of priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky. All this was because it did not want to recognise the Catholicity of the Church, but to be a schismatic ghetto-group, actually denying the sacraments of other local Churches, against its own people.

Q: But you must admit that ROCOR had long been a breeding ground for schism?

A: Yes, there had been the Bostonite old calendarist schism in, I think, 1986, when about 2,000 left, the tiny old calendarist schisms in France in 1987 and 2001, then the four schisms in the USA and England of 2007. But each time the numbers who left for all these various warring ‘True Orthodox’ sects were minute, often fewer than 500, sometimes as few as 50. The ROCOR Centre had remained firm.

And all those schisms proved just how necessary it was for ROCOR to enter into canonical communion with Moscow and to eliminate the sectarian spirit of hatred and division for ever. Those schisms also proved how ROCOR had for years been attracting the wrong sort of people, pathological extremists and the dissatisfied, sometimes second-generation immigrant Russians with their inferiority complexes and fantasies about pre-Revolutionary Russia, sometimes weird converts from Protestant sects, very often with sexual problems.

These are the sort of people who call normal Orthodox ‘World Orthodox’ and themselves, in their narcissistic and pharisaical pride, ‘True Orthodox’. There is no such thing as ‘World Orthodox’. True, there can be worldly or lapsed Orthodox, but they do not go to church and therefore, they are not Orthodox. An Orthodox is one who goes to church, unlike so many of the internet Orthodox who dare to call themselves ‘True Orthodox’. The only ‘True Orthodox’ are the saints of God, to whose state all Orthodox aspire.

Today, there are all of us who left ROCOR from 2021 on, in the USA, in England and elsewhere. Only this time we left not for weird and schismatic sectarian groups, but for the mainstream Local Churches, anti-Bartholomew Constantinople (those who joined Constantinople in the USA and Paris refuse to have anything to do with his fake Ukrainian Church) and then Bucharest, which welcomed us all with open arms and great sympathy, as heroic witnesses and refugees from ROCOR schism and heresy.

This time it was the scandal-ridden ROCOR itself which had become a weird and schismatic sectarian group. True, there were others in ROCOR who were too weak and fearful, including one bishop and several clergy, who did not leave for other Local Churches, but simply gave up and resigned in disgust at the lack of canonicity and corruption they had seen inside the new ROCOR. This is the end of ROCOR, its suicide. It has outlived its sell-by date.

Q: But what do you think about the anti-Moscow Patriarchate ROCOR Synod statement of 5 June?

https://www.synod.com/synod/eng2025/20250605_ensynodstatement.html

A: This was a clearly provoked by the very recent Sister Vassa debacle and the numbers of Russians leaving ROCOR in the USA and withdrawing their donations, since the documents contains nothing new and could have been written years ago. (Why wasn’t it written then? Well, as American say, ‘Follow the money’). It was clearly written by the German Metr Mark and his entourage, who have been running the Synod ever since they removed Metr Vitaly in 2001.

It is a document that deals only with the past of 70-90 years ago and fails utterly to address the present, the elephant in the room, the war in the Ukraine. The liberals will rightly mock the document as too little, too late. However, there is even worse.

From the Moscow viewpoint, the ROCOR document is scandalous. It is well known that the German Diocese of Metr Mark still has many children and grandchildren of Vlasovites (Russians who fought with Hitler) in it. For Russians in Russia Stalin was the victor of 1945, just as for British people Churchill (who was just as racist as Hitler) was the victor in 1945. And Vlasov was a traitor. Any attack of this manner on Stalin is seen as Nazi and therefore as support for the Nazis in Kiev, who are have been killing Russian civilians and children ever since 2014, with the support of the grandchildren of Nazis in Berlin and Brussels.

This statement has quite rightly outraged Moscow, especially since it has Vlasovite and CIA connections. It was 27 million Soviet citizens who were massacred by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945. Victory came when Stalin was the Soviet leader. Why is ROCOR, with its close Vlasov and CIA connections meddling in internal affairs in Russia? If Moscow ditches ROCOR, then it will lose its last shreds of a claim to canonicity and become officially the schismatic sect that it already is. For the quite correct Russian reaction, see:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2025/06/06/sinod_rpcz_nastupaet_na_te_zhe_grabli

Q: Today ROCOR is attracting many young men. So ROCOR is not finished?

A: All Orthodox dioceses in the Diaspora are receiving many young people today. This is due to the internet effect of various influencers. But we have to be very careful and receive only the serious, not the beardy-weirdy. With such people the lapse rate is extremely high. I am now receiving at least one young person a month, though as many young women as men, including refugees from ROCOR sectarianism, now that they have understood their mistake. ROCOR is once more attracting the wrong sort of young men, the terminally online, the exclusivists, incels, woman-haters, closet homosexuals, bisexuals, extremists, narcissists, internet Orthodox. You cannot build a Church on their exclusivist pathology and hatred, and yet ROCOR usually ordains such young men, preferring them to the normal!

Thus, they claim that Orthodoxy is ’manly’ and ‘masculine’. But what about women? Are they not allowed? Why are they against family life and children? Clearly, all this is internet fantasy. Russian churches especially have always been filled with women, 80% or 90%. But you will not learn about that reality from the internet. Those remaining in ROCOR just never learn. They are just making it worse for themselves. All we can do is to pray for their repentance despite their schism and heresy.

Eastern Papism

Q: Why did some Russian hierarchs fall into exactly the same error as the Greek (Constantinople) Church before it, by proclaiming themselves to be some sort of Eastern Papacy?

A: Only about 2% of Orthodox belong to the Greek jurisdiction of Constantinople, whereas 70% (140 million) belong to that of Moscow. Moscow therefore thinks that it is No 1. However, Constantinople maintains that as the Church of the former Imperial Capital (which fell nearly 600 years ago!), it is the ‘first without equals’, that is, No 1.

Now promoting yourself as ‘No 1’ is precisely the heresy of Papism, which directly contradicts the Gospel, where Christ calls on us to serve others, not to lord it over others. The First Rome fell because it wanted to dominate. Those who call themselves the Second Rome and the Third Rome have learned nothing from its fall and have instead chosen to imitate that exact same ‘Roman’ fall. It is the sin of Rome-ism, even though you may call it worldliness, secularism, erastianism or Sergianism.

Fortunately, the Church works through Catholicity, not through becoming a State (the First Rome), ancient prestige (the Second Rome) or through size (the Third Rome). A Council of the whole Church, all sixteen Local Churches, is the solution to this childish division. In any case, as a result, both Moscow and Constantinople have punished themselves. Today Moscow is being reduced in size, losing a third of its territories and parishes, and as for Constantinople, it is losing the last shreds of its prestige, making itself into a laughing-stock, as one bishop after another in the Church of Cyprus is ‘defrocked’ for the ‘heresy’ of disagreeing with Constantinople!

Both Moscow and Constantinople are punished by the sin that they sinned with, as the Book of Proverbs says. God is not mocked. Meanwhile the real Church, the other fourteen Local Churches, goes on together with the many healthy elements within both Moscow and Constantinople are in accord. This is not a sickness unto death, for repentance is possible.

A New Local Church

Q: What after fifty years of struggle do you think of the chances of a new Local Church being established?

A: I have always believed that I would not live to see it, but I have always fought for it, for the sake of our children and grandchildren. It is still for the future and despite the present Greek and Russian squabble we are far closer to it than fifty years ago, when it was an impossible dream and even services in local languages hardly existed. The present schism does not fill me with pessimism because people in their eighties die. What is frightening is that people of that age appear to feel no repentance.

The point is that over the last fifty years I have seen both the Russian Church in the Diaspora and the Greek (Constantinople) Church dying out. Why? Because they stuck to what for the new Western-born generations of Russians and Greeks were foreign languages, Slavonic and Greek. They do not understand a word of them. The decision not to use local languages was suicide, the ethnic funeral of the Church.

On top of that, what possible missionary witness do you give to Non-Orthodox, if you do not even speak the local language and understand the local culture? Did the Apostles go around speaking in a foreign language to preach the Gospel? No, they spoke in the local language. This is one of the meanings of Pentecost. To speak in tongues does not mean to speak in gibberish in a wave of hysterical self-exaltation, like crazy Evangelicals and Pentecostalists. It means to work in order to learn another language, its culture and customs, in order to inculturate the Orthodox Christian Faith and so bring people to Christ.

St Nicholas of Japan, St Tikhon of Moscow and St John of Shanghai are recent examples, for they did exactly this. They did not impose, they set examples. All we have to do is follow them. For instance, when Japan started its proxy war against Russia with its undeclared surprise attack on Russia, St Nicholas told his Japanese clergy to pray for their armed forces and locked himself away to pray for the duration. Here is our example.

Q: And what about the chances of achieving an Autocephalous Local Church today?

A: Firstly, most Local Churches do not even have a Diaspora jurisdiction, so they are not concerned by the question.

Secondly, many of the Churches that do have a Diaspora jurisdiction would never give autocephaly to their Diaspora jurisdiction for ethnic reasons, especially if that jurisdiction is small. So there is no hope that in Western Europe, for example, the Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian or Antiochian Churches will ever grant autocephaly. This means that only the big three, the Greek, Russian or Romanian Churches could ever give autocephaly in Western Europe. True, the Romanian Church gave autonomy several years ago, but not autocephaly for very good canonical reasons, for which see below.

Thirdly, there is the question of local people who have joined that Church. This is all about missionary work. Ghetto-churches will never give autocephaly. Why should they? They are precisely not local and do not want to be local! But if there were large numbers of local people in a Church, then it would have to receive autocephaly. This so far is not the case anywhere, the numbers of native people accepting Orthodoxy have been very small.

Fourthly, there is the question of size. For example, the Greek Church is by far the largest in North America and Australia, the Antiochian the largest in South America, whereas the Romanian Church has in the last 15 years become by far the largest in Western Europe. In those regions, we must hope that the largest group would take responsibility and draw towards autocephaly. However, more of this in the final point below.

Finally, there is the issue of ability to get on with others, i.e, the absence of nationalism and narrow jurisdictionalism and even worse, of sectarianism. This disqualifies the Greek and now the Russian Churches, one of whose bishops told our Romanians and Moldovans that, ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. This is racism, chauvinism on the same level as Constantinople’s.

The fact is that the Greek Church of Constantinople has never voluntarily given or recognised genuine autocephaly to anyone because of its centralising tendencies, neither to the Serbs, nor to the Russians, nor to the Romanians and, most obviously, nor to the Bulgarians, nor to the Poles, nor to the Czechs and Slovaks, nor to the Macedonians today. Even the ‘autocephaly’ the Greeks recently gave to the Ukrainian schismatics is completely fake. Their fake Church of gangsters and thugs has no independence and depends entirely on CIA cash. Even in history, when the Copts and the Armenians broke away from Orthodoxy, the main reason was their nationalist reaction to Greek racism.

With the suicide of ROCOR and its schism from the Paris Archdiocese of the Russian Church, in Western Europe the Russians have now done exactly the same thing as the Greeks, excluding most Ukrainians, Moldovans and normal local Western Europeans from the Russian Church, that is, becoming like the Greeks a nationalistic ghetto-Church. There is only one option left – the Romanians.

Are the Romanians up to the job? I can affirm that many are, the publishing efforts in English and French of the Romanian Dioceses are formidable. But is that enough? Only time will tell. What is certain that no one Local Church can give autocephaly. It must be done in concert, which is why Bucharest did not give us autocephaly, only autonomy. Thus, there is no room either for nationalism, nor sectarianism.

Q: What might a new Local Church look like?

A: I see it as a group of bishops, with their flocks of different nationalities, presiding in turn for a fixed term over the new Local Church, its autocephaly granted collectively by all the Local Churches concerned. Each bishop would have his own diocese, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Russian and Antiochian. We must avoid the error of the Greeks who set up episcopal assemblies. These failed and no longer operate because the Greeks wanted to dominate them and sat in permanent control over them, heavy-handedly trying to impose their views. That is not the way to go. There must be complete respect and freedom for different languages, calendars and customs, not to mention different attitudes towards ecumenism. There must be no interference from the Mother-Churches. Autocephaly must mean autocephaly. There is no other way.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Pentecost 2025