Category Archives: Russian Church

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).

 

 

 

The Crisis in the Russian Orthodox Church: Where Are They Going?

Add more evils upon them, O Lord; add more evils upon them that are glorious upon the earth.

Isaiah, 26, 15 (Septuagint)

 

1917

In February 1917 the Russian Empire was overthrown. Almost automatically, Georgian Orthodox saw their Church recover its canonical status as the ancient Autocephalous (Independent) Georgian Orthodox Church, of which they had so long been deprived by Russian Imperialist politics. As well as this, certain Non-Russian territories of the former Russian Empire were ceded and became permanently independent parts of the new States of Poland and Czechoslovakia. In the ecclesiastical sphere, eventually two completely new Autocephalous Churches were formed out of the old Russian Imperial Church, the Church of Poland and the Church of Czechia and Slovakia, in which countries there were and still are considerable numbers of Orthodox.

As for the few mainly very Lutheranised Orthodox in newly-independent Finland, after 1917 they formed a group of parishes, which chose to be under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as indeed they still are. As well as this, all of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and territories that belonged to western Belarus, the far west of the Ukraine and the Romanian-speaking area known as Moldova or Bessarabia were ceded. However, all of these were forcibly returned to the USSR as a result of Soviet occupation and then liberation from Nazism between 1939 and 1945, in what was a de facto partial reconstitution of the old Empire by the imperialist Stalin.

Between 1917 and 1945 the Orthodox in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova had encountered various difficulties and political and ecclesiastical changes involving the Patriarchate of Constantinople or, in Moldova, the Patriarchate of Romania. However, by the end of the Second World War their territories all ended up as parts of the USSR, the successor to the Russian Empire, and ecclesiastically were once again put under the Russian Orthodox Church.

1991

Almost exactly seventy-five years later, at the end of 1991, the multinational but highly centralised USSR split into fifteen independent republics. However, only two Local Orthodox Churches existed in those fifteen new countries: the Russian and the Georgian. Thus, the former still had jurisdiction in thirteen different countries outside the new Russian Federation, where there lived millions of Russians but also representatives of other nationalities who were also Orthodox.

It is our view that the Russian Church should have followed the political decentralisation granted by political Moscow to the new countries. Thus, ecclesiastical Moscow should have granted ecclesiastical independence to the Orthodox in those new countries, as indeed some senior Russian figures said at the time. We believe that in this way five new Autocephalous Churches would have been carved out of the Russian Church. These would have been the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Moldovan, the Central Asian (covering the five countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and the Baltic (covering the three countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia). (As so few Orthodox lived in the last two new independent countries, Armenia and Azerbaijan, there was only a need there for a few dependency churches under Russia or Georgia).

If this had been done, there would no longer have been one single multinational Russian Orthodox Church, but a new family of seven Sister-Churches: the Russian (by far the largest), the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Moldovan, the Central Asian, the Baltic (and the already existing Northern American, called the OCA). These would have come on top of the already existing two Autonomous Churches of Japan and China, later joined by the three much more recent Russian Exarchates in Western Europe, South-East Asia and Africa, perhaps already granted Autonomy. Thus, there would today have been formed a family of Seven Autocephalous and Five future Autocephalous Churches, Twelve Churches in all.

Instead

Instead, we have seen what was once a multinational Russian Church increasingly becoming a national and indeed nationalist Church. Russian flags, unheard of before, are more and more often to be found inside Russian churches. For example, in 2020 a huge new Orthodox Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces was opened in Patriot Park outside Moscow, alongside the aviation museum of the Kubinka air base and a tank museum. This Cathedral can only be called nationalist in its design, which some have called ‘Stalinist baroque’ and even ‘sinister’, and some of its militarist frescoes involving the Red Army are highly controversial and for many very shocking. However, apparently all this is fully acceptable to the once independently-minded, émigré-founded Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).

Worse still, on 15 August this year, the most recent of ten new monuments and statues of Stalin was unveiled in the city of Velikie Luki near Pskov. This was blessed by priests, one of whom is alleged to have declared that Stalin was great ‘because he had created so many martyrs’. The priests who did this have been rebuked for not having a blessing from their bishop to do so (only because of this?). However, what is even more worrying is that men with such values could have been ordained to the priesthood in the first place. They compare very badly to that pious Ukrainian priest in Moscow who was recently, quite uncanonically and shockingly, ‘defrocked’ for refusing to pray for Russian victory in the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine and instead of that praying for peace. We had thought that all should pray for peace, leaving the rest to God.

It seems as though the whole Russian Church has today been reduced to nationalist politics and centralised ‘protocols’, rules and regulations. We can only imagine the protests that would now be flooding in from the senior bishops of the old Moscow Patriarchate, like Metropolitan Antony Bloom in London or Archbishop Basil Krivoshein in Brussels. They must be spinning in their graves, seeing the utter rejection of the Gospel values they lived for and wrote about and the total destruction and renunciation of all their efforts to create multinational Orthodox missions. Indeed, after a lifetime of devotion to the Moscow Church, Archbishop Basil’s nephew, Nikita, now writes and acts against Moscow nationalism and its Church. It is hardly surprising.

Far Worse Still

However, all of this is as nothing compared to the Church wars that have been triggered elsewhere outside the Russian Federation since the Russian Patriarch Kyrill endorsed in no uncertain terms the eighteen-month-old Russian Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. Last year he even stated that those Russians fighting against Ukrainians, many of the latter Orthodox, and dying in battle, would go to heaven as martyrs, rather like jihadis. So far, some 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and at least 40,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in this Operation.

This is exactly the opposite of the example of Bishop (later St) Nicholas of Tokyo. After Japan had treacherously attacked Russia in 1904, Bishop Nicholas ordered his Japanese Orthodox priests to pray for the armed forces of Japan (not at all the same as praying for their victory) and himself retired into seclusion to weep and pray, refusing to take part in any public activities. Surely Patriarch Kyrill, officially Patriarch of both Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox, as well as many other nationalities, should have done the same? Who can rejoice at war?

The result is that most Orthodox in the Ukraine, as well as many in Moldova and Latvia, some in Lithuania, Estonia, Western Europe and North America, and even a few in Belarus and the Russian Federation itself, have left the Russian Church. Orthodox in the Ukraine have declared that they are ‘fully independent’ of Moscow and Orthodox in Latvia have been declared to be autocephalous and both are acting so, not commemorating Patriarch Kyrill. Now, the usual completely unChristian ‘anathemas’ and uncanonical ‘defrockings’ are flying around. (Defrocking takes place for acts against morality, not for acts against immorality, though try telling immoral bishops that…).

Typical is the example of the very aggressive and highly controversial Bishop Markell of Baltsy and Falesht in Moldova who has declared the usual, that anyone who leaves the Moscow Church (in this case, for the Romanian Church) is automatically defrocked and ‘has no grace’. As a result, many more Moldovans are leaving him and the Moscow Church in disgust, and he has lost several churches and properties with their income, which seriously concerns him. As a result, the already isolated Russian Church, already out of communion with the Greek Churches, is on the point of falling out of communion with the Romanian Church too. Where are they going? Insanity appears to have seized them.

 

 

The Murk Lifts as the Saints Come in Victory

Four years ago now we were informed by a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) that Fr Alexander Belya had been selected as a bishop by a majority of the old ROCOR Synod in New York. All had legitimately been signed off and sent to the Moscow for the final approval. Indeed, Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) had earlier personally spoken to us about Fr Alexander with great enthusiasm. However, the objections of a minority in the Synod were so strong that they launched what was in effect a coup d’etat, taking advantage of the late Metropolitan Hilarion’s dementia and cancer, creating a new ROCOR and beginning a campaign to discredit Fr Alexander’s candidacy. All manner of accusations were made, for which no proof has ever been offered.

Accusing someone of forgery and then spending two and a half years in the highest courts in the USA trying to avoid having to respond to evidence to the contrary does seem very strange. In any case, after losing its very expensive court cases against Fr Alexander Belya and awaiting the new one for defamation, the new ROCOR has lost yet another battle.  It can no longer resist the consecration of Fr Alexander Belya, already signed off by the old ROCOR under Metr Hilarion (Kapral). However, given the purging of the old canonical ROCOR by the dominant new ROCOR, the consecration will go ahead under the very unpopular and highly controversial Archbishop Elpidiphoros of the Church of Constantinople in North America. He has now called the bluff of very naïve, objecting bishops of other jurisdictions in Northern America and will proceed with the long-awaited consecration.

It is a great pity that few can trust Archbishop Elpidiphoros personally, but no doubt there was no other choice for Fr Alexander in the highly politicised American context. And so the vital forces of the Russian Church in Northern America are going under the Church of Constantinople, as the elderly who know the Tradition die out. We can only imagine the dissatisfaction with ROCOR in Moscow. A candidate for the episcopate and yet another set of good clergy and prosperous parishes lost by ROCOR and this time forced, however reluctantly, to join the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Moscow’s great rival. (Where part of the OCA also wants to go). The living elements of the old ROCOR, are fleeing its new marginality, in Northern America quite logically joining the largest jurisdiction there (the Patriarchate of Constantinople) and in Western Europe quite logically joining the largest jurisdiction there (the Patriarchate of Romania). In both cases all keep the old calendar and all other Russian liturgical customs.

All had been possible, but, according to some, on account of jealousy (Fr Alexander speaks and writes fluent Russian and Ukrainian, unlike those who oppose him), slander and sham ‘defrockings’, those who oppose him have lost nearly everything. First there came notoriety for receiving clergy without letters of release from canonical (= non-schismatic) Local Churches. (Letters of release are necessary to check on the moral conduct of clergy, not if the only objections to the clergy leaving are because they refuse schism, because of political disagreements or if they concern coveting of parishioners’ property on the part of those who do not wish them to leave.

The refusal to issue letters of release for purely political purposes or to try and obtain property illegally is not canonical. And there is no such thing as an oath of obedience to a schismatic bishop!). One Russian priest in London called ROCOR’s uncanonical suspensions ‘null and void’. And as another Russian priest said: ‘If there is no canonical crime, then it means that canon law is simply used as a mechanism of political repression’. (https://uk.yahoo.com/news/russian-orthodox-priests-face-persecution-062625884.html).

Thus, the clergy who left Constantinople for ROCOR were suspended by the Church of Constantinople. This is normal practice, as you do not ‘defrock’ clergy, if they are acting in integrity according to their conscience. Unless, that is, you are some sort of punitive, gaslighting, right-wing sect. Why did so many leave the new ROCOR elsewhere? The ROCOR schism from the Moscow Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church (to which ROCOR supposedly belongs!) in Western Europe took its toll. This was because the Moscow group in Western Europe receives Catholic clergy in the same way as the rest of the Moscow Patriarchate and the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, that is, not by rebaptism, like Greek Old Calendarists. This suicidal act of Russian old calendarism on the part of ROCOR cost it sixteen clergy and half of its Diocese in Great Britain. All refused to obey neophyte schismatics – see Canon XV of the First and Second Council. Now ROCOR in Great Britain will never be anything more than an irrelevant, tiny, closed marginal sect.

Then there was the use of electronic signatures, used in utterly vain attempts to bully, gaslight and intimidate. With these acts many have indeed discredited and isolated themselves from canonical Orthodoxy. How long will Moscow tolerate these losses and scandals? At a time like this, the already very isolated Moscow needs allies, not scandals. It has already suffered scandals in the tragic situations in Kiev, Riga, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vilnius and those that are rapidly developing elsewhere. There will come a point when Moscow, with its many parishes which use the new calendar, simply will not accept the threats made to it by the old calendarist American Synod. These threats involve boycotting the workings of the Moscow Patriarchate and are made by the New York Synod because it believes that it has Moscow over a barrel and can get away with anything. It is a dangerous game, because one day after the Ukraine is over Moscow will call its bluff and pull the plugs.

All this is a result of the ROCOR identity crisis. This began after its formal unity with Moscow in 2007, when it at last found universally recognised canonical status, for which we had battled for so long. However, instead of choosing to use this God-given opportunity to contribute to the positive and mainstream construction of new Local Churches in the Diaspora and show political independence from the secular Russian State, it chose negative and censorious self-isolation in an extreme right-wing ghetto and political co-operation with the secular Russian State. So it lost its Ukrainians – and many other normal families, purged by the alt right, long-bearded crazy converts it is introducing. It means that the only Russian Orthodox input into the inevitable new Local Churches in Northern America and Western Europe will come from the free Russian Orthodox, who belong to other Local Churches. Fringe groups with their extremism such as ROCOR will have no involvement. Just like all old calendarist groups, they have nothing to contribute.

Unless, that is, the few remaining Orthodox in ROCOR can at the last moment take back control of the Church from those who usurped power from the saintly, but very weak Metropolitan Hilarion (+ 2022) during the years of his dementia and cancer. This now seems very unlikely, unless the largely convert mini-Synod which took full control of ROCOR through its internal coup can be ousted. At present the new ROCOR is carrying out a purge of all its senior clergy of the St John tradition, all those who belonged to the old ROCOR and are being replaced by ‘Orthobros’ and incels.  Distracted by its loss of the Ukraine, Latvia etc and its desperate search for support in the Diaspora for the Russian State’s political and military battle against the USA in the Ukraine, the Moscow Patriarchate authorities have let things slide in the Diaspora. So badly indeed that the return of ROCOR to canonicity now seems virtually impossible. And that severely compromises Moscow’s own non-ROCOR existence outside Russia only more.

Interestingly, the news of Fr Alexander’s coming consecration was reported by the notoriously biased, American-run but Moscow-based, website ‘orthochristian.com’. This site is well-known for being backed by and publishing the works of very conservative ex-Evangelicals in Northern America. Some have even said that that website has been infiltrated by murky CIA/NATO assets, who started establishing themselves in ROCOR, Vlasovite and Russian-language publishing and broadcasting circles in the Diaspora in the 1960s. In any case that website never prints articles and comments that are critical of the practices of the MP and ROCOR or show up their hypocrisy and disrespect for human rights. It is surely being protected by someone important in the hierarchy in Russia, who knows the emigres well. According to some, he may himself, perhaps by naivety, have been turned and been involved in those murky dealings.

This is possible. After all, we should recall that the US Establishment is now divided between the conservative nationalist patriots of the CIA and the woke cosmopolitan neocons of the Washington State Department. And this situation is strangely very similar to that in the Soviet Union just before its dissolution in 1991. Then that was divided between pro-American liberal Euro-Atlanticists, who overnight transformed themselves from Communists into Capitalist oligarchs, and the patriots/nationalists, centred in the Soviet equivalent to the CIA, which was then called the KGB. And one of the latter was the present Russian nationalist President Putin, at that time a lowly KGB operative in provincial East Germany.

We should not forget that the former US President George Bush Senior (his son was not bright enough) was head of the CIA before himself being elected. Does a parallel between today’s patriotic CIA and the then patriotic KGB exist? Does the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 indicate the coming collapse of the American Empire? We remember how in the 1970s and then the 1980s, the right-wing Washington ROCOR, of which some were CIA assets (once an asset, always an asset, as the late Fr Mikhail Artsimovich commented to me in 1992), was warmly welcomed into the Reagan White House and the coffers of the CIA generously opened to it. Now it is payback time, return on investment. We gave you then, now you will obey us. You cannot escape the murk, once you have joined it, you are signed up for life. You have sold your soul.

What is clear is that the new ROCOR is collapsing. It is not for families. We have often asked ourselves what the righteous people, priests and bishops of the old ROCOR, so many of whom we knew well, would have done. What would the ever-memorable St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, Fr Seraphim (Rose), Archbishop Antony of Geneva (who never defrocked anyone) and Metr Laurus (Shkurla) have done, given the present convert sectarianisation? Their Church has now been taken over by the descendants of those who suspended and put St John on trial in 1964, who persecuted Fr Seraphim in the 1970s and Archbishop Antony in the 1980s and 1990s and ourselves since 2007.

Surely, if they had still been alive in the years following 2007 and saw they risked losing control of the New York Synod to the murky mini-Synod, which had already begun forming as long ago as 2001 after the Metr Vitaly fiasco, they would have closed down the separate Synod in New York. Then, seeing the convert immaturity and uncanonical actions, Moscow would have taken ROCOR under its direct control. Moscow then would surely have proceeded towards the regionalisation and Metropolitanisation of ROCOR, as so many of us and the Patriarch Kyrill of the time had so much wanted, as he told us quite clearly in the Danilov Monastery in Moscow in May 2012.

This would have helped towards founding the coming foundation of the four Diaspora Local Churches, in Western Europe, Northern America, Latin America and Oceania. In this way the New York Synod could never have been diverted from its Christian path by insecure ‘One True Church’ converts and the other psychologically troubled with their murky connections. It is probably too late for this, for the Persecuted Church has become the Persecuting Church and the way back seems impossible. It is too late for any ‘Make ROCOR Great Again’. This is what happens when the spiritual is supplanted by the political and the financial. In history such people were ruled by a Sanhedrin and they were called pharisees.

However, we should not doubt in Divine Providence. The saints came to rescue us from the ROCOR schism and even now they are gathering together with St John of Shanghai. We shall see great changes in the near future, as the Holy Spirit takes over from evil men, their hearts full of hatred. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

 

 

‘’Owing to personal ambition, Patriarch Kyrill has lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and other Churches in the lands of ‘Holy Rus’’’.

https://spzh.news/en/news/75027-after-odesa-cathedral-shelling-uoc-bishop-addresses-patriarch-kirill

The above are the words of my dear friend, Archbishop Victor (Bykov) of Artsyz, Vicar-Bishop of the Odessa Diocese of the UOC, on 23 July. They followed the devastation to the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odessa, which I knew so well and whose present ruinous state is so saddening. Vladyka Victor, who is a real monk, stressed that the Patriarch has repeatedly spoken about the unity of ‘Holy Rus’, which he ‘has utterly destroyed with his blessing and his actions’. ‘In my opinion you seem to have forgotten that, just as in Russia, so in Ukraine there are (were) your children, whom you consider as such, and you have blessed those who are now killing them’, wrote the Archbishop. ‘The words ‘Great Lord and Father’ do not come to my tongue when addressing you, for you are a father who has sacrificed his children to destruction and killing’. So sad and yet so true.

The problem is that the Patriarch has lost not only the Ukraine and Latvia, but probably also Lithuania, Estonia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, England and probably all the lands of Western Europe and indeed, probably ultimately everything outside the territory of the Russian Federation. He has transformed himself from the Patriarch of All Rus into the Patriarch of All Russia. Three letters more tacked on to the word ‘Rus’ may sound like a minor change, but in fact it is everything. A once great multinational Church is rapidly becoming a minor nationalist Church. The multinational quality of the Church of the old Russian Empire (1721-1917) and then of the Soviet Union (1917-1991) has been destroyed by ambition, which led to the twofold disease of inward corruption and outward nationalism, exactly, to the letter, as in the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

When the Soviet Union collapsed into 15 different countries at the end of 1991, the Russian Church retained the chance of being multinational. Now that has largely been lost in this wave of militant Russian nationalism. True, the temptation of national exclusivism was always there, and in every part of the Russian Church, as we know only too well from fifty years of experience inside it, but we thought that the victory of that nationalism could be avoided. Great figures in the Russian Diaspora Church like Metr Anastasy, St John of Shanghai and Archbishop Antony of Geneva thought so too. Now it all seems to be too late! The only hope now is a wave of autocephalies, which could at least keep the Russian Church as the historic head of a family of ten, with nine fully independent, canonical Autocephalous Churches forming part of the new ‘Holy Rus’.

By Divine Providence, the list of Autocephalous Churches would start with the older Polish, Czechoslovak and Northern American (formerly OCA) Churches, but now would extend to new Ukrainian, Baltic, Belarussian, Central Asian, Japanese and African Churches. As regards the Russian parishes in Moldova and Western Europe, they will probably pass to the majority Patriarchate of Romania, which, by Divine Providence, already has Autonomous Metropolias there and a flock of well over four million with a thousand parishes and ten, and soon, eleven, bishops. If those on those territories directly or indirectly under Moscow did not join into the symphony of those future Local Churches, they would become uncanonical sects. Such a situation would still leave Autonomous Churches under Moscow in Latin America, South-East Asia and China.

The ideal of ‘Holy Rus’ can survive, but not in its old administrative unity. Its unity is what Patriarch Kyrill has destroyed, as Vladyka Victor said above. ‘Holy Rus’ can no longer survive in a centralised/Sovietised form, but only in the form of a Family or Confederation of independent adults. The Autocephalous Church of Poland, once within the Russian Empire and the Russian Church, proved a century ago that this is possible. Others must now follow its example. For the Holy Spirit cannot be regulated by pieces of paper and intimidating threats, as bureaucrats and young and inexperienced neophyte bishops imagine. In the words of Christ, the only Head of the Church: The Spirit blows where it wills. And it does not blow in the direction of Moscow (or Constantinople), of corruption and nationalism, it blows in the direction of Autocephaly and freedom.

 

 

 

 

After Odesa Cathedral shelling, UOC bishop addresses Patriarch Kirill

23 July 14:12

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Author: Elena Konstantinova

https://spzh.news/en/news/75027-after-odesa-cathedral-shelling-uoc-bishop-addresses-patriarch-kirill

The vicar of the Odesa Eparchy believes that Patriarch Kirill, “due to personal ambitions, lost the UOC and other Churches in the countries of ‘Holy Rus'”.

On July 23, 2023, after the missile shelling of the Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa, Archbishop Victor (Bykov) of Artsyz, the vicar of the Odesa Eparchy of the UOC, addressed Patriarch Kirill and all members of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. His letter was published on the Facebook page of the St. Elias Monastery.

At the beginning of his address to Patriarch Kirill, Bishop Victor reminded that “at the Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on 27.05.2022, a decision was made that we, led by our Primate of the UOC, completely come out of Your submission” and stressed that the Patriarch has repeatedly spoken about the unity of “Holy Rus”, which he “completely destroys with his blessing and actions”.

The bishop also believes that it is precisely the “personal blessing” of the Patriarch that has led to the Russian military committing lawlessness and open warfare on the sovereign territory of the Ukrainian State.

“In my opinion, you seem to have forgotten that, just like in Russia, in Ukraine, there are (were) your children, whom you consider as such, and you have blessed those who are now killing them,” the bishop writes.

He noted that to his immense disappointment, during the last Bishops’ Conference in Moscow, Patriarch Kirill “did not say a single word about the need to stop this Cain-like war, to cease these killings and the destruction of peaceful cities and villages, to stop the bloodshed.”

“Your bishops and priests sanctify and bless tanks and rockets that bomb our peaceful cities,” the archbishop reminded.

“Today, when I arrived at the Transfiguration Cathedral of Odesa after the curfew, I saw that the ‘blessed’ missile from Russia flew right into the altar of the temple, into the Holy of Holies. I realized that there is nothing left in common between the understanding of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and yours,” Bishop Victor believes.

He is convinced that Patriarch Kirill “due to personal ambitions, has lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and other Churches in the countries of ‘Holy Rus.'”

“The words ‘Great Lord and Father’ do not come to my tongue when addressing you, for you are a father who has sacrificed his children to destruction and killings,” the archbishop writes.

The hierarch emphasized that for UOC believers, their “loving father and Abba” is Metropolitan Onuphry, who was elected by the Council of the UOC, and he demanded “not to ignore our Primate, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kyiv and All Ukraine”.

The bishop also requested the Patriarch “not to discredit our Church and not to destroy it with your own blessing”.

“As of today, neither you nor your representatives, such as Metropolitan Leonid or Archpriest Andrey Novikov, who fled the Odesa Eparchy, supposedly persecuted by the SBU, are doing anything to support us as your brothers,” the hierarch says.

Moreover, he believes that these people, “in their internet posts, only tarnish the name of the Holy Church without showing any respect for its Primate and the voice of our Ukrainian Church”.

“How can you call us, faithful children of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and its Holy Council those who ‘follow the path of schism’?” Archbishop Victor asks, continuing that this schism, mentioned by Patriarch Kirill and his clerics, is voiced by individuals such as Metropolitan Leonid and Archpriest Andrey Novikov.

“Today, you and all your followers are doing everything to destroy the UOC within Ukraine. There is no understanding of oikonomia in relation to the UOC,” the hierarch writes.

“Today, we (speaking on behalf of many hierarchs of the UOC) condemn this senseless aggression of Russia against our Independent country. We condemn the barbaric seizures of our eparchies in the East and South of Ukraine. We condemn the repressions and persecutions carried out by your authorities in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine!” declared the hierarch.

He demanded, “Stay away from our Church, our hierarchs, and our Primate,” emphasizing that “we have our own path, which was chosen by the Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church”.

“Sincerely, I ask you to stop. Every missile that comes to Ukraine’s territory is perceived by its inhabitants as your ‘blessing’ to your children,” concluded the vicar of the Odesa Eparchy, calling himself a “faithful obedient servant of his Primate”.

As earlier reported, His Beatitude expressed condolences regarding the shelling of Odesa.

 

When Will the Russian Orthodox Church Emerge from its Spiritual Ruins?

1992-2022

After the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church began to emerge from the physical ruins of 75 years of atheism. Tens of thousands of surviving churches lay half-destroyed, only a few monasteries survived, its senior clergy were accustomed to being minded by the KGB, its other clergy, often very poorly educated, were tiny in number, its potentially huge flock was unbaptised and uncatechised, prey to the ignorance of unbelievable superstition and magic ritualism. The situation was catastrophic.

However, physically and miraculously, the Church did gradually re-emerge, though still only half the size of what it had been in 1917. Tens of thousands of half-ruined churches were renovated after their return from a bankrupt State, others were built from scratch, nearly a thousand monasteries were opened, new clergy were taught the basics in dozens of reopened seminaries, a 100 million and more were baptised, though mainly without instruction, billions of church books were published and factories began issuing a billion icons and huge quantities of church furnishings and millions of sets of vestments.

However, a disease also appeared. As the money of oligarchs fed restoration, their disease fed into the Church. Bishops made for themselves luxurious palaces and began living like oligarchs themselves. Instead of monastic bishops, there appeared large numbers of young homosexuals in cassocks, called ‘bishops’, who hardly knew what a monastery looked like. Popularly people spoke of ‘priests in Mercedes’. Sadly it was true, as mere careerists became priests, often in return for ‘gifts’ of money to bishops. Very expensive black Western cars appeared in monasteries. Moreover, even more alarmingly, this same disease spread abroad all too quickly and infected clergy in the Russian Church outside Russia who copied very precisely the vices inside Russia.

The list of resulting clerical scandals and injustices with properties and money is too long to list. But it was clear that virtually overnight atheists had been made bishops and priests and they continued to live as atheists. Bishops, heterosexual or homosexual, who spent money on depravity and drugs, priests who beat their wives or cheated on them, other priests who had self-sacrificingly restored properties with their families and a handful of faithful saw them stolen by their bishops and themselves suspended or defrocked for ‘disobedience’, that is for having a conscience and denouncing criminal injustice.

This was not the Church that we had fought for during the era of Soviet persecution. The Persecuted Church, which we had sacrificed our lives for as confessors, had become a Persecuting Church. We had no place in it. We shook the dust from our feet and left it in disgust.

2022 – 

Then in February 2022 came the war in the Ukraine. This led to a wave of Russian nationalism, which meant that the vast majority of parishes outside the Russian Federation and Belarus left the Russian Orthodox Church altogether – about a third of the parishes in all. The Russian Orthodox Church had moved from being a broad, multinational Church to a narrow, nationalist Church. Why should Non-Russians belong to it? Especially affected were all the churches in the Ukraine, in the Baltics, especially in Latvia and Lithuania, in Moldova and elsewhere, from England to the Netherlands, from France to Spain. Many left the Russian Church, with large numbers leaving the nationalist Russian Church Outside Russia in Germany for the Ukrainian Church.

Politics had taken over and those who had always sought the spiritual were abandoned and persecuted. Divisions took place. However, the sad thing was not the divisions, but the corruption of the clergy, especially of the episcopate, which had made the divisions inevitable. The war in the Ukraine made a great and long overdue cleansing of the Church inevitable. The Russian Church, just like the Church of Constantinople before it, had to rid itself of those who had put politics and nationalism above Christ, and rid itself of atheists, careerists, mini-oligarchs, thieves, ecumenists, homosexuals, secret service agents and minders in cassocks, all whose only interest was money and not the salvation of souls.

I have always supported the Church and always will, putting it above the State, any State. Christ comes above politics. However, many members of the senior hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church are living in the oligarchic, money-money-money 1990s. And the State has a multinational vision, not the new nationalist Church. I have a very good friend in the Russian Ministry of the Economy who is deeply involved as a senior figure in building BRICS and who is close to President Putin. He has told me that for the Russian government the ‘Church’, that is its senior hierarchy, stuffed with the financially corrupt, homosexuals and FSB-minded, is a laughing-stock among them.

Once the conflict in the Ukraine is over, the Russian government will have to turn its attention to rebuilding the Church as a multinational and non-corrupt entity. The injustices will have to be reversed and many bishops defrocked. I have told my friend that it may be too late to reverse the damage done by the corrupt. I hope I am wrong. The fact is that the Russian Orthodox Church must now emerge from its spiritual ruins, just as thirty years ago it had to emerge from its physical ruins. Divine chastisement is a terrible thing, for God is not mocked.

As regards the situation in the Diaspora, we left the Russian Church after fifty years, and I left after nearly forty years service as an unpaid cleric. There has not been a day when we did not feel relief and gladness at our decision. The crazy right-wing converts and others whom we left thought they were special, better than others, like pharisees: such was their hubris. Now those embittered persecutors are in court on criminal charges. It is payback time for them. We, however, are not on trial, because we refused to compromise the Faith, for we do not belong to the Persecuting Church and never will. But they did and do.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Are You Going, Russia?

‘The situation in the Ukraine is not a regional conflict, but the total opposition of the Collective West and the rest of the world, caused by diametrically opposed views about the future development of humanity…The hybrid war they are waging against us now is their last chance to maintain the status quo in their favour and not to lose their weakened power and influence…The aspiration for independence of the countries of the Global South and East is not at all to the liking of the former colonial powers, which cling to the past with all their might’.

Dmitry Medvedev, 2 July, https://news.mail.ru/politics/56860026/?frommail=1

Introduction: The Communists and Oligarchs of the Past

In Russia today you can still find Communists. They are mainly elderly, sometimes living in retirement homes, sometimes having held high positions in the old USSR, and never recovering from the shock of the collapse of the USSR, which they want back. President Putin long ago stated the obvious majority view of the USSR: ‘Those who are not nostalgic for it have no heart. Those who want it back have no brain’. The Communist Party is then basically the Pensioners’ Party and they have a dream of another 1917 Bolshevik takeover. But where is their leader, Lenin? Lenin is a rotting mummy, embalmed in a chemical soup in his Moscow ziggurat, the Time Museum. These are the dinosaurs – they have no future.

In Russia today, though above all outside Russia, you can still find the next generation, the oligarchs – those who robbed Russia blind (‘privatised’ it) in favour of the West. These are the fifth columnists, all manner of totalitarian liberals, such as the CIA asset Navalny, who worship the so-called values of the West. Most, however, long ago fled to London, New York and Tel Aviv, with some on the French Riviera or in Malaga. Those who remain in Russia and supported Prigozhin (who is one of them and is typical of their age group) may soon be getting a knock on the door from the FSB, which replaced the KGB, about a matter of treachery. The conflict in the Ukraine is the final nail in their coffin and they know it. They too belong to the past.

The Present

Such is the past. What of the present? As a result of constant Western aggression, President Putin, who came to power at the end of 1999, has over the last generation moved from a position that was rather favourable towards to the West to one that is completely hostile to it. This is no surprise, since the West through its organisations like NATO, the EU and the IMF, only even displayed a predatory Russophobia and since 2014 has declared war on Russia through its Nazified Ukrainian proxy, which it has armed to the teeth as an Anti-Russia, openly stating that its aim is to destroy Russia and kill all Russians. Therefore, as the primary Eurasian power and by far the largest country in the world, Russia has over the last fifteen years been forced to ally itself with others, with China, the most populous country in the world, and with what we may in general call the former Western colonies of the Global South and Global East. This means all Afro-Eurasia and Latin America.

Working in close collaboration with China, the world’s No 1 economy, the Russian Federation, the world’s No 5 economy, belongs to a multipolar world. There is no place here either for Soviet Communists or for post-Soviet oligarchs. How exactly will the recently Russian-founded economic and political organisations expand? Here we are speaking of the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), the SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, now including Iran) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). The latter already has many dozens of applicants, from Afghanistan to Algeria, Egypt to Indonesia, and will probably come to include the whole Non-Western world, including most of Eastern Europe, at present in the increasingly dysfunctional and defunct EU. What will that future BRICS be called? What will its common gold-backed reserve currency (unlike the dollar, which is backed only by debt and a printing press) be called? How will China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the Greater Eurasia Partnership work out?

Many such absolutely vital details have yet to be elaborated in the coming years, but clearly this is where Russia is today – defending the new multipolar world whose founding Russia has initiated and helping to elaborate it because Russia is the principal Eurasian Power. Above we wrote that there is no place here either for Soviet Communists or for post-Soviet oligarchs, but in a multipolar world there is no place either for narrow and sectarian Russian nationalism. And that is a huge problem for the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leading figures have got onto bad terms with almost everyone, losing sympathy and support everywhere. That is no way to conduct yourself in a multipolar world. It seems that the senior administration of the Russian Church is stuck in a narrow and sectarian mindset, painting itself into a very dark corner.

Forward to the Future

The two great Super-Power victors to emerge from 1945 were the white star American Empire and the red star Soviet Empire. As we know, after the fall forty-four years later of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Soviet Empire crumbled. As we can see today, after the fall of the US puppet government in Afghanistan in 2021, it is now the turn of the American Empire to crumble. It too has had its day. In the twentieth century, over a period of seventy-five years, former Orthodox Christian countries fell to atheist Communism, ending in 1991. Former Roman Catholic countries fell to Fascism and that ended in suicide in a bunker in Berlin in 1945. As for former Protestant countries, they fell to Capitalism. Led by the USA and its senile President, with its nearly 32 trillion dollars of unpayable external debt (not to mention internal debt), Capitalism too is now failing.

As we have said, former Roman Catholic countries fell to Fascism until 1945. However, at the Second Vatican Council held under American pressure sixty years ago, they next fell to secularist Protestantism. From then on, the Americans began choosing the popes, most obviously the Polish John-Paul II (they appointed an English-speaking actor, just as later they appointed Zelensky). Official Roman Catholicism is like post-Protestantism now part of the Great Western Reset, and it is unclear what its present elderly and ill pope believes in. Conversely, in the twentieth century formerly Orthodox Christian Russia had fallen to Communism, but that ended in 1991. What replaced Communism? For some it was the apostasy of secularist American Capitalism – the ideology of the oligarchs. For most it is today the multipolar, Eurasian path of President Putin. However, there are others, who want to see Orthodoxy fully restored in a monarchy and a new Tsar.

For now this seems to many to be completely irrelevant and even laughable. However, in 2033, ten years on from now and forty-four years after 1989 (remember Communism emerged victorious in 1945 but lasted only forty-four years), President Putin will be 80 years old – if he lives that long. What and who will replace him? One possible answer is this Orthodox monarchist movement in contemporary Russia, which can be called ‘Forward to the Tsar’. This means the restoration of the People’s Orthodox Monarchy, Tsardom. This implies a prominent future role for the Russian Orthodox Church. This movement has support among a minority and there is a huge question mark as to how much support it has both inside and outside Russia. The problem is that the Church administration is severely compromised by the present.

Future Restoration Compromised

The fact is that several senior administrators of the Russian Orthodox Church (not ordinary clergy, monastics and people, who in the past were martyred in their millions and who in the present remain faithful to the memory of those martyrs) have long compromised themselves with the State authorities. Not to the extent of changing the Faith, but to the extent that they have collaborated with State authorities. This is the error of what in Protestant history is called ‘erastianism’, the unprincipled collaboration with the State (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Thomas_Erastus). The most obvious Russian examples up until early 1917 were in seventeenth century Russia, when many senior Church administrators took part in the State persecution of Old Ritualists, and then at the Russian February Revolution, when they abruptly renounced their oath of faithfulness to the Tsar in favour of Kerensky. They were swimming with the tide.

Then, later in the twentieth century, came another example with ‘Sergianism’, named after the Soviet Metropolitan and then Patriarch Sergius (+ 1944). Here supposed churchmen collaborated with the Soviet atheist State, making themselves into ‘Orthodox atheists’, holding to a rite without any Christian content, to the scandal of the faithful. And after the collapse of Soviet Communism, some such senior ‘churchmen’ promptly made themselves into mini-oligarchs, simply copying the example of secular post-Soviet oligarchs. As a result of their yet again swimming with the tide, ‘the Church’ understandably came to be perceived by the masses as a mere Business, a money-making institution, exploiting the zeal of sincere priests and the superstitious and sectarian desire for ritualistic magic of the by then baptised but still unChurched post-Soviet masses. As a result, the huge problems of post-Soviet Russia, alcoholism, abortion, divorce, very low demographics, have not been solved.  The masses do not attend Church or follow Her ways. Simply because they are not led by example. ‘Why should I bother? The senior ones don’t’.

Apart from the corruption of several senior Church administrators, there is also the threefold problem of their homosexuality, their work as minders and assets for secret services (mainly FSB, but also CIA), and their compromises with the Vatican. Curiously, these three problems often go together. It is exactly the same liberalism, homosexuality and collaboration with spies as in the seventeenth century, for example, the notorious Paisios Ligarides, ‘Orthodox’ bishop and Roman Catholic cardinal, business fraudster who sold indulgences and spy, traitor and intriguer, schismatic and sodomite. (https://www.historytoday.com/archive/ strange-case-paisios-ligarides). These liberal, homosexual, secret agent ‘Sergianists’, lovers of the State-Church, quite naturally love the Vatican Church-State. As they say, ‘birds of a feather flock together’.

The Third Rome or The Second Jerusalem?

The Russian Orthodox Church is still cruelly suffering from Soviet-style centralisation – Communists relied on central planning. As a result, the Church has largely ceased to be multinational. This centralisation is key to understanding why so many believing Ukrainians rejected the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, preferring their own Ukrainian Orthodox Church, sometimes preferring Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Protestant sects, and even atheist secularism. However, the Russian Church has as a result of nationalism lost not only the territory of the Ukraine to its jurisdiction, but also Latvia and is now rapidly losing Moldova (to the Romanian Church) and Lithuania as well as many, many other countries. The Russian Church is then going in precisely the opposite direction to the multipolar President Putin.

A nationalist, and not multinational, multipolar Russian Church, an inward-looking, for-Russians-only ghetto, attracts neither Ukrainians, nor anyone else. Such a Church does not export outside Russia. Moreover, many faithful priests have in recent years been defrocked by the Russian Church merely for protecting their church properties and flocks from corrupt and predatory oligarchic bishops, or simply for expressing different political viewpoints from senior figures. To put it mildly, this does nothing for the reputation of the Church. The absurd and over the top ‘defrocking’ of faithful clergy, as practised by Russian Church administrators all over the world, have made those same administrators the laughing-stock of the world. In other words, nationalist sectarianism repels all Russian Orthodox who are of Non-Russian ethnicity from the Russian Church. And that is some 35% of the whole.

After the fall of the Second Rome, Constantinople, in 1453, the concept of Moscow the Third Rome came to Russia and was first clearly formulated in 1492. However, being Rome is automatically a temptation. The First, Second and Third Romes all fell because power went to their heads. The Gospel says nothing positive of Rome. Salvation came not through Rome, but through the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, which took place not in Rome, but in Jerusalem. Let us stop speaking of a Third Rome. It would be more helpful to speak of a Second Jerusalem. This is why we some time ago suggested that the Russian Orthodox Church administration should change its name from the Soviet-invented ‘Patriarchate of Moscow (MP in Russian)’ to the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’ (NP in Russian) and move to headquarters in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow.

Conclusion: The Cleansing of the Russian Orthodox Church

It is clear that Russia and its Church are far from ready to bring forth an Orthodox Tsar even ten years from now. Of course, a lot could happen within future years – nobody predicted the present conflict in the Ukraine between the USA and its vassals on the one hand and Russia on the other hand. The conflict in the Ukraine is clearly a historic turning-point. It could lead to a great cleansing of Russian society and also to the cleansing of its Church. After all, you have to be worthy of a Tsar. The Russian Orthodox Church I grew up in was a Church of Saints, of New Martyrs and Confessors, a Persecuted Church and not a Persecuting Church, the Church of the New Jerusalem, not of Soviet or post-Soviet Moscow. It can still (just) survive as a multinational Church, but only as a decentralised Family of Russian-founded Autocephalous and Autonomous Churches reflecting the broader Family of the sixteen multinational Local Orthodox Churches. Otherwise, it will just slip into sectarian and nationalistic irrelevance.

If the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church should by some miracle bring forth a Tsar, He will first cleanse its administration of spiritual corruption and nationalist centralisation and so serve the whole multinational Confederation of the fifteen other Local Orthodox Churches. A cleansed Russian Orthodox Church would be a Godsent opportunity to witness to Christ amid the spiritual, moral and financial bankruptcy of the Western world, now led by a senile old man, appointed as puppet by business interests in Washington. In Europe new national-oriented governments have already come to power in Hungary, Italy and Finland. Now France has burned, increasing the popularity of the anti-EU National Party of Le Pen. Germany is in recession and the AdF (the German equivalent of Le Pen’s National Party) is ever more popular. As for the now bankrupt and freedom-hating UK, anti-EU brexiteers see their former leader, Farage, about to be exiled from his native land by the corrupt British Establishment. In a world like this, where populist patriots are making elitist globalists tremble, anything is possible.

St Alban’s Day, 5 July 2023

 

 

The End of the Two Russian Emigre Church Groups

Introduction

The two Russian émigré Church groupings that took shape in the 1920s in order to be independent of the by then Soviet-controlled Moscow Patriarchate were only ever meant to be temporary formations. Time and time again the leaders of both proclaimed that they would return to the Mother-Church inside Russia as soon as the Soviet Union had fallen. As we know, even though the USSR fell in 1991, it took many years after this before they eventually did reunite, in 2007 and 2018, but both for the same reason – that they could not canonically survive and function normally, if cut off from the far larger Mother-Church, centred in Moscow.

Unity Against Extremes

We in Western Europe, frightened especially of strange political and sectarian trends coming from the US since the 1960s, very much wanted to see both Russian émigré groupings reintegrate the Russian Church and canonical norms. And we also wanted to give them back their real missionary purpose. This was the purpose defined by, among others, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, that of witnessing to and spreading Orthodoxy worldwide, helping to form new Local Churches, while still remaining faithful to the Orthodox Tradition. In other words, both groups had to avoid two temptations or extremes. The first was that of being a closed inward-looking, exclusivist and so sectarian ghetto, which would inevitably die out, as do all ghettoes and sects. The second was that of assimilating completely or else basically becoming an Eastern-rite Protestantism or Eastern-rite Catholicism, or in any case being absorbed by the local dominant culture and also dying out.

The small Paris group, where we have family and close friends, and which reunited with the Mother-Church only in 2018, lost over 40% of its strength in so doing, for the secularising, assimilationist party mostly left it. That was in fact a cleansing. It meant that the group could go on with its mission to help build up a Local Church in parts of Western Europe, but faithfully following the Russian Tradition, while remaining independent of Russian internal politics. In other words, it wished to become a European OCA (Orthodox Church in America). With three bishops at present, it hopes to consecrate another three bishops. However, it remains a Paris-centric Church and its presence in the British Isles, as in many other parts of Western Europe, is very small and very weak. Nevertheless, it has made and will continue to make an important contribution to a future Local Church in Western Europe, into which it will eventually merge.

Americanisation

The larger, though still small New York-based group, with twelve bishops, took another line. Unable to be an ethnic ghetto because of assimilation and the loss of Russian, it chose to become an ideological ghetto. In 2021 it duly cut itself off from the Paris group in a schism, even though both were supposed to be united in One Church. The New York group had seen most of its original Russian emigres and their descendants die out or be assimilated into secular culture despite – or perhaps because of – CIA funding. Thus, it had become almost wholly reliant either on parishioners from the former Soviet Union or else on poorly integrated and puritanical converts seeking their ideal of an exclusivist fundamentalist ‘One True Church’ sect. They knew nothing of the real Russia and real Russian Orthodoxy, but only a Disneyfied, made in the USA, fantasy version. It was this second and highly politicised convert ethos that came to dominate the New York group.

In order to assert its control elsewhere and ensure its power fantasy of ‘another century of existence’, New York decided to ‘retire’ the old school of bishops and clergy. It would send out cultish new bishops to intimidate and close down opponents and financially exploit the peripheries of its group in Australia and Western Europe. Ass imperialists they would force those peripheries into the unipolar, ultra-conservative, New York convert mould, even ‘correcting’ their language for Americanese! This would mean their group becoming ever smaller and narrower and more isolated, creating schisms with other Orthodox, cutting itself off from mainstream Orthodox, from the majority. Parishes in insular Australia were already largely Americanised, but Western European parishes, with their tradition handed down from St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, were not. Geographically next door to Russia, Russian Orthodox in Western Europe know the real Russia and Russian Orthodox culture. They could have nothing to do with the fantasy version, cultivated on the American island far away.

Western Europe

Thus, Western European dioceses would have to be repressed and basically destroyed to fit the new and loveless, unipolar ideology of the US imperialist mould with its power-seeking and money-making ethos. The American crazy convert mentality of ‘money, money, money’, podcasts for ‘incels’ and ‘orthobros’, with punishing homosexuals or misogynists a la Andrew Tate, was alien to Orthodox in Europe. Harsh and jealous right-wing Americans and Americanised extremists, with their politicking, Vlasovite, CIA-funded Possevs, Radio Liberties and Voices of America, would never be acceptable to genuine Russian Orthodoxy in Western Europe. Thus, the New York group with its aggressive Americanisation and bullying schismatic sectarianism signed its own death-warrant in Europe. A censorious and sectarian Russian old calendarism had no attraction for normal Orthodox Christians, whether for the converted, or for Russians. Isolationism and hate-filled sectarianism repelled.

Therefore, most ex-Soviet parishioners did not feel at home in the New York group in Western Europe and would have preferred to attend Patriarchal churches, linked with their homeland, had they been available. Talking to the Orthodox bishops with whom I had studied at seminary or whom I had known when they were young priests, the reaction to the Americanisation or ‘convertisation’ of the old European ROCOR was universally the same: amazement and sadness at the destruction of a genuine spiritual, ascetic and liturgical heritage and its slandering by know-nothing neophytes without monastic experience. However, looking at the schismatic and sectarian mentality responsible, the whole thing then began to appear laughable. The reaction confirmed just how bad the New York group’s reputation had become in recent years. ‘Oh, that uncanonical sect’, was the typical dismissive reaction among clergy of other Local Churches.

The Coming Collapse

Once the divisive conflict in the Ukraine is over and the Patriarchal Russian Church returns to its freedom and so destiny, the fate of the New York group will be decided. In Western Europe, it has no future. It is out of communion with the mainstream. Its remnants will flee its uncanonical extremism and be absorbed into the dioceses of canonical Local Churches, especially of Moscow, which will by then be free to receive them. That is, once Moscow has freed itself from the effects of the divisive and all-absorbing conflict in the Ukraine, when it can begin decentralisation through a sweeping programme of autocephalisation and autonomisation, eliminating oligarchic corruption and the gay mafia.

Thus, outside Western Europe and Africa, in Australia there will surely develop a separate Metropolia (especially if Australia and New Zealand come out of their US-imposed political control and isolationism and join the BRICS political and economic bloc), as also will Latin America. In Northern America (the USA and Canada) the New York group will slowly integrate the future Local Church, founded by the great St Tikhon, whose life-giving presence is still in the OCA, which will be redefined. Surely it will be joined by the 40 or so Moscow parishes, still for the moment outside it, and perhaps be renamed.

Conclusion

After the conflict in the Ukraine is over, now providentially to be hastened by Prigozhin’s treacherous mutiny, and with the removal of certain divisive traitors in the Church, the unity of the at present very divided Orthodox Family must be restored. This will have to be through an authentic Orthodox Council unifying the totality of the Local Churches, in which Catholicity and Conciliarity alone reside. Worldwide, this will mean radical changes to both leading Patriarchates, Constantinople and Moscow. Only the reaffirmation of the Catholicity of the whole Orthodox Church can deliver us from a narrow, centralised, political and ethnic model of Church life. This has already happened so many times in our two thousand-year history. Only a real Council can lead to canonical Orthodox unity everywhere, not least in the Diaspora of Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania.

 

Draining The Swamp

Introduction: For or Against

As I have always been critical of the compromises of the elite of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, I have twice been asked if I am anti-Greek. No, I am pro-Greek, and not just because I lived and worked in Greece for a year and spoke (now rusty) Greek, I am pro-Greek because I am against those who betray true Greek Orthodox identity in favour of anti-Christian, secularist values. Secularist (or ‘Hellenic’ – in the language of the Apostle Paul) values are not Greek, they are not part of Greek Orthodox Tradition and culture. Therefore, I am pro-Greek and not pro-ecumenist and pro-LGBT, despite what one senior individual in the Greek Archdiocese in North America thinks of that. I support ordinary Greek Orthodox people, clergy and monks, some of whom come to our church. Similarly, I have been asked if I am anti-Catholic. Once more, I do not think in those negative terms. I am pro-Orthodox, which means that I value all the remnants of Orthodoxy that have survived in Catholicism. I have seen sincere piety among Catholics and where I have seen that, I am in that way ‘pro-Catholic’. However, I am not pro-filioque, pro-papist and pro-pedophile.

On the contrary, I am for digging deep in order to reach what is below, the roots. My example is the late Archbishop Augustine of Lvov who in the 1990s told Greek Catholics in his diocese to dig deeper when they said they could not return to Orthodoxy because their ancestors buried in their cemeteries were also Uniats. ‘Dig deeper in the cemetery’, he said, ‘and you will find that your ancestors were Orthodox’. My reply to questions about whether I am pro-Russian Orthodox or anti-Russian Orthodox is the same. I am pro-Russian Orthodox. That is precisely why I am critical of the recent infiltration of the Russian Church by secularist values, including the love of money, careerism, centralisation and homosexuality, which have tried to corrupt it from inside, largely over the last thirty years. I am pro-real Russian Orthodoxy, not pro-a recent oligarchic business version, run so often by careerists, homosexuals and fifth columnists. I believe that the Russian Church should grant at the very least autonomy (with the right not to commemorate the Russian Patriarch, if the local need is such, not just to Japan and China (including now Taiwan), but also to the Twelve: to Africa, Northern America (the ‘NAOC’, though this already has autocephaly under an inaccurate name), Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, South America, Oceania, Western Europe, the Baltics (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Central Asia, Moldova, Belarus and of course the New Ukraine, or Kievan Confederation, as it will be. The future is in new Local Churches, not Disneyland imitations of old Local Churches.

Thus, I am opposed to upstart converts who know little about the authentic Russian Orthodox Tradition, only knowing about outward show, and therefore who cause schism. They are those tyrants who come here and try to impose their crazy convert sectarian ways, including their debased English language, on people who had the Tradition before they and their parents were even born. In their incredible aggressiveness (as Orthodox of all other nationalities at once notice), manipulative arrogance and love of money and bling (they love dressing up because, as secular failures (whatever they claim on fictional cvs) they have an inferiority complex) they remind us of GIs who went to Iraq and tortured Iraqis. Why? Because they were American and therefore all was allowed them. They wanted to Americanise us, intimidating us and threatening us. As they know so little, making basic mistakes, they failed and their absurd and ignored petty punishments backfired on them and their incel yesmen followers. Their policy is the same policy as those who in their corrupt hubris, absolutely certain that they were right, went to conquer Vietnam, Afghanistan and the Ukraine, humiliating their peoples and despising and destroying their age-old cultures. They all failed and they all had to go back to where they came from and bear the spiritual consequences of their errors for the rest of their lives – and beyond. So the Russian Orthodox Church is now being cleansed. And I am for cleansing, for draining the swamp that has accumulated over the last thirty years.

The Fall of the Western World into Nazism

In reality, arrogant and aggressive Western hubris is a form of Nazism. We must understand that Nazi ideology is not about some historic German nationalist form of racism. That was only a narrow episode in the long history of the ‘Crusades’ of the Western elite against ordinary peoples worldwide, against the grassroots. Nazism is far broader than Hitlerism. Nazism is the whole ideology of Western superiority, the concept that the Western world is the only one that counts, that as the Rest are inferior to it, the West has the tyrannical right – and delusional pride – to destroy all other Civilisations and cultural values. How? By imposing its own on them through organised violence, such as that employed against England in 1066 (yes, English lives matter too), racial arrogance, economic blackmail and cultural bullying. How did this come about? Where did this all come from? Anyone who knows the West knows that there is great variety among its peoples and that many ordinary people do not share in these hubristic attitudes.

For example, from classic humanist Western culture, who would call Nazis, Dante and Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Vermeer, Shakespeare and Moliere, Cervantes and Goethe, Bach and Beethoven, Heine and Dickens, Chopin and Liszt, Puccini and Verdi, Brahms and Strauss, Hugo and Renoir, Dvorak and Grieg, Yeats and Joyce, Sibelius and Elgar? Nobody. So where did this Western culture of Nazism appear from? Any Civilisation is dependent on its essential spiritual and so resulting philosophical and cultural values. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism are the four most important belief systems in the world, accounting for over 75% of the world, though there are also many smaller systems, such as Taoism, Sikhism and the very small Judaism (0.2%). Now, although the Western foundational system later deviated into the denominational forms of Catholicism and Protestantism, the Western world began as part of Christian Civilisation. Clearly then, this Nazism began from those deviations, not from the original foundation.

In other words, we of the Orthodox Church are the West’s past. Catholicism and Protestantism are not that past. In other words, their spiritual authority is now small because they have wandered so far from the original Christianity and their institutional State forms have always, even if unconsciously, been part of that Nazi ideology of proud, self-appointed superiority. Yes, although both denominations had already added and taken away long ago, they did until relatively recently still share several basic Christian values. However, over the last hundred years and more, arguably since 1914 when Western elites massacred the flower of their own youth in the trenches, though others would say before this, others after this, they have degenerated. So much, indeed, that most of their denominational leaders now appear to deny even basic Christian values, the Three Pillars on which the Western world had built its Civilisation. How did this happen and what are those Three Pillars?

The Loss of Spiritual, National and Family Identities

Firstly, the Western world lost, or rather renounced, its own Spiritual and Civilisational Identity, that is to say, its belief in Christ the Son of God. It lost its Faith in its own foundation stone. Denying Him as the Risen Son of God and dismissing Him as a mere man and sometimes rejecting that He had ever even existed, it destroyed all faith in its own raison d’etre. Why did it exist any more? For example, it sold its Bibles to Native Americans and Africans, but then stole their lands and resources. What example did those people see in the West? What was the Western ideology worth? In the same way, its politicians and arms merchants blew to pieces Western youth in the trenches of the First World War, so that their bodies could never even be found. It became clear that the West was no longer Christian, just Capitalist, its only interest financial gain, and its reductionist forms of Christianity were only camouflage for making money. (The West always has money for wars, though not to pay doctors and nurses, for roads and hospitals). It had lost its spiritual and ideological foundation.

Secondly, the various Western nations lost their National Identity, that is their Sovereignty. They began to merge not simply into one another, but into an anonymous and homogenous, one size fits all, American standard world. Today, you can visit cities, airports and stores in Western Europe and you may well have no idea which country you are in. They all look the same, they all have the same transnational and transcorporate look and content. Western Europeans increasingly eat, drink and dress exactly like Americans and watch American films and television. The example of this is the US-modelled EU, which is supposed to be a United States of Europe, a single subservient transatlantic part of the USA with the same dollar-pegged common currency, in other words, it is little more than a set of client banana-republics. The Non-EU UK is even more subservient to that model.

Thirdly, the Western world is now in the process of destroying its Family Identity through Transgenderism. By undermining and destroying the basic building block of any Civilisation, the Family, and proclaiming that there are no longer two sexes, male and female, as God made them, it is ensuring its own death. It is even, through aggressive economic blackmail, trying to export this depravity to other countries, which have different civilisational values, in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa etc. Where will the fathers to provide the seed come from? Where will the mothers to carry children and give birth come from? Transgenderism is the last step in the end of Western Civilisation. It is suicidal, as we can also see in the forced large-scale population replacements by mass immigration which have taken place in Western Europe and accelerated over the last fifty years. It is just as at the end of the pagan Roman Empire. Immigration is always necessary for ageing and depraved societies to survive.

Conclusion: The Role of Russian Civilisation in Possible European Restoration

In the twentieth century Russian Civilisation was almost completely destroyed by the Western-orchestrated overthrow of its Non-Western, non-reductionist, traditional Orthodox Christian Civilisation. This was overthrown in 1917 by the Western ideologies of Bourgeois Rule and then of Marxism, that satanically-inspired ideological idealism. This utterly failed because it never took into account human nature, that is, reality, specifically Spiritual Identity, National Identity and Family Identity. All who opposed its straitjacket had to be massacred, exiled or silenced by fear. That was what happened, at least in the first generation of Marxism in the 1920s and 1930s, after which Russia received the Divine punishment of satanic Nazi aggression in 1941, which at last began to sober minds and prepare them for the following three generations of repentance. Today we are seeing the final phase of that repentance for stubborn sin in a renewed attack of Nazism.

In the last thirty years, the remnants of Russian Civilisation have slowly and painfully been restoring their spiritual roots in Russian Orthodoxy. This very slow and sometimes compromised return to Orthodox Christianity means that Russia is gradually returning to the same roots that the Western world once possessed, albeit long ago. This means that it is returning from that terminus towards which the West is now heading. In other words, today Russia and the West are like two trains passing each other, but heading in two different directions. The Russian train is coming from its terminus and heading towards the restoration of its Spiritual Civilisational Identity, of National Identity and Sovereignty and of Family Identity, all of which it almost lost in the years of Marxism. On the other hand, the Western train is speeding to its terminus – to nihilism, the rejection of everything.

After experiencing the Western deviation of Marxism, founded by the atheist grandson of a rabbi, today’s Russia is utterly opposed to the aggressive and narcissistic LGBT elites of the New West. It is in favour of the remnant peoples of the Old West and their potential return to their spiritual roots in an untarnished Christianity. The symbol of the LGBT New West is its leader, President Biden. He should not be in the White House as President (elected only because his senility guarantees that he can be manipulated by those behind him). Rather he should be in a nursing home with mental health care. So should all those who follow him, for they too suffer from a megalomaniac Napoleon complex, the concept that they are exceptional, that all is allowed them and all are subject to them. We, on the other hand, have worked all our lives for the restoration of authentic Orthodox Christian Civilisation, both for the restoration of real Orthodoxy in Orthodox homelands and therefore also of the real West. To help draw all up from the ruins of modernity has always been our task and always will be. The traitors to Christ will not succeed in stopping us from working for that.