Category Archives: Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia

The Russian Orthodox Missionary Revolution Begins

Outside the Russian Church, the twelve universally-recognized but small Local Orthodox Churches (in order of size: Romania, Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Alexandria, Poland, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Jerusalem) look after only 25% of all Orthodox, on average 2% each. This means small territories and narrow ethnic groups. The two exceptions are the Patriarchate of Alexandria, which looks after the vast African Continent, and the Patriarchate of Antioch, which looks after the Middle Eastern Arab world outside Africa as far as the Emirates and Iraq as well as Arabs and others in the Diasporas. But what of the rest of the world which have never been Orthodox? Who cares for this? Certainly not these twelve small and generally rather nationalistic Local Churches

Neither is it the former Patriarchate of Constantinople. The collapse of that tiny Patriarchate into the papist and phyletist heresies and its resulting falling away from communion with the Russian Orthodox Church is tragic. All we can do is to wait patiently for its repentance. Just as we have been waiting for the repentance of Rome for a thousand years, so we shall wait for Constantinople’s repentance too. However, every cloud has a silver lining. Constantinople’s recent fall from the Church and so self-elimination has led very swiftly to the Russian Church’s decision to set up a mission and build a new church in long-ignored Turkey and establish two new missionary Exarchates.

One of these is for Western Europe, though at present it covers only Andorra, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Italy, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands, Portugal, France and Switzerland. The second is for South-East Asia (Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, North Korea, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines and Thailand). Clearly, these are the foundations for new Local Churches. Indeed, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeev) has described their long-awaited establishment as missionary.

http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2018/12/29/nasha_zadacha_missionerskaya_prosvetitelskaya/

Thus, if we look at the world scene today, we can see that for the first time in history, most of the world is now catered for in terms of Orthodox missions. There is the tricontinental Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, based in New York, which fundamentally looks after North America, South America and Oceania. Indeed, in the last twelve years, it will have consecrated six American bishops and one Australian bishop. As for Eurasia outside the territories of the twelve Local Churches, the Russian Orthodox Church caters for the multinational Russian Federation, China (naturally, including Taiwan), Japan and now also South-East Asia and Western Europe through its two Exarchates.

This means that in reality the only territories of the world which are not catered for officially are Iran and South Asia (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka), in which countries conditions are such that missionary work is very difficult, even sometimes dangerous. However, South Asia contains one quarter of the world’s population. Perhaps one day we shall see two more Exarchates, one for Iran and one for South Asia.

We have come a long way from the anti-missionary bishops of the past who so persecuted us. We well remember Archbishop George (Wagner) of the Paris Archdiocese, who forbade the use of any language in services except Church Slavonic. Indeed, he considered that only three languages should be used liturgically – Greek, Latin and Slavonic. (He considered that the Romanian Church should return to using Church Slavonic).

He and another bishop of his background also unapologetically forbade the veneration of the local saints of Western Europe. Both bishops wrecked their dioceses, with a great many clergy and people fleeing their tyrannies, indeed as far as the USA and Canada. ‘I shall not die, but live and declare the works of the Lord, so did we sing in those dark days of the dark past. Their dioceses have still not recovered and, it seems, probably never will. The vital missionary forces left and their dioceses were abandoned to the ghetto and spiritual death, while others looked elsewhere for spiritual life and grew strong and numerous.

With these two new Exarchates in Western Europe and South-East Asia, which will only grow, the Russian Orthodox missionary revolution of East and West has begun in earnest.

 

The First 300 Years of Russian Orthodox Churches Outside Russia: 1617-1917

Introduction

Although several Russian churches in Europe date back to well before the Russian victory over the atheist tyrant Napoleon and the liberation of Paris by Russian troops in 1814, ignorant and ethnocentric Western Europe only began to understand the reality of Russia then. The Russian Empire was not after all some kind of Asian khanate, but a fully-fledged modern Empire. Russian science and art flourished with names of world renown and the theological academies brought fame to the Russian Church, amazing obscurantist European scholarship. Although the treason of 1917 put an end to this, today, with freedom come, we are once more seeing Westerners taking a more enlightened attitude to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose presence among them now dates back 400 years.

1617-1817

The 1617 Peace Treaty established the legal status of a Russian priest in Stockholm’s Ryssgarden. Services were conducted in premises which merchants rented. A real and more or less permanent Russian church was founded in 1700, with a diplomatic representative in Sweden, and from then on services were conducted almost continuously. In 1684 an embassy mission to China opened. Church life began in Berlin in 1718. In 1721 a church opened in London. In 1727 the embassy in Paris started Orthodox services. That same year under Anna Petrovna, Grand Duchess of Holstein, a church was set up in Kiel and lasted until 1799. A church which lasted briefly was founded in Tokaj in Hungary in 1749.

From 1759 till 1765 there was a church in Königsberg. A church was set up in Madrid in 1760 and in Vienna in 1762. A church opened in Copenhagen in 1797. The Russian embassy in Constantinople (1802) marked the establishment of the church there. That same year two more churches were founded, one at the court of Ekaterina Antonovna, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and the other in Üröm, near Budapest, the location of the burial vault of Alexandra Pavlovna, Palatine of Hungary and sister of Emperor Alexander I. In 1804 a church opened in Weimar and in 1808 in Ludwigslust (Mecklenburg-Schwerin). A church was founded in The Hague in 1816.

1817-1917

A church opened in Bern in 1817, later moving to Geneva. That same year a church opened in Teheran. The Stuttgart church was organized in 1819. The church in Rome was founded in 1823 and in Rothenburg (Kingdom of Wurtemberg) in 1824. Emperor Nicholas I sent an ambassador to newly liberated Greece and a Russian church was set up in Athens. In 1844 churches were set up in Naples and Wiesbaden. In 1847 Archimandrite Porfiry (Uspensky) opened the Mission in Jerusalem. A church was set up in Amsterdam in 1852, Baden-Baden in 1858 and Nice in 1859. Two churches were set up in 1862, in Brussels and Dresden, and in 1865 in Karlsruhe and in 1867 in Pau in France. In the following year churches in Karlsbad and Florence were built. In 1870 the mission to Japan began under the future St Nicholas of Tokyo.

In 1874 a church opened in Prague. There was a church in Coburg-Gotha from 1874 to 1905. In 1876 a church was set up in Bad Ems and in 1878 in Vevey in Switzerland. The church in Marienbad opened in 1882. An Orthodox community opened in Argentina in 1888. A church was set up in Franzenbad in 1889, in Biarritz in 1890 and in Menton in France in 1892 and in Merano in Italy in 1897. Two Church missions were founded in 1897 ─ one in Urmia in Persia and the other in Seoul in Korea. In 1898 a church was built in San Stefano, near Constantinople, and in the following year in Darmstadt and in Homburg. Three churches were founded in 1901 ─ in Hamburg, Herbersdorf (Silesia) and Kissingen. Finally, by 1910 there were churches in Sofia and Budapest. Several churches were attached to the main ones in cities like Berlin, Constantinople and Nice.

Conclusion

Thus, by 1894 the Synod and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs oversaw 51 churches with 96 clergy and during the reign of the Tsar-Martyr, this increased to 56 churches. In addition, in 1912 the United States Diocese had 286 churches, while the Japanese Mission had 266 communities, the Beijing Mission fifteen, the Urmian Mission seven and the Korean Mission one. Since the flood of refugees from atheism after 1917, hundreds more churches have opened, and not counting the thousand or so in autonomous Japan and China and in autocephalous Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia and North America, the total in 2017 is about one thousand, all dependent either on Moscow or on the Church Outside Russia, now based in New York.

(Our thanks to Deacon Andrei Psarev for information supplied for this article)

Principles of the Coming Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe

Introduction

We first called for a Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe early on thirty years ago, in April 1988, against the background of the then dying Cold War. Far more importantly, 15 years later, in April 2003, after the Cold War, but before the reunion of the two parts of the Russian Church, Patriarch Alexis of Moscow did the same. 30 years on, there is still no Metropolia, but we feel that, despite all the frustration, impediments and delays, its time is at last coming. A Metropolia, and then Church, that is Orthodox, but also Local, is inevitable in Western Europe. What principles must this Metropolia adopt?

  1. Faithful to Orthodoxy, not Heterodoxy

First of all, we say ‘Away with nationalistic Finnish, French and American ideas of ‘localism’’ (Finland / Rue Daru / OCA), which ignore the integrity of the Orthodox Faith, putting the local flag before the Cross. Instead of ideas propagated in Paris and transferred to the USA, we choose a Metropolia that is both faithful and local. This cannot be based on anti-canonical compromises, on spiritual betrayal of the Faith, in the name of State-sponsored or of self-imposed cultural conformism. We must keep the Orthodox calendar and Church canons, ignoring old-fashioned modernism and ecumenism.

  1. An End to Old-Fashioned Ecumenism

It is this latter ecumenism that has especially delayed the formation of a Metropolia, the foundation of a new Local Church. There were those who said: ‘We must not offend the Catholics/Protestants. We must not give local titles to our bishops’. Such voices were those of traitors to Orthodoxy, those who saw us and see it as a mere piece of foreign exoticism, of folklore. No Metropolia could be born until those voices had fallen silent – and they were still very strong in 1988 and in 2003. It is time to move forward to the free and independent future, to the Autocephalous Church of Western Europe.

  1. Bilingual and Missionary

Unlike the old Russian immigrants (and those of other nationalities), who were intent negatively on preserving and pickling the past, even when nobody any longer knew what it meant, and so guaranteed that they would die out – the future Metropolia will have to be bilingual. Here too we put the Cross before the flag. Only in this way will we be able to pass on the spiritual heritage and values of Russian Orthodox Civilization in a missionary fashion to both the descendants of Russian immigrants and to native Western Europeans. Only in this way can a truly Orthodox and a truly Local Church be born.

  1. Pastoral, not Bureaucratic and Racist

One of the greatest problems in Church life at all times is the tendency to put administration above pastoral care, to put marble and gold above church buildings and, above all, human souls. (We can think of the Irish and Rome). There can be no more second-class (or third-class) citizens; non-Russians must be treated as Russians. The past, all too recent past, is a very dark area indeed in this respect. In such a Metropolia, the foundation of a true Local Church, there can be no racism. The old-fashioned attitudes and mistreatment of native Orthodox is not acceptable and must be severely sanctioned.

Conclusion

Fifty years ago, with the Russian Church paralysed, there was still a hope that Constantinople would abandon its Greek imperialism and take responsibility for the Diaspora. It utterly failed to do so. Indeed, the spiritual decomposition of the Constantinople with its new lurch into Eastern Papism, means that its serious clergy and people now want to join the Russian Church (although the long-term solution would be for the Church of Greece to take over the Greek Diaspora and make it Orthodox). The recent, long-awaited appointments of new bishops in Western Europe and those to come, carried out by both parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, are all steps towards the future Metropolia.

 

 

1,000 Words on the Four Generations of ROCOR

Introduction: The Past 1918

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) was effectively formed after the martyrdom of the Imperial Family, even if it was only on 20 November 1920 that the besieged and persecuted Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow and his Synod in Moscow issued Decree № 362. This instructed all Russian Orthodox bishops outside Soviet territory, unable to keep in contact with a free Moscow, to organize themselves as an independent Synod.

With personal experience and knowledge of both the bright moments and the dark moments in the life of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) over the past almost fifty years, here is a brief sketch of the near-centennial history of ROCOR. This is a history which is varied, filled with diabolical temptations and insidious attacks from internal and external enemies, and yet one in which faithfulness has always in the end prevailed.

The Old ROCOR: 1918-1943

In exile, ROCOR, with over 30 bishops, organized its monastic and parish life worldwide. It included many of the best theologians from the Church before the 1917 Revolution and bravely stood up both to the compromises of senior Church representatives captive in the Soviet Union and to the modernist heresies of the schismatic Paris Jurisdiction. Thus, patriotically, most members of the Church rejoiced in the successful defence of the Russian Lands following the racist Nazi invasion of 1941.

However, there were also more worldly émigrés, dangerous sectarian elements, who were more politicians than Churchmen, and threatened the future of the Church. Especially after the repose of Metr Antony of Kiev in 1936, the first Primate of ROCOR, these elements slowly began to threaten the integrity of the Church leadership. Indeed, just before and during the Second World War such secular political elements even tried to compromise the ROCOR episcopate with Fascism.

The Threat: 1943-1968

After the Second World War these elements, now resettled in the USA, started to try and compromise the Church with the CIA and other dependent spy services. From the 1960s on, indeed, these elements tried to isolate the Church, putting the future St John of Shanghai on trial and linking ROCOR with fanatical old calendarists, making out that all the Local Churches had mysteriously ‘lost grace’, which they alone had conserved.

According to such phariseeism, on account of the political compromises of a few hostage-bishops in Eastern Europe, 100 million Orthodox were condemned, ‘deprived of grace’! Such was the theological nonsense of these extremists. However, these Donatists were opposed by the mass of the Church, who remained faithful to the old ROCOR, remembering the history of the Church before the Revolution and the whole bimillennial Church.

The Time of Troubles: 1968-1993

The situation worsened at the end of the 1960s, though gallant bishops, like the ever-memorable Bishop Sava of Edmonton (+ 1973), Bishop Nectary of Seattle (+ 1983), Archbishop Antony of Geneva (+ 1993) and many faithful priests and laypeople, all disciples of the spirit of St John of Shanghai, resisted. They held faith with the missionary heritage of the Church and genuine monastic life, with the Orthodox Tradition.

Meanwhile, on the political wing, one senior archimandrite debauched nuns and sold and stole property in Jerusalem for $6 million, money which he pocketed, though at last he was defrocked for this and his other crimes. However, his father tried to ally ROCOR with old calendarism and later opened communities which were not on the canonical territory of ROCOR. Some very dark events took place then.

The Rebirth of ROCOR: 1993-2018

In 1993, 75 years after the slaughter of the Royal Martyrs, came the long-awaited canonization of St John of Shanghai, who had so long awaited the canonization of the Royal Martyrs. This was a turning-point, for it meant that the Johannite wing of the Church, the spirit of St John, was winning, whereas the political wing, with its spiritual and moral hypocrisy, love of ritual, pomp and show, was being defeated. Meanwhile, in Moscow in 2000 the compromised of the Church inside Russia repented, at last canonizing the first of the New Martyrs and Confessors, nineteen years after ROCOR, and rejecting political and spiritual compromises. The final victory came in 2007 when ROCOR accepted the repentance of those in Moscow who had compromised themselves during the Soviet period.

However, some in ROCOR itself had also had to repent for the errors which had compromised it with the nonsense of politicized individuals and their naïve followers. In effect, both the old ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ (MP) and the anti-historical sectarian trend in ROCOR in the 1960s-1990s were finished. Even the term ‘MP’ is now used only by polemicists, who cling to the unpleasant past in order to justify their sectarian present. Since 2007, there has only been the Russian Orthodox Church: the 98% inside the Russian Lands and the 2% outside them. We are united by our common saints, the Royal Martyrs, all the tens of thousands of New Martyrs and Confessors who followed them, and the confessor-saints of ROCOR: St Jonah of Hankou (+ 1925), St Seraphim of Sofia (+ 1950) and St John of Shanghai (+ 1966).

Conclusion: The Future 2018

Approaching the third decade of the 21st century and its centenary, today’s ROCOR must stand steadfast in its uncompromising faith. It must stand against geriatric ecumenism, political or academic compromises, which make theology and so Church life into an ideological or intellectual game. It must oppose those who value property and money over human souls, always siding with the saints. ROCOR must be the Local Church, on whatever continent we exist.

Throughout Western Europe, the Americas and Australasia, ROCOR must stand for the local people, whatever their native language and origins. It must stand for already Orthodox people, as well as for people who seek to live according to the Orthodox Tradition. We must stand against ideology, bureaucracy, centralization, politics, what is done for mere show and prestige, for the Orthodox Tradition without either compromise or sectarian foolishness.

Trends in the Russian Orthodox Church Today

Introduction

After the revolution of the last generation, the generation since the end of the Cold War, what is the situation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church today, of the Russian Patriarchate and of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)? Once they were bitterly divided. And now?

A. The Russian Patriarchate of the Past

1. Attitudes to the Outer World

In the bad old days, a few prominent bishops of the Patriarchate were forced to sit in front of cameras and tell blatant lies, for example, that there was no persecution of the Church inside Russia. Why? Simply because if they did not, their priests and parishes would suffer. As hostages, they took the political sin of lieing onto themselves. Personally, such blatant lies never really bothered me. I knew why they were doing it. Frankly, I thought the sin was more with those who asked them such compromising questions. However, something else did bother me.

2. Attitudes to the Inner World

What bothered me was hypocrisy. There were certain bishops and others of the paralysed Patriarchate who were utterly corrupt, whether sexually or financially. And that corruption rotted all of Church life. Those people were not Christians. As a victim of them at that time, I know what I am talking about.

B. ROCOR of the Past

1. Attitudes to the Outer World

In the bad old days, ROCOR in the USA sometimes took CIA money. That bothered me. At that time, quite a few in ROCOR worked for various anti-Soviet (in fact, anti-Russian) Western spy agencies. These people have today almost all left the Church or else died of old age. Today, for example, I know of people who have joined the Paris Exarchate because they are not allowed to join either part of the Russian Church as they work as spies at GCHQ or spy agencies in Paris. Loyalty to the Western Establishment comes first for them, Christ second. That is clearly wrong.

2. Attitudes to the Inner World

Hypocrisy in the old ROCOR also bothered me. Some considered that as long as you were anti-Communist, you were fine, you could be as anti-missionary and racist as you wanted, as well as practise abortion. I could quote names. Fortunately, such outrageous phariseeism was the domain of a minority.

C. The Russian Patriarchate Today

1. Attitudes to the Outer World

Today, the Patriarchate is a Church of 150 million converts and various neophyte deformations can be found on the fringes. For example, we can find secularizing, pro-Soviet attitudes, the arrogance and racism of the old ‘Soviet tank’ mentality that simply wants to barge in and take over everything. This type of imperialism, with an undiscriminating admiration for the present State, pays no attention to pastoral matters and building up parish life, has little understanding of families and children. It is ritualistic, careerist and money-orientated, its representatives never having suffered.

However, we can also find pro-Western (ecumenist, liberal, ‘diplomatic’) attitudes among those from a bourgeois background. They vilify the Soviet past, dismissing its positive preservation of re-Revolutionary cultural values, detest President Putin and adore the Atlanticist Prime Minister Medvedev.

2. Attitudes to the Inner World

We can also find a conservative, pietist movement. Piety is good, but pietism generally means ritualism, sentimentalism, zeal without understanding, words without meaning. How many churches have we visited where services are read and sung in such a way that not a single word can be understood. This is what drives away men, meaning that services are attended by 80%-90% women. This may have been normal in abnormal Soviet times, when men would lose their jobs for attending church, but today it is abnormal. A huge work of catechism is under way. There is far to go.

We can also find a pro-social movement. Many of its representatives are very liberal, but they are at least beginning to deal with the huge social problems of post-Soviet society: massive and endemic corruption, alcoholism, abortion, drug-taking, environmental degradation, the handicapped…

D. ROCOR Today

1. Attitudes to the Outer World

Today, there is a danger of ROCOR becoming an Americanized Church, which simply refuses to understand the unpaid clergy and the plight of the mass of poor people who have come to us out of Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe. It does not want to know our sufferings. Here too there is a certain arrogance and spirit of takeover. ‘We are right, you are wrong’. Just as in today’s Russia, there can sometimes be a spirit of show, a concentration on externals. There can also be a spirit of mafia, a concentration of power among the first and wealthy, so that others are excluded as second-class citizens.

This lack of love is also fostering a liberalism, unheard of before in ROCOR, which comes from outside the Church. If unchallenged, this American-style cultural infiltration of ecumenist, liberal and ‘diplomatic’ attitudes from a bourgeois background will hamper our uncompromised witness.

2. Attitudes to the Inner World

Exactly as in the Patriarchate, we can also find a conservative, pietist movement. Piety is good, but pietism generally means ritualism, sentimentalism, zeal without understanding, words without meaning. How many churches have we visited where services are read and sung in such a way that not a single word can be understood. This can be accompanied by a self-righteous denial of the ROCOR past. ‘Everything was perfect’. This nostalgia of course is totally unjustified. Many ROCOR parishes are real and model communities, examples for the Patriarchate, but not all.

Pastorally, many are positively moving parish life into the inevitable multinational and bilingual future and creating real communities. Here there is also a danger – that Church life becomes only social, emotional, all words, the ascetic foundation forgotten, as in the Exarchate and the OCA.

Conclusion

Thus, we can see remarkable parallels, indeed convergence, between the two parts of the Russian Church. Clearly, only the positive trends are needed, all that is negative is not needed. Above all, we need the central unity of the spiritual food to be found in the purity of our Tradition of Holy Rus.

The Spiritual Meaning of the Guiding Saints of Faithful Russian Orthodox Outside Russia

Introduction

The Orthodox Empire of Holy Rus, also called the Empire of The Third Rome, was preserved by its faith in the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as expressed in the untampered Nicene Creed, confessed alone by the Orthodox Church. Our pure and uncompromised faith in the Holy Trinity is represented by three basic tenets of belief: Orthodoxy (representing the primacy of the Love of the Father), the Sovereign Monarchy (representing the presence of the Incarnate Body of Christ, the Son), and the Faithful People (representing the bearers of the Holy Spirit).

In the words of the last Christian Emperor, Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, the Orthodox Empire fell on account of the vices opposed to these three tenets of the Holy Trinity. In his precise words, the Empire fell because of Treason, Cowardice and Deceit. And indeed, Orthodoxy was undermined by the Treason of spiritual traitors, the Sovereign Monarchy was abandoned by the Cowardice of those who lacked faith, and the Faithful People were deceived by the Deceit of those who promised paradise on earth and instead created hell on earth.

The three vices of Treason, Cowardice and Deceit have since then also threatened the survival of the Church, both inside Russia and outside Russia. Thus, the Church inside Russia was threatened by the pharisaic Treason to Orthodoxy of ritualistic and nationalistic Sergianists who compromised the Church with an atheist State, by the weak-faithed Cowardice of those who would not recognize the Sovereign Monarchy of the Imperial Martyrs and those faithful to them, and by the schismatic Deceit of the Faithful People by those who claimed that the Church needed to be ‘renovated’ with their liberalism and ecumenism.

However, the Church outside Russia was also threatened by Treason, Cowardice and Deceit, and from both left and right: by those who compromised the Church to Western States, whether Masonic and liberal or Fascist and racist; by the Cowardice of those who would not recognize as saints the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Imperial Family and those close to them, or the local saints of the Ancient West; and by the Deceit of those who claimed that the Church needed to be ‘adapted’, either to renovationist liberalism and ecumenism, or else to formalist ritualism and nationalism.

The three guiding saints of the Church Outside Russia, St Jonah of Hankou, St Seraphim of Sofia and St John of Shanghai, Paris and San Francisco, were sent by God to protect Russian Orthodox outside Russia from precisely these temptations and diseases. Let us recall their lives, so that we can understand their spiritual meaning.

 St Jonah of Hankou (1888-1925), the Witness to the Love of God the Father

Born Vladimir Pokrovsky, the future saint was orphaned at an early age and adopted by a village sexton, who gave the child his own surname and an upbringing. After completing a religious school in Moscow, he enrolled at seminary in Kaluga where he graduated with honours. Thereafter, he went on to the Kazan Theological Academy. In his third year here he was tonsured monk and given the name of Jonah. Here, in obedience to the Optina Elder Gabriel, he took up an academic position. His spiritual father was the renowned Elder Gabriel Sedmiyezersky, locally venerated as a saint.

The revolutionary years brought him great suffering at the hands of the Bolsheviks. He was arrested, brutally beaten until he lost consciousness, and had all his hair violently ripped out. Miraculously, the future saint, now an abbot, survived and managed to escape. Abbot Jonah spent the Civil War in the army of Admiral Alexander Kolchak, within which he founded the Detachment of the Holy Cross. He then served as head priest in the Orenburg Cossack Army. Alongside these men, St. Jonah braved a perilous march across the steppes and overcame the frozen Pamir Mountain pass to find himself in Xinjiang – Chinese Turkestan.

In January 1922 Abbot Jonah sent an account of his life and work to Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky), who was then in Serbia, and offered to devote himself to the Council and its work. In response, the Council entered his name to be considered as a bishop. The consecration of the new bishop took place on 18 September 1922 at the Russian Spiritual Mission in Beijing. As bishop, St. Jonah would head the vicariate in Xianjiang (Hankou) and be appointed Dean of the mission’s church in Manchuria, where he arrived on 19 October 1922.

The zealous servant of God’s church and renowned missionary, the young and energetic Bishop Jonah, took it on himself to establish his flock in the faith. He instituted the prescribed church services, established a wonderful choir and gave sermons tirelessly. Bishop Jonah also served as chairman of the International Committee for Hunger Relief from the day of his arrival in the town of Manzhuria until his very death. The brunt of the work lay on his shoulders. St. Jonah began to gather funds. An intelligent and practical person, St. Jonah created a commercial division within the Committee, the main goal of which was to independently earn money that would fund charities the committee had founded. It was not, of course, without its enemies.

The limitations of some, the envy of others, and the phariseeism and hypocrisy of yet others wove a web of intrigue around the bishop and attempted to compromise his good name by virtue of the fact that he, a bishop, would promote such undignified work as trade. But he paid little attention to all of the attacks, simply prayed to God and said: ‘These rumours spread by our enemies lay down our path to the Kingdom of Heaven’.

Having tasted the bitterness of such a life himself, the saint felt an especially deep compassion for orphans. He opened an orphanage at the old church where he lived to care for orphaned and impoverished children and, relegating it to the authority of the International Committee. Missionary and educational work held a special place in his heart. As many as 500 people attended free of cost the elementary and middle schools founded by Vladyka.

On 1 August 1923 the International Committee had opened a free outpatient clinic providing medical aid and distributing medicine to the most impoverished sectors of the population and surrounding territories. Next door there was a free dental office. Prior to the Saint’s arrival, medicine was impossible to acquire. In addition to medical care and free medicine, certification of illness and disability were provided to the poor and a petition was started to provide passports free of charge. Medical care was given to 6,387 people in one year.

With the backing of patrons he established modest enterprises which, though they provided only a modest income, created jobs for the poorest refugees. Their metalwork and pottery were well known in Harbin for being particularly durable and beautifully made. Here is a list of the enterprises St. Jonah started during the three years he resided in Manzhuria: (1) Orphanage, (2) Elementary school, (3) Middle school, (4) Soup kitchen, (5) Free outpatient clinic, (6) Pharmacy with an allotment of free medicine for the poor, (7) Vocational courses at schools, and (8) Library.

The life of St. Jonah was very humble. It was unbelievable that he was a ‘prince of the church’. He had neither a cook, nor a kitchen. His meals were humble and simple. His favourite dish was fried potatoes and dark rye bread. Vladyka’s clothing and shoes were more than modest. Patches were the usual adornment on everything. Often the tailor and cobbler refused to mend them – the patches would not hold. He was adept at securing resources for others but spent hardly anything on himself. All his personal funds were dedicated to charity.

Ever friendly, ever cheerful and engaging, the Saint was loved and respected by all those around him. As the accounts of those who knew him attest, a constant stream of people called on him – some for advice, others for help. The doors of his unassuming apartment stayed open from 7 in the morning until 10 or 11 o’clock at night. Then, at 11 o’clock, when there was nobody to disturb him, Vladyka would sit down to work. And on feast days, squeezing into the room was impossible. Russians, Chinese and foreigners alike longed to speak with Vladyka.

St. Jonah left this world unexpectedly, at the age of 37, exactly three years after his arrival in Manzhuria. He was not accustomed to caring for himself, and he developed tonsillitis and died. Before his death the Saint wrote his last will and testament:

In the Name of the Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. – Too suddenly I have learned of my imminent death. My thoughts are becoming confused.… What do I wish to bequeath unto you? My darling and dear children of Manzhuria and Hankou. I came to you with the Apostle’s words of love: ‘Children, love one another’… and I leave you with these words: ‘Love one another’… This is the will of your shepherd. It is with gladness of spirit that I forgive anyone who has wronged me. Are there even such people? I tearfully ask and stand on my knees before each of him whom I have wronged. Do not give up on the little ones.… Forgive me for Christ’s sake; and do not forget your prayers.… Write my name in your prayer books.… And so, until eternity, until we all stand before the Final Judge. Jonah, Bishop of Hankou. 1925, 4/17 October.

 Three thousand copies of his will were made – barely enough for half of those in attendance at his funeral. Even death would not impede the saint in performing his good work. On the night of his burial, he healed a ten-year-old boy, Nikolai Dergachev while he was asleep. The inflammation in the child’s knees was so severe that he could not stand, much less walk. In his dream Vladyka approached the boy and said: ‘Take my legs. I don’t need them any more and give me yours. ‘He taught: love your neighbour as you love yourself, but his love was even greater than that…’

St. Jonah was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1996. His glorification coincided with the day of his repose and was decreed to be celebrated on the day of his remembrance: 7/20 October.

St Seraphim of Sofia (1881-1950), the Witness to the Incarnation of Christ the Son through the Church and in Sovereign Monarchy

As if sensing what a powerful enemy he would have in Vladyka Seraphim, the devil tried to destroy him while still in his mother’s womb. She had an extremely difficult and painful labour and the doctors decided they would need to operate to extract the infant piece by piece in order to save the mother’s life. At this moment she regained consciousness and, on learning of the doctor’s decision, forbade her husband to permit the murder of her child. The next morning, at the first stroke of the church bell on 1 December 1881, she gave birth without any help.

When she saw the baby, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, what a serious mukhtar!’ The infant was named Nicholas in honour of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, but his family sometimes called him ‘mukhtar’, an apparently meaningless word which he disliked terribly. Years later, Bishop Nestor of Manchuria visited Vladyka Seraphim in Sofia. He presented him with a book of his memoirs, in which, in the chapter about his visit to Jerusalem, it said that the word mukhtar means ‘bishop’ in Arabic. And so, not realizing it herself, his mother had foretold the destiny of her son.

Nicholas was an excellent student and, after attending the local parish school, he entered seminary. There, in the second to last year, he decided to devote his life to God. After graduating he attended Saint Petersburg Theological Academy and here became a monk. The bishop and rector doing the tonsure suddenly remembered that when he was present at the opening of St. Seraphim’s relics, he had made a vow to the saint that if he became rector of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, the first student he tonsured he would name Seraphim. Thus, he gave this name to Nicholas in honour of the great saint of Sarov.

Graduating near the top of his class, Fr. Seraphim taught for a year at a priest’s school before he was appointed assistant supervisor of the diocesan school in Kaluga. The pupils there greatly loved Fr. Seraphim. In 1912 Hieromonk Seraphim was appointed rector of the seminary in Voronezh. On 1 October 1920, on the feast of the Protection of the Most Holy Mother of God, in the Cathedral of Simferopol, Fr Seraphim was consecrated bishop. It was a great comfort for him that on that occasion, by God’s inscrutable ways, the great sacred treasure, the Wonderworking Kursk Root Icon of the Mother of God, was present in the Cathedral.

Soon after this, to his sorrow, Vladyka had to leave his native land. He spent a short time in Constantinople before moving to Bulgaria where, in August 1921, he was appointed Director of Russian Orthodox monastic communities there. Living in ceaseless ascetic endeavours, from abstinence and difficult living conditions Vladyka contracted tuberculosis. Despite his serious illness, he cared for his flock with true pastoral fervour. He served frequently and gave sermons three times a week, calling his flock to repentance, to grace-filled renewal and to the most basic virtue – humility.

As an archpastor, Vladyka Seraphim made the rounds of Russian parishes in the provinces and visited the Russian schools. His talks and his warm, loving personality left a lasting, grace-filled impression everywhere. In difficult material conditions, Vladyka also cared for poor and sick Russian people. For some he arranged free hospital treatment, others he placed in homes for invalids, for some he obtained pensions, some he fed at his place, and some he settled in his monastery. Nor did Vladyka overlook destitute Russian monks on Mt. Athos. He formed a committee to collect help for them and in his sermons he appealed to parishioners to donate to this holy work.

In 1934 Vladyka was raised to the position of Archbishop. Spiritually gifted from his early years and constantly engaged in a fiery struggle with the passions, Vladyka, while still a relatively young bishop, attained great spiritual heights. Several of his spiritual children recorded cases of his clairvoyance, which manifested itself even at a distance. For his angelic purity, Vladyka received from the Lord the gift to perceive subtle deviations from Orthodox Christian truth. He watched over Orthodox Christian life and was its conscience, as it were. Where he observed irregularity, he exposed it, not fearing to suffer for the truth. As a result, he produced priceless theological works.

One of Vladyka’s major works was the refutation of the Gnostic, anti-Incarnation heresy of the Parisian philosopher Archpriest Sergius Bulgakov, for which, in 1937, Vladyka received a Master’s Degree in theology. He was rushing to complete this work by a certain deadline when he fell ill. He implored the Mother of God, to whose prayerful intercession he had resorted all his life, begging her to heal him. And what happened? Vladyka’s temperature immediately dropped and he was able to finish his work within the allotted time.

Vladyka poured out all his love for the Saviour in his theological works, fervently defending the truths of Orthodoxy against compromise and ecumenism and also in defence of holy Monarchy. ‘My books are my blood’, he declared. And truly, he lay down his life for Christ in the struggle against heretics, sparing neither his strength nor broken health. Vladyka constantly worked at night, secretly. In the evening he would lie down and, when everyone else had fallen asleep, he would get up and continue writing, taking advantage of the night-time quiet, considering it his pastoral duty to defend the truth.

It is not by chance that the Lord called Vladyka to the next world on the very day when the Holy Church celebrates the Triumph of Orthodoxy and its defenders. For the day of Archbishop Seraphim’s repose was 13/26 February 1950. He was canonized jointly by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church in 2016 and his feast day is on 13/26 February.

 St John of Shanghai (1896-1966), the Witness to the Holy Spirit among all Faithful People

Michael Maximovich, the future Archbishop John, was born on 4 June 1896 in the village of Adamovka in the province of Kharkov in what is at the moment the Ukraine. He was a member of the Little Russian noble family of Maximovich, to which St John of Tobolsk had also belonged. He was a sickly child and ate little. He received his secondary education in the Poltava Military School, which he attended from 1907 to 1914. Upon completing military school he entered Kharkov Imperial University in the faculty of law, from which he graduated in 1918.

In 1921, following the Civil War in Russia, the future archbishop together with his parents, his brothers and his sister fled to Belgrade, where he and his brothers entered university. In 1924, Michael was ordained reader in the Russian church in Belgrade by Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), who continued to exert great influence over him. In 1926 Metropolitan Anthony tonsured him a monk and ordained him hierodeacon in Milkovo Monastery, giving him the name John, after the future archbishop’s own distant relative, Saint John (Maximovich) of Tobolsk. On 21 November of the same year Fr. John was ordained hieromonk.

From here he went to the town of Bitol in the diocese of Ochrid. At that time the ruling bishop of this diocese was the future St Nicholas Velimirovich—a noted preacher, poet, writer and inspirer of a popular spiritual movement. He, as much as Metropolitan Anthony, valued and loved the young Hieromonk John, and himself exerted a beneficial influence upon him. More than once he was heard to say, ‘If you wish to see a living saint, go to Bitol to Father John’.

For indeed it began to become evident that he was an entirely extraordinary man. His own students were first to discover what was perhaps Fr. John’s greatest feat of asceticism. They noticed that he stayed up long after everyone else had gone to bed; he would go through the dormitories at night and pick up blankets that had fallen down and cover the unsuspecting sleepers, making the Sign of the Cross over them. Finally, it was discovered that he scarcely slept at all, and never in a bed, allowing himself only an hour or two each night of uncomfortable rest in a sitting position, or bent over on the floor praying before icons. Years afterward he himself admitted that since taking monastic vows he had not slept in a bed.

Fr John lived by the high ideals of Orthodox Christianity and so of Holy Russia and was chosen to be bishop. His consecration, quite unexpected for him, took place on 28 May 1934. Vladyka was the last bishop of the very many to be consecrated by Metropolitan Anthony and was assigned to the Diocese of Shanghai in China. Vladyka arrived in Shanghai in late November and found a large Cathedral uncompleted and a conflict to resolve. The first thing he did was to restore Church unity, establishing contact with Russians, Serbs, Greeks and Ukrainians.

He paid special attention to religious education and also became a patron of various charities and actively participated in their work, especially after seeing the needy circumstances in which so many of his flock lived. Vladyka himself gathered sick and starving children off the streets and dark alleys of Shanghai’s slums. The orphanage later housed up to a hundred children at a time, some 1500 in all. Vladyka celebrated the Divine Liturgy daily, as he was to do for the rest of his life, and if for some reason he could not serve, he would still receive Holy Communion. No matter where he was, he would not miss a service.

By now it had become known that Vladyka was not only a righteous man and an ascetic, but was also so close to God that he was endowed with the gift of clairvoyance, and there were healings by his prayers. Vladyka loved to visit the sick and did it every single day, hearing confessions and giving Holy Communion. Vladyka visited the prison also, and celebrated the Divine Liturgy for the convicts on a primitive table. But the most difficult task for a pastor is to visit the mentally ill and the possessed – and Vladyka clearly distinguished between the two. Outside Shanghai there was a mental hospital, and Vladyka alone had the spiritual power to visit these sick people. He gave them Holy Communion, and they, surprisingly, received it peacefully and listened to him.

Vladyka possessed great courage. During the Japanese occupation the Japanese authorities tried in every way possible to bend the Russian colony to their will. Pressure was directed through the heads of the Russian Emigre Committee. Two Presidents of the Committee strove to maintain its independence and both were killed. Confusion and terror seized the Russian colony and at that moment Vladyka John, in spite of warnings from Russians who were collaborating with the Japanese, declared himself the temporary head of the Russian colony.

During the Japanese occupation it was extremely dangerous to walk on the streets at night, and most people took care to be home by dark. Vladyka, however, paying no heed to the danger, continued to visit the sick and needy at any hour of the night and he was never touched. With the coming of Communism, the Russians in China were forced to flee once again, most of them through the Philippines. In 1949 approximately 5,000 refugees from the Chinese mainland were living in an International Refugee Organization camp on the island of Tubabao in the Philippines. This island is located in the path of the seasonal typhoons which sweep through that part of the Pacific. During the 27-month period of the camp’s occupancy, the island was threatened only once by a typhoon, and it changed course and bypassed the island.

When the fear of typhoons was mentioned by one Russian to the Filipinos, they replied that there was no reason to worry, because ‘your holy man blesses your camp from four directions every night’. They referred to Vladyka John, for no typhoon struck the island while he was there. After the camp had been almost totally evacuated and the people resettled elsewhere (mainly in the USA and Australia), it was struck by a terrible typhoon that totally destroyed the camp. Vladyka himself went to Washington D.C., to get his people to America. Legislation was changed and almost the whole camp came to the New World – thanks again to Vladyka.

The exodus of his flock from China accomplished, in 1951 Archbishop John was given a new field for his pastoral endeavours: he was sent by the Synod of Bishops to the Archdiocese of Western Europe, with his see first in Paris and later in Brussels. In Western Europe Vladyka took a deep interest not only in Russians, for whom he exerted himself tirelessly in labours similar to those for which he had been known in Shanghai, but also in the local people. He received into his Diocese Dutch and French people, protecting them and encouraging their Orthodox development. He celebrated the Divine Liturgy in Dutch and French, as before he had served in Greek and Chinese, and as later he was to serve in English.

Vladyka’s interest in and devotion to the Church’s Saints, of whom his knowledge was already seemingly limitless, was now extended to Western European Saints from before the Latin schism. Many of them, venerated only locally, were not then included in any Orthodox calendar of Saints. He collected their lives and images of them and later submitted a long list of them to the Synod.

In San Francisco Vladyka’s life-long friend, the pious Archbishop Tikhon of San Francisco, retired due to ill-health, and in his absence the construction of a new Cathedral came to a halt as a bitter dispute paralyzed the Russian community. In response to the urgent request of thousands of Russians in San Francisco who had known him in Shanghai, Archbishop John was sent by the Synod in 1962 as the only hierarch likely to restore peace in the divided community. He arrived at his last assignment as bishop twenty-eight years to the day after his arrival in Shanghai – on the feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple, 21 November 1962.

Under Vladyka’s guidance a measure of peace was restored, the paralysis of the community was ended and the Cathedral finished. Yet, even in the role of peacemaker, Vladyka was attacked, and accusations and slanders were heaped upon his head, including by fellow bishops. He was forced to appear in public court – in flagrant violation of Church canons – to answer preposterous charges of concealing financial dishonesty by the Parish Council. All involved were completely exonerated but this filled Vladyka’s last years with the bitterness of slander and persecution, to which he unfailingly replied without complaint, without judging anyone, with undisturbed peacefulness.

On the evening before leaving for Seattle in late June 1966, four days before his repose, Vladyka astonished a man for whom he had just celebrated a service with the words, ‘You will not kiss my hand again’. And on the day of his repose, at the conclusion of the Divine Liturgy which he had celebrated, he spent three hours in the altar praying, emerging not long before his repose on 2 July. He fell asleep in his room in the parish building next to the church. He was heard to fall and, having been placed in a chair by those who ran to help him, breathed his last peacefully and with little evident pain, in the presence of the Wonderworking Kursk Root Icon.

Until his canonization the relics of Archbishop John lay in a chapel in the basement of the San Francisco Cathedral (after the canonization on 2 July 1994 the relics were moved to the main floor of the Cathedral). Vladyka also proved to listen to those who revere his memory. To one woman he appeared in a dream and said, ‘Tell the people: although I have died, I live!’ As people are drawn to the Church of Christ before the final unleashing of evil, we look to him as our loving guide and pastor who knows no death. He is a yardstick which indicates the truth in our confusing times. His unit of measure is nothing other than holiness, that is, pure Christian love, which he possessed and distributed in abundance.

Conclusion

A witness to the Father, Who is Love, and so to the two great commandments to love God and our neighbour, as an apostle of Love, St Jonah thus showed faithfulness to Orthodoxy against those who committed Treason. Pharisaic ritualists, the sort who would treasonously later support the Nazis, accused him of ‘socialism’, where there was only Love for our neighbour, the authentic Orthodox way of life.

A witness to the Incarnation of the Son, St Seraphim supported the doctrine of the Incarnation, the Kingdom of God on earth in the form of the Christian Monarchy, against the disincarnate heretics and ecumenists. These modernists showed Cowardice in abandoning the teachings of the Church, including the Orthodox teaching on the Sovereign Government of the Tsar. They preferred Western freemasonry to the Church and the recognition of the Imperial Martyrs.

A witness to the presence of the Holy Spirit among all faithful Orthodox People everywhere, St John showed that the fruit of the Spirit is the saints whom he so loved. It was he who had already called for the canonization of the Imperial Martyrs in the 1930s against the views of others who delayed that canonization until 1981. The worldwide mission of St John was opposed to the Deceit of narrow nationalism and racism of all sorts, loving all people and using all languages to speak of Christ.

Church life is full of temptations. There is only one way to overcome them – by faithfulness to the Holy Trinity. Whatever form the organization of the Church outside Russia may take, we must remain faithful to the Holy Trinity in the Orthodoxy, Sovereign Monarchy and Faithful People of Holy Rus. We must resist those who think that church buildings are more important than the souls of the flock, the anti-Orthodox Treason of the flattering rich, the Cowardice of power-seeking plotters and the Deceit of the pharisaical superficial.

Holy Hierarchs Jonah, Seraphim and John, pray to God for us!

 

 

From Recent Correspondence (September 2017)

Q: What is the Russian Orthodox view of patriotism?

A: As President Putin has put it: ‘For Russians […] patriotic sentiment, the sense of national belonging that is now, to their sorrow, being eroded in certain European countries, is very important’. In today’s Europe, the attention of those who seek to preserve their national identity, those who are patriots and nationalists in the best sense of the word, is fixed on Moscow. Conversely, those who yell the loudest about a ‘Russian threat’ and ‘European unity in the face of Russian aggression’ are precisely those who want to destroy European faces and borders and reviving identities, like that of Catalonia, as they are oriented towards the EU headquarters in Brussels and the White House.

Russia is the Motherland of patriotism in Europe and in defiance of the artificial denationalisation imposed by Western-imposed Soviet Communism, it is returning to the old mission of keeping the flame of national identity in Europe alight, preserving it as a Europe of homelands and not a public thoroughfare. Although the State-run media like the BBC try to slander all moderate patriots as ‘Neo-Nazis’ and ‘the far right’, in reality there are very few ‘Neo-Nazis’ and ordinary people, both on the normal right and the normal left, are patriots. 52% of British people voted for Brexit, surely even more would vote for Brexit today, given Juncker’s recent speech on the abolition of Europe (‘Eurofederalism’) in Brussels.

Q: Why is the West so aggressive?

A: The West is far more aggressive than many people even realize. Its wars of aggression are always camouflaged by code-names. For example, the multinational Western invasions and Western wars of aggression against Russia are variously known as ‘The Teutonic Crusades’, ‘The Napoleonic Campaign’, ‘The Crimean War’, ‘World War One’, ‘World War Two’ etc. In the same way, today the USA has a ‘Department of Defense’, and yet no-one has ever tried to invade the USA and that Department is notorious for its Offense.

Britain’s ‘Ministry of Defence’ has similarly always spent its time invading and bombing countries far away, all in the name of ‘national security’. Apparently Britain has invaded some 150 foreign countries in its history! This British Establishment aggressiveness goes back to its founders, in their so-called ‘Battle of Hastings’, which did not take place in Hastings and should actually be called ‘The Norman Invasion and Occupation’ or ‘The Defeat and Rape of England’.

The roots of this Westernwide aggression go back even further than 1066, to the anti-Christian Charlemagne, who revived the dead pagan Roman Empire – the model for all aggressive, asset-stripping and war-based systems – under the code-name of a ‘classical revival’. He told his people that they were superior to Christians (‘Greeks’) and also to anyone else, because the Holy Spirit came from their leader, the Pope of Rome, whom Charlemagne had made infallible with his filioque ideology. Later this mythical superiority was spread downwards to anyone who agreed with the Western Establishment and anyone who was ‘Western’ was thus considered superior. ‘Black, brown, red and yellow peoples’ were inferior and therefore could be enslaved and massacred by ‘White’ Western people. Here is the fruit of the filioque, from the Crusades to Iraq.

Yet another example: On 25 September the BBC programme ‘Beyond Belief’ (Radio 4, 4.30), the programme I spoke on twice after the Pussy Riot blasphemy, the subject was ‘The Persecution of Atheism in Russia’! I could hardly believe what the BBC has come to. It really is Beyond Belief! Not content with supporting the US installation of lesbian politicians and Zionist atheists as leaders in Eastern Europe, from Serbia to the Baltics and the Ukraine, the BBC are now directly plugging Western atheism in Russia, where a few decades ago Western Marxist atheists martyred 600 bishops and 120,000 clergy, under the pretext of ‘freedom of speech’.

Q: What worries you most about the situation of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church? Ecumenism?

A: Definitely not ecumenism. That is a bedtime fairy-tale for old people. It was abandoned as a failure long ago. No, it is something else. Let us try and understand the context in which we live.

We live in the fourth century. We in the Russian Church have come out of persecution and are being recognized, moving forward into the rest of the fourth century. (Unlike the West, where the heterodox have been in the fourth century and are now heading backwards towards the third century and persecution by various atheist emperors). What was the problem in the fourth century? There were no outward enemies, but there were inward enemies, all those who swam with the tide, the ‘fairweather Christians’ who joined the Church for their careers, for worldly advantage. Martyrdom is largely over for us: the ‘easy way’ to salvation has gone: all we had to do was to be killed. For a believing Orthodox that is not a problem. This is why in the fourth century, there was a huge growth in monasticism. Opportunities for martyrdom were mainly over, but the faithful still needed the real thing.

In times of peace we face not outward enemies, but inward enemies, as we in the Church Outside Russia, know only too well. We in our part of the Russian Church did not face martyrdom, what we have faced for nearly 100 years is inward enemies. We faced multiple schisms, by modernists (in the Paris Jurisdiction and in the USA), then by old calendarists (in the USA, France, South America and Great Britain), we faced racism and nationalism (the policy of excluding certain people from the Church because they had ‘the wrong blood’), we faced careerism, false brethren and slanders, backed by certain bishops. This type of persecution is insidious and calls on us to be confessors and not martyrs. That is much more subtle.

We have a great example in St John of Shanghai, who was put on trial in a secular court by so-called ‘ROCOR’ bishops, clergy and people. Shame on them! But who came out of this affair a saint? It is the insignificant and derided little man on the court bench who prayed: the others are, at best, forgotten. Something similar happened to Fr Seraphim (Rose), who faced persecution from inside. Our greatest enemies have always come from inside the Church. Our enemies confess not the Orthodox Faith, they confess ‘religion’, the outward ritualistic system of phariseeism, spiritual dryness and literalism, together with a systemic personality cult and academicism, sometimes homosexual, all of which persecute, mock and despise any authentic, living spiritual experience.

The souls of these go dry at Pentecost, they feel nothing, not the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit, not new green life, but they rattle off the prayers to the Holy Spirit without feeling, looking at their watches. These people have no Love, no Theology, no Knowledge of the Living God (St Alban), no compassion, all they have is their ill psychology, which they use for self-justification and persecution of the righteous.

Today we can see such tendencies inside Russia (and among some of its representatives outside Russia). Careerism, the interest in ‘awards’, rationalism, knowledge only of the outward, Spirit-free academicism, the rush for ‘degrees’, the salt that has lost its savour. It does not matter whether the tendency is new calendarist and modernist or old calendarist and traditionalist, it is the same anti-spiritual tendency.

Q: Was the Russian emigration a good thing?

A: Its causes were of course bad and émigrés suffered. But the spiritual life of the emigration itself was very mixed, both pure and impure. In the 1930s St John of Shanghai reckoned that only 10% of the emigration was Churchly. This corresponds to my own experience. Many Russians were ‘White’ only inasmuch as they were greedy for money and property and had no time, either for the Faith or for the Tsar, whom so many of them had actively betrayed. Many were racist and nationalistic, opposed to multinational Rus, so denying the words and commandments of the apostles to go out into all the world and teach and baptise ‘all men’.

There are still parts of the Russian emigration which have not returned to the Russian Church and, incredibly, are still on the Catholic calendar, which was introduced by the masonic Anglicans into Constantinople for a fee of £100,000 in the early 1920s. Still no repentance for such unspeakable spiritual decadence! In years to come we shall be amazed that any of this was possible, let alone justified by ‘theologians’, ‘the great and good!’

And yet the emigration also produced saints. As ever, I will say to you: Follow the Saints! Yes, the rest existed and exists. Ignore them, let the spiritually dead bury the spiritually dead. There can be no nostalgia for them. Follow the Chains of Love and you will set your soul free. The Russian emigration was caused by evil, but God’s Providence can always make good from evil.

Q: Is it true that ROCOR has never had a scandal?

A: I do not know who told you such a fairy tale. Sadly, very sadly, just think about the Antony Grabbe scandal in Jerusalem, about the consecration of Valentin of Suzdal (I remember how Archbishop Antony of Geneva prayed for a snowstorm so that his plane could not take off and he would not have to take part in his consecration under obedience), about Grabbe’s bishop-father who ended up in a right-wing sect outside the Church and banned anyone from attending his funeral, about the defrocked….

Q: What would you like to see the Orthodox Church do as a whole?

A: Publish statistics and facts! For example, I reckon that there are about 800 Orthodox bishops, 80,000 priests and 217 million Orthodox. However, these are merely informed guesstimates and I do not know the truth. I have no idea how many deacons, monks and nuns there are in the Church and in each Local Church. I would be very grateful to see some central statistical Orthodox authority issuing such information. (If any readers can correct my estimates, please will they contact me).

Q: In the light of what happened in Crete in 2016, what should be done about the state of the Orthodox episcopate, where there are so many who are clearly unprincipled?

A: That is of course a question for the episcopate, not for me. However, my suggestion would be something like deposing all bishops who do not confess that:

1. The Orthodox Church alone is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

2. The application of the canons which state that if they have been appointed by secular authorities (e. g. the State Department in Washington), they must be deposed.

3. The application of the canons which state that if they practise simony, they must be deposed.

4. The application of the canons which state that if they practise homosexuality, they must be deposed.

5. That if they are freemasons, they must be deposed.

Q: You are educated, how can you believe in heaven and hell?

A: We know from the unique revelation of the New Testament that God is Love. Therefore, it is clear that heaven is the presence of Love and hell is the absence of Love. It is very simple. It is even clear from this that heaven and hell, although in undeveloped forms, already exist on earth. People create their own heaven and hell. Please forget the primitive notions of atheists about heaven and hell that you seem to have. It reminds me of the incredibly primitive peasant Khrushchev who said that Gargarin had proved that God did not exist because he had been in space and had not seen Him! The only thing that this proved was Khrushchev’s own primitive ignorance and spiritual blindness.

Q: Why does the Church have rituals? Surely they are unnecessary?

A: The angels do not have rituals. So why do we? Obviously, because we are not angels, that is, we have bodies, a material nature. All people have rituals. Protestants have rituals (sit down, stand up, prayer, hymn, guilt-making sermon, collection of money to pay for the guilt, which is merely a copy of Catholic indulgences), secularists have rituals, parades, processions, the opening of Parliament, both military and civilian etc. Let us therefore make sure that our Church rituals are beautiful and meaningful.

People will always make rituals to worship something higher and greater than themselves, whether the True God or an invented one – drink, football, the sun on the beach, a human ideology…As we know that we are inferior and need to worship something, so let us worship the True God and not such false gods.

A: What is the situation in the Ukraine now?

A: I have not been there for a year now, but with the persecution of most of the people (‘ethnic minorities, of whom over 50% are Russian’), the continuing civil war, the fleeing of millions abroad (especially to Poland and Russia) and the fact that the government is propped up only by US money and money from US organizations like the IMF, I think the future is grim. It seems probable to me that in a few years from now, the country, which is an artificial conglomerate founded by Lenin and Stalin, will split between Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, leaving a possible Little Russian rump around Kiev.

Q: What are we to make of the recent hurricanes in the Caribbean and the earthquakes in Mexico?

A: There have always been such events. When you hear ‘the most powerful hurricane for 100 years’, it means that there have already been others at least as powerful in recorded history. None of this is the first time, it is just that the media are here to report these events. But the Caribbean and Florida are well known as places of crime, gambling, prostitution, drug-dealing and money-laundering. It is clear that only Faith can avert such catastrophes, not vice. Nearly 70 years ago on Tubabao St John of Shanghai protected that island from a typhoon through his prayers, going around the island with the cross and praying. This is what needs to be done here. But is anyone doing this?

In the USA some fear a great eruption in Yellowstone that could almost wipe out life in North America, or an earthquake in San Francisco. But what do people do in these places? Do they pray, do they repent? Some of course yes, but it seems that most just have more and more hubris. Just like Pompeii of old. Just like the Tower of Siloam. Little wonder that people speak of ‘Eurosodom and Gomorrhica’.

Q: Whose side are you on in the Brexit conflict between the Chancellor Philip Hammond and the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson?

A: That is a political question. All I can say is that I support neither of them. The Anglo-Turkish Old Etonian Boris Johnson is, despite his Russian Christian name, a fanatical Russophobe who supports a new Cold War. As regards the multi-millionaire Philip Hammond, I knew him personally, as he was in the same year in the same college in Oxford and also born in Essex (though at the wrong end). Even then, as a teenager, he was quite a ruthless careerist. True, he has done very well for himself in this respect, but has not yet got the top job, which is what he wants. However, regardless of that, both of these politicians are pro-British, i.e., anti-English, which is because they are pro-UK Establishment. The last pro-English politician I can think of is the long ago-retired Sir Richard Body. I am not sure that there is a single pro-English politician left in Parliament today.

Q: Should we be worried about the conflict between the USA and North Korea?

A: For the moment there is no conflict, just mutual insults. What worries me is that both leaders have terrible inferiority complexes that produce paranoia. One wants to be taken seriously as a President, instead of as a horse-trading businessman of limited intelligence, the other is a shy man who is trying to live up to his father and grandfather in cruelty, bluster and everything else. And his country is surrounded by aggressive US ships and planes (the USA is not surrounded by North Korean ships and planes), which only deepens national paranoia.

They both remind me of Kaiser Wilhelm who also had a terrible inferiority complex, caused by his deformed arm and his profound jealousy of Great Britain, and so started the Great War, with all its appalling consequences. ‘Inferiority complexes’ (= the sins of jealousy, vanity, selfishness and pride) cause many problems in world history. They are dangerous. As for these leaders, you should give children toys to play with, not guns, missiles and nuclear bombs. That is worrying.

4 July 1997- 4 July 2017: Twenty Years of Mission: On Restoring the Heritage of St John of Shanghai in the British Isles and Ireland

Exactly twenty years ago, on the eve of the feast day of St John of Shanghai in 1997, an Orthodox Christian mission began to England from the east coast town of Felixstowe, the town of St Felix. This was much like the original Orthodox Christian mission of 631 to exactly the same place but led by the future St Felix. Indeed, this new mission was also an Orthodox Christian mission and it came from the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe, centred in Geneva, precisely next to the native Burgundy of St Felix. This was therefore not a mission created around Parisian personalities with dreamy philosophies and dubious cults, nor one of sectarian and Calvinist phariseeism.

On the contrary, this mission owes itself to Archbishop Antony of Geneva (1910-1993), who was named after the theologian Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev, ordained by Metr Anastasy, and was a disciple of St John of Shanghai and so another authentic Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Western Europe (1). He was briefly bishop in England in 1985. It was in order to restore the heritage of his spiritual father, St John, who had left England in 1962, that we returned, for, to all intents and purposes, his heritage had been lost and forgotten in the British Isles, crucified by spiritual impurities from both the left side and the right side.

Today, as a result of this mission, we are looking not only at real parish bases in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, two of them our property, with four priests, but also at hopes of penetrating further inland, with missions to the north, south and west, to Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Kent and Sussex, and setting up a monastery. It seems, if God so wills, that the mission that could lead to a new Local Orthodox Church here, is indeed to be led from New York by the largely English-speaking ROCOR, to which Archbishop Antony belonged. Its local representative is Bishop Irenei (Steenberg), whose patron saint is the very saint whose icon was long ago painted in the Russian Orthodox church in Lyons – by Archbishop Antony.

Thus, today, whereas our Isles of the North Atlantic (IONA) appear to have a separate destiny from the Continent, it seems that God’s will for the imminent Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Continental Western Europe, the foundation of a new Local Church there, is not for it to be centred under the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in Geneva, as it was in the past under the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. It is rather for this work to be continued directly from Moscow via the new Cathedral and seminary in Paris. May God’s Will be done!

Note: (From his Biography)

1. As a priest in the 1950s Archbishop Antony had served in different churches in the Western European diocese, including in Lyons. Here he had painted the iconostasis of the Lyons church, including an icon of St Irenei of Lyons. As a hierarch, at the Third All-Diaspora Council in 1974 he spoke forcefully for Church unity and against ROCOR self-isolation. He advocated preserving the purity of Orthodoxy against atheism and new calendarist modernism, all the while using the free voice of the Church Outside Russia to understand and not condemn the enslaved, cherishing unity with the universal Church of Christ, avoiding old calendarist divisiveness, intent on seeking out and exaggerating errors.

He called all Russian Orthodox to unity through love and to help Russia. He was commended for taking this royal path by the future St Paisios the Athonite. Archbishop Anthony was also noted for his pan-Orthodox vision and welcome to converts, asking one of his Russian priests to compose a service to All the Saints of the Swiss Lands. Despite his limited linguistic abilities, he ordained clergy of many origins and established multinational missions. His episcopacy was noted for the peace and love within his diocese, which stretched from Portugal to Austria and from the Netherlands to the south of Italy, and for the brotherly feeling among the clergy.

100 Years On: The End of Anglican Orthodoxy and Reality

Within a few years of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing enslavement of the Russian Church inside Russia centred in Moscow, some 2,000 Russian émigrés had settled in England, mainly in London. They split into two Church groups, both independent of enslaved Moscow, a larger group of various origins, and a much smaller group, mainly of liberal aristocrats and intellectuals, mainly Anglophiles and mainly from Saint Petersburg. The first group formed a parish in London under the initially Moscow-established Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which had four Metropolias, in China, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Americas, catering for all emigres. The second group also formed a parish in London, but under the small Parisian Rue Daru breakaway jurisdiction, outside the Russian Church, under the then largely Anglican-run and financed (now US-run and financed) Patriarchate of Constantinople.

After the Second World War the first group, under ROCOR, formed more parishes for several thousand refugees with Polish nationality, mainly Ukrainians and Belarussians but also some Russians, who all awaited freedom in the Russian Church inside Russia. (This was to come in 2007, only after most of them had died, bringing reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia). On the other hand, after the Second World War the second group returned formally to the still unfree Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, but on a special basis under the unique Parisian personality of the then Fr Antony Bloom, and developed into an independent group of several small communities. After he died in 2003, this group split in 2006, the majority remaining under Moscow and as a result, by 2007, the majority in the second group and the first group had entered into the unity of canonical communion with one another.

However, some 300 people, often of Anglican background and in small scattered communities, returned to the breakaway Paris Rue Daru group in 2006. Why did they avoid the reconciliation of the vast majority? It was because their leading ideology was that of an English-language Orthodoxy, which was in fact a Russophobic Anglican Orthodoxy. This has largely been invented by an Oxford Anglicanophile academic called Nicholas Zernov. Indeed, it could be called ‘Zernovism’, though in truth many individuals were involved in its formulation. This consisted of a sociological dream, that of reconciling a certain ‘embourgeoisé’ Russian Orthodoxy, liberal, intellectual, aristocratic and conformist, with an upper middle-class Anglo-Catholicism. This was a phyletist (racist) ideology that put a bourgeois and effete Russian Orthodoxy and the Anglican ‘public school and cricket’ Establishment, first – above Christ and His Truth. For when all is compromise, there is no place for Truth….

Those who had never been Anglican felt totally out of place in this group, indeed rejected by such a narrow and forced sociological concept of the Church. Today, their dream (a nightmare for others) is over. It has been made irrelevant by reality – for we do not live in the past. It is not at all that English-language Orthodoxy in itself is irrelevant, in fact just the opposite, today it is all the more important. For in today’s England there are not 2,000 or even 5,000 Russian Orthodox, but 300,000 Russian Orthodox. These come mainly from the Baltics, Moldova and the Ukraine, not to mention 220,000 Romanians and 80,000 Bulgarians, totalling 600,000 Orthodox from these three areas of the Orthodox world. This recent immigration, together with their English-born children, dwarfs all previous Orthodox emigrations, including the mainly 1950s-1960s 200,000-strong Greek-Cypriot immigration, which is now largely dying out after almost complete assimilation.

With 600,000 new Orthodox and their children, mainly in England, there is a huge mission-field for English-language Orthodoxy. However, most of these immigrants work on building sites, in car washes, in hotels and catering, or in farming and horticulture and food-processing factories. They certainly have no interest in an effete and intellectual-dream philosophy of Orthodoxy, but rather in a hands-on, down-to-earth Orthodoxy, which alone meets their simple and practical needs. They need an English-language Orthodoxy to meet the needs of their children, who are being brought up on council estates and in rented flats in the East End of London and the crowded suburbs of modest working towns up and down today’s England. We clergy will be judged on how well we meet their needs, keeping faith with Orthodoxy, but at the same time speaking in the language that their children and increasingly the immigrants themselves, communicate and socialize in. History moves on.

A Prophetic Anniversary

В Москве прошла конференция к 10-летию воссоединения Русской Церкви

Слово священника Андрея Филлипса о 10-летии объединения РПЦ и РПЦЗ

Fr. Andrew Phillips on the 10th anniversary of the ROC and ROCOR reunion

Christ is Risen!

Dear Fathers, Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Ten years ago, on 17 May 2007, during the Liturgy of the Ascension, at which the Act of Canonical Communion was signed, I stood in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour confessing. Among those confessing were senior military officials, in uniform, who had come to repent for persecuting the Church in Soviet times. They did not realize that they were confessing their sins to God in the presence of a priest from the Church Outside Russia. Never have I felt our unity so profoundly. It is from our mutual repentance, and both sides had to do this, that we took our profound unity and so could ask together for the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors. In particular we ask today for the prayers of the Royal Martyrs, whom we remember on this centenary of the tragic betrayal of the Russian Empire.

For decades I have belonged to the Church Outside Russia and have served her in France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal and England, speaking for her in the USA, Australia and the Netherlands. For the Russian Federation is today only part of the Russian Orthodox world, of what we call Rus. Today, Rus is not only the Russian Federation, the Ukraine (despite the US-installed junta in Kiev) and Belarus, not only Moldova and Carpatho-Russia (Zakarpat’e). Rus is everywhere that the Russian Orthodox Faith is confessed, from Kazakhstan to the Baltics, from Japan to Thailand, from Germany to Venezuela, from Switzerland to Central Asia, from Italy to Indonesia, from Argentina to the USA, from Australia to England, from Canada to New Zealand. We too are Rus, together with you all.

In these latter times the Russian Orthodox Church has a worldwide mission to preach our common Faith without compromise, globally and in all languages, despite those who oppose us. Some of the greatest patriots of Rus belong to what Fr Andrei Tkachov rightly calls ‘our Church Outside Russia’. Our motto has always been ‘For the Faith, for the Tsar, for Rus’ and this is what our greatest saints, St Jonah of Hankou, St John of Shanghai and St Seraphim of Sofia, always proclaimed.

We are part of the Tsar’s Church, working in his spirit, for the Tsar-Martyr spoke five languages and built eighteen churches in Western Europe, desiring to see one built in each Western capital. (We still have one to build in central London in fulfilment of his desire). We in the Church Outside Russia are the outposts of Russian Orthodoxy, spiritual oases in an often hostile Western world. We are preparing, even in the West, for the coming Tsar of Rus. This is our unity. And our unity is our common victory!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
Parish of St John of Shanghai,
Colchester, England