Category Archives: Russian Church

The Future of Orthodox Christianity in Western Europe

Introduction: Orthodox Church Immigration to Western Europe

Since 1917 there have been three large-scale waves of immigration of Orthodox Christians from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. These have been: the Russian-speaking, mainly since 1917, though in four sociologically very different generations, the Greek-speaking, mainly since 1950, and the Romanian-speaking, mainly since 2000. This latest immigration is composed of well over four million Romanians with a million and a half Moldovans, probably six million people in all. Nearly half of these now live in Italy, Spain and Portugal, since Romanian is very similar to those languages. This recent immigration dwarves all previous Orthodox immigrations to Western Europe, not just the Russian and Greek, but also the much smaller ones, like the Serbian, the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Macedonian, the Bulgarian, the Antiochian (Arab) and the Georgian.

The Greek-speaking (Greek and Cypriot) immigration has remained very closed to others and remains stuck in its ethnic identity, but its leaders also have very strong pro-US politics. Both these factors alienate nearly everyone else from it. It does not in general and cannot in reality attract many native Europeans to its religious practice. As regards the Romanian and Moldovan immigration, it is still too early to say whether it will attract others to it in any number, though there are some promising signs of openings to others, as a result of its youthfulness, its ten bishops, including a French one, and some Non-Romanian clergy and people. The Romanians are helped here by their Latin language and by being very open and welcoming, but the infrastructure remains weak.

The Russian Immigration

What of the oldest, most political and most complex immigration, the Russian-speaking? In four waves, this consisted of anti-Bolsheviks from pre-1917 Russia, anti-Stalinists from pre-1945 Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, those from the small, largely ethnically Jewish, dissident intellectual immigration of the 1970s and 1980s, and those from the post-USSR but still Soviet immigration, especially from the Baltic States, Kazakhstan and Moldova. These waves of immigration are sadly divided into three different and quite disjointed ‘jurisdictions’ with separate episcopates, one of which (ROCOR) since January 2021 has officially decided to be in schism with and not concelebrate with one of the others (WEA). (See below).

  1. The MP

Firstly, there is the largest jurisdiction, that of the Mother-Church, the Moscow-based Moscow Patriarchate (MP), which is 99% of the whole Russian Church, mostly in the ex-Soviet Union, but also has eight bishops in Western Europe. This is organised under a Paris-based Exarchate and its people come from all over the ex-Soviet Union, especially from Moldova and the Baltic States, but also from the Ukraine, though in the last two years many Ukrainians have left it to help found yet another group of over eighty quite separate new Ukrainian Orthodox communities, mainly composed of Ukrainian refugees (most of whom appear not to be baptised Orthodox – the Orthodox have stayed in the Ukraine or in Eastern Europe). This MP Exarchate has been patterned by a number of Exarchs and bishops, who have embarrassingly compromised themselves in some way or other and so have met with failure.

One of the great current problems here is the dramatic events now going on in Moscow against the background of the war in the Ukraine. Here, ‘traitors’ are being tried by Church courts. These include the once senior Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachov), the former Exarch in Africa, who is under suspicion of various misdeeds (1). If treachery to the Russian State is the real charge, then there must also be bishops in the very divided New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (see below) who must also be trembling. Astonishingly, several of the latter have from the outset publicly called for the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukraine and openly supported anti-Russian US policies and persecuted pro-Russians. If there is one thing that Russians cannot support, it is treachery.

  1. b) The WEA

Secondly, there is by far the smallest group, the Paris-based Western European Archdiocese (WEA) with only three bishops, whose aristocratic founders from Saint Petersburg created it in the 1920s. This elitist intellectual group is now very small outside Paris. It has either not been able, or perhaps not wanted, to take off and expand outside the intellectual group. At the present time, most believe that its often elderly leaders will die out within the next generation. Essentially it has only three church properties of its own and these are all in Paris. The death or removal of two individuals would hasten the takeover of those properties by the much larger MP and its inevitable absorption of the small remains of this group.

  1. ROCOR

Thirdly, there is the New York-based ROCOR, which was formed over 100 years ago, in 1919 and has its own Synod, now of only thirteen active bishops. In Western Europe it has four bishops. By 2001 its first generation had essentially died out. Thus, in order to survive it had to reinvent itself. A few very elderly individuals, including its own Metropolitan, were expelled in what was essentially a coup d’etat. Having taken over, the new Synod, which had accepted large numbers of new immigrants from the ex-USSR, was then forced to reconcile itself with Moscow. However, it was also recruiting converts, especially in the USA. Unfortunately, it purposely recruited some very strange and right-wing extremist converts, many of whom it made priests and even bishops, putting them into oppositions of power. These now form a very powerful group and are harshly persecuting those who are Russian-speaking, pro-Russian and anti-schism.

Apart from about 150 communities, many of them very small, mainly in the USA, and about 30 communities in Australia, the other main centre of ROCOR is its 70 or so communities in Germany, where it has many historic and beautiful churches and a large flock, with both clergy and laity nearly all from the ex-USSR, especially from Kazakhstan. As well as these churches, it also has a few historic churches in Switzerland, two historic churches (recently taken from the WEA) in northern Italy and one in Brussels. Elsewhere it has virtually nothing, apart from some very small and often unstable communities, making some 300 communities in all and at least 50,000 people. It is clear that the MP is waiting to take over the historic churches in Western Europe from the declining ROCOR and add them to its Exarchate of Western Europe. The death or removal of two very divisive and very aggressive, US-trained individuals in Western Europe, who have very strong anti-Russian political backgrounds and connections, would hasten this process.

At the present time the New York Synod is very divided, not least about its heretical programme of rebaptising other Orthodox, in defiance of the teachings and practices of the Russian Church and of the whole of the Orthodox Church. Although there are three Russian bishops against a break with the MP (they have already broken with the WEA part of the MP), there are three bishops for, and the other seven are fence-sitting. We expect further events.

Conclusion: The Future

Most countries in Eastern Europe already have their own independent Local Orthodox Churches. It seems quite likely that the small Orthodox population (3% ?) from among the eleven million people of the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and from Nordic Finland, whose language is related to Estonian, will form their own Local Baltic Orthodox Church. All these Eastern European countries have strong historic Russian connections and a current Russian presence and historic churches. Similarly, Eastern European Hungary, to which Carpatho-Russian Transcarpathia and its 600 Orthodox parishes may soon return, may also obtain its own Local Orthodox Church. This is just like the Church of Czechia and Slovakia, the main part of whose traditional flock also consists of Carpatho-Russians.

This would leave a geographical West of Europe, with an eastern border stretching from Norway down to Sweden, Germany, Austria and Italy, enclosing the at present twenty-one countries of Western Europe, with its population of 400 million and area of 3.5 million square kilometres. This has a population of some 10 million nominal Orthodox, about 40 bishops and perhaps 2,000 communities. If they banded together into eight multinational dioceses and worked towards forming their own Local Orthodox Church, they would then form the fourth largest Local Orthodox Church, after the Russian, Romanian and Greek.

These eight dioceses could cover the territories of: Italia (Italy, Malta and San Marino); Iberia (Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar); Germania (Germany and Austria); Gallia (France, Wallonia (Southern Belgium), Luxembourg and Monaco); The Isles (the British Isles of England, Scotland, Wales etc, as well as the island of Ireland); Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland); the Netherlands (the Netherlands plus Flanders (Northern Belgium)); Helvetia (Switzerland and Liechtenstein). The main task here would be to maintain Orthodox and their descendants in the Faith, protecting them from the surrounding ocean of ever more aggressive Western secularist atheism. However, it would also be for these dioceses to conduct missionary work among the native peoples of their territories, though in this profoundly atheist (ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant) region, the results of that work would be modest, for sadly few want real Orthodox Christianity, often preferring at best a virtual version of podcasts, internet nonsense and negativity.

Note:

  1. The retired Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachev) of the ROC said the upcoming trial against him will be a betrayal of the Church and Fatherland” and “all who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”.

    Former African Exarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Leonid called the upcoming hearing on his case in the Supreme All-Church Court “a betrayal of the Church and the Fatherland” and said that “all those who participate in this lawlessness are traitors”. He wrote about this on his Telegram channel.

    According to him, with the upcoming trial, “we have passed the line of realisation of good and evil”.

    “Now everything is possible if you have uncontrolled power in your hands,” the retired bishop said, without specifying whom he meant.

    The hierarch is convinced that his work in the African Exarchate was “the first breakthrough since 988,” and Gorbachev appreciates its results very highly.

    The hierarch also noted that his trial benefits the Vatican and is “giving up one’s own people”, and that all those involved in it are “traitors”.

    The metropolitan threatened to “provide details afterwards,” adding that he “did not want this”.

 

 

 

The Russian Orthodox Church After the Ukraine

Introduction: After the Special Military Operation

One of the outcomes of the ten-year old American war against Russia in the Ukraine will inevitably be great changes in the Russian Orthodox Church, often known as the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’. The first outcome could be precisely to change the name of the Moscow Patriarchate, which is a temporary Soviet name, perhaps to the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’, which refers back to the seventeenth century history of Russia. New Jerusalem is a restored historic monastic centre with an international background just to the west of Moscow. Such a name change would be the final step in the Patriarchate losing its often unpleasant, centralising Soviet associations and Moscow-centric image.

The second outcome could be to restore to the priesthood and diaconate those who were ‘defrocked’ over the last three years, either because they had political disagreements with the Russian State, or because their bishops were schismatics, thieves, perverts, womanisers or persecutors of truth-telling clergy. Before being ‘defrocked’, they had been forced to transfer as refugees to the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople or to the Romanian Orthodox Church, or elsewhere. (Why such bishops are not defrocked for committing such serious misdeeds – priests would be defrocked automatically if they did – is a problem that needs to be addressed by all the Local Churches. Recently we saw yet another example of episcopal impunity in the case of a Metropolitan Joseph of the Antiochian Church in North America. Convicted of such above crimes, he was simply retired!)

The third outcome would be a further and more radical restructuring of the Russian Orthodox Church, in order to take account of the real post-Soviet, international world. The possible forms taken by such a restructuring, overdue by more than 30 years, are outlined below.

Autonomisation and Internationalisation

After 2008 the Russian Orthodox Church went through an initial process of restructuring, which can be called ‘Metropolitanisation’, that is, Localisation, the establishment of Local Metropolias covering large geographical areas, each led by a Metropolitan with an archbishop and several diocesan bishops who help him. This has led to the consecration of over 200 new bishops in the Church. This was a move away from the previous 300 years, when there were few bishops and great centralisation.

It is our suggestion that there should be a further stage in this process, at last recognising ecclesiastically that the old unitary State of the Soviet Union long ago ceased to exist and is now divided into fifteen different, independent republics. Such a further move away from the old centralisation could be called ‘Autonomisation’. This means the granting of Autonomy (Independence) to Russian Orthodox in various ex-Soviet and Non-Soviet countries and groups of countries outside the Russian Federation.

At present Autonomy means that a Church is independent, except that the Mother Church has the right to select the head (Metropolitan) of the Autonomous Church, that all the clergy in the Autonomous Church must commemorate the Patriarch of the Mother Church and that the Autonomous Church must obtain its myrrh from the Mother Church. However, Autonomy could be redefined only to mean that the Mother Church selects the head of that Church. The two second conditions could be made voluntary. Thus, commemoration of the Patriarch by bishops or priests would be voluntary and each Autonomous Church would have the possibility to make its own myrrh, if it so wished.

Some may ask why would only Autonomy be granted and not Autocephaly (full independence)? This is because Autocephaly is only possible on five conditions. These are: If an Autonomous Church is not on a territory shared with other Local Churches, if it is large enough (it should have at least four bishops), if it is in politically stable conditions with fixed borders, if it is spiritually mature, that is, has many parishes and an established monastic life, and, above all, if the majority of its members wants such Autocephaly. (Autocephalisation on territories shared with other Orthodox has to be worked out at a Council of all the Local Churches, though it can come much sooner on non-shared territories).

Two Autonomous Churches already exist within the Russian Orthodox Church. These are the small Church of Japan and the tiny Church of China, both established because of the total political independence of Japan and China from Russia. In order of geographical proximity, ten more Autonomous Churches, recognising international realities, could be:

  1. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This would cover the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox population in the New Ukraine (Malorossija?), now under Metr Onufry of Kiev. This would be the old Ukraine, but probably minus the nine new eastern and southern provinces: Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhie, Kherson, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev, Odessa, which would revert to Russia (five already have done so), and minus the four new provinces in the west: two, Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk, going back to Poland, one, Chernovtsy, going back to Romania, and one, Zakarpatie, going back to Hungary. In other words, the New Ukraine would basically be the historic, pre-Soviet Ukraine.

However, this Autonomous Ukrainian Church, covering less than half the territory of the post-1922 Soviet Ukraine, could also be responsible for two Exarchates. These would be all the remaining Russian churches in Moldova (most churches there are joining the Romanian Church, perhaps only 15% will end up remaining under the Russian Church) and all the churches in Hungary, which, if the border change happens, would nearly all be from a former part of the Ukraine. Given its size and recent history, this Ukrainian Orthodox Church could probably soon become Autocephalous, if it is desired by clergy and people, once it has found political stability, just like the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches, which received their Autocephaly from the Russian Church in the last century.

  1. The Belarussian Orthodox Church. This would replace the present Belarussian Exarchate and cover the Belarussian Orthodox population in Belarus. Given its size, this Belarussian Orthodox Church could probably soon become Autocephalous.
  2. The Baltic Orthodox Church. This would cover the Russian Orthodox population in four countries, that is, the three Baltic countries and Finland.
  3. The Central Asian Orthodox Church (CAOC). This would cover the large Russian Orthodox population in the five republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
  4. The Western European Orthodox Church (WEOC). This would cover the Russian Orthodox population in the twenty-one countries below. It would include the Paris-based Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe and the non-schismatic churches of ROCOR. This group used to be canonically Russian Orthodox, but sadly, after entering into canonical communion with Moscow, it first rejected the Metropolitanisation or Localisation which the Patriarch and all of us wanted, as a result going into schism (from the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe), by introducing the scandalous practice of rebaptising other Orthodox, thus totally discrediting itself and becoming a sect. As we suggested in 1988, the WEOC, centred in Paris, could consist of eight archdioceses and have a considerable number of diocesan metropolitans, archbishops or bishops in the following groups of countries, according to language and culture:

Gallia: France and French-speaking Southern Belgium, Luxembourg and Monaco (centred in Paris).

Germania: Germany and Austria (centred in Berlin).

Iberia: Spain, Portugal, and Andorra (centred in Madrid).

Italia: Italy, San Marino and Malta (centred in Rome).

Iona (Isles of the North Atlantic): The British Isles and Ireland (centred in London).

Scandinavia: Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland (centred in Stockholm)

Netherlandia: The Netherlands and Northern Belgium (centred in Amsterdam).

Helvetica: Switzerland and Liechtenstein (centred in Geneva).

  1. The African Orthodox Church (AOC). Centred in Kampala, this would cover the Russian Orthodox population of the whole African Continent.
  2. The Northern American Orthodox Church (NAOC). This would cover the USA, Canada, Greenland, Bermuda and St Pierre et Miquelon and include the churches of the former OCA, whose tomos of autocephaly will have to be revoked anyway. This revocation will be necessary because, after over fifty years and despite the best intentions and efforts of many, the territorially ill-defined OCA has not been successful in bringing all Orthodox in Northern America together, which is what it was created for. As it is on shared territory, that Soviet-era tomos has never been accepted as canonical by the majority of Orthodox there. In this it has not been helped by a narrow ideology and grave pastoral errors made in the past. There is one Metropolitan in the Russian Orthodox Church, at present much under-used, whose diplomatic and linguistic talents could be of vital import here in solving the problem of this heroic, pioneering, but failed attempt to create a Local Church. Unlike the old OCA, the NAOC would also include churches which are at present under the Moscow Patriarchate and the non-schismatic churches of ROCOR. This group used to be canonically Russian Orthodox, but sadly, after entering into canonical communion with Moscow, it first rejected the Metropolitanisation or Localisation which the Patriarch and all of us wanted, as a result going into schism (from the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe), by introducing the scandalous practice of rebaptising other Orthodox, thus totally discrediting itself and becoming a sect.
  3. The Latin American and Caribbean Orthodox Church (LACOC). This would cover all Russian Orthodox in Latin America and the Caribbean, with populations speaking Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Dutch, as well as local languages, especially in Central America.
  4. The South-East Asian Orthodox Church (SEAOC). This would replace the present international Exarchate of the same name.
  5. The Oceanian Orthodox Church (OOC). This would cover all Russian Orthodox in Oceania.

Conclusion

A Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus would consist of one Mother-Church, covering the population of the Russian Federation, with a Family or Confederation of Twelve Autonomous Churches. In due course, Autocephalisation on non-shared territories could follow, but only if the five necessary conditions (see above) were met. As we have said above, Autocephalisation on shared territories would have to be worked out at a Council of all the Local Churches and would require great diplomatic skills and an supranational, and not nationalist consciousness.

The Seven Ages of Rus’ and its Future after the Fall of President Zelensky

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2023/12/30/ot_rusi_do_rusi__ot_rasputina_do_putina

Introduction: East Slavdom

Over a millennium ago the West Slav peoples, Sorbs, Czechs, Poles and Slovaks, were gradually forced under German pressure to become proto-Roman Catholics, nowhere so obviously as in Moravia, where Germans forced out Orthodox missionaries. On the other hand, the South Slavs – Bulgarians and Macedonians, Serbs and Serbian Montenegrins, though not the Croats and Slovenes, who again under German pressure had to become proto-Roman Catholics – are members of the Orthodox Church.

Three times more numerous than the West and South Slavs combined, with vast lands, at present called the Russian Federation, Belarus and the Ukraine and known in history as Rus’, the East Slavs are also members of the Orthodox Church. We can identify seven ages in the history of these East Slav lands, or Rus’, of which the seventh age has only just begun. These seven ages are:

  1. Pagan Rus’: – 988

The East Slavs were nature-worshipping pagans until 988, when the first of them were baptised in Kiev by Orthodox Christian missionaries from Bulgaria, Constantinople, Moravia, Hungary and Carpatho-Rus (most of which is for now called Transcarpathia). This event is known as ‘The Baptism of Rus’’. However, in reality the baptism of the whole East Slav people took generations and paganism continued in superstitious vestiges for centuries.

  1. Kievan Rus’: 988-1283

In order to survive, the then main East Slav principality, called Kievan Rus’, had to resist both eastern and western, both Tartar-Mongol and Western Roman Catholic, aggression. The authority of the Grand Princes of Kiev, ‘the mother of the cities of Rus’’, was also undermined by the attacks of treacherous princes from different principalities around Kiev, who with their followers vied for power in fratricidal struggles.

After nearly 300 years, in the mid-13thcentury Kievan Rus’ was finished off by the invasions of the Tartars and Mongols. From there East Slav power was transferred to northern Rus’, to Novgorod and above all to the better protected Muscovy, named after the trading waterway of the Moskva River and its centre in Moscow (meaning precisely ‘waterway’).

  1. Muscovite Rus’ 1283-1682

Geographically, Muscovy, which after being ruled by Grand Princes became a Tsardom under its first Tsar, Ivan IV (reigned 1530-1584), was relatively small in size. However, it began to expand northwards to the shores of the White Sea and then eastwards through Kazakhstan into Siberia, and later would reach the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The Muscovite ideals were ‘Holy Rus’ and ‘the Third Rome’, the ideals of incarnating holiness among the East Slavs and so being a bastion of the True Faith. In order to survive against so many enemies from Western aggression, especially from Poles and Lithuanians, and with a change of ruling house from Rurikids to Romanovs in 1613, which was forced on it by treasonous boyars (aristocrats) and foreign invasion, Muscovite Rus’ became isolated.

After nearly 400 years, from the 1650s on, this isolation led to a split from the Russian Orthodox Church with the formation of apocalyptic Old Ritualist sects. They wanted to keep old rituals, out of keeping with the wider Orthodox Church, seeing themselves as the True Church. The Old Ritualists, often led by merchants, wanted isolation and did not want to know about the majority of Orthodox. Despite this extreme, and the extreme of treasonous boyars, who conversely had become obsessed with Polish and Italian influences coming in from the far west of the present Ukraine, which had been forced into becoming Roman Catholic by the Poles, the Tsardom of Muscovy evolved into an Empire.

  1. Imperial Russia: 1682-1917

Although Russia was not proclaimed an Empire until 1721, in reality Imperial Russia began in 1682 with the reign of Peter I (‘the Great’). Though he did much for Russia’s secular greatness and power, he also denigrated the Church, abolishing the Russian Patriarchate and subjecting the Church to a Protestant-style Minister of Religion, and generally promoted Western influences, such as serfdom. This Imperial period led to the great expansion of Rus’ to the west, taking part of largely Jewish eastern Poland and all Finland, to the Pacific east and to the Muslim south. Hence the need to change its name from ‘Rus’’ to ‘Russia’, in order to include all these Non-East Slavs. The Non-East Slav peoples were controlled by a centralised administration in Saint Petersburg, which caused dissent among them. The end of this period saw rapid industrialisation, making Russia into the fifth largest economy in the world and well on its way to becoming the first, with high levels of literacy among the young.

Seeing the appalling decadence and hedonism of the upper class in Peter I’s capital of Saint Petersburg, its last Tsar, Nicholas II (1868-1918), looked back with nostalgia precisely to pre-Imperial Rus’ and especially to the father of Peter I, Tsar Alexis (1645-1676). Indeed, Tsar Nicholas II named his only son after him, reconciling some of those who used the old rituals with the Church, working towards the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate, building churches in the national style of that previous age and reforming Italianate church singing and iconography according to the older standards.

Tsar Nicholas II was betrayed by those who disagreed with and openly mocked and slandered his desire to return to roots and revive the old ideal of Holy Rus’. They scorned his Faith and the radical unity of peasantry and Tsar, which he cultivated. These aristocrat-traitors, whose mentality had been spawned by Peter I, allied themselves with the West, with British spies and politics, with French language and culture. This is why most of them ended up in Paris after 1917. The Tsar was left inside Russia, refusing to leave his homeland out of patriotism, and so was murdered with his whole family. Imperial Russia had lasted barely 200 years.

Imperial Russia contained the seeds of its own destruction and was felled by its internal contradictions between Holy Rus’ and a centralised, Western-style Imperial State, so well portrayed in nineteenth-century Russia, which was split between Slavophiles and Westerners. This can be seen in its literature, especially Dostoyevsky’s prophetic novels, ‘The Possessed’ or ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. Nevertheless, Imperial Russia also reached cultural heights, symbolised by the poetry of Pushkin, the novels of Tolstoy, the music of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and the lives of the last Romanovs, martyred by Western-inspired atheists in 1918.

  1. The Soviet Union (USSR): 1917-1991

Although formally founded only in December 1922, in reality the USSR began with the two Revolutions of 1917. As a result, the word ‘Rus’’ became archaic and even the word ‘Russia’ was largely replaced by ‘Soviet’. With a highly oppressive and militant atheist ideology imported from Germany, it created millions of New Martyrs and Confessors, who died under sadistic Non-Russian dictators, such as Lenin, Stalin and Khushchev. The multinational, but highly centralised USSR was founded on an ocean of blood. However, thanks to the immense sacrifices and patriotism of its peoples, in 1945 the USSR was victorious against Western Nazism. Tired of being invaded by the West, it set up a buffer-zone Empire in Eastern Europe to protect itself, also oppressing the peoples of that zone.

The USSR did prolong the pre-Revolutionary ideals of the last Tsar and his programme of social justice, full employment, free education, free health care, accessible culture and support for exploited Western colonies. However, it fell after only three generations because of its oppressive centralism and the treason, greed and corruption of its elite, the ‘nomenklatura’. The members of this ‘nomenklatura’ were those who wanted Western consumerism: Money, money, money for parasites, thieves and traitors.

The nomenklatura had already come into being by the 1970s. I can remember them then, with their vulgar and amateur aping of bourgeois Western ways and clothes, shopping in Berjozka shops. In the 1980s they helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, betraying the social justice that was its greatest legacy, fighting against the patriots who, curiously, were largely centred in the KGB.  Having lived in the USSR, I was not in principle against its fall, as it had persecuted the Church and all its peoples, but I believed that that fall could only be on condition that something better would first be put in its place. I follow the principle that you do not destruct until you first construct.

  1. Post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: 26 December 1991-24 February 2022

Here we can give very precise dates for the beginning and the ending of this sixth incarnation of East Slavdom, of post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Tragically, instead of keeping the best of the old USSR, full employment, free education, free health care, accessible culture and support for the exploited Third World, once the nouveau-riche nomenklatura had taken long-coveted power and renamed themselves ‘oligarchs’, imitating rich Westerners, they simply put in place a poor-quality imitation of the corrupt West. They kept only all that was worst in the old USSR, its centralisation, alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce on demand. It was the worst of both worlds.

National assets were stolen (‘privatised’) by the ‘oligarchs’ and tens of millions of abandoned Russians found that they had become disliked and discriminated against in new, foreign-controlled countries, especially in the Ukraine, where Russians numbered over 50%. Western companies made a killing inside Russia and the Ukraine, tens of millions of people were robbed of their savings and pensions and millions died of poverty, despair, alcoholism and in nationalist wars in the Caucasus, which were directly provoked and supported by the West. It was one of the greatest thefts of natural resources and identity in the history of the world.

However, from 1994 on in oligarch-free Belarus and from 1999 on in the Russian Federation, but not in the oligarch-owned Ukraine, patriots came to power. They gradually began to develop something better to put in place of the monstrous crimes that had taken place after the collapse of the USSR. However, this was a generational project and could not be rushed. Only in early 2022 was the project ready to be implemented, if necessary. A New Rus’, purged of parasites, thieves and traitors, began to take shape, although some of its institutions still have to be cleansed of corrupt mafias, infiltrators and spies.

These compromising traitors were just like the aristocrats, generals, politicians and professionals who had coveted power in 1917 and overthrew the Tsar. Just as the aristocrat-oligarchs and bourgeois elite of traitors, who had implemented the Western-planned February 1917 palace revolt, caused chaos, civil war and destruction and then irresponsibly ran away to the West, so too did the oligarchs. Post-Soviet Russia ended with their treason, the oligarchs fleeing to London, New York, Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

  1. The New Rus’: 24 February 2022 – Until Repentance Stops

With the New Rus’, we turn full circle, away from Russia and back to Rus’ and the restoration of the fundamental unity of East Slavdom. The New Rus’ was born on 24 February 2022, the first day of the SMO (Special Military Operation), the operation to liberate the one still occupied part of Rus’, the Ukraine. It had to be freed of its US-run, US-financed, US-trained and US-armed Neo-Nazi militarists, largely Galicians from the far west of the Ukraine, formerly part of Poland. These Neo-Nazis were the puppets used by the US elite, who hoped to destroy President Putin, However, in reality, they made him great and destroyed President Zelensky instead.

If the New Rus’ were to survive and thrive, it had to be decompromised and cleansed of the post-Soviet Westernised traitor-oligarchs. Almost at once after 24 February 2022, traitors ran from the birth of the New Rus’. Tens of thousands of the Russian nouveau-riche upper class headed for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, Serbia and elsewhere. They hated the New Rus’, because they could no longer go skiing in the French Alps in the winter, to Florida for summer holidays, to their villas and use their bank accounts in London, Nice, Malaga, Sofia, Nicosia and Podgorica. True, most, it is said 85%, have since returned, realising their error. However, millions fled from the Ukraine, one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

No longer able to sweep the Ukrainian catastrophe under the carpet until the next US elections, the delusional USA and the heavily censored US-run Western media are now abandoning the American proxy war in the Ukraine and its puppet leader. President Zelensky faces assassination, like all dumped US puppets. We are on the threshold of recovering the unity of East Slavdom after the civil strife between brothers in the Ukraine. East Slavdom is what the Belarussian President Lukashenko calls the ’Union State’, but we know it as ‘Rus’’. The Russian Federation and Belarus, stretching from the Polish border to the Pacific, are going to be joined by a New Ukraine, perhaps to be renamed ‘Malorossija’. This latter will be a State similar in size to Belarus and not the Soviet Ukraine, which existed only between 1922 and 2022.

The principle of self-determination would be followed. Thus, the east and the south of the old Soviet construct will return to the Russian Federation. The Romanians of Chernovtsy and the Hungarians of Transcarpathia could well return to their motherlands. As for the only real Ukrainians, who are Greek Catholics and live in their two or three provinces ‘on the edge’, ‘u kraja’, and who have caused all the trouble, they can return to Poland, if the Poles want them back. These ‘Ukrainans’, or border people, are in fact West Slavs. The East Slavs do not want them, for they are not part of Rus’.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. As they say in Russian ‘Bog ljubit troitsu’, ‘God loves threes’. This is the New Rus’, the Union State of the East Slavs, of nearly 200 million people, stretching from the Baltic and the Black Sea to the Pacific. There is no intention of taking over other, Non-East Slav, lands. That is only the base propaganda of Western scaremongering of ‘Russians marching through Europe’. The age of the Soviet Union with its imperial buffer-zone in Non-East Slav Eastern Europe is long over, as also is the age of Imperial Russia. We have come to the reconstitution of ‘Rus’, hopefully to be founded on the ideal of ‘Holy Rus’.

What of those East Slavs who live in other countries, outside East Slavdom, in, say, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Moldova, where they constitute smaller minorities, of between 2% and at most 25% of the population? The New Rus’ hopes that their human rights will at last be guaranteed and protected through the establishment of friendly relations by their governments with their giant neighbour: The New Rus’. After the Russian liberation of the Ukraine, Russians will surely gain the respect and co-operation of those governments which have oppressed their Russian minorities in the past. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan such friendly relations already appear to be the case. And the New Rus’ already has great influence outside itself through the Russian-founded BRICS. Once US influence fades in Europe and Central Asia, all these countries will surely be led by new US-free elites which will realise the need to improve relations with the New Rus’.

Thus, we come to the New Rus’, free from the West, knitted together by the Orthodox Faith. Whenever that Faith has been weak or even denied as an ideal, the East Slavs have quarrelled amongst each other, giving rise to civil wars between princes/boyars/aristocrats/oligarchs. As a result, successive enemies have invaded and taken over. Invasions have only happened when there has been no internal unity. For a house divided cannot stand. This is a warning. If repentance for the past ceases, the New Rus’ will also fall.

Conclusion: Towards Holy Rus’

Just over 100 years ago Imperial Russia ended with the murder by British spies, a right-wing fanatic and a transvestite aristocrat of the first victim of the Revolution, a peasant-prophet and healer called Rasputin. His surname means ‘the parting of the ways’. However, the New Rus’ is being founded by a man called Putin, whose name means ‘the way’. The New Rus’ is indeed a national ‘way’. However, the New Rus’ is also an economic, technological, military and diplomatic Superpower and is closely allied with the other world Superpower, China. For in this new world the very troubled USA is being reduced to just a regional power.

Although founded as a national East Slav Union, the New Rus’ can play an international role in the world, especially in an American-free Europe. With the coming collapse of the already panicking American-chosen EU and UK elites and their replacement by patriots and sovereignists, the New Rus’ could call Europe to repent, it could do missionary work. Various countries like Hungary and Slovakia are already showing the way. Perhaps tomorrow this will come in the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Germany, Italy and France.

For this, however, the New Rus’ will need, after ‘the way’, a leader with a spiritual, not a nationalist, vision. A new leader, an actual Tsar, would have to cleanse the Russian Church of American and other traitors, all the fifth columnists and sectarians, supporting those who oppose them instead of persecuting us, and protect all the Local Orthodox Churches, which the Russian Orthodox Church must co-operate with and not dominate. He, the leader of the New Rus’, would be the ultimate destiny of Rus’. If we may paraphrase: ‘Six Ages of Rus’ have fallen, the Seventh stands and an Eighth there shall not be’.

 

America, the Ukraine, Russia, the Church: Temptation, Tragedy, Challenge and Opportunity

Foreword

The world is now becoming a post-globalist world. The Globalists (Americans) have been defeated by the Sovereignists. Despite the attempts by the US elite, the power behind the throne, to keep the embarrassingly senile Biden in power until after the next elections, the Ukraine is collapsing (and Gaza genocided by American bombs) and so Biden too will Biden. First in Russia, then in Hungary, then in Slovakia, now in the Netherlands, the Sovereignists are in power. They are increasingly strong in Germany, Italy and France. Union is off the cards. Confederation is the order of the day, as the real New World Order. Sovereignty is beyond the artificial and absurd divisions of left and right, inventions of the Western oligarchies (the mythical ‘democracies’) in order to divide and rule. Sovereignty is what both Russia and China have, though the Globalists falsely call them ‘autocracies’. The Western world has yet to recover its sovereignty. It still can, if it takes the opportunity to return to the Holy Trinity, the model of unity in diversity, what politicians today call multipolarity.

The American Temptation

The American temptation was Empire building, not just in one region, but universally or ‘globally’, as it proclaimed. Let us leave the north to the ice and build ‘from sea to shining sea’, they said. So they stole half a Continent from the natives, whom they slaughtered, bought from a desperate Napoleon, grasped the south from Mexico, began a Civil War with 600,000 dead and invaded small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. This culminated in a four-year war and dropping its atom bombs on the big island of Japan in 1945 in order to dominate the Pacific. At the same time, they conquered and occupied the peninsula of Western Europe in 1944-5, which victory followed its expeditionary experiment of 1917-18. The 1945 double victory meant its victory over half the world. The USA was a Superpower. It still had to conquer the heartland of Eurasia, which it thought it had done in 1991, becoming the only Superpower. This was a delusion and it duly proclaimed it as ‘the end of history’. This proud triumphalism, a Non-Jewish Zionism, was failure, for the fall always follows pride – delusions are always countered by reality.

The American Empire depended on using expendable proxies, puppets whom it flattered and told that they were superior to their neighbours. These puppets were hired do the dirty work for the US. Through them it could divide and rule, sowing chaos and destruction, whether in Latin America, East Asia, West Asia or in ex-Soviet Eastern Europe. However, its agents, from Marcos to Somoza, from Hussein to Bin Laden, from Bolsinaro to Zelensky, would go off script, falling into delusion. The USA has always suffered from a ‘spoilt child syndrome’. The spoilt child always shouts: ‘If I cannot have it, then no-one will have it’. And so they destroy their once much-coveted puppets and toys. This I know from experience with an American. Internationally, it can be seen in Latin America, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Western and Eastern Europe – now isolated from Russia. However, this spoilt-child syndrome only works in a unipolar world of exclusivism, not in a multipolar world. In the latter there is choice and people can escape US despotism, whose policy of containment fails.

The Ukrainian Tragedy

Now desperate the Kiev government wants to mobilise all Ukrainians between the ages of 17 and 70, Berlin-style, and, barbarically, women. The latter are already being killed on the front, where poorly trained and poorly equipped troops without air support, average age 43, are being forced to commit suicide against vastly superior Russian forces. Kiev dead already number between 500,000 and 600,000 and more and more are deserting. The needless death of these troops is a war crime. President Zelensky, like Hitler suicidally forbidding retreat despite military advice, is also isolated and unhinged in his bunker, having banned elections, delusional with his Messiah complex. His PR advisors have told the Western media that Russians have tried to assassinate him five times. Of course, this is nonsense. Zelensky, the brilliant and well-paid actor but utterly incompetent politician, is the greatest asset of the Russians. He may well be assassinated, only by US-backed Ukrainians, which assassination can then be blamed on Russia. The Ukraine has now lost 20%, of its territory, taken back by Russian forces after being ruled by the Ukraine for up to 100 years. But since Kiev refuses to negotiate, it will lose even more.

If the Ukrainians manage to continue losing, they could lose up to 50% of their territory or even more. Russian forces are waiting to fill the vacuum once the Kiev forces collapse and move forward to the River Dnieper and, if necessary, cross it. Whatever happens, Kiev will be forced to surrender unconditionally. There will be no negotiated settlement, as Kiev refused this constantly for eight years. The new, post-Zelensky government in the Ukraine will have to agree to and sign the Russian conditions. It is indeed time to end ‘the magical thinking about Russia’s defeat,’ by which headlines the Wall Street Journal means ending its own delusions and fantasies and those of the whole Collective West and their carefully censored media since 2014. As we have been predicting in over 116 published articles between March 2022 and October 2023, the West is being routed in the Ukraine. Kiev is the second Kabul and even worse in humiliation. As a result, the failed elites in the US and in Europe will fall. NATO and the EU are therefore finished; they were only ever post-1945 relics. Their time is up. Europe’s future is Eurasian and Confederal.

Indeed, the reign of the official Western media like the BBC, used by Western Establishments as propaganda mouthpieces, weapons of mass deception, are over. People are seeing through their lies. The US and the EU made a fatal mistake in forcing Russia into a close alliance with China through their aggression. It was delusional Western hubris that called Russia ‘a gas station with nukes’. Its booming economy has now overtaken the depressed German economy, cut off from cheap energy by US sabotage. As a result of the rout of the Collective West in the Ukraine, worldwide all recognise that there are three Superpowers: China, Russia and USA – and in that order. It is two against one. Queueing up not far behind them are India, the Muslim World, Africa and Latin America, with largely unpopulated Australia left as the natural resource reserve for the great East Asian Superpower – China. Europe discounted itself by allying itself with the US as vassals and client states. Now US failure and humiliation are shared by its lapdogs, Germany, France and especially the UK. France and the UK are to lose their places on the UN Security Council.

The Russian Challenge

Militarily, economically and diplomatically, this is a triumph for the Russian Federation, a Superpower and not ‘a regional power’, as the US President Obama contemptuously called it only a decade ago. Russia is in fact the leader of what used to be called ‘The Global South’, the 90% of the new multipolar world which is Non-Western. Through Russian-founded BRICS +, Russia is the toast of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They too want independence from the neo-colonial West, now that Russia has shown the way through its superiority. It is Russia, backed by China, which with BRICS troops will make peace in West Asia between Palestine and Israel and at last, inevitably, give the Palestinians justice and a homeland. The US is isolated at the UN and has failed because it was one-sided and supported the injustice of Israeli genocide. The US has failed both to divide Europe from Russia and failed to divide and colonise Russia, which was its aim in using Ukrainian soldiers as pawns to attack Russia and die for Washington. However, winning the war in the Ukraine and defeating American Europe is one thing. Russia must also win the peace.

In the Ukraine, this means no occupation of the real Ukraine, where real Ukrainians live, in the north-west and centre-west. It also means that all the Non-Ukrainian parts of the pre-2014 Ukraine, created by brutal Soviet dictators and whose brutality the Collective West has so fervently supported, where Russians, Poles, Romanians and Hungarians live, will at last be able to return to their homelands. They will leave the real Ukraine, about half the Soviet Ukraine. As post-Soviet Russia learned its lesson not to oppress Non-Russian peoples and has never had the slightest intention of occupying the real Ukraine, let alone other Eastern European countries (Zelensky’s Ukraine was in no way defending the West ‘against the Asiatic Muscovite hordes’; that was pure racist propaganda), the peoples of Europe are going to see the real Russia, instead of seeing it through the eyes of their US-selected elite of nonentities, who constantly lied to them. With people’s governments in Europe, a new agreement could be reached, with the abandonment of NATO and mutually beneficial security guarantees.

This means the repeal of the illegal anti-Russian sanctions and respect for the human rights of Russian minorities in all European countries, especially in the Ukraine, where the Orthodox Church has been banned. Tragedy remains. Apart from the unnecessary sacrifice of a whole generation of well over a million Ukrainian men, killed or crippled, Ukraine will need rebuilding – and repopulating. Eight million and more fled Zelensky’s tyranny and his hated SBU secret police and many were needlessly made to fear Russia because of Western propaganda. They emigrated, first to Russia, then to Poland, Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. The death toll for Russia could well reach 40,000 dead. There were also the 14,000 Russian-speaking civilians massacred by the US-installed Kiev regime in the Donbass since 2014. Apart from this, there is the whole question of the once multinational Russian Church. In February 2022 its leadership took a Russian nationalist stance. This meant that Non-Russians and those Russians who did not agree with the Russian Military Operation in the Ukraine left that politicised Church, some with bitterness.

The Orthodox Christian Opportunity

Clergy and people outside Russia, in the Ukraine, in the Baltics, in Moldova, in Western Europe and one day in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, will not return to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Church will have to decentralise and form a family of new and autocephalous (independent) Local Churches for these peoples. This is the challenge and the only way forward. The Russian temptation was to try and dominate the rest of the Orthodox Church because their Church is by far the biggest and so the most powerful, three-quarters of the whole. God has humbled them and they will be reduced to half of the Orthodox world. Russians will have to return to their saints, to Sts Antony and Theodosius of Kiev, St Sergius of Radonezh, St Nil of Sora, St Paisy (Velichkovsky), St Seraphim of Sarov, the Saints of Optina, St John of Kronstadt, the New Martyrs and Confessors, St John of Shanghai. These are the actual spiritual and moral leaders of the Russian Church. Today the Russian Church is at last heading towards becoming a post-post-Soviet Church, that is, to a Church free of centralisation, nationalism, politics, sect and schism.

However, there was also the Greek nationalist temptation, no less historic in its catastrophic proportions. This temptation, which began as long ago as 1917, was to go the way of the world, that is of the USA. Now God has humbled the Greeks too, making them powerless in worldly terms, for they placed their hope ‘in princes and the sons of men’. Their only greatness is in the saints whom they themselves persecuted, St Nectarios, St Paisios and St Porphyrios, to name but a few. The situation reminds us of the following. Some forty years ago St Paisios the Athonite told a then young man, whom I know well, the following. The young man had been scandalised by the conduct of certain bishops. Fr Paisios told him: ‘When you walk along a path on Athos and come across animal excrement, what do you do? You kick it aside into the bushes so that other passers-by will not tread in it and then you wipe your shoes’. This is what we do today. We shall defeat both sectarianism and modernism, for they all end up in the same way, in the bushes, in sect and schism.

Reflections on the New Offer to Join the Moscow Patriarchate

On Saturday 11 November 2023 we were asked by a bishop of the Moscow Patriarchate if our group of six parishes and 5,000 parishioners would like to transfer from the Patriarchate of Romania to the Moscow Patriarchate. He has told us that this can be arranged, apparently following new instructions from the now besieged Moscow, backtracking from the past. Here is our answer, reprinted and updated from 20 February 2022:

 

Even if I look at the situation as an outsider, just objectively, it will seem absurd, unthinkable and outrageous. There is a very small ROCOR diocese covering a sizeable part of Europe. Its bishop created a schism, causing a lot of damage and pain to many faithful and clergy, including to some widely-known priests. And its American Synod is paralysed due to Metr. Hilarion’s illness (dementia and cancer). And there is the Moscow Patriarchate, the main centre, which can take steps and heal the schism any time, and punish its instigator, any time it wishes. But, instead, it coldly and calmly observes the situation, pretending to ignore it, and in effect taking the perpetrator’s side, without protecting the suffering faithful and clergy. How does it look after that? As if the main centre is afraid of the instigator. Even if you look at this as a pure outsider, its behaviour appears absurd and far from Christian.

From a Correspondent in Moscow, February 2022

 

Many untruths, slander, vilification and much misinformation have been posted about us on the internet over the last thirty months. It is the same vilification as led to the unjust suspension of the great St John of Shanghai in his time, sixty years ago. These postings have clearly been centrally organised. Other lies, or simply misunderstandings, will follow.

This whole affair has been a story of bullying and then betrayal. Throughout the several months of this affair, a certain young, inexperienced and non-seminary trained neophyte bishop, formerly a tutor in a Roman Catholic college in the City of Oxford, has consistently portrayed our departure from the Russian Church as a ‘personal rebellion’. He did this in order to portray himself in a good light and to minimise the gravity of the situation, in which he has lost over half his diocese in the British Isles.

On 23 August 2021 16 clergy left ROCOR in the British Isles in all. True, three of them were Western rite and they are not involved in our group, now that we have been forced into leaving the Russian Church. The annual throughput of our six parishes (excluding the Western rite ones) is about 5,000 Orthodox.

This was never a ‘personal rebellion’, but the collective decision to reject the ROCOR schism from the MP Archdiocese of Western Europe on the issue of rebaptism, which began over a year ago in Cardiff and has now spread throughout both ROCOR dioceses in Western Europe.

ROCOR’s excessive reactions were caused by what really lies behind his attitude: the determination to seize our properties and extract more money from us by bullying over the last four years. We resisted this, but never dreamed of leaving his jurisdiction for reasons of disputes about property ownership, or his bullying, negativity and spectacular rudeness. We consider that you can only canonically leave a jurisdiction in cases of episcopal heresy, episcopal schism or episcopal attempts to force people into acts of gross immorality.

That very young and untrained bishop managed to offend everyone in our multinational group.

He offended our Russian core by writing the most untruthful and unChristian personal attacks against the popular Fr Andrew Phillips on the internet over the last thirty months. As one of our parishioners said: ‘Everyone who knows Fr Andrew and the other 25 members of his family knows all that to be lies. He is a well-known figure internationally, tireless worker for Russian Church unity over the decades, writer, hagiographer, European cultural historian, author of the Services to All the Saints of the Isles (of the North Atlantic) and to All the Saints of the Western\ Lands, and the greatest Russophile you can find in England, who has been faithful to the Russian Church despite continual persecution for nearly fifty years. Unlike his bishop, he speaks and writes fluent Russian and he does not tell Russians to ‘learn English’, so they can speak to him. If the Russian Church rejects him, it will have no friends left in Western Europe. What an appalling way to treat people who have sacrificed their whole lives for the Russian Church’.

The young neophyte bishop then offended the Romanians, telling them to their face that he did not like them and then offended  the Moldovans that he only half-liked them and then forbade them from kneeling on Sundays, something that Orthodox in Moldova have been doing for centuries.

He offended the Greeks by telling them publicly that they must not venerate the icon of St Sophrony, whom Fr Andrew knew well and who was also forced to leave the Moscow Patriarchate because of persecution, and that their Greek Patriarch is ‘possessed’.

He offended the French, with whom he communicates by Google translator, by excommunicating members of their family and friends of 50 years standing who live in France and have always belonged to the Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate. For decades Fr Andrew had battled for this Archdiocese to rejoin the Russian Church and he with others had been successful in this.

He offended the English in an act of swaggering American imperialism and crass cultural insensitivity by insisting that they speak American English, instead of their own native English, which they had been using in the Orthodox context for long before he had been born.

He insisted that we left ROCOR without letters of canonical leave. At any point he could have written those letters in a matter of 15 minutes. Although these letters were politely requested on several occasions by Metr Jean and then by Metr Joseph, he refused to write them. However, in reality no letters of canonical leave were ever necessary, since clergy do not need letters of canonical leave in order to quit a bishop who is in schism (Canon XV of the First and Second Council held under St Photius the Great).

After Metr Jean of the Moscow Patriarchal Archdiocese of Western Europe was forced, stabbed in the back by a certain MP Metropolitan (even younger than nearly all our children), to abandon us on 10 February 2022, with the words ‘I could not care less about them’, We discussed what to do. Tired of the utter divisiveness and sectarianism of the Russian Church, whose bishops are out of communion even with each other, we as a group considered offers from various Local Churches to join them.

We decided for the following reasons to join the Romanian Orthodox Church:

The Romanian Church is in communion with everyone. They are not involved in the Russian-Greek dispute, which began in the Ukraine and has already spread to Africa and elsewhere, isolating the Russian Church.

Over 60% of all Orthodox in England are Moldovans or Romanians. They have an Autonomous Synod of seven Bishops for Western and Southern Europe, nearly 700 parishes, a large number of parishes and two monasteries. No Local Church will ever be formed in the British Isles and Ireland without this majority.

Among our 13 clergy are two Moldovan priests, one Romanian priest, one Moldovan deacon, one Moldovan reader and one Romanian reader. Thus, nearly half our clergy are Romanian-speaking.

The majority of our people are Moldovans or Romanians. As we have so many Moldovans, Ukrainians and Russians, we remain on the old calendar and all our liturgical customs, with the full blessing of Metr Joseph. Nothing changes. Effectively we are a Diaspora part of the Metropolia of Bessarabia, which is under the Patriarchate of Romania.

There are 30,000 Moldovans in Essex and East London who have been pastorally neglected. We have a pastoral duty towards them.

All our six parishes and twelve clergy were received into the Patriarchate of Romania in just four hours on 16 February 2022, with the help of the leading Professor of Canon Law of the Patriarchate of Romania.

We believe that the four very aggressive clerical personalities in the Russian Church who are entirely responsible for the divisions and who have either created or else supported sectarian division inside it will in time be removed.

Then will have to begin the work of re-establishing canonical, and not political, principles of action. The present situation leaves the Russian Church in Western Europe in a state of three jurisdictions, divided and feeling betrayed. It has created great scandal among the people who can only see warring, aggressive and bullying bishops. This is all because of the lack of conciliarity between the three Russian jurisdictions. They ask: ‘Are those bishops even Christians?’

This whole intra-Russian situation reflects the wider and scandalous divisions between the Local Orthodox Churches, which can only be overcome through a return to canonical, and not political, practices, to be re-established by a Council of the whole Orthodox Church.

20 February 2022

This very cruel rejection and betrayal by the Russian Church of its greatest Non-Russian friends in the United Kingdom, ourselves, after nearly fifty years of faithfulness, has led to a spiral of departures from it caused by further astounding acts of Russian nationalism, resulting in November 2023 in its now disastrous situation in the Ukraine, Latvia and Moldova. In the last case, senior priests are now pleading with their Metropolitan to lead the remains of his Church and follow the 30% who have already left it into the Patriarchate of Romania (See the article below, Metropolitan Vladimir….). This is exactly what we did first, over twenty months ago on 16 February 2022, fleeing schism, sectarianism, cultishness, phariseeism, censoriousness, bigotry, greed, sheer lack of love and lack of pastoral care. We fled a very young, inexperienced neophyte bishop who knew very little about the realities of Orthodoxy, only bookish theories, and did not understand even the language of his Russian clergy and people. As by far the senior and most experienced priest in his diocese and financially and morally independent, I had the responsibility and duty of leading the exodus across the Red Sea of his old calendarist schism. What began then has now developed into the heresy (I do not use that word lightly) of the rebaptism of Orthodox who wish to join ROCOR. As the proverb says: ‘Those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind’.

City of Colchester

13 November 2023

 

Metropolitan Vladimir convenes a meeting with all the deacons, after receiving the letter from the priests from Botanica

On Thursday, at the Metropolia of Chisinau and All Moldavia, a meeting is to be held with all the archpriests and abbots of monasteries subordinate to Metropolitan Vladimir, at which the proposal of some priests regarding the in corpore accession of this Church structure to the Patriarchate will most likely be discussed in Romanian.

According to the priest Pavel Borsevschi, the Metropolitan convened the meeting, after receiving today the letter from the clerics of the Botanica Deanery of Chisinau, which urges him to switch to the Romanian Orthodox Church.

A single priest from the II Deanery of the Archdiocese of Chisinau spoke out against the accession of the Metropolia of Moldova to the Romanian Patriarchate. The Dean of Botanica, priest Pavel Borșevschi, said this for Jurnal.md. We mention that 30 churches from the Botanica Deanery, but also from the villages of Sângera, Revaca, Băcioi, Străsiteni and Brăila are part of the II Deanery of the Archdiocese of Chisinau.

“The letter is signed by most of the priests in the diocese. We do not propose to join the Metropolia of Bessarabia, but we demand that the entire Metropolia, as a canonical structure, led by Metropolitan Vladimir, renounce the Russian Church and Patriarch Kyrill and come under the jurisdiction of the Romanian Patriarchate. We cannot be in a church where the Patriarch blesses his priests to pray for the victory of the Russian army over Ukraine, which is our suffering sister. We have just had a war in Transnistria, with the blessing of Patriarch Alexiy II. In such cases, when we say “victory”, we are talking about humiliation. It is something that cannot be explained from a Christian point of view.

When he received the letter, the Metropolitan did not tell us either yes or no, but decided to summon all the deacons and abbots of the monasteries on Thursday to discuss this issue. I don’t think he has any reason to disagree with us, based on his letter to Patriarch Kyrill and considering that this opinion is not only ours, the priests’, but also that of the religious community, which we shepherd” . priest Pavel Borševschi reported.

We remind you that, on September 5 Metropolitan Vladimir addressed a letter to Patriarch Kyrill, in which he informs him that he cannot do anything to stop the rise of the Metropolia of Bessarabia in the Republic of Moldova and that the Russian Church is perceived in society as an outpost of the Kremlin and a supporter of the Russian intervention in Ukraine. The letter also states that “the people of Moldova have Latin roots and it is perfectly normal to aspire to remain in this civilizational space, after centuries of artificial division”.

In Memoriam: The Russian Emigration Church

Those of us who became part of the Russian Emigration Church half-way through its life, back in the 1970s, have been betrayed by the direction of the post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church. We knew quite well such figures as Metr Antony Bloom (I was tonsured reader by him in January 1981), Archbishop Basil Krivoshein, Archbishop George Tarasov, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Archbishop Seraphim of Brussels. Whatever their ‘jurisdiction’, their spirit was the same – that of piety, that of non-possession, that of pastoral care, that of faithfulness to St Sergius of Radonezh, St Seraphim of Sarov, St John of Kronstadt, to the New Martyrs and Confessors. And their spirit was a missionary spirit, a multinational spirit, not a narrow nationalist spirit. Today all those bishops are spinning in their graves, as they see the spirit of materialist possession, nationalism and narcissism that has taken over the Russian Church administration and even filters down among priests. Of them there are two sorts: those who are hireling priests for career and ‘awards’ and those, like us, who cannot be supressed, because we are priests by destiny.

The Russian Orthodox administration, called the Moscow Patriarchate, will inevitably now lose all its churches outside Russia. We were the first to leave. The strangest thing is that the Patriarchate’s strongest ally outside Russia is ROCOR. What was in its first three generations the most spiritually independent, and could still be so, has now become the most loyal servant of compromise with the world. With its history, it should have been the first to ask the serious questions. It refuses and so the task has been left to us.

How sad that a few years after the Russian Church administration had been freed of atheist persecution, it began to behave towards its faithful children not as a mother, but as a stepmother, and began to persecute us. As a result of its political compromises and nationalism, the Moscow Patriarchate has lost all authority and influence with us in the Emigration and in general outside the Russian Federation. It can no longer be the Patriarchate of Orthodox in the Emigration in Western Europe, in the Ukraine, in the Baltic States, in Central Asia, in Moldova, in Belarus. As a result, it will lose all the once Russian Orthodox Churches, Metropolias and Dioceses outside the Russian Federation. The following article confirms exactly what we began to observe since 2016, forcing us in 2022 to leave the Russian Orthodox Church after nearly fifty years of loyalty to it. It had been disloyal to us and had abandoned us. We were left with no other choice. We thank God that we were well-known to many bishops who were happy to help us and ignore the uncanonical and absurd sanctions later taken against us after we had left.

 

Another 13 parishes leave the Metropolia of Moldova and move to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. Another 50 will follow in the coming weeks

Next week, 13 churches from different districts will officially pass to the Metropolia of Bessarabia, sources close to these parishes told Radio Free Europe. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, more than 60 priests from the Republic of Moldova have moved from the Metropolia of Moldova to that of Bessarabia.

Two weeks ago six priests were excommunicated by the Synod of the Orthodox Church of Moldova (canonically subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate), because they Had joined the Metropolis of Bessarabia (part of the Romanian Patriarchate), in a few days another 13 parishes will leave the Metropolia of Moldova. Next week, these churches are to receive the re-registration documents from the Public Services Agency.

One of the parishes that has already changed its metropolitan in documents is the church of the Holy Archangels Mihail and Gavril from Malcoci village, Ialoveni district. Its parish priest, priest Andrei Oistric, was until recently Dean of the Faculty of Pastoral Theology at the Academy of Orthodox Theology, part of the Metropolia of Moldova.

“I studied in Suceava and Bucharest and I was always closer to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. I have dedicated more than half of my life to theological education: for 13 years I was a teacher, spiritual priest and deputy director at the “Regina Maria” girls’ high school theological seminary and for another 12 years I worked at the Academy of Theology, of which 10 years I was Dean. My feelings for Romanian Orthodoxy were not a secret. All my colleagues and students knew this,” priest Andrei Oistric told Radio Free Europe.

How does the transition from one Metropolia to another take place?

The parish priest from Malcoci says that he wanted to move to the Metropolia of Bessarabia 15 years ago, when he came to the village, but the people in the community were not ready. “Since the war started, I have had more and more requests from the parishioners: “Father, look at how the war is supported, it is not good like that!”. I was also affected by this war, and so was my family. I have relatives on both sides. I showed this desire at the end of February-beginning of March, and in August the parish of Malcoci village officially passed from the Metropolia of Moldova to that of Bessarabia”, explained the priest.

The transition from one Metropolia to another is done through a legal procedure. Parishes are re-registered with the Public Services Agency. “At our place, in the village of Malcoci, a meeting was held with the parishioners and minutes were drawn up. I submitted it to the Metropolia of Bessarabia, the Ministry of Justice and the Public Services Agency. The agency gave us a new tax code, the right to have a stamp, so all the legal rights”, states the parish priest from Malcoci.

“The Russian Church was not like a mother to us, but like a stepmother”

In practical terms, however, nothing changes in the parish, not even the calendar. The priest says that he will still keep all the holidays on the old calendar. Even before officially leaving the Metropolia of Moldova, he left the Academy of Theology. His resignation was approved at the same Synod on October 25 and he was replaced by Hieromonk Macarie Crudu.

“I retired from the academy. I tried to be as fair as possible in everything. Let someone come with new forces, with new ideas. Like it or not, our roots are Latin, we don’t have Slavic roots. The Russian Church was not like a mother to us, but like a stepmother. Nevertheless, it would have been nice to say now: «Return to your natural mother, we allow you». We want to remain on friendly terms with the Russian Church, as it has been throughout the centuries”, adds the parish priest from Malcoci.

This week, the founder and vice-rector of the Academy of Theology, Viacheslav Cazacu, also declared that he had left the Metropolia of Moldova and joined the Metropolia of Bessarabia. More such announcements are expected in the coming weeks.

“The parishes that want to join the Metropolia of Bessarabia are of an impressive number, but let’s see how they take the steps. About 50 have already applied. I cannot give you the names, because that was the deal, so as not to cause confusion. Certain parishes are now in the transition process, at the documentation stage,” said the representative of the Metropolia of Bessarabia, priest Ion Marian, to Radio Free Europe.

Two weeks ago, the Metropolia of Moldova defrocked six priests who had transferred to the Metropolia of Bessarabia. On the other hand, the Metropolia of Bessarabia considers that the decision to defrock the six priests is not valid, because it has no justification “from a theological and canonical perspective”. In a press release, the Metropolia of Bessarabia urged all clerics and monks who “feel constrained by the Russian dioceses to have the courage to get out of this slavery and return to the tradition and communion of the Romanian Orthodox Church”.

In a letter sent to Russian Patriarch Kyrill in September, Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova complained that the Metropolia of Moldova is losing ground to the Republic of Moldova due to the war in the Ukraine and that more and more priests are moving to the Metropolia of Bessarabia.

The two Orthodox churches operating on the territory of the Republic of Moldova – subordinated to the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Romanian Patriarchate, respectively – have disputed their canonical status since 2002, when the Metropolia of Bessarabia was registered, following a decision of the European Court of Human Rights.

 

 

Searching for the Spiritual

Seek first the kingdom of heaven and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you (Matt, 6, 33)

Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s (Matt 22, 21)

In the World

The genocide that is going on at this very moment by the graveyards of children in Palestinian Gaza can rightly be called a holocaust, a whole burnt offering on the altar of hatred. ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, they say, but the occupying Israelis are taking ten eyes for every eye and ten teeth for every tooth the Palestinians have taken. However, what we outside observers see happening there is actually much less tragic than in the Ukraine, where some 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been dying for NATO’s war every single day for over 500 days, making well over 500,000 dead so far. Euroatlantic NATO, called North America and Western Europe, and Middle Eastern NATO, called Israel, are at work. Such are the aggressive ways of the world, following the rejection of diplomacy. Atheists fighting atheists, but also brothers fighting brothers. It is deeply tragic and no Christian agrees to war. We defend, but we do not offend, others. Such is the Law of Love.

In the Russian Orthodox Church

The saddest thing is that all this time certain bishops of the once multinational and once non-sectarian Russian Orthodox Church have also been warring for nationalism, but not for Christ. Thus, most Orthodox churches in the Ukraine no longer want to commemorate the Russian Patriarch. This is understandable, as he appears to be in favour of war and not of peace. And yet, as a result of the refusal to commemorate him, there are those who condemn the heroic and State-persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev as ‘schismatic’. Should we not rather support those persecuted by the corrupt and anti-democratic Kiev government? For the pharisees who love the word ‘schismatic’, the fact that Orthodox churches in Latvia, whose Faith is no way altered, are now not allowed to commemorate the name of the Russian Patriarch means that those churches too are ‘schismatic’! But surely the only important thing is that churches commemorate Christ? Patriarchs come and go. They are hardly the main point. Faith comes before Nation and the Orthodox Faith is everywhere the same, Russia, the Ukraine, Latvia. Sadly, there are some Russians who love to use the word ‘schismatic’, when what they really mean is ‘Non-Russian’.

Now we have a similar situation in Moldova, where Orthodox are leaving the Russian Church to join the neutral Romanian Orthodox Church for exactly the same reason – they seek spiritual freedom, not the captivity of Russian nationalism. In any case, the Russian Orthodox Church is the only one of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches where all should commemorate its leading bishop (patriarch) (as in Roman Catholicism). In all other Churches they commemorate only their local bishop, as is ancient tradition. Sadly, all too many Orthodox seem not to want to follow Christ. Instead, they want to follow the spirit of this world, either of ritualist nationalism, or else of pharisaic conservatism, or else of liberal secularism. As a result, they at once introduce division into the Church. This we saw most clearly in the highly politicised Russian Orthodox Church Diaspora after 1917. It quickly split into three warring parts. The first and by far the smallest part, was so nationalistically loyal that it remained with atheist Soviet Moscow and neither sought the freedom or desired the freedom to tell the truth about the persecution there. Even though its adherents lived in political freedom outside the USSR, they preferred loyalty to the Soviet Caesar in Moscow.

Others, Francophile aristocrats and bourgeois liberals, who had actually greeted their first 1917 Revolution, founded a separate grouping. This was under the Anglo-American controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople, which sadly veered and veers towards the Caesar of Western secularism. However, the majority of Russian emigres preferred conservative politics, shaped by their visceral anti-Communism. However, in recent years its newly-enriched bishops have been shaped by a visceral centralising Russian nationalism, which excludes all others unless they pretend to be more Russian than Russians, even though they speak Russian badly. They did not have to choose this latter path, as they are numerous enough to have a supposedly independent Synod outside Russia. However, purely voluntarily, they chose political subservience to Moscow and so showed that they have no reason to exist separately from it. Their whole structure should be absorbed into Moscow, as they are not local and have plainly rejected any contribution towards the Incarnation and building Local Churches. This rejection of the local is why after a generation or two their flock disappears and they have to rely on the ex-Soviet Union to restock their empty churches with people.

Tragically, none of these three movements put Christ first. The result was division, not least among the increasingly pharisaic conservative group. Today this group is enforcing schism from its own brothers and sisters and now even wants to rebaptise other Russian Orthodox, let alone Non-Russians. Their lack of love is such that none is good enough for them. Although there were those who without reward toiled for decades for unity against these Russian divisions of nationalism, phariseeism and liberalism, and despite being viciously persecuted and slandered, these three worldly failings of ritualist nationalism, pharisaic conservatism and liberal secularism were all greater than the love of Christ. As a result, all three groups are now dying out because of a false spirituality which confounds Caesar with Christ and idolatrously renders to Ceasar what is Christ’s. All such false spiritualities are fake, emphasising only the outward, nationalism, ritualism, secularism, power, gold and the world, and do not possess inward spiritual content. Those who preach the false Christ, who is called Caesar, preach spiritual impurity. Thus, they are marked by the sinister sign of Death, the spirit of this world, whose prince is satan and whose minions are the Nations of this world.

The Spiritual

The task of seeking to return Church structures, and so the world, to their proper order falls to all who seek the spiritual. The world will be saved by the spiritual, which is why Christ the Saviour will return at the end of it. For now we may seek and find the spiritual on Mt Athos, in the Carpathians, in the forests of Sarov and Optino, in the Hebrides, in secret and little-known places, in woods and mountains and on islands, but also in great cities and pious families, wherever the Word of God is kept. Sadly, we are unlikely to find the spiritual among bishops who view their passports issued by earthly States as far more important than their passports to Heaven, which have yet to be issued at all. They have yet to put Christ first and that is why they, with their politics, bureaucracy and ‘protocols’, seek spiritual Death. And as their churches empty, it is Death they are finding, for ‘they hold the form of religion, but deny the power of it. Avoid such people’ (2 Tim. 3, 5).

The End of a World

Politics

Catastrophic predictions and apocalyptic undertones are here. Even the name of a place in the Holy Land, Armageddon, is on some people’s lips. The US elite is threatening to invade Chinese Taiwan ‘in order to protect it from China’. In the US-backed ‘democratic’ Ukraine, that ‘bastion of Western ‘Civilisation’’ the most corrupt country in the world, which is now banning Christianity, 20,000 untrained and poorly-equipped Ukrainian conscripts are dying every month for the sake of dependence on the US, thousands more are shot in the back by the Ukrainian secret police for retreating, or else are deserting or surrendering. The Ukrainian birthrate has plummeted to 0.7 per woman and the population is now under 20 million, whereas just over thirty years ago it was 52 million.

Then there is the Holy Land, where Israeli colonists, 100% backed by US and Western European financial, and therefore political and media elites, but not by their peoples, are planning to genocide two million native Palestinians. Men, women and children are being murdered or dismembered by US bombs, dropped by US aircraft with Israeli insignia. The whole once disunited and warring Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan, from Iran to Turkey, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, from Yemen to Syria, is united against the Israeli military machine and its Western sponsors. Mass demonstrations in support of the genocided Palestinians, largely unreported by Western State media, are taking place all over the world, including in Western countries. The US is isolated, faced down by the Global Majority, from Brazil to South Africa. Heads of countries even refuse to speak to the senile President Biden. It has sent aircraft carriers, but China has sent warships, as Russia also. Iran is threatening isolated Israel and its corrupt political leaders with destruction, if Israel invades Gaza. In Syria, part of which is illegally occupied by the US Army, which is pumping out stolen oil, Russian forces, present at the invitation of the Syrian government, are threatened by the US. They will react.

The problem is ‘Gentile Zionism’. This is the Non-Jewish, Western fantasy that all political decisions taken by Western countries are infallibly correct and that the superior Western ‘liberal’ world, as ‘an exceptional civilisation’ with ‘a manifest destiny’, must rule the planet as the unique model for all. All Non-Westerners are as nothing, just folklore to look at in a Disneyland zoo. The Global Majority, seven billion out of eight billion, do not agree with this Nazism and is at this moment preparing to intervene in the Holy Land to bring about a ceasefire. There has only ever been one way out of this, ‘the two-state solution’: one homeland for Jews and one homeland for Palestinians, as was agreed by Resolution 181 of the UN in 1947, but which has ever since been vetoed by the US.

Christianity

The largest nominal religion in the world, though still covering only a minority of the world, is Christianity. Two forms of it used to predominate in the Western world. The first, Roman Catholicism, invented a thousand years ago, has been undermined by unending scandals involving papal and episcopal corruption, clerical pedophilia and crime, misogyny and racism. Few Roman Catholic laypeople actually believe in or observe its controversial ideology. The second form, Protestantism, invented 500 years ago after dissatisfaction with Roman Catholicism, has nearly completely dissolved into the anti-Christian Secularism which both spawned. Protestant leaders widely predict that their own religion will die out by 2050. Who believes in the Western form of Protestantism any more? Most Protestant churches in the Western world are empty and many have been sold or are for sale.

As for the Non-Western, Orthodox Church, some of its main leaders are only politicians and not pastors, whose only concern seems to be power and money. Thus, the Greek Patriarch, out of communion with the Russian Church, set up an uncanonical Church in the Ukraine for a $25 million bribe from the US and his Patriarchate has been undermined by incessant sexual and financial scandals. Meanwhile, the Russian Patriarch, out of communion with the Greek Patriarch, thanks St Seraphim of Sarov for nuclear weapons! (1). His once multinational and united Church, undermined by centralisation and Russian nationalism, is utterly divided. It suffers from constant moral and financial scandals with bishops, divisions or schisms everywhere outside Russia, in Estonia, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova (2). Tomorrow divisions may well begin in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Moreover, the Russian Church’s small, sectarian American branch has been in schism from its even smaller French branch for nearly three years. Nothing has been done about this schism except to encourage it, despite the appeals of its clergy to its now wealthy bishops to return from schism, the consequent collapse of the American branch in one country and the open persecution of theologically-educated and conscientious Orthodox. One of the American bishops scandalously and openly rebaptises, not just Non-Orthodox, but even other Orthodox (!). This is a sect, not part of the Church. Yet, apparently, the leaders of the Russian Church find this arrogant Americanisation and ‘One True Church’ sectarianisation normal.

We have seen it all before. Those who have not seen it all before can read about it in the history books. Although all may become a lot worse, we do not believe the apocalyptic hype. In the Holy Land the Global Majority (miscalled by some the ‘Global South’), Russia, China, India, Africa, Latin America, can still make peace between the two warring sides in the Holy Land. If US dollars were to be withdrawn from troubled places, Taiwan would peacefully return to China, the Ukraine would peacefully return to Russia, and the south and west of Israel would peacefully return to Palestine. There are solutions.

As for Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, these were only ever temporary, politically-shaped Western deviations of Christianity, with some very strange traits. Having served their time, they can now disappear and be replaced, perhaps even by historic Christianity and the historic Church. Their roots from the first millennium are still present. As for the Orthodox Church, we have also seen all the polarised divisions and sectarianism before (3). Leaders come and go. The head of the Church is Christ, not men. When men refuse to deal with the problems they have created, Christ will step in. All racism, schisms and sects can be overcome and dissolved by new, Christ-appointed leaders. We do not believe that this is the end of the world. However, it is the end of a world. We are surely present at the remaking of the world, at its reconfiguration, not at its end.

 

Notes:

  1. In French: https://orthodoxie.com/le-patriarche-cyrille-les-armes-nucleaires-par-linexprimable-providence-de-dieu-ont-ete-creees-sous-la-protection-de-saint-seraphin-de-sarov/
  2. Summarised in Romanian in: https://tv8.md/2023/20/10/dornici-sa-invete-limba-romana-6500-de-persoane-s-au-inscris-la-cursurile-organizate-de-stat-din-ce-domenii-vin-participantii/242307.

The full version of the still unanswered letter from 5 September, which is in fact an urgent appeal for autocephaly, with its clear emphasis on continuing Russian racism towards Moldovans, is available in Romanian-style Russian (Metr Vladimir’s native language is Romanian) on Facebook. If the Russian Patriarch ignores the appeal, the whole Moldovan Church may well join the Romanian Church. The absurd and uncanonical ‘defrockings’ of Moldovan (and other) priests who have already joined the Romanian Church will be rescinded – as they always are when they are purely political.

  1. For example, there was the scandal of the rebaptism of Orthodox by the selfsame Americanised branch of Russian Orthodoxy of neophytes in Guildford, England in 1976. The remnants of that Guildford group of pseudo-Orthodox are still rebaptising Orthodox today. Just another story of primitive neophytism, openly encouraged by its bishops, of whom some are themselves neophytes, despite the canons against the consecration of neophyte bishops. But the heretical rebaptism of Orthodox is itself only a repeat of the age-old phariseeism of the sectarian heresy of Donatism from the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. There is nothing new under the sun. What is disgraceful that the leadership of the once theologically respectable Russian Church countenances such a heresy in its midst and the persecution and slandering of those who oppose it. Those who start receiving Non-Orthodox Christians by baptism end up receiving Orthodox by baptism too!

The Force of White Orthodoxy

Foreword: Come a Long Way

Ten years ago on a rainy, autumn evening, the deserted, leaf-strewn pavements shining in the streetlight, I arrived at a small hotel in rue Alexandre I in Alencon in Normandy, France. A puzzled Frenchman asked me: ‘Have you come a long way’? To which I replied with a smile: ‘Yes, I have come a very long way…from the other end of history’. I did not add, but could have added: ‘I am a White Orthodox priest. There must come justice and restoration in Russia, after which justice and restoration will come elsewhere, including here in France too.’

Three Russias

In November 1721 we saw the establishment of Imperial Russia with its enslaving westernised aristocracy. In 1922 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of the Soviet Union, Imperialist Marxist Russia with its enslaving centralised nomenklatura. In December 1991 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of post-Soviet, American Russia with its enslaving dollarised oligarchate. On 24 February 2022 this Russia in turn fell, the victim of its internal contradictions, caused by its corruption.

The three versions of Russia had lasted 200 years, 70 years and 30 years respectively. Despite great achievements, all three versions ended badly, either in revolution and tyranny, or else in plunder and despair, or else in bloodshed and tragedy. This was because for 300 years none of them had respected its underlying Orthodox Russian identity and its calling to form a Multinational Civilisation. When you go against your true nature, you suffer. That is why Russia has had to suffer for 300 years.

The End of Post-Soviet Russia

The fall of Post-Soviet American Russia is very painful and very bloody, but also inevitable. Of course, there are those who opposed its end. These were the cosmopolitan westernisers and traitors, who last year ran away from Russia, to Finland, to Georgia, to Turkey, wherever they could go. They wanted their American Russia to continue, even though both sides of the Atlantic had ‘cancelled’ Russia. Some of them already lived in the West, some of them were represented in the Russian Church. Over the last year some of them have begun to return, realising that their flight had been based on lack of faith.

On the other hand, there are also the xenophobic Russian nationalists, the Prigozhinites. They too are ending badly, as they desire the restoration by violence of an Imperialist Russia, not understanding that Russia has moved on from Imperialism and Sovietism. They understand neither Orthodoxy, nor the multinational calling of Russia. They do not understand that they will lose everything if they continue clinging on to the disastrous centralism of the past. The Multipolar Age of BRICS has begun. Unipolarity, whether Russian or Western, is over.

The Fall of the Russian Church

The State-minded nationalists, the centralist controllers and their denouncing minders who accompany them everywhere, are over-represented in the Russian Church. Its fate is now on a knife edge because of their errors. Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have written much about the possible restoration of Sovereign Orthodox Russia, the Eurasian bulwark of worldwide Orthodox Civilisation. Shall I see it before I die? Unfortunately, its heart, the Russian Church, is still not free. True, it is no longer captive to anything so crude or primitive as Communism, but instead is captive to something far worse, far more insidious, to 300 years of the dead, corrupting hand of the State.

Thus, the Russian Church is captive to spiritual captivity, practical atheism, love of power and wealth, dictatorship and bureaucracy, arbitrary rule, cultish sectarianism, its believers are exiled, the corrupt take control, intent on destroying the Church. They are Black Orthodoxy. Their feudal despotism, blatant commercialism, clerical careerism, moral corruption and institutional simony are merely symptoms of the sickness, not causes. Here is why we are still very far from the restoration of Sovereign Russia. If it comes, it can only be after the Russian Church has been cleansed by the present very painful and very bloody events in the Soviet-established Ukraine.

The Fall of the West

Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have also written much about the coming millennial turning-point in world history. At last it has come, the fall of the West after a thousand years of its elite’s domination of the rest of the world through their technology of organised violence. It is time for the West to return to itself, to its roots, to its true nature, which is in its saints and in the culture of the spirit. This is the Truth of the West, as I have been affirming for fifty years.

The Truth of the West is not in power and mammon, as, sadly, even some modern Orthodox bishops, self-appointed ‘princes of the Church’, claim. We live far away from the love of luxury, academic theorising and effeminate worldliness of such nominal bishops. We strive to live in accord with the humble spirit of genuine Orthodoxy, of White Orthodoxy, spread from the Egyptian desert to the Atlantic Hebrides, from the East Anglian coasts to the Fen islands, from Sarov forests to Carpathian hermitages.

Afterword: The Multipolar Church

As for me, I shall continue here where God has put me, in the Kingdom of the East of England. It is where I was born and where I belong. Our task is to complete the noble mission allotted us by the last Christian Emperor, to build up the Church multinationally, accepting all inclusively. We are the Free Church, the White Church. We fight off the ‘protocols’ of the evil and the greedy, the scribes and the pharisees, the sectarians and the schismatics, who would close down all our churches and destroy us all. Those who persecuted us and tried to silence us unleashed an irresistible force, the Force of the Spirit, the Force of White Orthodoxy. God is with us.

St Andrew the Fool for Christ

2/15 October 2023

 

 

The Church on Earth Belongs to the Faithful People, Not to the ‘Princes of the Church’

  1. Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be a bishop desires a noble task.2 Now the bishop is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. 5 (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s Church?) 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. 7 He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.

I Timothy 3, 1-7

England

The Church belongs to Christ, as all agree. Christ, and no other person or institution, however powerful, is the Head of the Church. However, as for the Church on earth, it is purposeless without the people. It exists to save souls. Nearly three years ago a certain very young foreign bishop, parachuted in from abroad, tried to impose his own alien culture and language on us, take away from us our church building, bought by the people and valued by the insurers at £2.35 million ($3 million), and all its contents, which he enumerated like an accountant in minute detail and for which he had composed an act to be inserted into the deeds of ownership. (For £340 our Church solicitor informed us that this act was illegal and amounted to theft). We warned the bishop and his superiors that if he continued, he would find himself with an empty building, quite expensive to run, no clergy, no choir and an empty bank account, as the people would categorically not follow him. As usual, he refused to listen to anyone, including to his own Patriarch.

The people had already obtained a very bad impression of the bishop from earlier visits, with his outbursts of rage, threatening demands for more money and bullying, basic theological and liturgical errors, as well as racist utterances against Romanians, Moldovans and English – half the parish! Sadly, as he was such an inexperienced neophyte, born after most of us, and had never taken or listened to any advice at all, he continued his threats which he published on his several de facto personal websites and on other sites where he had friends, issuing bits of paper about clergy having ‘no grace’ and discrediting himself among the whole Orthodox episcopate throughout Europe. By persecuting the faithful, he only managed to destroy his own cause and isolate himself from the Christian mainstream. It was suicidal on his part. Thus, he destroyed his own future clerical career.

Latvia

We can see similar problems in many other parts of the Russian Church today. For example, in Latvia, the local Metropolitan, in connivance with the government, has declared his Church independent (‘autocephalous’) and banned the commemoration of the Russian Patriarch. The people, a smallish and predominantly Russian minority and with a strong nationalist twist, which comes from the anti-Russian persecution they have borne for over thirty years from the US puppet government in Latvia, are furious. They had already been suffering for years from the homosexual scandals there, which nothing had ever been done about in sleeping Moscow. Now, since they have no canonical alternative to the Russian Church (no other Orthodox jurisdiction is present here), the people are voting with their feet and staying at home or else crossing the borders to go to churches in Lithuania or Estonia, where they do commemorate the Russian Patriarch.

At the moment, as far as I know, only two Russian priests in Latvia are defying their Metropolitan and the government and are commemorating their Patriarch. We await further developments in EU Latvia. This could go all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, though that Court actually seems to encourage religious persecution against Russian Orthodox, as in the Ukraine. The boycott of churches in Latvia means a fatal lack of income for the Metropolitan and it is perhaps this factor that will be decisive. For the moment, the very elderly Metropolitan has consecrated a very ill priest to the episcopate without his Patriarch’s blessing in order to create four bishops, the minimum required in order to be an independent Church. This has created even further division. It is suicidal.

Moldova

In Moldova the situation is very different. Here, Orthodox are not a small minority as in Latvia, but some 98% of the whole population. The mass of people, who are in fact Romanians, are divided between two Churches, the Russian and the Romanian. The former was the obligatory Church in the Soviet period after 1945 and is still the majority, perhaps some 80% or more.  However, the Romanian Church, whose territory this was before the Second World War, is gaining ground, quite rapidly since the conflict in the Ukraine stepped up in 2022 and since the Russian-appointed bishops in Moldova began intimidating and persecuting the clergy and the people who have left. This intimidation, by spoken and written word has, as in England nearly three years ago, had very negative consequences for the bishops who are speaking and writing thus.

Showing themselves not to be Christians by issuing threatening bits of paper about clergy who no longer ‘have grace’ is the worst thing they could do. What began as a slow movement towards the Romanian Church could easily snowball because of their actions, just as it did in England nearly three years ago. The people are urging their priests to leave the Romanian Church. Can the pastors desert their flock who want to return to the legitimate, pre-Soviet Church? No. Several of the Russian-appointed bishops in Moldova, where, as in Latvia, the set-up goes back to Soviet times, were already very compromised by videos and other leaked information, just as in England and Latvia. This is also suicidal and it is happening, exactly as in England, where there is a canonical alternative to the Russian Church and plenty of canonical Orthodox bishops who are happy to take persecuted Orthodox into their jurisdictions.

The Ukraine

Here the situation is better known, partly because it is so catastrophic. There is in the Ukraine only one canonical Church, which, living in an independent country with which Moscow is at war, has, quite reasonably, declared itself completely independent of Moscow, as indeed it used to be, though long ago. As a result, it has become the victim of persecution from centralist Moscow and also from the atheist State in Kiev. It is like Christ on the Cross, against Whom the two thieves railed, until one of them repented (Matt. 27, 44 and Mk. 15, 32). The atheist Kievan State has even set up its own rival State-run ‘Church’, given a veneer of ‘legitimacy’ by a piece of paper issued by the Patriarchate of Constantinople under US pressure, with the help of ‘a very large sum of money’ (rumoured to be $25 million). Since very few practising Orthodox in the Ukraine are interested in this fake Church with its fake clergy – they can see through it – the fake Church has been stealing church buildings from the canonical Church, which it then locks up and leaves empty, as there are no clergy and no people to fill them. It is Soviet-style persecution all over again.

This is similar to the situation in England, only in the Ukraine the gangsters have the backing of the atheist State; in England the State is simply contemptuous of religion, not actually hostile. You can try and take over churches through outbursts of rage, bullying demands for money, threats and intimidation, but you can only succeed in doing so by force, if the atheist State supports you. And even then you will only succeed in emptying them. Nobody goes to them, neither the authentic clergy, nor the people. We are reminded of the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1949): ‘A time will come when not persecution, but money and the pleasures of this world will turn people away from God and far more souls will perish than during the times of open persecution. One the one hand they will raise up crosses and gild cupolas, but on the other hand the kingdom of lies and evil will come. It will be dreadful to live until those times’.

The People

The fact is that the Church on earth belongs to the believing people. There must be consent and agreement from the faithful people. When whole parishes, clergy, their multigenerational families and the people in solidarity, apart from a tiny number of naïve, misinformed or hoodwinked individuals or recent converts, fewer than 1%, leave their bishop, it is because the bishop is in the wrong. In these cases, in truth, ‘vox populi, vox Dei’, the voice of the people is the voice of God. And the saints confirm that by their miracles.

However much the bishop may offer in bribes to clergy to set up parallel churches in the same city, sends letters to denounce the clergy and the faithful to other bishops (which they ignore, as they only discredit the bishop in question) or tries to divide the families of clergy, attempting to set son against father, a bishop cannot succeed against the impregnable fortress of real Faith. At best he will win a Pyrrhic victory, but for the most part he will utterly humiliate himself and lose everything, as has happened and is happening in all the above and other cases.

Conclusion: The Corruption of Part of the Episcopate

I remember meeting the late Fr Alexander Schmemann in Paris in May 1980. I asked him for his impressions of the episcopate inside the then Soviet Russia. He answered me: ‘Half of them are saints, the other half are demons’. Indeed, in Russia there is a popular saying that when a priest is consecrated bishop, a demon tries to enter him: sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he fails. When the demon succeeds, the consequences are awful. Visiting Florida in the USA in October 1996, I spoke to a much older priest who explained to me the struggles of his three-thousand strong parish in Pennsylvania against the intrigues of what he called ‘the lavender mafia’, (homosexuals), who controlled his previous jurisdiction. Their demands were all about property and money. That type certainly love their comfort.

Roman Catholicism in Western countries is rapidly dying out, largely because of the enforcement of celibacy on its priesthood and all the associated homosexual and pedophile scandals. In the Orthodox Church, it is not the priesthood that is the problem, but the episcopate, which also is obligatorily celibate. Thus, the pool of candidates is very small, especially where monastic life is very weak. Our unsurprising conclusion is that to be a good bishop you must have a pure soul (see I Tim 3, 1-7 above). For bad bishops will consecrate others in their own image and even more unworthy than themselves (their homosexual boyfriends, as we have so often seen) and that is why there are so many woeful metropolitans and bishops in the Church: ‘But, when the Son of Man comes, shall He find faith on the Earth?’ (Lk 18, 8).