Category Archives: Secularism

The Suicide of a Civilization

Пусть кто-то от Общей-Европы,
А я – от Всея Руси!

Нина Карташева, Порфира и Виссон

There may be some from a Common Europe,
But I am from All Rus!

Nina Kartasheva, the contemporary Russian poetess

Some speak of the contemporary crisis in Western countries as ‘the death of a culture’. It is worse than this; it is the suicide of a civilization. I have personally lived through the last 50 years in England and seen this tragedy with my own eyes and the eyes of my parents, grandparents and whole family, lived it and deeply felt it. My grandparents’ generation, born in Victorian times and dying between the 1960s and 1980s, was able to tell me of the first phase of the suicide in the First European and then World War; my parents’ generation, born just after that War and dying over the last 25 years, was able to tell me of the second phase of the suicide in the Second European and then World War. Both those wars were phases of the suicide, the killing not of a mere culture, but of the Christian roots of that culture, that is, of Western civilization.

However, the third and final phase of the suicide, which made it ‘successful’, has come in the last 50 years, without a World War, but with a spiritual war, resulting in the massive loss of Faith in the West since the 1960s. This began with the apostasy of Catholic and Protestant clergy, who publicly declared that they had lost their faith in the Holy Trinity, in the Divinity and Resurrection of Christ, in the Ever-Virgin, in the Saints and in the moral commandments of the Scriptures, which they saw as a mere literary work. And, worst of all, they justified this loss of Faith, replacing the Divine with the belief that fallen humanity should have the ‘sacred’ freedom to mutilate and destroy the image of God in itself and mutilate and destroy the world around it. Having destroyed the Fatherhood of God, they destroyed the Brotherhood of mankind. Having rejected Christian belief, which is at the root of Western civilization, they killed that civilization and so committed suicide.

What remains today of Western civilization is ‘sights’, monuments for tourists, museums, a ‘heritage industry’; what was vibrant and living has gone from this huge cemetery of Western civilization, which the curious flock to see from all over the world as a historical theme park. With the Christian faith that underpinned that civilization gone, the centre has gone and two tendencies have come to dominate Western countries in the last two generations. These are tasteless vulgarity and boorishness, with the suicidal obesity and mutilating tattoos that go with them, or else the love of money and mammonism, with the futile vanity and snobbish pride that go with them. These two tendencies can be seen everywhere in the Western world, from North America to Western Europe to Australia. Little wonder that a Christian world leader, perhaps the only one left, Vladimir Putin, has said that ‘the West has replaced God with Satan’.

Some point to contemporary Russia, the rejection of militant atheism there and the return to the Faith and ask: ‘Why could the same return to the Faith not happen in the West?’ It could not happen in the West, because in Russia there was vicious persecution of the Faith by an alien ideology, whereas in the West there has been no persecution, only voluntary self-liquidation by a home-grown ideology. An attempt to kill a civilization, as happened under the foreign ideology of militant atheism, imported from Switzerland (Lenin) and the USA (Trotsky) and financed from overseas, is not at all the same thing as a voluntary suicide. Suicide was sooner or later inevitable in the West, as the seeds of destruction were all along contained in the compromised Halfodoxy of the Catholic/Protestant mindset. This long ago began adapting and reducing the original Orthodoxy of the first Christianity to a mere humanistic ideology, centred first in Rome and then in a multitude of places all over the Western world.

As Orthodox in the West, it has always been our task to go in the opposite direction to the contemporary West and its chosen path of spiritual catastrophe. Instead of rejecting the roots of Western civilization in the original Christian Faith, preached and lived by the first martyrs and saints of the Western Lands in the first millennium, it has been our task to be radical, to call the West back to those roots. In other words, it has been our task to call for the restoration of Orthodoxy, the return in repentance to Orthodoxy, to the original Christian Faith at the roots of the West in the first millennium, which is identical in spirit to the Orthodoxy of Holy Rus. It has been our task to try and save what is valid in Western civilization, the precious fragments and vestiges which have survived in the remoter parts of the West and which relate to its Christian roots. This is a struggle against all the odds, a struggle for the Orthodox Faith against the prince of this world.

Unlike in the West, whenever there have been temptations to renounce the Faith in Russia, there have always come outsiders to call back to repentance. No matter whether it was the Tartars and the Teutonic Knights, the Poles and the Lithuanians, Napoleon and Hitler, or now the American elite and their European puppets in their futile attempt to take over the Ukraine. This latter attempt has only served to strengthen the peoples of Rus against the temptations of the corrupt, Western-sponsored oligarchs and the other contemporary Westernisers. The peoples of Rus have not lost the fear of God – unlike in the West, where they are even preparing to legalize incest, the marriage of father and daughter, mother and son, to die in self-inflicted deformity, sterility, dementia and euthanasia. In the West the old paganism has been reborn as the new paganism, as all the old demons come back from hell.

The difference between the peoples of Rus and the West is that no-one in Rus justifies atheist apostasy, whereas the West not only does justify it, but also aggressively tries to foist it onto the rest of the world, denying any other civilization the right to exist. We are reminded of the words of the philosopher: ‘He whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes mad’. Only this can explain the insanity and self-destruction of the contemporary Western world. As for us, we shall continue regardless, in faithfulness to the Church of All Rus and the commandments of the saints and martyrs new and old. It may be that the present Western apostasy, which is now proceeding at breakneck speed, can be halted for a time. But it may be that we shall come to be persecuted by the atheist Western authorities, which will first stop us from baptizing. Then the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa will come true and ships of people will sail to St Petersburg to be baptized. And then we shall either face martyrdom in the West or refuge in Russia. In any case we shall be ready, for we have no illusions.

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

Economic Nazism: On the Murder of the Sick and Elderly

The word ‘euthanasia’ is a euphemism invented from Greek words for ‘good death’. It is therefore a fantasist invention, for there is no such thing as a ‘good death’. Death is unnatural, a product of the Fall. Similarly, there is no such thing as a ‘dignified death’, as secularists also like to call it. Death is never dignified, for death, like life itself, always involves suffering. Forty years ago a bishop whom I met (who also had a secular training as a doctor) called ‘euthanasia’ a euphemism for murder. And that is what it is.

Herein is the essential difference between the Christian world-view and the secularist world-view. This latter includes the world-view of those who may call themselves Christians, like a former Archbishop of Canterbury, who are essentially secularists and not Christians. The Christian world-view accepts suffering because it is the result of sin and even sees how it can be positive. Secularism, however, does not recognize sin and therefore rejects suffering. The result of this is that secularism also rejects the Resurrection, but, therefore, ironically has to accept death, to which it has no answers.

Here we do not reject the use and usefulness of painkillers. We also reject the secularist concept of keeping the dying alive artificially. Death is inevitable and there is no such thing as ‘saving’ someone’s life, only of extending someone’s life. But we clearly realize that the real reason behind the introduction of State-sponsored euthanasia is not a humanistic desire to curtail human suffering, but to curtail State health budgets. The hospital chimneys of the secularist world already belch out smoke from the millions of babies slaughtered every year. Now, with the economic Nazism of ‘euthanasia’, the crematoria of the secularist world are going to be working overtime too.

The West is Alienated from Christ and Therefore Intolerant

Many people worldwide have been amazed at the Western indifference and even hostility to the plight of massacred and fleeing Christians in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and now in the Ukraine. There, 55,000 refugees have fled to Russia in the last 24 hours from the devilish massacres by foreign mercenaries of the Christian people of the Ukraine. The neo-Nazi junta in Kiev, under strict Western control, sends in tanks, murders and maims Christians, refusing to talk to its own people.

Where do this intolerance and hatred for Christianity come from? Surely the West supports Christianity? It used to. And why does President Obama meddle in the UK’s possible decision to leave the atheist EU and Scotland’s possible decision to leave the atheist UK? Why does he threaten and intimidate even Western peoples? Where does this bullying arrogance come from? These riddles have today been answered by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov.

As reported by the Interfax Religion agency and the sedmitza.ru website, the Russian Orthodox Foreign Minister considers that the West has become antagonistic to Russia because of its return to the Church of Christ. He noted the Russian amazement that the West still equates the Russian Federation with the atheist Soviet Union, whereas ‘the new Russia is returning to traditional spiritual values, rooted in Orthodoxy’.

At the same time, he noted that the ever clearer contradiction ‘between the multipolarity of the world which can be objectively affirmed, and the desire of the USA and the historic West to hang on to their habitual positions of domination, the ever clearer contradiction between the cultural and civilizational diversity of the contemporary world and attempts to foist Western values on everyone’. He added that the West ‘is increasingly breaking away from its own Christian roots and is less and less receptive to the religious feelings of people of other confessions’.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

The title is an expression used in an inspiring conversation with the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus at the ROCOR Council of San Francisco in 2006. Below are a number of recent conversations, both actual and also from correspondence by e-mail, regarding current Church matters, all of which illustrate the search of all conscious Orthodox for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy in the Light of the Resurrection.

Q: What recent changes have marked the Church inside Russia?

A: A generation has now passed since the commemoration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 and the world-changing events that followed it, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the passing of that generation, in the last few months there have been major changes, with the retirement in Kiev and St Petersburg of both Metropolitans Vladimir and in Minsk that of Metr Philaret. Thus, all three most senior Metropolitans in the Russian Church inside Russia have retired through age and ill health. This is the end of the old generation of those who were connected with the highly controversial and politically-minded Metr Nikodim (Rotov) of the Soviet period.

Those of his disciples who are still alive have all had to adapt since the Jubilee Council of 2000 with its rejection of sergianism and ecumenism and canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs, and then the acceptance of the reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia in 2007. In other words we are now entering the second generation since the collapse of secularist-atheist ideology in the Russian Lands and so the resurrection by the purity of Holy Orthodoxy of the crucified Church inside Russia. These three senior posts that have changed hands are symbolic of a more general generational change, as Lazarus’ grave-clothes have fallen off.

Q: What do you mean by ‘Lazarus’ grave-clothes’?

A: I liken the resurrection of the Church inside Russia to the resurrection of Lazarus. This was an incredible and astounding miracle, but we should not forget that Lazarus’ grave-clothes did not smell good because the decomposition of his body had already begun. These grave-clothes are represented by the deathly, Soviet and post-Soviet (not yet Russian), phenomena and problems that have accompanied the resurrection of the Church inside Russia.

Q: What phenomena?

A: For example, inside Russia in the 1990s they were so short of priests that they ordained very easily. There were several disasters here with clearly unworthy ordinations and subsequent defrockings, sometimes for sexual misdemeanours, sometimes for financial misdemeanours. I have met such priests – I know what I speak of. Then there was the confusion between Stalinism and the Church and the total misunderstanding or even rejection of the Royal Martyrs – all as a result of the brainwashing from old Soviet propaganda and lies. Then there have been the phenomena of pro-Catholic clergy (like the assassinated Fr Alexander Men, a suspected Uniat) and the events surrounding Paris-style Russophobes, including the modernist, pro-Protestant Fr George Kochetkov, suspended at one point by Patriarch Alexis as a ‘neo-renovationist’, and the recent scandals concerning Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev and Professor Zubov (a close friend of the late Olivier Clement), who both had to be sacked. These are all people who to some extent still live in the Soviet thought world. They have never managed to shake off the spiritual and intellectual impurity of the past and so make the transition from that old-style Soviet conditioning, paradoxically mixed with a superficial Orthodoxy, to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

The same thing happened outside Russia, where the Church inside Russia had several unworthy and scandalous representatives, uncanonically ordained, or other representatives who are now very elderly as they were appointed in Soviet times. Fortunately, the unworthy ones have mostly died out or been moved, some very recently. According to the 2007 agreement the Church inside Russia has to prepare its parishes outside Russia (except in China and Japan, which is part of its canonical territory) for their canonical handover to ROCOR. His Holiness understandably wants this process to go smoothly, without hurting anyone’s feelings, especially those of the elderly. Therefore it will take a generation before it is completed and all moves to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

A: ROCOR had from the start two wings. One was the political wing whose identity was nationalistic, cultural and anti-Communist rather than simply Orthodox; the other wing, which could be called the ‘Johannite wing’, as represented by St John of Shanghai, was the mainstream of ROCOR. Our view was and is Christian. I can remember how the political and nationalist wing dominated in certain parishes, for example at the former ROCOR chapel in Paris or at the old London Cathedral, as it used to be, when it had several members who worked for MI5. Significantly, those parishes have not survived, but died.

This was because the politically-minded elements refused reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007 or even before. As one of our archbishops said before 2007, reconciliation with the repentant Church inside Russia, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, would lead to a ‘purification’ of ROCOR. That is exactly what happened. Spiritual impurities such as extremism, phariseeism, sectarianism and fanaticism could not bear reality and love others or the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, and so that political wing left the Church for various sects. Several of the small communities concerned in North America were dominated by individuals who worked for the CIA or the Canadian Secret Services.

Q: What do you make of current political changes in the Ukraine?

A: Two weeks ago the US removed the gold reserves of the Ukraine. Then the CIA took over a floor in the offices of the Ukrainian Secret Police in Kiev and the head of the CIA, John Brennan, went to Kiev on Lazarus Saturday. The head of the CIA does not visit a foreign country without a very good reason. It was no doubt with the intention of hoping to further destabilise the Ukraine and then run it, just as it did countless Latin America banana republics and Italy and Greece after the Second World War.

Sure enough, just after that, the CIA began issuing black propaganda, sheer lies, for example about alleged persecution of the Jews in the eastern Ukraine or that President Putin had tens of billions of dollars in private bank accounts in the West, implying that he was a thief. Naturally the Western-media were fed those lies and naturally reported them. The Times of London (part of the Murdoch tabloid empire) was especially keen to report these slanders and lies.

For instance, as regards the Jews, everybody knows that the Jews were massacred by the Uniat Ukrainian SS in Galicia, the western Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler and where earlier anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place. These are facts of history. Many members of the Ukrainian (= Galician) SS, with Polish nationality, came to live in the UK and especially the US, after World War II. I know; I met some of them 30-40 years ago; some of them were frightening and admitted to killing Jews.

Today, at least 150 US mercenaries, probably being paid for by the CIA, are active against the people of the Ukraine, given that most Ukrainian soldiers and police refuse to use violence against their own people – indeed 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already asked for Russian nationality. Other soldiers in the eastern Ukraine have simply joined the insurrection of the Ukrainian people against the junta. We cannot see this crucifixion of the Ukraine, orchestrated in Washington and Brussels and carried out by their paid puppets in Kiev, as being successful.

Q: Why not?

A: First of all, the Ukraine is bankrupt, which is why the bankrupt US called on the world to ‘save the Ukrainian economy’. But it is too late. Prices are doubling. The poor people of the Ukraine, exploited and impoverished for 23 years by corrupt oligarchs, are spontaneously rising up against the unrepresentative, US-installed, separatist Kiev junta and its terror tactics. That regime seized power from the democratically-elected government in Kiev by violence and murder; now it is facing opposition from the Ukrainian people, who are using the same techniques as it did, in order to seize back power from it in turn. As it is written, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there is chaos.

Q: Does any of this have any significance in Orthodox terms? Is it not all political?

A: All of this is highly significant for us. Today’s Russia is at last just beginning to position itself as a spiritual power, opposing the secularist atheism of the Western elite. This was Russia’s traditional role – to protect Christian civilisation both from Western barbarians and from Eastern hordes. Thus, it repelled the Mongol-Tartar yoke, encouraged moderate Islam, repelled the Charleses, Napoleons and Hitlers, liberating both Paris and Berlin, and supported the Church in the Holy Land, the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Outside Eurasia Russia has always helped the peoples of the developing world, aiding them to throw off the yoke of colonialism, as did Tsar Nicholas II during the Boer War in South Africa and also in Tibet, Thailand and Ethiopia. Even the Soviet Union merely continued these policies in Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), Asia and Latin America.

The Russian Orthodox civilisational model, the Christian one, is quite different from the Western Catholic/Protestant model, which calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. Thus, the ‘civilised’ Judeo-Christian West and ‘Western values’ destroyed the native peoples of the Americas and Africa, enslaving them, massacring them like wild animals, sending them into concentration camps (‘reservations’), as the British were still doing in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s. Christian Russia, on the other hand, spreading across Eurasia into Alaska, left the native peoples in peace, not enslaving them or systematically exploiting them, but making them into equal allies. Today Western ‘civilisation’, which has reached its final stage of degeneration in Europe and the USA, has come to a dead end by trying to subjugate the whole world to its ruling transnational atheist elite and its corrupt New World Order pseudo-democracy. That, in fact, only gives a false choice – between one atheist oligarch and another.

Only Russia can potentially deliver the world from this civilisational dead end by providing a Non-Western and spiritual alternative. This is a geopolitical challenge and a historic turning-point. The US military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower’s terminology, has bankrupted itself with its lust for global hegemony and us finally meeting its match in the resurgent Russian Lands. The New World Order, the near-millennial and ever accelerating movement of the Western world to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem, has been stopped for the moment.

The Russian Lands (Rus) are, it seems, returning to fulfilling their destiny as the last restraining force in the world, the last bastion of True Christianity. The Ukraine is a litmus paper, an acid test of this. If the Ukraine were to fall, that is, to lose its Orthodoxy, that would lead to the enthronement of Antichrist. The situation is on a knife edge, which is why so many icons in Russia and the Ukraine are at this moment giving off myrrh. We have to understand that today’s division in the Ukraine exists as the result of two historic injustices, which have to be righted

Q: Which are these injustices?

A: These two historic injustices are the events of 1054 and 1917, which are interconnected. In 1054 semi-barbarian, provincial nationalists, filled with the pride, greed and ambition of Roman paganism, rose up in heresy against the Church of Christ, the Christian Roman Empire, and declared that they were the true Church! And persecution followed 1054, with 1204, the sack of New Rome by barbarian Catholics, which in turn led to 1453, the fall of New Rome, not to mention the Western Crusades against the Russian Lands (including today’s ‘Ukraine’), and all the anti-Church horrors that followed, including Uniatism.

The second historic injustice was in 1917 when the descendants of the same provincials performed a coup d’etat in St Petersburg, overthrowing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed on behalf of traitors, cowards and deceivers from inside the country who had lost their Faith. This atheist coup resulted in the martyrdom of the Christian Emperor and the destruction of his Empire, which had been about to end the First European War and liberate Constantinople (so preventing the Armenian genocide), Vienna and Berlin.

The atheist coup of 1917 also culminated in 1991 in the destruction of the legacy of the Christian Empire which had been built up over centuries by the Tsars and their peoples. That 1991 collapse of the legacy of the former Orthodox Empire, the Soviet Union, was inevitable because its atheism had denied the Faith of a Faith-based Empire. Today, in 2014, we are merely seeing the attempt to deepen that geopolitical fall, again using provincial nationalists, this time from the far west of the Ukraine, as its pawns. All that is happening now was prophesied by Solzhenitsyn in 1998. Thus, as he said then, the US and its EU colony want to dismember and separate the Ukrainian part of the remains of the Orthodox Empire, the Empire’s weakest link.

Q: Why is the Ukraine the weakest link of the former Orthodox Empire?

A: The word Ukraine is composed of two ancient Slavonic words meaning ‘at the border’ – though interestingly it could also be translated as ‘on the edge’. It was first recorded in the 12th century in this sense of a narrow strip of borderland and there exists an interesting academic article on its origins and uses for many geographical areas, including the area near Kazan. However, in its modern and non-historical sense – and so a sense completely unknown to the greatest ‘Ukrainian’ writer Gogol – the word ‘Ukraine’ was invented only in the late 19th century by the Hapsburgs. Then it was reused by the Soviets and the Nazis, and today by the US and the EU – by five empires all thoroughly hostile to the Orthodox Church. Indeed, decades ago I met old Ukrainian emigres, adults before the Revolution, who told me that they had never heard the word ‘Ukraine’ until the 1920s, when the atheists brought it in.

The contemporary Ukraine is the weakest link because at present it includes and is now run by never denazified, ultra-nationalist, Uniat Galicia, which until 1939 was part of eastern Poland. This is a schismatic, Catholicised area, which lived under foreign and anti-Orthodox – Polish and Austrian – rule for centuries. The majority of its population, just like that of the rest of Western Europe, now has no concept of uncompromised, unsecularised, non-1054 Christianity, that is, of Orthodox values. Until that area returns to Poland, or else becomes independent, it will continue to create chaos in the rest of the ‘Ukraine’, the 85% of it which is known to history not as ‘the Ukraine’, but significantly, going from east to west, as New Russia, Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia.

Q: So does this mean we should support President Putin?

A: He is only a politician and, like all politicians, he makes mistakes. The Ukraine, in some form or other, has a right to exist as an independent state, just like Belarus. It is an integral part of threefold Rus – Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus are the primary territory of Rus, the three Russias. I suspect that President Putin thinks the same thing. The last thing he wants to have to do is to send in tanks. However, he has to defend his country and Russian people against extreme Western aggression – which is what he did when he restored the Crimea to Russia amid the jubilation of its people. Otherwise the Crimea would have been invaded and occupied by the US military and its ports would have become NATO naval bases, closing off the Black Sea to Russia.

Our objection is not to an independent ‘Ukraine’, but to its domination and division by an anti-Orthodox and unrepresentative, US-installed, puppet clique in Kiev, which would mean that the Ukraine would become just another bankrupt and pillaged Western colony, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya etc. Divide and rule is ever the Western policy. Our support should go to the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, as he was the last ruler of All Rus, and not to politicians. We support the saints – politicians only count inasmuch as they support the saints. Again we fight for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, not for politicians.

Q: Why has the BBC been so incredibly biased in its reporting of events in the Ukraine?

A: Since the Second World War the UK Establishment elite has become the poodle or colony of the US ruling elite (a relationship that the UK Establishment has flattered itself into calling ‘the special relationship’!) and it has taken no account of the peoples of these islands. The BBC, even more than other Western media, is biased because it is an inherent part of that Establishment elite, in the pay of a secularist-atheist regime and its secret services. It is therefore hostile to Christianity, especially to uncompromised Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy, just as it is hostile to the people, from which it is ever more distant.

The BBC has become particularly subservient to the Establishment since it dared to criticise the Blair regime’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, for which the Blairites sacked the BBC Director General and intimidated BBC journalists. Now the BBC just seems to parrot whatever MI5 and MI6 tell it. I know two BBC journalists who have also worked for the secret services, which infiltrated the BBC from its inception in the 1920s; there must be many more of them.

Thus the BBC talks of the Neo-Nazi Uniat Galician terrorists in Kiev, who overthrew a democratically-elected government as ‘heroes’, but calls the Ukrainian citizens who are rising up against foreign oppression and US mercenaries in the south-west, south, east and north, ‘pro-Russian activists!’ Nor has the BBC reported on the wave of dissatisfaction in Kiev at the doubling of many prices and the very large anti-junta demonstrations in Kiev….

Q: Some would say that your views on the Ukraine are political and that Orthodoxy should be apolitical. What would you say to this?

A: Precisely by saying that they are ‘apolitical’, such people are making a political statement. For them Orthodoxy is, like Protestantism, just a personal belief, a private affair, a mere theory or hobby, which has no public and practical ramifications, no Incarnational consequences. This is a denial of the Incarnation of Christ. What they are saying is that Christianity should have no influence at all on society, including on economics and politics, and should just be a set of private opinions or personal fantasies for futile discussion and theoretical debate.

In the meantime, they say, we should just swim with the secularist-atheist tide of US/EU apostasy, to which such people, some of them nominally Orthodox, are spiritually enslaved. However, our Faith, if it is real, has practical consequences. This is what these secularists refuse. For those who are secular-minded, religion has no importance, but for us what counts is the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The many icons now giving off myrrh in Russia and the Ukraine only prove the spiritual significance of these current events.

Q: With the events in the Ukraine and the new puritanism of political correctness, will there be a witch-hunt and persecution of Russian Orthodoxy in the West?

A: Not yet. We have not yet come to this point; that will come later. Then we may need Russian passports and in any case have to take refuge in Russia in order to get baptized and practise our Faith. But we are not there yet.

Q: So much for the contemporary situation of the Church inside Russia. What is the situation of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR? Some say that it no longer has any reason to exist, since the Church inside Russia also has parishes outside Russia. What is the role of ROCOR in this new reality?

A: The Orthodox diaspora, whether in Europe, the Americas or Australia, and of all nationalities, has experienced two temptation or deviations in the last 100 years or so. The role of ROCOR is to avoid them. These are the deviations of the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The first deviation is that of the nationalist ghetto, of the superiority complex. This means that the Orthodox Faith is preserved as if in a museum, without any reference to the surrounding world (because of the superiority complex towards it), to the reality in which the children and grandchildren of the immigrants go to school and grow up. This ethos can be called the ‘three-generational syndrome’, since after three generations such a faith dies out, as it no longer even speaks in a language comprehensible to the descendants of the original immigrants. ‘Three generations and you are out’. I have seen countless Russian parishes in France and England disappear completely because of this mentality. It was the fate of the old London ROCOR Cathedral (but this will not at all be the case of the new parish that has risen phoenix-like from its ruins), exactly as was foreseen by many in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of many parishes abroad under the Church inside Russia, which are not independent of Russia, as is today’s ROCOR.

The second deviation is that of the conformist ghetto, of the inferiority complex. This means the ‘let’s swim with the tide’ mentality. Again I have seen countless examples in France and England. ‘Let’s give communion to Catholics, after all they are Christians’ (Paris jurisdiction). ‘Now we are in England, we baptize our children in the Church of England’ (as one well-known Russian academic in Cambridge did). ‘After all, we really do not want to be different from the others’. ‘The English do cremations, so we’ll do them as well’ (the old Sourozh jurisdiction). ‘The Protestants have pews in church, so shall we’ (Greeks and Antiochians). This is the deviation of those of weak faith, the ecumenists, liberals and modernists, who do not really believe in Orthodoxy, just like the Uniats. Indeed, the atmosphere in modernist churches (as sometimes in Finland, for example) is exactly that of Uniat churches.

It is to be noted, however, that, initially at least, both these deviations are psychological, and not at root theological, though in a second phase, they are then justified theologically, clearly by a false theology. ROCOR must avoid both these deviations.
Q: So what is the role of ROCOR? What is authentic Orthodoxy in the Western world?

A: Authenticity is faithfulness to the best, and not to the worst, in both attitudes. This means being both traditional and open, both strict and merciful, but without excesses and extremes, which would mean being unfaithful. We must be faithful to the incarnation and to the spiritual, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our calling, the establishment of authentic European Orthodox culture, as also of authentic American and Australian Orthodox culture, means being both faithful and international = fruitful. ROCOR has an opportunity to do this, depending on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, that is, inasmuch as we can be both faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and also be incarnate, settled and permanent here (unlike most parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia). At least, this can be the case, for as long as our spiritual existence is tolerated in the increasingly intolerant West.

Q: Do you have examples of these deviations in the specific situation of Orthodoxy in the UK?

A: Here in the UK we have two ‘renewed’ jurisdictions, those of the Romanian and Russian Churches, which in recent years have increased in size from one parish or a few parishes to many parishes, simply by immigration. However, we also have the older jurisdictions like the Greek, which used to be the biggest but is now beginning to die out, just like the Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians immigrated in about 1920 and so after 50-60 years, in the third generation, began to die out. The Greeks (more precisely Cypriots) mainly immigrated here in the 1950s and 1960s – 50-60 years ago – and so too are now dying out. This is the ‘three generational syndrome’, which I mentioned above.

There are also two tiny ethnic English jurisdictions under the Patriarchate of Antioch (anti-Greek, anti-Russian, Antiochian’, as some Anglicans say) and the Paris Exarchate (the old Bloomite Sourozh jurisdiction). These are deaneries because they are both only a few hundred strong and mostly composed of ex-vicars and converts from Anglicanism. The Exarchate is particularly weak and small and is tending to die out. They failing to pass on their ‘Anglican-Orthodox’ Faith to children and grandchildren and so are dying. Their possible possible survival can only come from attracting Greeks, Romanians and others, not from attracting Anglicans.

Here I am much more optimistic about the future survival of the Antiochian Deanery, which is rapidly becoming Romanian. However, it still has to ordain clergy who are not ex-Anglican vicars. Here there is a very useful lesson to learn: all ethnic jurisdictions die out – including ethnic English jurisdictions. In other words, successful parishes – of all jurisdictions – are non-ethnic, that is, they live if they accept those whom God sends to them, without ethnic ghettoism, including Anglican or ex-Anglican clubbishness. In other words, they live only if they put the Faith above nationality, only if they put the Kingdom of God first.

Q: Does this mean that the convert movement in the UK has stopped?

A: The convert movement (I would prefer the word ‘trickle’) in the UK was only ever basically in England and it was always very small, concerning at most 2,000-3,000, many of whom were received by various jurisdictions without preparation and soon lapsed. There is still at least one ex-Anglican priest, like the late Metr Antony Bloom, who perhaps is his model, who receives within one week! You can imagine that his turnover is large. In 18 years he has not grown. It is true that the convert ‘movement’ has declined as the old generation of converts dies out, but it has not stopped. What it happening today is that Anglicans have largely stopped joining the Orthodox Church and trying to become Orthodox, which actually they often did not succeed in doing in any case.

Q: Why have they stopped?

Firstly, because Anglicanism is itself dying out, so there are even fewer Anglicans than before. Secondly, because those who are interested generally find Orthodoxy ‘too hard’ and either do not try to become Orthodox (if they try at all) or else give up very quickly, especially if they have been received prematurely by one of the ethnic English groups.

Q: So there are no more converts?

A: There are still converts, but they come more and more from the vast majority of English people who are not Anglicans. However, though there are fewer converts, they are now generally more serious. They are refreshing, blank sheets, without the cultural prejudices and baggage of Anglicanism. Here there is a future. English Orthodox culture could only be born when that prejudiced Establishment Anglican culture was dead. Authentic Orthodox culture could never be built on a compromised, semi-Orthodox, semi-Anglican faith.

Q: How are people being converted today?

A: There are two ways. One is through information about Orthodoxy which is today on the internet and then brings them to Church services. The other is through Orthodox wives whom they marry and who convert them. Orthodox wives are often very good missionaries.

Q: You have not mentioned those who did not support the reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007 and left to join various sects which existed already. How do they fit into the picture? Do they suffer from the superiority complex of the nationalist ghetto? Surely they do not suffer from the inferiority complex of the conformists?

A: They do not belong to nationalist ghettoes, as much as to ideological or psychological, sectarian, ghettoes, usually very Russophobic and very right-wing – such was the case even before they left ROCOR. In the USA, from what one of their bishops proudly writes and tells me, they seem to be linked to the CIA. There are among these people, and most are converts from Anglicanism or other forms of Protestantism, some very sincere and pious people, but also some with psychological problems. It is tragic. Sects are always based on hurt pride which then turns to hatred.

Such protest sects make themselves irrelevant, not only because they are tiny (often fewer than ten in number over the whole country), but also because they have played into the hands of this world by painting themselves into irrelevant corners. They have no influence because they focus so much on small and often ritualistic detail and individual opinions, with a negative, ‘anti-everything’ mentality. What they lack is a conscious, logically consistent and integral Orthodox world view, an overview. That is very important and all Orthodox need to develop such a world view.

Q: Do you think that the Inter-Orthodox Council will actually take place in 2016?

A: On paper, no, especially since the amazing, absurd and pretentious claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ukraine, as described in the statement of Patriarch Bartholomew on Palm Sunday, which was surely written by the CIA. In the 1970s there could be no Council because the Russian Church inside Russia was controlled by the KGB; now we have Constantinople controlled by the CIA. That statement alone has surely set everything back until after the death of Patriarch Bartholomew.

However, everything is still possible – if the Greek Churches can overcome their vanity and inferiority complex, which the American State Department so plays on and exploits, and if they and the other Balkan Churches can overcome their phyletism (nationalism). Thus, at present three problems are outstanding and until they are solved they will stop this Council taking place.

Q: Which are?

A: Firstly, there is the territorial dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Secondly, there is the dispute between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and, thirdly, that between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

These three problems all have to be solved before even a proper agenda (rather than the old, secularist, Protestant-style 1970s one) can be agreed. So 2016 is possible, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople will first have to liberate itself from outside political interference from the US government, which is forcing it to interfere in the Ukraine and Mt Athos, and from the Vatican. So Constantinople must demonstrate that it is free and independent and can actually speak with an Orthodox voice and not a Greek nationalist and Uniat voice. Metropolitans Andrew and Seraphim of the Church of Greece have already warned it about this quite clearly in their 89-page letter asking for the repentance of Pope Francis.

Q: Do you think in this context that the Church inside Russia could take back the autocephaly of the OCA in order to ease negotiations with Constantinople?

A: I think that for the Church inside Russia the OCA is a bargaining counter. We all know that there is a problem with the autocephaly of the OCA, the brainchild (not heartchild) of the highly controversial Fr Alexander Schmemann. Firstly, it was granted during the Cold War by the self-same, highly controversial Metr Nikodim (Rotov), whom we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, and whom the Roman Catholics claim to have been one of their cardinals. So it was dubious from the start.

However, secondly and much more importantly, how can you give a jurisdiction autocephaly when it has been in schism from you for decades (as was the pre-OCA Metropolia) and, above all, when it only includes a minority of the Orthodox who live on the same geographical territory? However, the Church inside Russia will not cede these points if Constantinople does not first abandon its own anti-canonical errors elsewhere, for example on Mt Athos, in the Ukraine, Estonia, Finland and Paris, returning Russian Church property to the Russian Church.

Q: What could happen to the OCA, if Constantinople did stop such anti-canonical interventions?

That would be a miracle, so who knows? I suppose one solution would be to take back the OCA’s autocephaly and grant it autonomy instead. Alternatively, you could wait until the present generation of OCA bishops, many of them in difficult and compromised situations or retired, die out. Then, after that generational change, you could pick up the pieces and reincorporate the ex-OCA into the Russian Church in North America, though letting ultra-liberal, dissident pieces which are perhaps beyond redemption (St Vladimir’s Seminary?) join Constantinople or simply go back to the Episcopalians. The OCA too can only survive if it moves towards being a group based on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Bright Monday 2014

Euroatlantic Aggression Against the Unity of Holy Rus

To speak of a new Cold War between the Western secularist world and the Russian Christian world is absurd; the Western aggression of the Cold War never finishes and has been going on for centuries, at least since the age of Daniel of Galicia (1205–1255) and St Alexander of the Neva (1221-1263). True, sometimes that Cold War heats up, as in the thirteenth century, as in 1612, 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. Or, as in recent years, with the attempted US-funded and EU-backed Georgian invasion of Russia in 2008 and now the US-funded and EU-backed seizure of power by mainly Catholic Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine in 2014.

The roots of this aggression, ‘the ‘Cold War’, were sown over a thousand years ago, when what had been the western part of the Church assumed the ideology of papism. This ideology, known as the filioque and stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Pope of Rome, meant that what had been the western part of the Church became a papocaesarist State, its self-proclaimed task to conquer the whole world. This globalist imperialism was in the sixteenth century inherited by a new vital force in the West, Protestantism, which asserted that all male believers are popes, not just one, so ‘democratising’ the filioque.

Today and since its long-awaited appearance in the 1960s, there is the new vital force of atheist secularism, which asserts that all, believers or not, are popes, so further democratising the filioque and making faith completely irrelevant, for the Holy Spirit proceeds from all human nature, not just from white males, but also from atheists, pagans, homosexuals, transgenders etc. So the process of apostasy that started in Rome long ago spread outside it. Rome was only the carrier of the virus that will lead to final apostasy and the end of the world.

In today’s Ukraine we see how all these forces, Catholicism (in its Uniat form), Protestantism (in the new self-appointed President), secularist atheism (in the ideology that rules all these puppets), and also schismatic and apostatic ‘Orthodoxy’ under the married ‘monk’ Denisenko who concelebrates with Catholics) the apostate front is complete. All the filioquists are together, all united, all ready to accept the rule of Antichrist, as long as the West rewards them with their toy of Ukrainian nationalism.

Yesterday in Brussels President Obama, himself the apparently lapsed Muslim leader of the collected atheist and agnostic heads of Western European states, made a clear statement of naked aggressive intent against the Christian world. He called for the stationing of more NATO troops throughout Eastern Europe, asserted that Might is Right and that a big bullying power (the USA) has the right to take over a small, bankrupt country (the Ukraine), using the puppet junta that it has put into power there. Thus, in a speech full of historical lies, the US President denied freedom and democracy, the right to self-determination, of tens of millions of Little Russians and Carpatho-Russians, now under the yoke of the Euroterrorist junta in Kiev.

To sow discord between Orthodox Christians using nationalism as the sword with which to rule and divide has always been the Western technique. Thus, in the Balkans, almost a century ago, it began to divide off the small and weak, if ancient, Greek Orthodox world from the rest of the Orthodox world, experiencing success in Anglican-subsidised Constantinople and British-controlled Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Antioch. Then under the masonic Patriarch Myron, it tried to pluck Latin Romania from the Orthodox Christian orbit. Today it works ardently in the same direction in EU Bulgaria, in bombed, much divided and bribed Serbia and at this very moment in puppet-regime Ukraine.

Thus using the weakness of nationalism to divide the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world (for which nationalism the West then reproaches it!), the West hopes to disrupt the Inter-Orthodox Council which may take place as early as 2016. Now is the time of testing. If semi-modernist, Western-financed representatives of Local Churches at that Council do not return to the fullness of the Orthodox Christian Tradition, regarding for example ecumenism, the liturgical calendar and other practices, it will turn out not to have been a Council at all, merely a failed Conference. It will then be for the Russian Church to organise a real Council, attended by all the bishops of all the free Local Orthodox Churches.

Euroatlantic aggression against the unity of Holy Rus means a clear choice between Western Secularism and Orthodox Christianity. Whose side are you on?

A Time to Lose the Last Soviet Delusions

Introduction:

The CWN News Agency reports that the head of the ‘Ukrainian’ Uniats, Archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk, has called on Western European countries and the USA to interfere in Ukrainian political life by supporting the rioters and terrorists on the Maidan Square in Kiev against the democratically elected government. The Greek Catholic prelate said that ‘the future of democracy in Europe, Eastern Europe and even Russia depends on this’. Naively failing to notice that the West had already started a new cold war against the lands of the former Russian Empire in 2000, he added that if ‘the USA and Europe abandon the ‘Ukraine’ or do not take pre-emptive action, humanity may find itself on the brink of a new cold war’.

Source: sedmitza.ru 11/02/14

Commentary:

The above statements come only a day after the US Vice-President Joe Biden met Ukrainian schismatic leaders, a Uniat and the Soviet-period married head, now 85 years old, of the tiny so-called ‘Kiev Patriarchate’. As an English proverb says, ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good’. For the events in Kiev, heavily orchestrated from Warsaw, Brussels and Washington and timed to coincide with the Winter Olympics, make it crystal clear who the enemies of the Orthosphere are: Washington, closely followed by its poodles in colonial London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, the Vatican, the Phanar and all other ecumenists, including the naïvely deluded who still exist in former Soviet Russia.

However, these events also make clear that the closest friends and patriots of the Orthosphere outside the Orthodox homelands are those not engaged in the heresy of ecumenism, among them us in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. As Metropolitan Hilarion has said of his ancestral homeland, called by its real name, Kievan Rus:

“As faithful children of the Russian Orthodox Church, we cannot remain indifferent to the troubles plaguing Her cradle – the Mother of Russian Cities, Kiev. We call on all the faithful of the Russian Church Outside Russia around the world to pray for an end to all violence, that God might prevent all bloodshed and speedily restore brotherly love and understanding.”

“Again we pray Thee, O Almighty Lord, that Thou mightest grant peace to Kiev, the Mother of Russian cities which is shaken by civil strife, and the entire country of Kievan Rus’, and by the power of the grace of Thy Holy Spirit extinguish all enmity and violence therein; O Source of goodness and Abyss of love for mankind, swiftly hearken and have mercy.”

2014: Towards the Realignment of the World

Introduction

Once upon a time the West was Christian. It is no longer, not even hypocritically. The long and complex process of DeChristianisation, that is, the fall from Orthodox Christianity known as Westernisation, has gone on for 1,000 years and is now coming to its bitter end. The last fifty years, my own lifetime, which followed two Western Wars, called World Wars, have seen a most dramatic turn. As we come to the 100th anniversary of the First Western War, we are now actually seeing a realignment of the world into only two blocs – one Western and Secularist, in other words, Neo-pagan, the other Universal and Traditional, in other words, Christian. However, the basis of this second bloc is in fact the Russian Orthodox Church with its integral Christian values and ensuing world view.

Why Only Two Blocs?

There are many competing religious ideologies in the world, but in reality they are too compromised, too weak or too local to withstand the Western Secularist onslaught. Thus, the heresies of Catholicism and Protestantism (and make no mistake, apart from a few eccentrics, the whole Russian Orthodox world categorically views these as heresies), have no chance of survival because they are at the roots of Western Secularism itself and so are inherently compromised; Buddhism is a psychic philosophy, not a religion; Hinduism depends on the inward-looking nationalism of Hindustan (India); Animism is even more primitive than Secularism itself. Of all the great religions there remains only Islam. But Islam, like its cousin Old Testament Judaism, operates on far too primitive a level of violence, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, to convince anyone beyond its own fanatical nationalists. And in any case, fatally divided into Sunni and Shia, Islam is a house that is destined to fall, its divisions now ruthlessly exploited by the Western Secularist Powers.

What remains? Only the Church of Christ. Its Empire, weakened by the deliberate export of Western Secularism, in its Communist form, 100 years ago, followed by the worst persecutions and massacres in the epic 2,000 year history of Christianity, is now reviving, as we hoped it would 20 years and more ago, under the name of the Eurasian Union. The spiritual foundation stone of this Union is the Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox world, and it stands out as the critic of Western Secularism.

With the political, economic and social project of the Eurasian Union under way, we are now more and more seeing the spiritual and therefore moral aspects of the project. This is essentially the first stage of the Reconstituted Roman Christian Empire – the rebirth of that which existed before the blasphemies of 1917. Standing completely outside the heterodox Christian world with its Scholasticism, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and Modernism, and uncompromised by Western interference as in some of the smaller Local Orthodox Churches, the Russian Orthodox Church is in fact the only consistent and consequent Christian critic of Western Secularism.

The Thirst for Revenge

Seeing the dangers for itself of any form of opposition, especially if that opposition has a real, that is, a spiritual and so moral, basis, the Western authorities, using their security services, subservient media and zombified populations, have therefore launched a typically underhand attack on Russia. This routine, highly aggressive Western Drang nach Osten (Drive against the East) comes on the exact 201st anniversary of the victory of Rus against the 1812 invasion of its domains by the French and their allied 12 Western tribes. This not only liberated the Russian Empire from the atheist scourge, but also resulted in the liberation of Paris by Russian troops in 1814. This was 100 years before Russian troops again relieved Paris, though then, in 1914, this was from the might of the Catholic-Protestant German Second Reich, rather than from the God-less, revolutionary hordes of Bonaparte.

This routine Drang nach Osten comes after the brilliant victory of Russian diplomacy last August which averted a possible Third World War being started by the USA in Syria. The Western revenge for the victory of peace has come in the last few weeks with the attempted invasion of the Ukraine, using Galician dupes financed by the CIA and encouraged by a series of foolish Western politicians, showing their usual militant intolerance for a Sovereign State. However, this too has failed.

So there has been the attempt to surround the Eurasian Union with missiles, to which the Russian Federation has replied by installing missiles around Kaliningrad. So now we are left with absurd and pathetic Western accusations about ‘political prisoners’, such as the billionaire bandit Khodorkovsky, who has shown his hatred for Russia by fleeing to Germany, or the yobbish and blasphemous female dupes of the CIA-orchestrated, sex and violence ‘Pussy Riot’ group, or the release of the detained trespassers from Greenpeace. If these silly slanders do not work, the all too predictable Western politicians will then try and spoil the Sochi Olympics.

The Fruits of Western Intolerance

Meanwhile, in the real world, millions of Syrians are starving and freezing as a result of the Western-fomented invasion of their country by savage Islamist mercenaries, paid for by the Sunni fanatics of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Islamist Afghanistan, 80% controlled by Taliban and the Western troop contingents holed up as prisoners in their own highly fortified ghettos, looms; ruined Iraq explodes in violence – like Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. The whole Middle East is a powderkeg of Western-encouraged division and terrorism. Moreover, this terrorism is spreading throughout Africa; the Western-armed fanatics who have seized control of parts of Libya have now spread to Mali, as all along the long Muslim-Christian watershed of Nigeria, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

In Central and Eastern Europe, it is now clear that although a generation ago so-called ‘perestroika’ led to the collapse of the dictatorship of Communist Materialism, it also led to the foundation of the dictatorship of Consumerist Materialism. The whole thing was, in the end, only treachery and the exchange of one God-denying tyranny for another. Thus, the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been ravaged; as the ‘losers’ of the Cold War, they are owned by European Union ‘investors’; there is no work, villages and towns have been destroyed, young people have fled as refugees to the ‘winners’ of the Cold War in Western Europe, where they work on minimum wages in menial tasks like Christian slaves in Ancient Rome, and their countries are ruled by utterly corrupt, but EU-approved, ‘parliamentarians’. Full employment, culture, low crime rates, social security, an excellent education and free health care, are lost and are bitterly regretted by all who knew them

Ironically, the greatest advocates of the internationalist rape of former Communist Europe are nationalists, often, as for example in the Ukraine, Hungary and Latvia, resettled there from their old emigrations. Like robots, they do whatever the CIA and their US ambassadors tells them to: support the drug dealers, human organ merchants and gun runners who run occupied Kosovo; open a secret prison where we can render and torture Islamists; allow poppy fields in Afghanistan to flourish; support genocide in Iraq and Libya; vote for the massacre and bombardment of Syria; visit a synagogue for a photo opportunity; hold a ‘Gay Parade’ and impose homosexual ‘marriage’; be nasty to Russia: and instantly the EU-installed elites of the new Central and Eastern Europe grin and vote yes, just as they used to grin and vote yes when before some Communist gerontocrat from Moscow told them to destroy themselves.

Against the European Suicide

These countries are today occupied by the colonists and integrationists of the EU Fourth Reich, just as they were once occupied by the Nazi Third Reich. Their conquered and foreign-owned media spread their lies to captive populations, their education systems are zombified, children are taken from their fathers and mothers, in Lithuania known as ‘parents No I and No 2’, assets perhaps to be sold abroad for adoption, perhaps to be adopted by homosexual couples, perhaps to be debauched by compulsory ‘sex education’, certainly to be taught that men and women are the same, for your very gender is, apparently, merely a social construct, a fruit of conditioning. So say all those who have been brainwashed by the conditioning of Western Secularism and so are unable to think for themselves.

Europe dictates that these countries too must be destroyed, they must lose their national identity and sovereignty and their national traditions. So, like Greece, they must be flooded with Muslims so that their Christian identity can be trampled underfoot. It is no good claiming that there is no alternative. There is. It is called the Eurasian Union. It rejects sodomy, moral decadence, liberalism, oligarchy, capitalist consumerism and proclaims the Tradition. This is not anti-Western, for all in the West who support just, healthy, traditional values, those of the ancient saints of the West, will join it – providing, of course, that the nascent Union can finally free itself of the systemic corruption spawned by the old Communist errors. After all, Christianity is itself an Asian religion that came to Europe and in the symbolism of the double-headed eagle supported the unity of East and West, Asia and Europe, Eurasia.

Western Europe continues its suicidal policies, resulting in ultra-low birth rates, homosexual marriage and senile dementia. Western Europe is dying out of its own will, reaping the millennial fruits of its apostasy, becoming a corner of irrelevance and Fascist intolerance before the face of the rest of the world. It is opposed by the ever-growing spiritual and moral importance of the Russian Orthodox world, incarnate in the Eurasian Union. This combines States with social values and traditional values, freedom from the anti-family sodomocracy and gender dictatorship of the barren European Union.

Conclusion

The essential Western heresy was to promote itself as independent of Asia, that is, independent of Christ, replacing Him with its ethnic leader in Rome, from whom it made to proceed the Holy Spirit, God himself. This is Sodom, the land of intolerance of real men and real women. We of the Eurasian Union utterly reject its tyranny of lies, injustice, stupidity and vulgarity, To its ideology of materialist Consumerism, Western and Secularist, we oppose the ascetic and ecological principles of Orthodox Christianity, Universal and Traditional, which are so hated by the decadent, self-indulgent and dying contemporary West. As we stand on the brink of 2014, the 100th anniversary of the first Western War, we issue a rallying cry: Those who are not with us are against us. Where do you stand?

25 December 2013

On Conquering Nationalism and Globalism

Introduction: Patriotism

We define patriotism as the love of our country in its God-created beauty. This has nothing to do with the blindly fanatical promotion of man-created States, institutions and menacing armies as ‘better’ than others; patriotism has nothing to do with hatred for other countries, for in patriotism there is nothing negative, only positive. We have always maintained that love for other countries, inter-patriotism, is a virtue, but that it comes from love for one’s own country, where it was God’s will for us to be born. Indeed, we say that he who does not love his own country cannot love other countries, just as he who hates himself also hates others. This we can see throughout history in the stories of one pathological and self-obsessed ruler after another, from pagan Roman Emperors to Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Lenin, Hitler and those more recent.

The Origin and Spread of Nationalism

We define nationalism as a secularist lack of love for other countries, which originates in ignorance of them and arrogance with regard to one’s own country. Modern nationalism was born in 16th century Western Europe as a secular reaction to the oppressive centralism of Papist Europe. Nationalism was thus born in the Protestant countries of Europe, the classic case being England, whose greedy ruler made himself head of his own national ‘Church’, a department of state, a secular institution or ‘establishment’ with a religious exterior. However, nationalism soon spread outside Protestant England, Holland, Scandinavia and Lutheran German principalities to Roman Catholic countries like Spain, Poland, Ireland and France which were soon infected. Ultimately, the evil of nationalism, evident in Western European nations, small but powerful through their technological superiority, was to result in the Satanic, inter-tribal slaughter of the First and then the Second World Wars.

Nationalism in the Orthodox World

However, it was not only the Protestant and then Roman Catholic world that underwent the inherently secular process of nationalism. Later, in the 18th century in Russia and in the 19th century the Orthodox world also underwent the same process, especially in the Balkans, thus repeating the ‘Balkanisation’ that had already affected Western Europe, causing warfare and strife there. As a result, a Council in Constantinople on 10 September 1872 qualified such nationalism, or ‘phyletism’, as a heresy: the Church, it said, should not be confused with a single nation or race. This phyletism affected the whole Orthodox world, but above all the Patriarchate of Constantinople and other areas that had been under the Turkish Yoke (Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania). However, in recent generations we have seen the same intolerant, racist phyletism in the Ukraine, Finland, North America (‘the OCA’), Estonia and in France and England (‘the Paris Jurisdiction’).

Two Remedies for Nationalism

Since 1945, Western Europe and the Westernised world have found a remedy for the spiritual disease of nationalism in another spiritual disease: Globalisation (= Americanisation). This is in fact a return to the old Roman Papist centralism of the Middle Ages, a return to the oppressive pyramid of feudalism under the mask of the futurist Big Brother, with its universal electronic surveillance, satellites and drones. By destroying local diversity, globalisation, or globalism, has tried to project a homogeneous, ‘one size fits all’ uniformity onto the whole ‘Mcworld’. At last the Orthodox world has been provided with an alternative remedy. This is the Trinitarian ideal of ‘Holy Rus’, the multinational Inter-Orthodox Eurasian Confederation led by the Russian Federation. Belarus and Kazakhstan already belong to this and the Ukraine, last week on the verge of bankruptcy and social chaos, for which the illusory, US-devised, bankrupt EU puppet had no remedy, is now also finding an alternative in it.

Conclusion: Inter-Patriotism

Once Orthodox countries like Serbia, Moldova and Georgia have not yet fallen to the EU, though their political elites are being sorely tempted by EU bribes, as the elites of many other countries before them, including in the early 1970s the UK political elite. The hope now is that other countries like Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic States can also free themselves from the EU and join the Confederation, first overcoming their nationalism. As for the nations of Western Europe (which includes Galicia in the westernised far west Ukraine), only minorities there defy the pride of secularist nationalism. However, beyond them there are Syria and the Middle East, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australasia, where Orthodox minorities are also allying themselves with the Trinitarian ideal of Unity in diversity: Inter-Patriotic Holy Rus.

On Overcoming the Paris Captivity

On Friday 6 December, the Interfax News Agency reported that Fr Vsevolod Chaplin has called on certain Russians to overcome ‘the Paris Captivity’ of academic theology and to give priority instead to the legacy of the New Martyrs. Fr Vsevolod, the Social Affairs spokesman for the Church, is seen by many as the right-hand man of Patriarch Kyrill.

Fr Vsevolod called on certain Russian Orthodox to pay more attention to our own theological tradition instead of to that of the Paris Jurisdiction and its branches, which reject the millennial, monastic-based Russian Orthodox Tradition and prefer Protestant-based philosophies and speculations. He said that if ‘even Muslims and Protestants wonder what to do when there are contradictions between Russian and foreign traditions, and usually choose the Russian’, then it was for Russians themselves to opt for their ‘millennial tradition of Orthodox thought, learning and piety, for the Tradition’.

Like the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, he too inside Russia is convinced that it is time to overcome ‘the Paris Captivity’ of Russian theology and return to ‘the tradition of Orthodox countries in periods of freedom’ and do not have ‘to adapt to domineering Western surroundings, nor to totalitarian atheist regimes’. He recommended all to look at Russian Orthodoxy just before the Revolution (Metr Antony Khrapovitsky and his Patristically-minded followers) and Serbian Orthodoxy (Sts Nicholas of Zhicha and St Justin of Chelije), but above all to devote particular attention to the legacy of the New Martyrs, which ‘provides answers to many present-day issues’. He added that ‘by definition’ the Paris School was ‘marginal in the context of free Orthodox peoples’. (http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=53710)

Living outside Russia, we can confirm the truth of Fr Vsevolod’s words and the consequences of such Protestant and Catholic-based ‘theology’ on a practical day to day basis. Thus, one parish of the Paris Jurisdiction in England is losing its premises and so public mission for lack of parishioners, and yet in the same city, there are dozens of Russian Orthodox who regularly travel over a hundred miles at weekends so that they can get to the nearest Russian Orthodox liturgy. They are in fact boycotting an ex-Anglican group of four (with two priests!) who refuse to put up an iconostasis, to confess before communion and celebrate on the Orthodox calendar. They prefer to travel great distances to a busy priest so that they can receive pastoral care as Orthodox, and not as Protestants or Catholics.

Another Paris Jurisdiction parish in France is boycotted by local Russian Orthodox because it also refuses to celebrate on the Orthodox calendar and have an iconostasis, and there communion without confession is obligatory for all (those who do not commune every Sunday are humiliated and made to feel guilty) and little girls are forced into being acolytes. In a monastic group of the same Paris Jurisdiction in France, a woman with a grave sin on her conscience was refused confession last weekend and told: ‘As long as you have not killed anyone, you do not need confession’. This glaring lack of pastoral care and understanding of Orthodoxy in many – though not all – parishes of the Paris Jurisdiction has set it on a course of Uniatisation. This is why Russian Orthodox have been leaving it for decades.

Sadly, such ‘theology’, in fact merely a lack of faith that weakly swims with the heterodox tide, has also spread to convert parts of the Antiochian Jurisdiction in this country, where, in addition to the above practices, there are pleas to celebrate Easter on the Roman Catholic dating and intercommunion is openly practised. Such practices attract only a few unChurched and lapsed Orthodox, who do not know their own Tradition and already take communion in Anglican and Roman Catholic churches.

Orthodox England

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