Category Archives: Schism

On Whistle-Blowing: For the Freedom of the Church, We are Fearless Against the American Schism

If we live a life for Christ, we strive to do what He would have done.

Thus, when an MI5 spotter showed interest in me in Oxford in 1977, I replied by blowing the whistle.

Thus, when homosexual bureaucrat-bishops representing the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the sort who, once bribed, recently founded a fake church of atheist thugs in the Ukraine (the OCU), showed interest in me, I replied by blowing the whistle.

Thus, when Moscow bureaucrat-bishops, homosexuals, secretly married, alcoholics, sectarians who rebaptise one another, and, worst of all, politicians who manifestly profess atheist values, tried to recruit me, I replied by blowing the whistle.

In my lifetime, I have seen the Greeks lose it and then the Russians. The Greeks were only interested in Hellenism. The Russians, at that time, were only interested in Soviet politics. Russia, as I continually repeated ever since my return there after de-Sovietisation, in 2007, could go one way or the other, towards the whole Church or towards racial and nationalist introversion, it was on a knife-edge. Sadly, it went the other way, towards nationalist schism, and cut off from communion and concelebration with the mainstream. We can only pray and hope that that tragedy will be overcome. At present the Russian Church is out of communion even with itself in Western Europe. As for the Church in the Ukraine, it must receive independence, or else it will be boycotted. The people will not go to churches under Moscow, just as they do not go to fake churches.

The mantle has passed on our long and thorny path of building our new Local Church of Western Europe. I have no interest in those who have no openness and want to form nationalist ghettoes. There is no future with them, as they are absorbed by internal, racial questions which are spiritually irrelevant. As a result, they disobey the canons and use canonical discipline to apply purely political decisions. Those who live according to nationalistic criteria have no interest in Local Churches. Therefore, they have committed suicide in Western Europe.

When the bureaucrats obeyed the State and tried to close down our churches because of ‘covid’, I replied by blowing the whistle.

We are not afraid of death because God protects. When sociopaths become psychopaths, they turn violent. So what? Salvation lies in the path of Confession or Martyrdom.

If you have a conscience, honour and integrity, you must act against schism, whoever is creating it. At such moments you are not concerned by slanders and personal attacks, because you are taken up by the protective grace of God and you must follow that grace. Grace is irresistible. You must resist schism, because it always turns into heresy, as our Metropolitan Joseph very precisely predicted in February 2022.

Thus, the refusal to concelebrate with another part of the Church, because it receives Orthodox in the customary way of the Church, indeed soon turned into heresy. This heresy is that of the rebaptism of Orthodox who have long been receiving the sacraments of the Church. The rejection of the sacraments of the Church by such typically Protestant, anti-sacramental schismatics is a heresy. Like the proselytising pharisees, recruiting and rebaptising Christians in the freezing cold sea is not a solution to increasing the tiny numbers in your tiny schismatic and sectarian communities.

Two liturgies and five baptisms this weekend and, much as usual, some 200 communions from three chalices. And a certain ‘bishop’ wanted to close our church and even told people that we are ‘closed’! He is ignored. As with the fake Church in the Ukraine, it is the same persecution here. But here the law and the canons are on our side. Western Europe is different from the USA. Europe belongs to Europeans, not to Americans. We are not bossed about and do not speak American. We have our own culture.

 

The Struggle for Catholicity Against Papist Centralisation and for Unity Against the New American Heresy of ‘Corrective Baptism.’

Introduction: Centralisation and Decentralisation: Unity in Diversity

The Church is an image of the Holy Trinity, a Unity of Three Persons in One Essence, of Diversity and Unity, a subtle balance between centralising and decentralising forces. If centralising forces take over, legitimate diversity in Church life can be threatened, as we see outside the Church, in Roman Catholicism. This results in the boycott of the Church, which is no longer seen as being ‘our Church’, but the ‘Church’ of an irrelevant, distant, alien and foreign clerical elite. If decentralising forces take over, Church unity can be threatened by divisions and sects, as we see in Protestantism. This results in the dissolution of the Church into secular fragments, which are irrelevant to spiritual resistance and incapable of ascetic struggle for the Truth of Christ.

The Two Struggles of My Life

Personally, my life can be divided into two halves. The first half was spent in apprehending and comprehending God’s presence in the world, in learning and in serving in the Church in Europe. The struggle then was for the teachings of the Church against ideological compromises, being forced onto the Church by the anti-Christian Western world. That US-led world was trying to impose on all others its One World Government under the name of ‘Globalism’. This meant trying to deform the integrity of the Orthodox Church by imposing syncretistic modernism and ecumenism and corrupting its clerical elite, as Globalism had already done with Protestantism and Roman Catholicism and was then trying to do with Orthodoxy too. This was an attack on the integrity of the Church.

The second half of my life is being spent in England, building towards the inevitable Local Church of Western Europe. This ongoing struggle now takes place from within the largest part of the Orthodox Church here, the millions of the Romanian Metropolias of Western and Southern, Central and Northern Europe. This struggle is for the Catholicity of the Church through the concord of fourteen of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches. This is because the two remaining Local Churches, Moscow and Constantinople, have tragically fallen into schism with one another because of their rival nationalist centralisations. Through their Papist-style centralisation of finance, power and control they are trying and failing to divide and share out the Orthodox world between them.

The Struggle for Catholicity Against the Papism of Constantinople and Moscow

Thus, the fourteen other Churches, the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, the Churches of Georgia, Cyprus, Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, America, Albania and Macedonia, are fixed between the two extremes of Constantinople and Moscow. True, some are much closer to one or the other, but still they say to Constantinople: Yes, you were once the Patriarchate of the Imperial City, but that was nearly 600 years ago and even then you had no right to interfere in the internal affairs of others. And to Moscow they say: Yes, you are by far the largest in number, but you are still only one among sixteen, so do not try and tell us how we must live and think. The Soviet age is over, so stop denying the diversity and Catholicity of the Church.

The friction can most clearly be seen in the Ukraine. Thus, most, if not all, of the fourteen Local Churches know that what Constantinople did there in setting up a fake Church outside its own territory was wrong, against the canons of the Church. This is very clear, especially through the statements of the heads of the Churches of Albania, Poland and Bulgaria. As for Muscovite centralisation, so reminiscent of the Soviets, it is rejected not only by all others (though in the case of Constantinople, the rejection is clearly politically dictated by the US and so has no spiritual authority), but also in the Moscow Patriarchate, in the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Metr Onufry and wherever decentralisation and new autocephalous Churches are for pastoral reasons urgently required.

We can see all this visibly, if we simply compare photographs of bishops. The photo of the average Constantinople Metropolitan appears to show a bureaucrat with a thin black veil and a carefully trimmed beard, like that of a married priest whose wife dislikes beards. Only the metropolitans are not married, supposedly monks. The photo of the average Moscow Metropolitan appears to show a richly-decorated and rigidly-uniformed military man, at the service of a State army, not of the Word of God. Both show careerists, ‘Princes of the Church’, to use the Roman Catholic term for cardinals. My favourite photo of a metropolitan from one of the fourteen Churches shows a man in a dusty old cassock hauling a bag of cement in a wheelbarrow to build a new monastery.

The Novel and Aggressive American Heresy of Rebaptism

Orthodox Unity is now being challenged by the novel and highly aggressive American heresy of rebaptism. This sectarian heresy of rebaptising Orthodox is known as ‘corrective baptism’, a term quite unknown to the Fathers of the Church and the Saints, because it has been brought into the Church from the sectarian Lutheran world outside. Contradicting the Creed of the Church ‘I believe in one baptism…’, it means rebaptising those who have been canonically received into the Church by the established authority of its thousand canonical bishops. Although the Orthodox in question may have been receiving the sacraments of the Church for years, the schismatics are rebaptising them. This revolt against Church practice is uncanonical, heretical and sectarian.

The practice was condemned by all as long ago as 1976, when the Syshchenko scandal in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) broke in London. Then this same practice, implemented by an uncanonically ordained and very poorly-trained Ukrainian priest, was thoroughly rejected by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Philaret and the then still Orthodox ROCOR Synod as the heresy of Donatism. Sadly, this view is no longer held by some of today’s ROCOR bishops who do not know the Church Tradition. Thus, apart from ‘bishops’ in old calendarist sects, there are now those in ROCOR who have also turned aggressively schismatic, imposing their pseudo-Russian, American old calendarism, which is in fact nothing more than a sectarian Protestant revolt, a new outburst of Anabaptism, the bullying and hypocritical pharisaic rebaptism for ‘the pure’.

This is the first heresy of converts, neophytes who want to be ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’. Such converts do not remain Orthodox because they have not yet cleansed themselves of the post-Schism Western mentality, they still do not know the Pre-Schism Western mentality. For them Orthodoxy is not existential, it is just a decoration added on top of what they do not want to renounce, a cherry on top of the Western cake. Their mentality therefore remains fundamentally anti-Orthodox. And they can go to one extreme or the other. Being anti-Orthodox is not only being pro-ecumenist, pro-modernist, pro-reformist, it is also to be filled with hatred for Roman Catholics and Protestants. Both extremes are equally anti-Orthodox, equally opposed to Truth and Love.

Conclusion: The Dangers of Centralisation and Sectarianism

With their natural Russian flock dying out or leaving them, these bishops are desperate to make up falling numbers by recruiting disgruntled ex-Protestants. These often psychologically unstable extremists have no spiritual roots in the Church. To my knowledge, so far two American ROCOR bishops in different continents are publicly boasting of rebaptising other Orthodox, though others may be involved. Once this news reaches the for now politically unfree Moscow and it has the time to act, there will be trouble for the ROCOR schismatics. So continues our struggle for the Catholicity of the Church against anti-missionary and secular-inspired centralisation, and for the Unity of the Church against sectarian attacks, always towards the new Local Church of Western Europe to be established through a Council.

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

 

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

After the overthrow of the Tsar by traitors in the so-called ‘Revolution’ of 1917, and the ensuing substitution of the Russian Empire for the Soviet Union, parts of the Russian Orthodox Church broke away from it. Although divisions of tiny, temporary ‘catacomb’ church communities formed inside the USSR, divisions were nowhere so obvious as outside the USSR, where there was the political freedom to choose which part of the Church to belong to.

The anti-Soviet Russian emigration split into two warring groups, one quite independent of the rest of the Orthodox Church, the other under the British-controlled and, after British bankruptcy from 1948 on the US-controlled, Patriarchate of Constantinople (1). In any case, both groups were independent of the vast majority of the Russian Church, which was under the enslaved and enhostaged administration of the 99% of the Church inside the Soviet Union. Why did these divisions develop?

  1. The Moscow Patriarchate: Bride of Christ or Concubine of the State?

Like all other Churches the Russian Orthodox Church has had a long history of both dependence on and independence from the State. In this respect, people may think of the independence from the State of St Nil of Sora (1508) and the Transvolgan Non-Possessors (1), of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow (murdered in 1569 on the orders of the centralising Tsar Ivan IV) and of the Old Ritualist schism of the 1660s, which was largely created by reaction to the persecution of the centralising State, which demanded absurd ritual conformity. By 1917 some 10% of the Russian population were declaring that they were Old Ritualists, thus showing the strength of opposition to the centralist State. All the above showed independence from the nationalist State, and many showed faithfulness to Orthodox Tradition, placing the Holy Spirit above corruption.

Under the imperialist Emperor Peter I (‘the Great’) (+ 1725), the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate was abolished and replaced by a Protestant-style Minister of Religion. Soon after this there began the persecution of monastic life, when some two-thirds of monasteries were closed by the German Empress Catherine I (‘the Great’) (+ 1796). Nevertheless, the Church continued to live, under the great St Paisius (Velichkovsky), forced into exile in Romania, and in the Russian Lands, in Sarov and Optina, where new saints appeared, and in Kronstadt, where there began the eucharistic revival, and elsewhere. The grace of the Holy Spirit was active and the deadly bureaucrats of the State apparatus did not manage to quench it, despite their best efforts. They were opposed by Tsar Nicholas II, who, despised and mocked by the bureaucrats in cassocks, had such great saints as Seraphim of Sarov canonised.

However, during this Imperial period most Russian Orthodox omitted to take communion more than once a year and lead an active life of prayer and fasting. Church life became largely an empty ritual, an exercise in ritualism. Here is why the Soviet atheists (most of them, like Stalin, were also ritually Orthodox) came to power: there was no Orthodox conscience and so spiritual resistance to the myths and practices of atheism. Under the Soviet regime, which unsurprisingly admired the imperialist Peter I as their centralising model, the Church was run by the Secret Police. Therefore, the enslaved Church hierarchy of the time adopted a subservient pro-State policy called ‘Sergianism’, in order to ensure its survival. Sergianism was massively rejected by the politically free emigration: hence the divisions. Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, ordinary bishops, priests, monastics and faithful people were martyred in their hundreds of thousands.

The remnants of these State-subservient attitudes are still very present in the Russian Church today. For instance, churches in towns and cities usually have professional choirs (if parishioners want to sing, they are forbidden, as in the Russian church in Chiswick, a suburb of London, for example), which reduces the church to a ritualist theatre with a choir to listen to. For example, many ordinary Orthodox in Russia today reproach the Church which appears to be run like a business, the main interest seeming to be profit. Also the centralised hierarchy in Moscow actively opposes clergy who have dissident political opinions from the State about the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. This only creates more scandals.

This centralisation has led to those parts of the Church in independent countries outside the Russian Federation wanting to break away from the centralised control of Moscow. This is for national reasons, for example, there is resistance to the Moscow centralisation on the part of Non-Russians in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere. They all seek Church independence and devolution. However, there are also cases of sectarian and schismatic groups which break away from central authority for purely political, right-wing reasons, both inside the Russian Federation, but also outside it, above all in the highly Americanised ROCOR (see below).

  1. ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

In 2007 we all at last managed to get the New York-based ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) to rejoin the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. Otherwise, it would have become a schismatic sect, out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. When it reunited with Moscow, it lost some 5% of its 300 parishes. These 5% were extremists who really wanted to be in schism, out of communion with everyone, claiming like pharisees to be ‘True Russian Orthodox Churches’. There were then, and perhaps still are, about four of these tiny squabbling sects, formed in 2007, all cursing each other.

After the wonderful God-sent opportunity of reunion with the bulk of the reviving Russian Orthodox Church and life-giving canonical communion with it for a decade between 2007 and 2017, very sadly, the ROCOR authorities gradually lapsed back into their sectarian temptations from before 2007. Step by step these sectarians took control of ROCOR’s New York Synod in an internal coup d’etat, effectively isolating its ill but charismatic Metropolitan, rejecting all his decisions and using his electronic signature to justify their very strange and deeply uncanonical decisions.

Very sadly, the extremists had learned nothing from being in communion with the Mother-Church for ten years. They had simply camouflaged and justified their pharisaical, schismatic and sectarian tendencies behind their alleged unity with the Moscow Patriarchate. Today ROCOR is out of full communion with Moscow, and so its second state is worse than its first. Instead of Orthodoxy, it has espoused the sectarian American right-wingery of woman-despising ‘Orthobros’ and Trumpism, totally confusing Divine Orthodoxy with mere human conservatism and its lust for money and power.

This pharisaical state of schism and fanatical sectarianism was encouraged by deluded Non-Russian neophytes, who want to be more royalist than the King, more Russian Orthodox than real Russian Orthodox. In reality, these Lutheran and Calvinist sectarians have ended up outside full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, the King they betrayed. They have painted themselves into their own corner, apparently feeling very comfortable in their isolation. Thus, they have renounced their own saints, who were internationally-minded, not isolated, and concelebrated with and gathered together all Orthodox. These include St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, whom the US right-wingers so cruelly suspended and persecuted, leading to his premature death in 1966.

Some suspect that the new ROCOR division has been encouraged by the CIA, of whose largesse ROCOR was a well-known recipient for a generation between 1966 and 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. As participants in the San Francisco ROCOR Council in 2006 we all know that the CIA virulently opposed the ROCOR reunion with Moscow in 2007 and from 2017 on tried to censor and then close this anti-CIA (and anti-FSB and anti-MI5) Orthodox England site through an amateur agent. For a few months he succeeded, causing an international scandal and making ROCOR a laughing-stock among the other Local Churches. Perhaps money exchanged hands here too.

  1. Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

The second part of the Russian emigration which split away from the enslaved Church authorities in Soviet Moscow was the group founded by Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals and centred in Paris. (Some of them spoke better French than Russian; all spoke fluent French). Originally less than a third of the size of the now US-centred ROCOR, today it is called the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition. In reality it is very small outside France, as it is practically forbidden to expand elsewhere, and now has only some sixty parishes.

In 2019 it too at last rejoined the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, leaving behind in Constantinople, to our open relief, its masonic and modernist wing with its uncanonical practices, losing not 5% of its parishes, clergy and people, as with ROCOR, but over 40% of its parishes, clergy and people. If ROCOR had lost 40% of its body, then it would have remained in full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate after 2017. Too much of the pharisaical, ‘onetruechurchist’, sectarian and schismatic had remained in ROCOR, thus poisoning its potential. Conversely, the much smaller Paris Archdiocese not only remained in communion, but also, to its credit and unlike ROCOR, remained politically free of Moscow centralisation.

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

In the history of the last generation of pre-Revolutionary Russia under the last Emperor, it is clear that right-wing extremists played as negative a role as left-wing extremists. For example, plotting together, they murdered the Tsar’s adviser, Gregory Rasputin, who was helping him bring the Old Ritualists back into the Church. But this treacherous extremism can above all be seen in the ensuing history of the tragic Civil War between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. Then both sides committed awful atrocities, as described in any history of that dreadful war, where brother killed brother.

Sadly, just like the Reds, most of the Whites did not support the Tsar: it is reckoned that only 10% of them did so. They were the only real Whites. Most simply wanted their land, property and wealth back from the Marxists. Many ‘Whites’ were quite as openly atheistic as the Reds. As a Russian patriot and real Orthodox, the Sovereign Tsar stood above both Reds and Whites, above and outside the vulgar extremes of both left and right, above and outside their centralisation and nationalism. This is his Testament. This is our heritage. Under him there would have been no tragic war between Russian and American-proxy Ukrainians today.

Notes:

  1. https://orthodoxwiki.org/Maximus_V_of_Constantinople
  2. It is interesting that the enemies of the Non-Possessors accused them of stealing money! Nothing has changed. We know of a very greedy bishop in England today who accused a Non-Possessor priest, who subsidised his parish from his own money, of exactly the same thing! Of course, the bishop never apologised.

 

Five Years of Schisms: The Church Torn by Needless Divisions

2024 opens in sadness for all the Local Orthodox Churches.

In 2021 well over half the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) Diocese in England left that New York-based branch of the Moscow Patriarchate. This was because of the new ROCOR schism against the Western European Archdiocese (WEA) branch of the same Moscow Patriarchate. The Archdiocese had accepted a Roman Catholic priest into its clergy in the normal Russian Orthodox way, by confession and concelebration. However, for that reason the new American ROCOR, strongly old calendarist and imposing a quite outrageous and very aggressive policy of Americanisation, to the point of imposing the American language (!), had broken off communion with the WEA. This was unthinkable under the old Russian European ROCOR. This schism then spread Europewide under another ex-Lutheran ROCOR bishop. And then the whole ROCOR Synod backed up its young, inexperienced and non-seminary trained American bishop, ‘converted’ from Lutheranism, who had instigated the schism.

In the meantime, the Moscow Mother-Church, of both ROCOR and the Western European Archdiocese, remained silent, for unexplained reasons known only to itself. Church discipline appeared and appears to be breaking down. However, any number of Orthodox bishops fell over themselves, and are still falling over themselves (too late), to receive the group of six parishes, including with by far the largest church, the senior priest of the Diocese (with nearly forty years of conscientious service), several other clergy and 5,000 people who left ROCOR on account of the American schism. This group are now thriving in the canonical Patriarchate of Romania, despite the absurd ‘suspensions’ and ‘defrockings’, with which they were punished by ROCOR after being received into the Romanian Church. Their position was all about standing up for the Orthodox Truth, canonical Church practice and generations of faithfulness to Russian Orthodoxy.

This is perhaps the fifth time (or is it more?) that ROCOR has faced schisms on account of its adoption of and (too late) abandonment of old calendarist positions on the reception of Non-Orthodox by rebaptism. All these occasions go back to its contamination by the fanatical Greek old calendarist ideology, with its easily identifiable convert language movement (‘Pascha’ for Easter, ‘Nativity’ for Christmas, ‘hierarch’ for bishop, ‘temple’ for church, ‘chant’ for sing etc), in the 1960s. The best-known occasions were perhaps the Guildford (England) schism of 1976, the Boston schism of 1986 and then the multiple schisms of 2007, including that of the Brookwood monastic community and London convent in England at that time.

In any case, the 2021 scandal in England spread back to North America. It turns out that there at least one ROCOR bishop there had actually been receiving unrebaptised Orthodox converts from Non-Orthodoxy by rebaptism, even though these converts (surely, by now former converts?) had been inside the Orthodox Church and receiving communion for years! This is despite the Nicene Creed, which states: ‘I believe in one Baptism for the remission of sins’. The ROCOR Synod appears to be in chaos, split down the middle. Not only does it face responsibilities for its uncanonical actions in England, but also in North America.

Here the recent concelebration of Fr Alexander Belya, (now again bishop-elect) with the Romanian Orthodox Church also has to be faced by the split ROCOR Synod. Fr Alexander, a former ROCOR priest chosen by the ROCOR Synod to be bishop and then suddenly dropped and ‘defrocked’ (!), was persecuted by the ROCOR Synod for still unknown reasons (the court case for libel is ongoing). Before being ‘defrocked’, he had already joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople with a large group of similarly appalled ex-ROCOR clergy and some 20 parishes. His concelebration with the Romanian Church means that, yet again, the Romanian Church does not recognise the actions of ROCOR. The latter is proving to be yet another (irrelevant) irritant to the Romanian Patriarch, who ignores all the increasingly strange letters from the New York group. The Moscow Mother-Church can be none too happy with its New York representatives who are discrediting themselves and the whole Russian Church through their eccentric, indeed scandalous, conduct and persecution of the faithful.

The latest twist to this sorry rebaptism saga is the case of at least one priest of the Antiochian Diocese in England, a certain Fr Matei. Having freely joined the Antiochian Diocese relatively recently, he decided that his bishop (and presumably therefore all Antiochian bishops) are heretical and stopped commemorating him. This was because this bishop follows the Orthodox practice of receiving Protestants who have been baptised by water in the Name of the Holy Trinity, by chrismation. (This is the normal practice of 1,000 Orthodox bishops – the opposite of the abnormal and new ROCOR practice). On top of this, this Fr Matei objects to the old Antiochian practice of giving Non-Chalcedonians communion, which is also a practice of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Although all the Local Churches receive Protestant converts by chrismation, they do not give communion to Non-Chalcedonians. However, they do accept that Antioch and Constantinople do this as their local practice, and that is no reason to break off communion with them. What is very strange is that Fr Matei objects to these practices, as he must surely have known that these are old-established Antiochian practices from long before he so recently joined the Antiochian Diocese. (Here we see the other side of the coin to the ROCOR rebaptism schism, which is a recent innovation and quite unheard of in the old ROCOR in Western Europe). Nevertheless, in the USA, there are now other Antiochians who have suddenly woken up to the reality of long-held Antiochian practices and object to them. Where they have been all these decades remains a mystery.

All of this comes against the background of the 2018 schism between the Russian Church and various Greek Churches, such as the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria, as well as with individuals in the Greek and Cypriot Orthodox Churches, who supported setting up a fake Church on age-old Russian Orthodox canonical territory. As one correspondent has put it: ‘This is worse than Protestant dissension’.

Clearly, the solution to reverse this chaos is for all to return to canonical practices, namely of:

  1. Not setting up ‘Churches’ on the canonical territory of other Local Churches.
  2. Not refusing to concelebrate with and not breaking off communion with others because of their different practices regarding the reception of Non-Orthodox.
  3. Refusing to rebaptise those who have already been received by another Local Orthodox Church and who have taken communion in it.
  4. Suspending and defrocking only priests who have committed criminal acts (usually, the theft of money or property, or else who work as spies for the CIA or other spy agencies), or who have committed immoral acts (heterosexual, homosexual, or even pedophile), and not because priests refuse not to concelebrate with canonical Orthodox, or because they profess political opinions and vote for political parties, different from those of their bishop. (This, apparently, is considered to be disobedience and is therefore ‘uncanonical’!!).
  5. Suspending and defrocking bishops for criminal or immoral acts, instead of protecting them (for example the late Archbishop Nathanael of Vienna, (ROCOR)), Metropolitan Joseph of the Antiochian Archdiocese in North America. Apart from them, there are other immoral, homosexual and even pedophile bishops of all nationalities, who (out of jealousy?) persecute heterosexual priests and laymen who have normal family lives.

But will any of this return to canonical practices take place?

What Went Wrong With ROCOR?

In 1974 I asked the then Fr Kallistos (Ware) what the situation in ROCOR was. He told me that he had met the future St John of Shanghai (+ 1966) in the 1950s and had seriously thought about transferring to ROCOR in the 1960s. However, the well-respected priest at the ROCOR Cathedral in London, Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), who had been the confessor of the Tsar’s sister, Xenia Aleksandrovna (+ 20 April 1960), had dissuaded him.

Fr George had told him that the new censoriousness coming from the then CIA-financed ROCOR in the USA was poisoning ROCOR in England and he had better not join it. As an elderly priest, he would stay, for him the old ROCOR was still alive, but it was not a jurisdiction for the young. Consequently, Fr Kallistos remained a priest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, though also remained priest and confessor at the ROCOR Convent in London until 1976, when the poison from the USA reached a new crescendo. In any case, Fr Kallistos’ witness dissuaded me from joining ROCOR in 1974.

Leaving England for Paris in 1979, there I encountered the old ROCOR, still uncontaminated by the US ROCOR, unlike in England. The ROCOR Western European Diocese, living in the spirit of its former Archbishop, St John of Shanghai, had as its ruling hierarch St John’s successor, Archbishop Antony of Geneva. The Dean for France was Archpriest Alexander Trubnikov, who was priest at the parish of the Resurrection in Meudon in the Paris suburbs. He had a great influence on me, an inspiration, and I knew his matushka and children very well.

Fr Alexander had been born in 1908 in Tsarskoe Selo, where the Tsar and his Family and servants lived, into the noble family of a hereditary Russian imperial officer. During World War I, his father was posted as a military attaché to France. After graduating from a French high school, the future Fr. Alexander had to take on various jobs to make ends meet. At the same time he completed military classes organised by White Russian émigrés in France.

The majority of White Russians went indiscriminately to any Russian church. St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, his vicar Bishop Nathaniel of Brussels, Archbishop Anthony of Geneva and all of us considered that both those in the Paris Jurisdiction, then under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and ROCOR were our common flock in France and Benelux and ignored the minority of freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction. Thus, we freely concelebrated with it. Fr Alexander was the rector of the Parish of the Resurrection in Meudon from 1954 until 1984, where he inspired several young men to become priests and rebuilt the Meudon chapel, courageously mortgaging his own home to do so. Besides his role as rector, Fr. Alexander served as chaplain to the Russian scouting organisation, the Vitiazi, which educated children from all jurisdictions.

Fr Alexander was also actively involved in inter-Orthodox and inter-Christian relations for many years, publishing books and a newsletter in French that shared news of the Orthodox world. This publishing activity brought Fr. Alexander to participate in the Second Vatican Council in Rome, where he met the then Pope. He wrote books, published his newsletter and attended the Vatican Council, hoping to represent the point of view of the free Russian Orthodox Church to all who would listen, not least to the Roman Catholics who were, and still are, undergoing a crisis, as they threw out the baby, but kept the bathwater. A priest and a diplomat, Fr Alexander reposed 35 years ago in November 1988. Eternal Memory!

After the repose of Archbishop Antony of Geneva five years later, in 1993, the last barrier fell. Thus, the censoriousness began to appear in the Western European Diocese from the USA, but now via Germany. All the clergy at the funeral were profoundly shocked when we found ourselves forbidden from celebrating. Thus, the new order of categorical phariseeism and judgementalism was already remarked at Archbishop Antony’s funeral. We patiently withstood it to defeat it in 2007, at last bringing ROCOR into canonical communion with Moscow. However, a decade later the censoriousness returned and took revenge; communion with Moscow had for them just been a delaying tactic to give their schismatic spirit outward legitimacy.

The new order of the new pharisees was founded on cupidity, jealousy, narcissistic egoism and the love of power of those who manipulate and use others as instruments for their own benefit, before discarding them. Those of the new order corrupted and destroyed everything they touched. Therefore, we did not allow them to touch, out of respect for St John of Shanghai, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, Fr George Sheremetiev, Fr Alexander Trubnikov and all those of the old and traditional ROCOR. You could accept their sectarian and schismatic censoriousness or else resist it. It all depended on whether you were a careerist or someone of principle and integrity. One day it will all be over. Our victory is inevitable because those who occupy the spiritual and moral high ground always win, even though patience will be required in waiting for Moscow to reject the Americanised and schismatic CIA-shaped ROCOR sect.

American ROCOR took over fifty years to spread its tentacles and take over completely. Once the American proxy war in the Ukraine is over, the unprincipled American ROCOR, which has lost so much by sitting on the fence in that conflict, will divide into two camps. On the one hand, there will be the pro-Russian non-schismatics and, on the other hand, the anti-Russian schismatics, the right-wing crazies and persecutors, penetrated by the CIA, heirs to the pro-Hitler Russians of the 1930s and 1940s. This will be the end of ROCOR, as the healthy part will be absorbed into the Moscow Patriarchate or into other Local Churches who obey the canons.

When it is all over, all of us together, from all the Local Churches, will at last be able to build the new Local Church of Western Europe in a US-free Europe, a Sovereign and Confederal Europe, co-operating with all the Local Churches, including a decentralised Moscow, and stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Only then will Europeans be able to recover their lost Motherland of the Church and their lost fatherlands of their own freed countries. At last, with a mother and a father, they will be able to become true brothers and sisters, fleeing the towering pride that created sectarianism and schism, which is what went wrong with ROCOR.

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

Foreword

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

The American Temptation

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

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

The Ukrainian Tragedy

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

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

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

The Russian Challenge

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

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

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

The Orthodox Christian Opportunity

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

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

The End of a World

Politics

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

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

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

Christianity

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

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

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

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

 

Notes:

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

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

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

Unlocking the Crisis in the Orthodox World

The 200 million-strong Orthodox Church is in an unheard-of state of schism between the clerical leaders of 14 million Greek Orthodox and the clerical leaders of 140 million Russian Orthodox. This crisis has been caused by nationalism. Indeed, even the word heresy is being used of this schism.

Thus, Greeks accuse Russians of nationalism by promoting their concept of ‘the Russian world’, which Greeks find akin to the heresy of ‘phyletism’ (racist nationalism), which denies the Catholicity of the Church. For them this is what the conflict in the Ukraine is about – the nationalist desire of the Russian government to unite into Russia all Russians, including the Russians who were persecuted and massacred while living near the Russian borders in the east and the south of the old Ukraine and keeping the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under its control. In the nationalist Russian world, non-Russians, even if they are Orthodox, may be treated as second-class citizens.

Russians also accuse Greeks of the same heresy of phyletism, in their claim that the whole Orthodox world must be under the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople, who is effectively an Eastern Pope, and that all Non-Greeks, even if they are Orthodox, are therefore effectively second-class citizens. This we have seen in the Greek establishment of dependent ‘Churches’, led by some very dubious individuals and even criminals, in the Ukraine, Estonia and elsewhere. And all this on the age-old canonical territory of the Russian Church and under the political patronage and with the finance of the US State Department.

We are neither Greek nor Russian, as we are drawn from the other 46 million Orthodox. We, who belong to the majority of the fourteen other Local Orthodox Churches, with over a third of us belonging to the Romanian Orthodox Church, are left in the middle. We are in communion with both Russians and Greeks, but in disagreement with both. We find that they are influenced by extremism and that they should sort out their problems at a real Council of the whole Church. Sadly, the elderly Patriarch of Constantinople has rejected this, claiming that he is above Councils!

Given the Greek rejection of a Council, which Council has been promoted by us in an attempt to resolve their schism, cynics say that the Church will just have to wait until the two aged Patriarchs, of Moscow and Constantinople, have died. Only then will the situation be resolved, as the only way out of the crisis is for both patriarchs to pass on and be replaced by new, non-political patriarchs, free of nationalism and US interference. This is to reduce the whole affair to a mere personality issue. That is not at all the case, for here is a vital theological issue about putting the Catholicity of the Church above nationalism, and also we are not cynics. We are believers.

We have already lived through a similar situation of blockage, that of the Cold War, when Church affairs were blocked by politics, in the USSR for 75 years, in the rest of Eastern Europe for 45 years. (Although there was no Greco-Russian schism then). What happened? In 1991 the USSR fell overnight. The hand of God. The present schism is, we believe, not yet as serious and as long-lasting as the era of the Communist captivity of the Church. Those who despair have forgotten the Faith. The hand of God intervenes and all can change in a moment.

As we have seen, there is no possibility of a Council of the whole Church, as it will be boycotted by the Patriarch of Constantinople, as he has stated. What is possible, however, is a Council of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) which recognises that the USSR no longer exists. One country became 15 independent republics. Surely the ROC needs to decentralise and found new Local Churches, by giving independence/ autocephaly to those Russian Orthodox who for over thirty years have lived in other countries. If independence (autocephaly) were granted by a Church Council in Moscow to those Orthodox outside Russia, but who were formerly in the USSR, this would completely undermine Constantinople’s fake Churches in the Ukraine, Estonia and Lithuania (this latter created only by Moscow defrocking priests for no canonical reason), pulling the rug from under Greek feet.

Firstly, a new Local Church for the New Ukraine is required, as Moscow mulled over doing in the 1990s. The New Ukraine is what will be left of the old and purely artificial Soviet Ukraine, once the latter has been dismantled. Already five provinces with the Crimea have been transferred to Russia. It is not known if other provinces, perhaps two (Nikolaev, Odessa?) or even two more than that (Kharkov, Dnipropetrovsk?), will be transferred to Russia, another two may return to Romania and Hungary. Russia has never wanted to invade or occupy the whole of the Ukraine. It has enough territory of its own and knows from recent history that it cannot occupy areas that are not Russian, where it is not accepted.

So a New Ukraine will still exist, not as large as the old Ukraine which is a construct invented from 1922 on, but still large, between half and three-quarters of the old one. It will be a Ukraine that does not have a US puppet government and one that is demilitarised and denazified, that is, neutral. Unlike the old Fascistic Ukraine which is now collapsing, it will also have to grant all its citizens democracy, freedom to practise their religion without fear of the secret police, and other essential human rights.

The New Ukraine will need a Church which is fully independent of the ROC in Moscow. Similarly, a new Local Church for the three Baltic statelets and another new Local Church for Moldova can end divisions there. However, if Moscow does not do this, Orthodox there and elsewhere, notably in Latvia, will precisely turn to Constantinople for autocephaly and Moscow will also lose Moldova to the Romanian Church. Ultimately, the same may well have to happen for Orthodox in Kazakhstan together with the other four ‘stans’ of Central Asia and then in Belarus.

The point is that Russian nationalism only works with Russians, just as Greek nationalism only works with Greeks. The situation with Greek nationalism is all the more critical for Constantinople. Still seemingly denying that the Greek Orthodox Empire fell in 1453 and still addicted to US dollars, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is going to have to deal with the consequences of the Russian military and technological victory in the Ukraine and its economic and diplomatic victory in BRICS +, which includes Africa, where the ROC is very active.

Both Russian victories already mean the humiliation of the United States and Western Europe, especially of the fatally divided NATO and the EU, which are both likely to collapse. For example, Turkiye, whose President was saved from US assassination by Russia on 15 July 2016 and who was recently in Moscow for talks, has shown great interest in joining BRICS + and so leaving NATO. And Turkiye, whose application to join the EU has been humiliatingly rejected by it on many occasions over the decades, is precisely where the Patriarchate of Constantinople is fixed.

If Turkiye, whose army is for now the second largest in NATO, joins BRICS +, US influence there will collapse, as also in the part of Syria which it occupies and exploits. BRICS + means the end of the prospect of a potential future World Dictatorship, as foretold in the prophecies of Antichrist. Since Russia has good relations with Turkiye and thousands of Russians live there permanently, it will not be long before the ROC opens an Exarchate there, as it has already done in Africa. In Africa it seems as though the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria will go back to what it was 100 years ago and still essentially is, a small Greek diocese covering Egypt and Libya.

If Constantinople boycotts a Council of the Church, then a Council will go ahead without it. It will be its loss. If Constantinople does not need the Church, the Church will not need it. However, if Moscow does not give autocephalies to the Orthodox in the independent countries formed over thirty years ago, it will find that those countries will gain their Orthodox autocephaly without Moscow. This has already happened in Latvia, just as generations ago it happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia and North America. The peoples of the Church do not need bureaucracies, protocols and their pieces of paper to live and develop. They need freedom. This should be blatantly obvious. Sadly, to some it is not.

In any case, both Greeks and Russians will have to recognise that there is no future in phyletism, racist nationalism. Nationalism is the hatred of other countries and, as it is hatred, it can have no place in Christianity. Patriotism, however, is a Christian value, for it is the love of our native country and, as such, in no way excludes positive feelings towards other countries. Let both Greeks and Russians be patriotic, as much as they want, but let patriotism not degenerate into nationalism. The Church of God is much larger than Greeks and Russians. It is the Holy Spirit Who alone creates the spirit of Catholicity, uniting all peoples in their Local Churches. It is called Unity in Diversity and is the image of the Holy Trinity.

 

The History of the Schism of the New ROCOR from the Church

Introduction

The schism of the new ROCOR from the Orthodox Church has its origin in the mentality of certain US ROCOR converts, of woman-hating ‘incels’ and ‘orthobros’. This mentality first raised its head in US ROCOR under the influence of the neo-puritanical, Bostonite old calendarists as long ago as the 1960s. In other words, the ‘orthobros’ mentality today is ultimately the fruit of Gregory Grabbe’s old calendarist ‘We are the True Church’ fanaticism. (Boston’s twenty-year long reign ended in 1986 in unanswered charges by ROCOR of homosexuality and the extreme right-wing Gregory Grabbe, who had been secretary of the New York Synod for several decades, ended in 1995 in old age outside the Church, still calling himself ‘Bishop Gregory Grabbe’, having consecrated the pedophile Bishop Valentin (Rusantsov) in Suzdal in Russia, who was later imprisoned, and banning ROCOR members from attending his own funeral).

Let me say now that there is no personal animosity at all to those family-deprived ‘orthobros’ who are suffering, often from the temptations of sexual deviancy, and need Christ. They are deeply unhappy and lonely, not to say, disturbed individuals. However, the ideology that many of them have developed, once they have been given power over the Church and Orthodox families, is filled with hatred. Our Faith is not an ideology, for it is filled with Love. Hatred, especially towards normal families in the Church, is the unfailing warning sign of the sect. That is why they are so dangerous. That is why they must be prayed for. We still hope for the salvation of all, turning the other cheek. We publicise this simply because it is our duty to defend Church truth against sectarianism and its inevitable consequence which is, as we have seen with our own eyes, schism. And schism from the Church means precisely separation from Love, that is, schism is the path to hatred

The ROCOR schism that began in December 2020 in Cardiff, Wales. It was initiated by a very new ROCOR priest who had belonged to an old calendarist sect for some twenty years beforehand and who had previously been refused admission to the Church. His reception as a priest (without ordination) had therefore been very controversial. He objected to an even newer former Roman Catholic priest in the same city, who had been accepted into the Russian Orthodox Church in the usual way (see below).

Amazingly, instead of rebuking the former old calendarist priest for his ignorance and non-acceptance of Orthodox Tradition and ordering him to concelebrate with his brother-priest of the same jurisdiction, the local ROCOR bishop (himself a convert from Lutheranism who had been received by chrismation into the OCA some twenty years before) backed him and then his ROCOR colleagues backed the whole old calendarist mentality and schism. It was all part of the new ROCOR policy of expelling older, experienced, traditional ROCOR priests and laypeople and replacing them with crazy converts. Birds of a feather flock together….

Thus began an international schism and scandal. Some of course say that this Welsh incident was just a long-awaited trigger and any pretext would have done for those who were already possessed by a sectarian mentality and wanted revenge for the unity of 2007. Too proud to repent for the initial error of backing an old calendarist, ROCOR then launched itself into a vicious spiral of sectarianism and schism. This took it very, very far from the Church, the Tradition and the Love of Christ, Who wills all to salvation.

A Little History

In London the well-respected and unmercenary Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), the spiritual father of the Tsar-Martyr’s sister, the late Xenia Alexandrovna, warned of this mentality in the 1960s. He persuaded the future and now late Metr Kallistos (Ware) to join the Greek Church, and not ROCOR, in order to avoid that new pharisaical censoriousness, as the then Fr Kallistos himself related to me in 1974. Also from London, the late scholar Fr Ambrose Pogodin, who went to the USA, later joined the OCA for exactly the same reason. Western European ROCOR always had a different mentality. This is Old Europe, next to the roots of the Faith, where we keep the Tradition and the canons.

The rebaptism of Non-Orthodox was never accepted by Western European ROCOR, which was faithful to the mainstream Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition of Metr Antony Khrapovitsky. He had consecrated St John of Shanghai and Western Europe (he spent 13 years here, the same period as in China). Naturally, St John did not rebaptise Non-Orthodox, apart from in two known exceptional cases. St John was succeeded by the ever-memorable Archbp Antony of Geneva, who ordained me and many others and who said that the reception of Non-Orthodox by baptism is simply ‘not necessary’. This was always our policy. And in the case of Roman Catholics, reception by confession and communion was always our policy also.

Non-rebaptism had also naturally been the practice of US ROCOR until the 1960s, as ROCOR then had, like the Moscow Patriarchate, kept faith with the pre-Revolutionary Russian Tradition. Look for example at how super-correct ‘Orthodox’ rebaptisers persecuted Fr Seraphim Rose, another disciple of St John of Shanghai. The latter was suspended and put on trial by the political US ROCOR bishops, which stress basically led to his early death three years later.

In 2007, led by the ever-memorable Carpatho-Russian Metr Lavr, we at last thought we had rid ROCOR of this schismatic and sectarian mentality by entering into canonical communion with Moscow. I was there as a speaker at the Fourth ROCOR Council in San Francisco in 2006, in Moscow in 2007 and again in 2012 for the fifth anniversary. Before 2007 those ROCOR bishops responsible had already abandoned their uncanonical old calendarist connections in the Balkans, which had been promoted by a tiny number of ROCOR bishops in the 1990s and rejected and ignored by everyone else. These included the link with the sect of the late Metropolitan Vlasie in Romania, who had preached purity, but before he died had fallen with a nun.

The New Sectarianism

However, in 2017 the mini-Synod took its revenge for the unity of 2007 and seized power after our beloved Metr Hilarion (Eternal Memory!) fell ill. Among other things, they wanted to ‘bring Western European ROCOR into line’ with the US, ‘to drain the swamp’, as they claimed. In fact they did exactly the opposite and brought the US swamp here, destroying the old ROCOR. Their first move was in 2018 when they ‘retired’ the local ROCOR Archbishop of Geneva and the pillars of the parish who had been there for generations, causing huge scandal there, and replacing him with a young and highly inexperienced American convert. The latter had been received into the OCA from Lutheranism by chrismation some 18 years before.

It was the start of a Stalinist purge and micromanagement. Then they insisted that we, who were Russian Orthodox before they were even born, speak American and use novel US liturgical customs! They are typical of the US converts who want to be ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’. Their whole reasoning is obsessed with Protestant-style ‘salvation’ and ‘baptism’, with the conservative Lutheran ‘promise’ of hellfire for any who disagree with them. What wonderful Christians!

All here are profoundly shocked by what has happened. Most pretend to ignore it, as ROCOR is so tiny. However, the Greeks here write of the scandal-ridden ROCOR: ‘Once a sect, always a sect’, they say. The MP Sourozh Diocese told us two years ago that American ROCOR needs a ‘psychiatric ambulance’ (It sounds better with a Russian accent). They actually laughed at the antics of these pretend Russian Orthodox and their Disneyfication of the Faith. To get an understanding, see the Polish psychiatrist Dr Andrew Lobaczewski in his book Political Ponerology, where he speaks of a pathological type known as “Schizoidia” or “schizoidal psychopathy“.

ROCOR ignored the advice of Patriarch Kyrill to simply write us letters of leave, as we had politely requested from the start, as we were willing to accept all their humiliations and had done so, but we were not willing to enter into a schism, as we had clearly explained four months before we left. Therefore, seeing the reckless stubbornness of ROCOR, Moscow arranged with their friend, Patriarch Daniel of Romania, for us to be taken into the Romanian Church (Patriarch Daniel’s main canonical adviser and professor of canon law is the brother-in-law of our Romanian priest), until the war in the Ukraine is over. The process of our reception took just four hours.

Moscow had arranged all beforehand. Only after the conflict in the Ukraine will Moscow at last have the opportunity to deal with the ROCOR schism. This means dealing with the crazy and uncanonical elements who seized power from Metr Hilarion and then created a schism with the MP’s Archdiocese of Western Europe, where we have had close family and friends for over 50 years.

If Moscow then offered us and all our churches to join Sourozh, as we had originally wanted in May 2021, I am not sure what we would do. The Romanians have been fantastic to us, real Christians, letting us remain Russian Orthodox, visiting us, concelebrating regularly and making us a real part of the Romanian Metropolia. Of course, we had always been good to them. They are paying us back. Why ever should we want to ask the Romanian Church for letters of leave? They do not try and destroy us and close our churches and they are not jealous, in love with money, are not spectacularly rude and do not bully and threaten. In a word, Romanian Orthodox are Christians.

Our minimum requirement would be for the schismatics to be removed, though frankly they should at least be suspended for creating a schism, which even ‘the blood of the martyrs cannot overcome’ and persecuting those who obey the canons. Then all 16 of us clergy who left ROCOR and did not return would have to receive some sort of compensation. This would be a bit like the slandered Fr Alexander (Belya) and all those with him (we have seen the papers where he was clearly elected by a majority of the Synod), the angelic Fr Christopher Stade, Abbot Tikhon (Gayfudinov), Metr Hilarion’s former private secretary, and Fr Edouard Chervinsky, priest at the Synod building. They all left in disgust at the new clique, which usurped power from the dementia-suffering Metr Hilarion. Their behaviour has been not just uncanonical, but shamelessly unChristian.

The New Rebaptism Book and the Reception of Non-Orthodox

The new American book on rebaptism was written in the convert style by an insecure convert priest in Greece, who had already been rejected by the US Assembly of Orthodox Bishops. I say insecure because none of this is an issue for secure Orthodox, in Greece, Russia, Romania, or anywhere else. It is, however, a perennial theme amongst those from a Protestant background, but who have not yet fully converted. Fr Peter Heers, if he is the author, has no known bishop (he is then on paper a Protestant), until he can prove otherwise. There is nothing new in this book, it repeats the vast debates around this subject to be found in Orthodox literature in the 70s and 80s (St Vladimir’s Quarterly, Eastern Churches Review, Sobornost, Orthodox Word etc, as well as in other languages for example in Le Messager of the Western European Diocese of ROCOR).

This new book appears to recount various practices from history, taking quotes of saints and elders out of context (as Protestants are wont to do) is certainly not sound traditional pastoral practice, but is inclined to the booklore of pharisees. The fact that at certain times and in certain places the reception of Roman Catholics by baptism has been practised is a well-known fact. It has always happened whenever Roman Catholicism was aggressive towards Orthodoxy and seems to have begun, unsurprisingly, with the sack of New Rome in 1204. However, it has not been the practice whenever Roman Catholics have treated Orthodox well and even respected us, in other words, whenever they have behaved like Christians towards us.

The demand for reception by baptism renounces the living Tradition, the Tradition of the Saints, of all the Local Churches, of the Moscow Patriarchate, of the pre-Revolutionary Church (the Tsaritsa St Alexandra was received by St John of Kronstadt by chrismation). Personally, I will always follow the practice of non-schismatic Orthodox bishops in this. Those who do not accept this practice risk putting themselves outside the Church, especially when they refuse to concelebrate with whole jurisdictions because they have received a priest from Roman Catholicism by confession and communion. What was good enough for St Seraphim of Sarov. St John of Kronstadt, the martyred Tsarina Alexandra and for 100% of non-schismatic, canonical Orthodox bishops today is certainly good enough for me.

Any who demand the rebaptism of someone who has already for years been in the Orthodox Church and taking communion also renounce the Creed: ‘I believe in One Baptism….’.

See youtube for how the Moscow Patriarchate today, as ever, receives Roman Catholic priests into the Church:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHjinL1OAGo

Outside of this book, which I have not had time to read, I would say the following about the whole invented issue of ‘corrective rebaptism’ – a totally unPatristic term, namely:

If you do not accept the above practice of the ROC, that Roman Catholic clergy are accepted into the Russian Church by confession and concelebration and you cut off communion with those who do accept this, then you are simply not Russian Orthodox, indeed you are simply not members of the Orthodox Church. You belong to a sect. You are schismatic. To cut off communion with others because of their traditional practices in this matter is a schism. That is the sin. And that is what has happened.

Of course, we all practise threefold baptism by immersion in the Name of the Holy Trinity (I do this at least twice a week on average), but watch the above video with one who had already been baptised in the Name of the Holy Trinity being received in the usual way into the Russian Church today. What we do not do is fall into schism and say that others are not Orthodox because they have been received in the way shown in the youtube video above, and not according to the strict teaching. That is anti-canonical – see Canon XV of the First and Second Council under St Photius the Great.

The Orthodox teaching on Non-Orthodox ‘sacraments’ is crystal clear and I will repeat it here for newcomers to the Church, who know nothing of the extensive literature about it written in the 19th and 20th centuries, for the umpteenth time:

There are no sacraments outside the Orthodox Church. However, there are sacramental forms or rites, which actually have the same names as ours and are outwardly very similar to Orthodox emergency baptisms. The spiritual presence that is missing in those forms or rites is obtained when a Non-Orthodox comes into the presence of the Church, the source of the Holy Spirit. The ritual form is then filled with the missing grace.

The problem with any novel doctrine of rebaptism is that:

Its claims about the need to rebaptise Non-Orthodox are old-fashioned, done to death over the last 150 years. This issue was debated to death by Palmer and Khomyakov in the 19th century and thousands of pages were again written about it in the 1970s, especially after the uncanonical, indeed blasphemous, 1976 Guildford ROCOR rebaptisms by Grabbeites of those who had been Orthodox for some years. (This is still done by old calendarists, linked to the Guildford group in England). It came up yet again in the 1986 Boston schism and the Fontrier schism in Paris. Both ex-ROCOR groups went to the old calendarists. As Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR said to all of us at the time: ‘You receive by economy (chrismation). However, if someone insists on being baptised into the Church, you can do so, though it is not necessary’. When in the 1990s one Polish ROCOR nun at the Lesna Convent, Sister Varvara, learned of the new American ROCOR practice of obligatorily receiving Roman Catholics by baptism, she was horrified. As were we all – and still are.

In 1979 the now local saint, St Sophrony the Athonite, explained to us (and to me) the Orthodox teaching that there is no need to rebaptise. This followed the rebaptism of a Catholic priest by Abbot Aemilianos in 1978. Fr Sophrony had sent the Catholic priest, Fr Placide, to Athos to be received, but was horrified and very upset when Fr Aemilianos, behind his back, received Fr Placide by baptism. It did cause a quite unnecessary scandal at the time.  Whatever was missing in the heterodox sacramental form is made up for, and activated by, contact with the grace inherent in, and which radiates from, the Church of God – the Orthodox Church.

The rest is the Protestant-style fundamentalist literalism and ritualism of converts with their psychological fragility and insecurity. In other words, none of the rebaptism hysteria is to do with theology, only psychology and often an unhealthy psychology, even pathology (see above). Young men who come to our parishes for the first time, as they do, having spent hundreds of hours on the internet and are therefore ‘experts’, and at once demand that they be rebaptised, that they must dress in black, grow long beards and hair and change their names from ‘John’ and be called Moses or Seraphim, Silouan or Vladimir do not need a priest. They need a psychiatrist. Either they accept us Orthodox as we are, or else they go elsewhere. We do not have any in our parishes.

This is what Patriarch Alexei II meant some twenty-five years ago, when he spoke of the insecurity of certain small groups of introverted Russian emigrants, who lived in narrow, self-protecting and parochial ghettoes, frightened because ‘others are not like us’, ‘the others are not real Russians like us’ etc.

These claims about the need for rebaptism reject all the ROCOR bishops and priests of the past, those who taught us the Tradition. They were not upstart converts from a US Protestant background, but came from a millennium of Orthodox Tradition.

Rebaptism is obligatory claims mean that all the saints of the Old Testament and many post-New Testament martyrs of the calendar baptised in their blood, and not by triple immersion in water, are not even Orthodox, let alone saints.

Rebaptism is obligatory claims mean that the hundreds of thousands of Uniats received into the Russian Church in Belarus, the Ukraine and Carpatho-Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries by confession and communion (the third rite) never joined the Orthodox Church!

Rebaptism is obligatory claims mean that hundreds of Orthodox priests, received by chrismation as laypeople, are not priests and their sacraments are not valid!

These claims mean that some 100 million Russian Orthodox (some 35,000 of them now priests, at least one hundred are now bishops) are not baptised! Until 10-15 years ago most baptisees there had to stand kneeling forward with two hands in a bowl of water and had water poured over their heads. Quite simply, there were hardly any baptistries.

These claims deny the validity of baptisms by numbers of Serbian and Greek Diaspora (and not only in the Diaspora and not only Serbian and Greek) priests, who baptise by pouring water over the head.

These claims deny the validity of Orthodox emergency baptisms of babies and adults, done in hospital conditions.

The fact is that if you only practise akrivia (the strict teaching), you will wander as far from the truth as those who only practise ikonomia (dispensation). Pastors use both according to need. Intellectuals and theoreticians fall for one or the other, lapsing to the right side or to the left side. Pastors are practical and, by definition, pastoral.

Conclusion

Once the war that the US began in 2014 in the Ukraine is over, because this is of course a war between Moscow and Washington, for whose military-industrial complex 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already died, these matters will be sorted out. The events in the Ukraine and those ensuing in the Baltics, Moldova and Western Europe have distracted Moscow from the events here.

Eventually, the sectarians will refuse to repent and will no doubt found yet another wealthy (through internet influencing and podcasts) American sect, ROCOR – Russian Old Calendarists Outside Russia. However, Orthodoxy does not exist in podcasts and on the internet, it exists only in buildings, services and sacraments, in our incarnate Christian way of life. But sects do not want to know about that.

Those Orthodox who still remain in ROCOR, and these include some of their bitterly divided bishops – I am told by one source that the division is indeed bitter – will become part of the MP, or whatever it will come to be called after the conflict in the Ukraine is over. This is the future. Moscow will pick up the sane pieces, once the insane pieces have expelled themselves into their sects in a repeat of the 1986 Boston schism and the multiple schism between 2001 and 2007.  I have not the slightest doubt about it and have not doubted it since 2007. The post-2007 crisis of identity of ROCOR, with all its absurdities and now schism from the Moscow Patriarchate, would have been overcome by ROCOR in Europe, Latin America and Australia merging with the MP, or in North America with its local American branch, the OCA. It will happen anyway.

Then ROCOR would simply have merged with the MP and so become its missionary arm outside Russia. Providentially, it would then have helped the MP from sinking into disastrous Russian nationalism and Soviet-style centralism and injustices, like defrocking priests with differing political opinions about the Ukraine. And at the same time, through its engagement with the masses, and not with ghettos, ROCOR would have helped the imploding Western world to refind Christ.

Sadly, the new ROCOR, renouncing the old and traditional ROCOR with its pre-Revolutionary heritage, took the other sectarian, way. It sovietised itself and at the same time turned to the right-wing ghetto instead of to the mainstream. In the end, however, the forces of moderation and sanity will prevail. Light always wins against darkness in the end.

 

 

 

Heresies, Schisms, Divisions and the Consequences of the Ukrainian Tragedy

The misfortune that has befallen Russia is the direct result of grievous sins and her rebirth is only possible through cleansing from them. However, so far there has been no real repentance.

Bishop (now St) John of Shanghai

Death is the enemy of Life; and he has many friends among men, in all those authorities in whom a debased sense of Life is linked with temporary power.

Introduction: On the Misuse of the Words Heresy and Schism

The words heresy and schism have been much misused and even abused, for self-justifying nationalist and political reasons. For example, Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky) (+ 1936) was accused of ‘heresy’ (heresy is a Greek word meaning a wrong choice) for stating that not only Christ’s Crucifixion, but also His Agony in Gethsemane played a part in our Redemption. Those who unreasonably accused him of ‘stavroclasm’, that he had rejected the centrality of the Cross, either misunderstood his words or else deliberately distorted his words out of personal dislike or, more often, because of differences in political views. Or there is Patriarch Sergius of Moscow (+ 1944), who was accused of the ‘heresy’ of ‘Sergianism’, a ‘heresy’ named as such by a priest who was a CIA operative and freemason! Of course, that Patriarch sinned through cowardice, abject lies, subservience to militant atheism, careerism, bureaucratic centralism and ritualism. The same misuse and abuse have happened with the word ‘schism’. (A Greek word meaning a split). This word has been misused to describe parishioners who left a (corrupt) priest for a non-corrupt priest, or who left a schismatic bishop for a non-schismatic bishop. The only schism was that of the bishop they had left! The same is true of political ‘defrockings’ (See below).

For example, over the last century the Russian emigration and the Patriarchal Church inside Russia were at each other’s throats for generations and accused each other of being ‘heretics’, ‘schismatics’, ‘without grace’ and ‘defrocked’ one another’s clergy. However, when the time came for reconciliation a few years after the fall of the USSR, they suddenly both withdrew all charges, stating that they had all been politically motivated. In other words, both sides had been lying the whole time! No wonder that there are priests who have been ‘defrocked’ by the KGB or the CIA and are considered to be confessors and not defrocked at all. Such ‘defrockings’ are of course all reversible, unlike what is stated on a Kremlin-funded, English-language ‘Orthodox’ website, which carefully censors all disagreement with itself. There is nothing new here. St John Chrysostom (+ 407) was also ‘defrocked’ for political reasons, St Nectarios of Pentapolis (+ 1920) was suspended because of jealousy, slandered, exiled and later canonised. As for St John of Shanghai (+ 1966), in the early 1960s he was suspended by his own ROCOR Synod and put on trial as a common criminal by his fellow-bishops. Later they canonised him! Nothing has changed.

Heresies

In the fourth century the Church became established, that is, it became closely linked to the State. There were many advantages to this, such as not being persecuted, being able to do missionary work freely, or receiving State financial aid to build churches. However, there were also many disadvantages, for example, officials were nominated as bishops by the State as part of an attempt at command and control, with centralisation, bureaucracy and protocols, clergy lined up in rigid ranks like soldiers, churches which were nationalist ghettos and not parish communities, and money charged for sacraments, all amid ritualism and superstition. St Basil the Great (+ 379) complained about bishops who had this mentality as not real bishops, they would side with anyone. Some of them did indeed know very little about Orthodox Christianity, some of them were probably atheists, or at least they behaved as the worst atheists. In any case, they compromised the Faith by their way of life, even though on paper they did not renounce the Creed, or Symbol of Faith, and so by inertia remained Orthodox Christians, but only nominally and formally, that is, only outwardly, and only for a time.

However, as usual, when you start living in a way that differs from the Creed, you fall into heresy. Now a heresy is a teaching that contradicts the Creed, which was drawn up at the two Universal Church Councils at Nicea in 325 and Constantinople in 381. Those who follow heresies are called heretics. The contents of the Creed, agreed on by all for all time, are dogmas of the Church. To apply the words ‘heresy’ and ‘dogma’ to anything outside the spiritually-revealed Creed is a misuse or abuse of the term. So a heresy is a separation from the Church for a dogmatic reason and leads to new dogmas and a new way of life, opposed to the Church. Many of the above nominal Orthodox Christians duly became heretics, called Gnostics, Arians, Nestorians, Sabellians, Donatists, Monophysites, Monothelites, Iconoclasts etc. Generally extremely proud and self-justifying, they all essentially denied that God is the Holy Trinity or that God had become man. All of these groups therefore denied some part of the Creed. Some of their naïve adherents, ‘heretics’, did return to the Church, but others, not naïve, did not.

The Roman Catholic Example

As an example of heresy, it was out of the situation of a State Church that in the eleventh century a new heresy (a heresy because it changed the Creed) called ‘Catholicism’ was born. This is a religion which is actually a State in itself. Its promoters who were greedy for power (unlkei its unconscious victims), wanted all the advantages of being a State Church, without the disadvantages. They did this by creating a ‘Church-State, that is, they put themselves above the State, making their institution into a Superstate. At the origin of this was their alteration to the text of the Creed, adding the word ‘filioque’, which implies that their Pope of Rome replaces Christ and the Holy Spirit. Thus, Orthodox Christians in Western Europe were forced to leave the Church by the invention of this new ‘Roman Catholic’ religion. Those who were conscious of this change were heretics, as they replaced Christ, present through the Holy Spirit, by mere men, with the title of Pope of Rome. The consequences were almost immediate.

At once bloodthirsty military campaigns were organised to obtain power, conquering lands and resources. The Popes of Rome promised the men who took part in them that whatever they did, murder, rape, theft, pillage, they would go to heaven because they were doing it in the name of the new Roman Catholic god. These expeditions were called ‘Crusades’ and started in what is now Italy, Spain and England (in 1066) and were then taken to Palestine, southern France and Eastern Europe (in the thirteenth century). These then developed into internal crusades with the bloodthirsty Inquisition and were spread in the sixteenth century to what is now Latin America. Certain Roman Catholics were still murdering and pillaging in Croatia and the western Ukraine only three generations ago and were still being promised a ticket to heaven by their Roman Catholic clergy for their Fascist deeds. This is what happens when you replace the Holy Spirit with some manmade teaching. In other words, false teaching always becomes a heresy and so leads to an evil and deformed way of life.

Schisms

A schism is a permanent separation from the Church for a non-dogmatic reason. Often these reasons are nationalist and sectarian, though there is also the risk of schisms becoming heresies. For instance, from an Orthodox Christian viewpoint, Protestantism is a schism from Roman Catholicism. Although Protestantism confessed the same heresy as the Roman Catholicism through the same filioque deviation from the Creed, it did not agree with Roman Catholicism in other respects and so split away from it. Therefore, in the sixteenth century dissident Roman Catholics separated, calling themselves Protesters. Then, as is always the case with schismatics, they disagreed with each other and have since separated into a myriad of sects. For sectarianism, usually accompanied by personality cults, is the result of schisms. Of course, apart from this classic case, there have been a multitude of other schisms. And just as heresies lead to an evil and deformed life, so schisms also result in hatred, jealousy, lies and slander.

For instance, in Russia in the seventeenth century there took place the ‘Old Ritualist’ schism. This was about minor changes in ritual, but because the changes were imposed by the State, they led to a schism, which soon became violent and split into multiple schisms, just as in the Protestant model. A more recent example is in the last century when those in Greece who did not want to accept the dating of the Western calendar for the fixed feasts, as the Greek State was insisting under pressure from Western governments, operated schisms from the Orthodox Church. They called themselves ‘old calendarists’ and they in turn also split into a multitude of sectarian groups that hated one another. As the calendar is not a dogmatic issue (the Creed never mentions it), separation on this basis is a schism, not a heresy. And finally there is the case of the nationalist and Sovietised US-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russa (ROCOR), which instituted a schism from the multinational Archdiocese of Western Europe. Although they are both groups under one and the same Moscow Church, yet they are now not in communion with one another.

Divisions

Finally, there are divisions. These are neither heresies, as Church teachings are not involved, nor schisms, as they are not permanent. These are temporary separations from the corrupted administration of a Church, usually for nationalist or political reasons. In other words, a division is due to differences of opinion between bishops or groups of bishops. Divisions have existed and exist within the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds. For instance, Liberal Methodists separated from Tory Anglicans and so far only some have returned, and various groups of Traditionalists have separated from liberal Roman Catholics and, again, so far only some have returned. The danger here, as with all divisions, is the risk of them developing to schisms, that is, they become permanent, and so full of nastiness, hatred, jealousy, lies and slander.

In the Orthodox Church there have also been several divisions for nationalist or political reasons, especially over the last two centuries. For example, the Bulgarians separated from the Constantinople Greeks, the Macedonians from the Serbs, three different groups of Russian emigres separated from the Church inside the USSR and Serbian emigres separated from the Church inside Yugoslavia. Most of these issues were resolved, divisions overcome, even if it took decades and generations, almost a century in some cases. Despite these generally positive resolutions, today there is a new cause and outbreak of such divisions and they risk turning into schisms, that is, becoming permanent. These divisions are all centred around one single subject: the highly centralised and profoundly corrupt ex-Soviet (and not very ex-Soviet) multinational Republic of the Ukraine

The Ukraine

The first new and serious division here (there had been old divisions) took place in 2018 between the most powerful Local Orthodox Churches, the Greek (7% of the baptised, or four Local Churches) and the Russian (70% of the baptised and one Local Church). This left the vast majority of the Local Orthodox Churches (23% of baptised and ten Local Churches) in shock. When in 2018 the Greeks set up a new Church on Ukrainian territory, which has been under the Moscow Church for nearly 350 years – shocking enough – the Russians replied by refusing to concelebrate or co-operate with the Greeks – just as shocking. Then the Russians in turn set up a Church on the territory of Africa which, apart from Egypt and Libya, had been Greek Church territory for nearly 100 years – more shocking. Thus, a separation in the Ukraine had spread to Africa, a territory which the US and China with Russia are directly battling for political influence in. The consequences of this division are now escalating even further.

It seems that power does indeed corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. For of course, behind this division lies power politics, the desire for control of territory and so for money. The small Greek Churches are heavily financed and even controlled by the US, and the much larger Moscow Church is heavily financed and even controlled by the Russian State. Yet another new escalation took place one year ago in February 2022, as a result of the war that had begun between the US-controlled Ukraine and the Russian Federation in 2014. This had followed the violent US-organised coup which overthrew the democratically-elected Ukrainian government. The result was the present highly centralised, puppet regime in Kiev, financed and armed by the West, and threatening to complete its genocide of those of Russian language and culture in the east of the Ukraine. In response, in 2022 Russia sent in troops to protect those of Russian language and culture in the east of the Ukraine. A war had begun.

The Tragedy of the War

After Russia’s vastly superior forces had defeated the Kiev forces within a few weeks, the Kiev regime was about to conclude a peace agreement, but it was forced by the US to break off negotiations. Thus, in a second escalation, the US made its vassals send old, mainly Soviet, military equipment to re-equip the Kiev forces. By summer 2022 Russia had destroyed that equipment too. Then, in a third escalation, the US-led West began sending huge sums of money ($150 billion in twelve months so far), huge amounts of its own military equipment, training Kiev troops and also paying tens of thousands of mercenaries to fight on behalf of the beleaguered Kiev regime. Russia will destroy that too, but of course it will take even longer and even more will die. The proxy-war is being fought until the last Ukrainian and the last mercenary who wants to fight is dead. It is a giant war crime.

The result is that today Kiev dead number between 160,000 and 300,000 (including several thousand foreign mercenaries). Russian dead number 19,000. And this does not include the hundreds of thousands of physically wounded and psychologically wounded (traumatised). This does not include the damage to the infrastructure of what was already one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in Europe, which is still the battlefield for this proxy war between Washington and Moscow. This European war is unspeakable in its horror. Nor have we mentioned the millions of refugees who have fled to Russia and to various countries in Western Europe. Millions of lives have been disrupted and there are hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans. How could anyone possible approve of this tragedy? And yet…..

The Tragedy of the Moscow Church

The tragedy here is that the Orthodox faithful both in Russia and in the Ukraine used to belong to one united Church. The Church, centred in Moscow, used to be multinational, with faithful not only in the Russian Federation and the Ukraine, but also in Belarus, Moldova and Kazakhstan, and with millions of others in over sixty other countries around the world, especially in the Western world, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, the countries of Western Europe, Northern America and Australia. However, almost the whole episcopate of the Moscow Church inside Russia has failed to condemn what is now a nine-year long civil war, in which nominal Orthodox are killing nominal Orthodox. The result is that the once multinational Moscow Church is rapidly becoming a national, not to say, nationalist, Russians-only, Church. Why would Non-Russians want to belong to a Russian-controlled Church, where they cannot even express their own opinions? Most don’t, not to mention many Russians themselves, for whom the Church should have nothing to do with war. The Russians will surely win the war in the Ukraine, but the far, far greater challenge was to win the peace. Sadly, that seems to have been lost already and inevitably an independent but canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church will be born there.

Thus, left-wing liberals in the USA and the Roman Catholic politician Cardinal Koch have accused the Russian Patriarch of ‘heresy’ for saying that ‘the Russian World’ (wherever there are concentrations of ethnic Russians) must be united and that the Russian soldiers who die to unite Orthodox will go to heaven. (The accusation by Cardinal Koch is particularly hypocritical, since for its whole existence Roman Catholicism has claimed that those who murder others to make them Roman Catholic will go to heaven). Although clearly not heretical but just nationalistic, the Russian Patriarch’s words do invite profound disagreement, and not only among fringe liberals. Few, if any, agree with the Patriarch. These words are his personal opinion. They are especially strange, given that the leader of what used to be a multinational Church is seen to be promoting militant nationalism, just as his Greek Orthodox enemies do through their nationalist racism, which they call phyletism. Where is the difference between Greek and Russian leaders? Six of one and half a dozen of the other?

The Break-Up of the Moscow Church

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of both sides in the war and of its final outcome, the result is that everywhere, outside the tightly-controlled Russian Federation and Belarus, the faithful have been leaving the once multinational Russian Church. Either they have left for other Local Orthodox Churches or else they have declared themselves ‘fully independent’, as in the Ukraine and Latvia. Most recently there has been the case of five Orthodox priests in Lithuania, four of whom are ethnic Lithuanians. Not surprisingly, as Non-Russians, they find that they cannot agree with the Russian Patriarch and do not want to belong to the same Church as him. The result of this is that they were ‘defrocked’ (forbidden the priesthood) by the Moscow Church, even though they are not in Russia or Russians. However, they have now been allowed the priesthood by the Church of Constantinople, which had jurisdiction in Lithuania some 350 years ago. (Ironically, Constantinople, today called Istanbul, is now the largest city in Europe and with a population of Russians probably fifty times greater than its Greeks).

Apparently, these priests are not allowed the right to freedom and self-determination, they must obey what has become a foreign, since no longer multinational, Church. This situation is unthinkable in a Western country which has a culture of freedom. And of course, you cannot be defrocked for a difference of opinion about nationalism or politics! Real defrocking happens only when a priest behaves immorally, for example, he steals money or he is involved in sexual impropriety. Clearly, ‘defrockings’ like those in Lithuania are not canonical, they are purely political, and are not recognised by anyone except the present Moscow authorities. The irony is that those who defrock in such cases, though not in this one, are often guilty of real causes for defrocking! For instance, over the last fifty years in North America and Europe, only very recently in the Antioch jurisdiction, we have seen priests ‘defrocked’ for being whistleblowers because:

Their bishop was a pedophile.

Their bishop was heretical or schismatic.

Their bishop was homosexual.

Their bishop was committing fornication.

Their bishop wanted to sleep with the priest’s wife.

Their bishop was jealous of a priest’s church and tried to steal it from him.

Their bishop wanted a priest to spy for a secret service.

Their bishop was an atheist and ordained atheists.

Their bishop was a careerist and ready to commit any crime in furtherance of his career.

In each case the priest left his bishop and was duly ‘defrocked’! Of course, the ‘defrocking’ was completely ignored and the priest continued to serve, transferring to a normal bishop. As a result, the persecuted priest gained respect and his ‘defrocking’ bishop lost all respect, together with much of his flock – and also his career.

Conclusion: The Dogmatisation of Personal Opinions

As we can see, these new divisions are not at all theological, but nationalist and political. Here we are in the world of personal (political) opinions, the world of intolerance. Differences in personal opinions have nothing to do with heresies and schisms. Personal opinions are here being treated as dogmas. The Faith is the same. When Church authorities intolerantly impose nationalist and political opinions, they automatically divide their flock, as we see today in the Ukraine. Thus, the Moscow Church has lost moral authority in most of the Ukraine, not to mention in most of the rest of the world outside the Russian Federation and, one day, in Belarus too. The Moscow Church is rapidly ceasing to be the multinational Russian Orthodox Church and becoming a mononational Church. You cannot be a multinational Church and be a national (and nationalist) Church at the same time. You must decentralise yourself, as the USSR was decentralised (but astonishingly the Church was not decentralised), and grant other nationalities freedom and independence.

Only two bishops of the present Moscow Church have remained traditional, that is, multinational Russian Orthodox, by diverging in their opinions from the authorities. One of them, Metr Hilarion (Alfeev), was disgraced and exiled to a church in Budapest, the other, Metr Jean Renneteau, a French national, has courageously expressed his total disagreement (1). As far as they are concerned, through unequivocal support for the war in the Ukraine the Moscow authorities have confused the Church with politics, thus discrediting the Church which they represent, as well as themselves. These divisions are only about nationalism and politics. A dispute about territories and whether they belong to or do not belong to a Local Church has nothing to do with the creed and heresy and schism. Through their centralisation the Church authorities have dismissed the right to freedom and self-determination. And sadly, despite constant warnings, the centralisation of these Church authorities is not a case of Resovietisation, as there never was any Desovietisation.

Afterword

Reading the above there are those who will fall into despair. They are mistaken to do so, for they have forgotten Church history. Now is the Gethsemane of the Church, that is, the moment not of Her defeat, but of Her victory has begun. Christ is deserted by His disciples, who have fallen asleep, but as time and time again in Church history, when cast aside and deserted, this is the moment when Christ has overcome the world. The arrogance, narcissism and sense of impunity of the crazies who, even in complete freedom, sell their souls for a mess of Soviet pottage, accepting brainwashed ‘obedience’ for the sake of their careers, more Soviet than the Soviets, are cast down. Throughout the Russian Church, exactly as St Seraphim of Sarov prophesied, there will be a great cleansing from corruption, a generational change among the episcopate. From that will follow the repentance and restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church (which, it seems, now no longer exists) and the resurrection of the Russian Lands. But first they must go through this Great Tragedy, the Crucifixion of the Ukraine, the war that has happened on account of the apostasy of those who denied the Church of God. They reduced it to the sins of cowardice, abject lies, subservience to militant atheism, careerism, bureaucratic centralism and ritualism. Did they really think they could get away with it? We follow another way, the way of the New Martyrs and New Confessors. For the King is coming and we must be ready to meet Him.

 

Note:

  1. See: https://www.svoboda.org/a/mitropolit-dubninskiy-ioann-my-idem-po-krovi-nashih-muchenikov-/32276466.html