Category Archives: The Church

Fourteen into Twenty-Four: The Patriarchs and First Hierarchs of the Fourteen Local Churches Meet on Mt Athos, 8 February 2026

On 6, 7 and 8 February 2026 the Patriarchs of Constantinople, New Jerusalem, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Tbilisi, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem, and the First Hierarchs of the five other Local Churches, of Skopje, Warsaw, Nicosia, Prague and Tirana, together with Metropolitan Tikhon of the OCA, the Metropolitans of Kiev, Minsk, Riga, Uzhhorod and Kampala, the Metropolitans of the two Metropolias in Moldova, and senior hierarchs from the Diaspora, together with their delegations, met in the Skete of St Andrew. This church, built by the Russian Tsar Alexander II, is the largest church on the multinational Holy Mountain, which is under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

They were at last able to meet in freedom to resolve the only two issues which have troubled and divided the Church for generations. Firstly, they met to put an end to the schisms between the Patriarchates of New Jerusalem, Constantinople and Alexandria. Secondly, they met to grant canonical status to the many millions of Orthodox living in, and to Orthodox who for generations have been born in, Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, entrusting their destiny in each case to organisation by the Patriarchate with the most Orthodox living on those territories, with the guidance of the Mother-Churches of the minorities.

By repentance for past errors, including allowing the CIA to penetrate the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria and New Jerusalem, directly through allowing its agents to be planted inside them, and indirectly through adopting its oligarchic mentality, and by the prayers of those present and of the monastics of the Holy Mountain of Athos, they reached the following resolutions:

New Jerusalem

As many will know, before this meeting the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Rus had been renamed the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus and its headquarters had been moved to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. It also refrocked all Russian Orthodox clergy who had been defrocked for political reasons since 24 February 2022 in Russia, Lithuania, Western Europe and elsewhere.

In accord with the Church of Constantinople, the newly-appointed Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod granted autocephaly to three new Local Churches, whose faithful had for centuries lived on its canonical territory. These are:

The Kievan Rus Orthodox Church (Kievan Rus is the new country established last year, whose territory corresponds to most of the western and central parts of the old Soviet Ukraine), headed by Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev. All Orthodox in Kievan Rus are called on to join this new Church, as the Patriarchate of Constantinople has now given up its jurisdiction there.

The Belarussian Orthodox Church, headed by the Metropolitan of Minsk.

The Baltic Orthodox Church (covering the territories of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland), headed by the new Metropolitan of Riga. All Orthodox in Finland, Estonia and Lithuania are called on to join these new Churches, as the Patriarchate of Constantinople has now given up its jurisdiction there.

Additionally, in accord with the other Patriarchs present, the new Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod granted autocephaly to a fourth new Local Church, the Carpatho-Rus and Hungarian Orthodox Church, whose territory covers the Zakarpattia province of the old Soviet Ukraine and Hungary. It is headed by the Metropolitan of Uzhhorod and Budapest, but has deaneries for Greeks, Serbs and other Orthodox nationalities present in Hungary under the new Church.

Constantinople

As many will know, before this meeting the new Patriarch of Constantinople, previously the Archbishop of Athens, and his Synod had moved the headquarters of the Patriarchate from Istanbul in Turkiye to Thessaloniki in Greece, with the absorption of the Greek Orthodox Church. This move was financed by a very generous donation made by the government of the Russian Federation for its infrastructure costs. However, Turkiye, together with Greece, remain the canonical territories of the now Greece-based Patriarchate of Constantinople and a bishop remains in Istanbul.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople recognised the (North) Macedonian Orthodox Church as an autocephalous Local Church.

The Patriarchate of Constantinople recognised the autocephaly granted by the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem to the four new Churches on the territories of Kievan Rus, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, Carpatho-Rus and Hungary, and will recognise any autocephaly granted in the future, if necessary, to Orthodox in Central Asia, Japan, China and Korea by the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus. All Non-Russian Orthodox on those territories must already join the local jurisdictions of the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem there in their own deaneries.

It recognised that the Patriarchate of Bucharest has sole authority to establish a Western European Orthodox Church for Orthodox living in its at present 21 countries of Iceland, Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Monaco, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Portugal, Spain, Andorra, Italy, San Marino, Malta, since Bucharest has by far the largest number of Orthodox on those territories. It will be headed by the Romanian Metropolitan of Paris and Western Europe, but will have dioceses and deaneries for Greeks, Russians of all three Russian groups, Kievan Russians, Moldovans, Serbs, Bulgarians, Georgians and other Orthodox nationalities in Western Europe.

In return, all Local Orthodox Churches recognised that the Patriarchate of Constantinople has sole authority to establish a new Northern America Orthodox Church (USA, Canada, Greenland, Bermuda and St Pierre et Miquelon) and a new Local Oceanian Orthodox Church, in concert with all the Local Churches represented on those territories, since it has by far the largest flock there. Notably the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem cedes jurisdiction of its own parishes, withdraws the Tomos of Autocephaly of the OCA, and cedes jurisdiction of the churches of the OCA and ROCOR in Northern America, including the abolition of the OCA Synod in Washington and the ROCOR Synod in New York, to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. However, the first First Hierarch of the Northern American Orthodox Church will be Metr Tikhon, formerly of the OCA. Orthodox of Non-Greek nationality both in Northern America and Oceania, under the Metropolitan of Sydney and All Oceania, will be cared for in their own dioceses and deaneries under the new Local Church.

Alexandria

The new Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and his Synod ceded jurisdiction of all African countries, except for Egypt, to the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem, thus returning to its Patriarchal territory of 100 years ago. All clergy defrocked by the Patriarchate of Alexandra for political reasons since 2019 were refrocked. In return, the government of the Russian Federation made a very generous donation to the Patriarchate of Alexandria and to St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai to continue Church life in Egypt and Sinai.

In accord with the other Patriarchs present, the Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod jointly granted autocephaly to all Orthodox on the territory of Africa, outside Egypt, founding the African Orthodox Church, headed by the Metropolitan of Kampala and his Synod of African bishops.

Antioch

The Patriarch of Antioch and his Synod was granted sole authority to establish a Latin America and Caribbean Orthodox Church, as it has by far the largest flock there. Orthodox of Non-Arab nationality in Latin America and the Caribbean will be cared for in their own dioceses and deaneries under the new Local Church.

Bucharest

The Patriarch of Bucharest and his Synod and the Patriarch of New Jerusalem and All Rus and his Synod jointly granted autocephaly to all Orthodox on the territory of Moldova, forming the Moldovan Orthodox Church. The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem refrocked all Orthodox clergy, who had been defrocked for political reasons for joining the former Metropolia of Bessarabia.

As mentioned above, the Patriarch of Bucharest and his Synod was granted sole authority to establish a new Local Church of the 21 countries of Western Europe (see above). Orthodox of Non-Romanian nationality will be cared for by self-governing dioceses and deaneries of their respective Local Churches, but under the new Western European Orthodox Church.

In this way, the number of Autocephalous Orthodox Churches, now standing at 20 after the absorption of the Greek Orthodox Church into the Patriarchate of Constantinople and of the OCA into the Northern American Orthodox Church, and the foundation of the six new Autocephalous Churches, will be brought to 24 Local Churches, once the four new Diaspora Churches have been established within the next twelve months.

The ending of the schism between New Jerusalem, Constantinople and Alexandria was confirmed in the church of St Andrew by the concelebration of all those present on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son, 8 February 2026. This meeting is already being called ‘The First Athonite Council’ and ‘The Bread and Water Council’, since that was the only food and drink provided during the three days for the participants in the Council.

 

 

 

 

Hope Without Prayer = Leadership Without Authority

Foreword: Fukuyama 0 Huntingdon 1

The End of History and the Last Man was the 1992 work of the US thinker Francis Fukuyama (born 1952). In it he proposes the victory of US/Western liberal Globalism, expressing the myth that it is universal (originally a French myth) and so must be adopted by all. In 1993, another US academic, born exactly a generation earlier, the late Samuel P. Huntingdon (1927-2008), proposed another world view in his ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, the view of a multipolar world of nine civilisations. The events in the Ukraine since 2022 and the rapid development of BRICS since have proved Huntingdon right. The Unipolar world of one only Great Power, the USA, was only ‘a moment’, now over, as the US Secretary of State has at last publicly recognised.

Fundamentally, the argument between the two academics was between Centralisation and Decentralisation, Unipolar Globalism and Multipolar Sovereignty. Sovereignty has won in Washington and the transitional, but still anti-Globalist, figure of Trump is retreating from the overextended US Empire to its natural sphere of influence in a united Northern America, consisting of the USA, Canada and Greenland, with island possessions extending from Hawaii to Bermuda. (The second-rate UK will quickly cede Canada and Bermuda). Greenland is falling into Trump’s pocket and he has already talked to the Premier of Alberta in Canada, Danielle Smith, whose grandfather was Carpatho-Russian. (In Canada any province has the right to leave that ‘Dominion’).

Huntingdon’s Error

However, Huntingdon still made one error. Huntingdon’s error was not his analysis that the world is multicivilisational, but that he wanted the West to go back to being a reactionary conservative institution in order to survive alongside the other world civilisations. Having recognised that Western Secularism is merely one among many civilisations, he just wanted to go back to his youth, to the ‘golden age’ before Vietnam, when the USA was the undisputed leader of the Western world (the ‘Free World’, as it absurdly called itself), in fact, it was the imperialist boss of the whole Non-Communist world. However, its Civilisation was already bankrupt, because it had already wandered very far from its roots, which it then renounced.

And since Huntingdon’s time in 1993, over the last thirty years the remains of Western Civilisation have proved their bankruptcy. The only solution is for Western Civilisation to return radically, not to a generation or two ago, to Huntingdon’s youth, which just means being old-fashioned, but to return to its roots in the first millennium. And that means a spiritual solution, which is exactly what we have been advocating for the last fifty years. Whether the West is actually willing to return from its spiritual apostasy and decadence, or not, is another question. For the last fifty years the West has just gone down to the bottom, the floor of hell. Will it remain there or will it start its ascent? Only the history of the future will answer this question.

 

Introduction: Hope and Prayer

According to cynics, hope is like a carrot which is dangled in front of a donkey. Therefore, they say, we should give up the carrot of hope and start acting independently instead, doing things for ourselves, not being drawn forward by empty promises. Christians say that it is not hope that we should give up, it is being a donkey that we should give up. For a donkey is one who hopes blindly, because he does not pray. Hope without prayer is the hope of the donkey. In other words, we should accompany hope with prayer, which alone raises us above the level of animals, such as donkeys, and alone makes us into human-beings using our immortal souls. And hope without prayer is like being a leader without authority, of which more below.

The Collapse of the Kiev Regime

According to the anti-Russian Mediazona organisation, the conflict in the Ukraine has now led to 100,000 dead on the Russian side, that is, 100,000 dead eastern Ukrainian and Russian Federation soldiers. However, what Mediazona agents do not add is that the number of Ukrainian dead and crippled totals over 1.05 million. This huge human tragedy results from the fact that the Western elite wanted to see Ukrainians killed like sacrificial lambs ‘to the last Ukrainian’, in Biden’s proxy war, begun in 2014, to topple the Russian government. However, there are also the consequences of this war for Western Europe and its Russophobic ruling class. Its pre-Trumpian, US-appointed elite hates Russia so much that it has bankrupted its own peoples.

For well over four decades Western Europe survived and even prospered on cheap manufactures (consumer goods of all sorts) from China and energy and raw materials (oil, gas, metals, diamonds, minerals and fertilisers) from Russia. However, in the last three years Western European elite has suicidally cut itself off from Russian products, allowing the US to blow up the Nordstream pipeline and Kiev to shut off its Russian gas. It is true that Western Europe (especially Germany) is hypocritically importing ever greater amounts of Russian LNG, Russian gas via Turkiye and Russian oil via India. But it is all more expensive than before. And so Western Europe is collapsing economically, deindustrialising, and its infrastructure is failing – while China’s is advancing.

The Collapse of Western Europe and the Future

The result is the same in all European countries, from Hungary to Croatia, from Slovakia to Italy, from Romania to France, from Austria to Spain, from Germany to the UK. The Globalist elite, whether in Brussels, Paris, Berlin, London or anywhere else in Western Europe, is being challenged by strong national Sovereigntist parties and small but serious left-wing parties. Moreover, the Sovereigntists are supported from the new anti-Globalist Washington, where Trump is now busy draining Biden’s swamp. Though the Sovereigntists are always called ‘far right’ by the Globalists, who are actually so woke and intolerant that they are Fascists, the Sovereigntists are not that, indeed they have much in common with the small left-wing parties.

The close parallels between the Big Three, Germany, France, UK) in Europe are striking. The detested French Macron, the hopeless German Scholz and ever-changing British nonentities, such as May, Truss, Sunak, Starmer, are all the same. In France, Macron lost the elections last year, but clings on to power like a dictator, even though he was rejected by the people. Now the would-be future German Chancellor, Merz (like Scholz) and Starmer (like May, Truss, Sunak etc), is so utterly charmless as to be defined as anti-charismatic. The Trump government, whose spokesman is Musk, appears to intend to regime-change Germany and the UK, its two closest satellites in Europe, and both of which the USA occupies. Hence his talks with the AfD and Reform.

Regime-Change in Germany and the UK

In both these countries, this would actually be popular. Here the fact that the UK is not formally in the EU is irrelevant, since the end-of-EU Brexit was never implemented by the EU-bribed British Establishment, which knew that Brexit could be the first step to the end of the EU and their income. In Germany there is the small left-wing Wagenknecht Socialist Party and in the UK the small left-wing Galloway Workers’ Party. However, both countries have big Sovereigntist Parties. In Germany there is the AfD (very popular in former East Germany) and in the UK, the Reform Party. Both are now at about 25%-30% of the vote in the polls. The German AfD Party has a lucid and highly-educated leader, Weidel, and the UK Reform Party has some strong personalities.

Reform already has nearly 200,000 members, overtaking the dying Conservative Party at 130,000 members, and is catching up with the rapidly shrinking Labour Party. Should such parties reach 35% in the polls, they may well form the next governments. After all, the Labour government was elected by only 20% of the electorate. However, leadership without authority is in fact no leadership at all, just as hope without prayer is no hope at all. In Germany, the AfD, threatened with real censorship and even legal banning by the Fascists in power, continues to grow, challenging especially in the East the bourgeois CDU and CSU Parties of former West Germany. The fact is that those who lived under Communism, as in East Germany, are socially conservative, not woke.

The Church Leadership

This political situation has parallels in the Church. There are Local Churches which have solid and even remarkable leadership, such as the Romanian (Patriarch Daniel), the Serbian (Patriarch Porfiry), and now the Bulgarian (Patriarch Daniel). Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, eternal memory!, and his Synod also played a remarkable and honest role. The Polish Church too, and the American, whose Metr Tikhon alone had the courage to visit the much-persecuted Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Churches of Antioch under the Athonite Patriarch John and of Jerusalem, and the elderly and saintly leader of the Georgian Church have also played a role of leadership, not to mention individual bishops in Greece and Cyprus.

On the other hand, there are those who have played with the canons for political self-justification. They have uncanonically abused the canons for purely political and nationalistic reasons, acting at times with personal hatred and jealousy, accepting bribes and invading each other’s canonical territory, trying to wind back history by hundreds of years. This is all mere self-justification. All they have done through their scandalous actions is to compromise the unity of the Church and to discredit themselves and their Local Churches before the people as well as before the secular world. This has been a case of leaders without authority. As a result, in those places authority has passed to the people and their shepherds, the pastors, priests, monks and nuns.

Conclusion: Humility

The choice, in other words, is Centralisation or Decentralisation. However, the latter means giving up a large amount of power and wealth. This is called humility. Some might think that Church leaders would find this easy to do. Are they not Christians? Sadly, just as among the world’s political leaders, that is not the case. And yet if Church leaders want authority, they must have humility. We only have to think of the saintly Patriarch Ilia of Georgia, Patriarch Porfiry of Serbia, who solved the Macedonian schism in an instant, and many other holy hierarchs, both living and departed – like Patriarch Pavle of Serbia, who always used public transport, refusing to have a car, as many of his priests do not have cars. Here is the solution, old and yet eternally new: Humility.

 

 

 

 

Standing up to the Bullies: The Chickens Come Home to Roost

Foreword: Retribution and Faith

There is such a thing as retribution, also called requite or recompense. Retribution is popularly known as ‘getting your just desserts’, ‘karma’, ‘payback’, or ‘the boomerang effect’, but the words of the Saviour express it as According to your faith be it unto you (Matthew 9, 29). This means that, if we have no faith, we will suffer, but if we do have faith, we will suffer only as much as we need and we can bear, for God is with us. This is the meaning of the saying: ‘We are Orthodox, God is with us’. His grace protects us, for we are with Him.

That God is with us depends on Faith. However, if we do not have Faith and it is replaced by a mere ideology, regardless of whether it is liberal or conservative, not only do we lose Divine protection, we also become stupid. This is because ideologies are not based on reality, but on intolerant ideals imposed by trying to make reality fit them. When reality refuses to fit, the ideologies collapse. This is what happened to Fascism and Communism. Today, this is true of Globalism, the one-size-fits-all incredibly intolerant Western ‘liberal’ woke ideology.

A Bully

As everyone has long known, the new (and old) US President is a bully. However, it is possible to stand up to him. Russia and China do. In fact, anybody can stand up to a bully, it is a question of will-power and allies. However, the new US President is also an Anti-Globalist, he believes in local spheres of influence. His sphere is Northern America, which is why he will take over Greenland and then maybe Canada, perhaps working from the east, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan etc to Ontario and Quebec in the west, as the most resistant.

He may even want to take over Latin America, though that is very uncertain, since those countries have become much more independent in recent decades, refusing their old role as vassal banana republics. In the wider world, he may want to take over the rest of the Anglosphere – Australia, New Zealand and the mother countries, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The latter could agree, given the bankruptcy of the EU and British Establishments. But for all of them there is still the very strong alternative of BRICS, of China and Eurasian Russia.

The Technique of the Bully

When American authorities overthrow legitimate governments and then occupy their countries, from Iraq to the Ukraine, they first boss the local people around, insisting that everyone speaks American, instead of their native English, or whatever the local language may be. Next, they ship out the gold reserves. Thus, straight after the coup in Kiev in 2014, the US conquistadores took out the $15 billon of gold reserves from Borispol. Those who come here do the same, they want the gold, any treasure and property they can get their hands on.

In other words, they attempt to asset-strip, intimidating, humiliating, picking on the slightest weakness, as all bullies do, and then expelling the legal owners and taking over their church property. ‘Give me the keys’, they scream down the telephone. Then, when nobody goes there any more, because the legal owners, clergy, choir and people, have been ‘defrocked’ and expelled by them, they plan to sell the by then empty church property to buy themselves a bishop’s palace, from where they can continue to practise their guru’s papal infallibility.

Resistance to the Bully

Our unwavering adherence to the practices and canons of the Church has been criticised by the same ‘crazy convert’ fringe. They express personal hatred, personal jealousy and bullying persecution, trying to close the churches of the faithful people, bought and set up with their own money. They even defrock the clergy of other Local Churches because ‘their paperwork is not in order’, while themselves taking in misled clergy from other Local Churches without letters of leave! However, the truth is now out the world over. All can see it.

Having canonically and clearly belonged to the Patriarchate of Romania for three years, that is, to the mainstream of the Church, we are able to concelebrate with all Orthodox. There are no schisms here. This freedom is the fruit of standing up to bullies, having principles, defending the integrity of Church life – all recognise us as canonical. However, those who created schism and are out of communion with others, the schismatics whom we left, are ever more isolated, stewing in their own juice, with nobody listening to them. They are talking to themselves.

Real Clergy Unite

The fate of all whistleblowers is to be persecuted at first, but later they are justified and they say: ‘Told you so’. For those who slandered and punished the whistleblowers have painted themselves into their own self-created corners, where they are ignored by all, if they are at all noticed. The most distinguishing feature of the punishers is their imagined infallibility and power – they never apologise, but instead they only justify their lack of Christian faith and way of life. This is proved by their inability to repent for the evil they have committed.

The duty of all non-careerist, that is, real, bishops and priests is to pray, celebrating the services and distributing the sacraments. In this way they gather the people together, they unite, for dioceses and parishes are communities and families. However, there are those who want to divide families, setting son against father, daughter against mother, one nationality against another, one jurisdiction against another. The dividers are unpopular, well known for not telling the truth, persecuting and closing churches. Such isolate themselves.

Afterword: The Cleansing Has Begun

Meanwhile, those who do their jobs of gathering together are respected and are invited to concelebrate everywhere. For they are in unity and communion and communion is the sign of belonging to the Church. This communion enrages even more the dividers, schismatics and persecutors, for they are ever more isolated and all see that they are out of communion with others, confined to their tiny sects and ghettoes. And the more they rage, the more they are ignored and even mocked. They have created a vicious circle for themselves.

The Great Cleansing of the Church is coming. Yes, the Church has been infiltrated, as it always has been. In the time of Christ, the Twelve were infiltrated by a traitor, Judas. It is no different today. They shout that Russia must leave the Russian Ukraine to its Fascist fate of genocide, fully agreeing with their US masters. It is normal – they have the same masters as the Ukrainian puppets, they are brothers. It is sad to see that the Church too has been infiltrated by them. But the Church too will be cleansed of them. There is no doubt about it.

 

 

A New Year’s Message: Battling Antichrist and His Antichurch

A buffoon will destroy the Ukraine

1992 Prophecy of St Gabriel (Urgebadze)

  1. The Antipoliticians: The Collapse of the Western Political Establishment

The once apparently inexorable march towards the Brave New World of Globalism, that is, towards the One World Dictatorship of Antichrist, has been restrained. The restrainer is President Putin. However, he has been supported and followed by the whole Global Majority, those who represent the seven billion plus of the world against the one billion plus who are formally, and only formally, represented by the Western elite, whom we call Antipoliticians. For they are the forerunners of Antichrist, he who replaces Christ is adored by those who replaces politicians.

The Global Majority would not submit to the Globalists. Even though the world was intimidated by the mainstream media’s covid hysteria, outside the Western world the majority refused to conform. Then the same thing happened in the Western war against Russia, which has been taking place in the Soviet-established borders of the Ukraine. The vast majority rejected the West’s fairy-tale ‘narrative’ of lies, with which the Western elite has deluded only itself. Now that it is apparent that the Globalist elite and its hireling media are losing their war on Russia in the Ukraine, they are collapsing in desperation and panic. Thus:

In the American Empire the Globalist and bankrupt regime of Emperors Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden is dying out in humiliation and dementia. The American Empire first tried and failed to assassinate twice its new rival, Trump. Now it is desperately fighting in its last days to cling on to power and cause maximum worldwide destruction, as in Syria. But it has been voted out of power by the American people.

In the military dictatorship of South Korea, established by the US decades ago, the corrupt President faces impeachment for trying to take over the country in a coup d’etat and trying to give away its stockpiles of US arms to the Kiev regime.

In Japan more and more voices are calling for independence from the occupying and bankrupting US regime.

In Israel the US-financed and supported leader has been placed on a list of wanted war criminals for his genocide in Gaza, followed by his genocides in the West Bank, the Lebanon. He is now illegally invading Syria – again. So where are the Western sanctions against Israel? Double standards again.

In Canada the hated woke Trudeau regime is collapsing. Future President Trump has even joked that the US should take over Canada as its fifty-first state. But his joke was taken seriously by many Canadians who welcomed it as the solution to their national problems.

In the bankrupt UK the authoritarian Starmer regime, chosen by only 20% of the electorate, is collapsing, together with the economy, the military, and Establishment pedophile Anglicanism. According to some, Elon Musk is to give $100 million to the only Opposition, the fast-growing and anti-Ukraine war Reform Party. President Trump, it is said, will clamp trade tariffs on the UK, if Trump’s friend, Farage of the Reform Party, is not made at least the new UK ambassador to Washington. Instead Starmer wants to appoint a very sinister individual, Mandelson, a Non-British homosexual, known in the UK for over a generation as ‘the prince of darkness’. A senior aide of Trump has called Mandelson (Mendelsohn) ‘an absolute moron’. The old EU technique, practised as long ago as the Maastricht Treaty in the 1990s, of cancelling or repeating elections that you risk losing may soon be imitated by the Starmer regime in the UK.

In bankrupt and deindustrialising Germany the hated Scholz regime has collapsed. Early elections will take place in February 2025.

In France the anti-democratic Macron regime, elected last summer by only 20% of the voters, and clinging on to power against the will of the people, has collapsed. It is expected to collapse again.

Thus, the Western European Big Three, the UK, Germany and France, all face a choice between Trumpian candidates and Brussels candidates. (Brexit has never been implemented in the UK – the British Establishment did not want it, and Starmer is the Brussels candidate). All three yesmen (Starmer, Macron, Scholz) are resisting the Trumpian candidates (Farage, AfD, Le Pen) on orders from Brussels. It labels all opposition to it as ‘far right’, regardless of whether they are on the left, on the right, or in the centre.

In fact, the unelected Commissars of totalitarian Brussels, several of them the grandchildren of Nazis, behave as if they were members of an International Fascist Party. Therefore, they refuse to implement any democratic decisions. All three main countries of Western Europe are bankrupt and suffer from collapsing infrastructure, but all three have been giving tens of billions to the equally bankrupt Ukraine. All three are desperately anti-Trump and anti-Russian and look at countries like China and India as racially inferior. Thus, they all despise and oppose three of the world’s four largest economies, China, India and Russia. Do not look for logic here. The only logic is the determination of the Western European elite to commit suicide. It is an Antilogic, for they are Antipoliticians.

In Romania, where the patriotic, Orthodox (he is a priest’s son), and therefore anti-Zelensky and anti-EU, candidate was expected to gain 63% of the vote according to polls, the imminent elections were cancelled by the Biden regime. Only their candidate, on 37%, was supposed to win.

They have not yet been able to cancel elections in Hungary and Slovakia – the only free countries left in the Western half of Europe, even though they tried to assassinate the Slovak Premier six months ago. It is widely expected that Hungary, Slovakia and Non-EU Serbia will join BRICS as soon as possible. Italy, Spain and Portugal may follow them in time, as the EU collapses.

In Georgia, US/EU-financed protests against the anti-US/anti-EU election victory over the defeated French President have failed miserably. The US/EU threat is now to call new elections because the results of the first elections were ‘wrong’.

In Moldova, despite massive election fraud by the EU, the US/EU victor has in practice no majority.

China looks on in astonishment at the Western chaos. One day it will soon just walk back into Chinese Taiwan, unopposed, as the West s so distracted by the chaos it has created.

Meanwhile in Moscow, General Kirillov was assassinated. Why? It was he who exposed the British-planned fake chemical attack in Syria. Next he exposed the Skripal attack, when the British failed to murder Russians with Novichok poison, which almost uniquely in the whole world, is kept eight miles away at the sinister British chemical weapons centre at Porton Down. He then exposed the US bioweapons factories in the Ukraine. His assassin? An MI6-trained Uzbek terrorist paid by the Ukraine.

Throughout the world, it is at last being recognised that so-called democracy in the Western world is a myth and was long ago replaced by authoritarian oligarchy. The West, like its puppet in Kiev, is ruled by the rich. There is no democracy here.

All this leaves the existence of the seriously divided NATO and EU in serious doubt. The deluded and racist Western fantasy that it has the supreme right to control and oppress the rest of the whole world is over.

  1. The Antipastors: The Collapse of the Western Spiritual Establishment

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, lovers of money, boasters, arrogant, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, despisers of those that are good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

2 Timothy 3, 1-5

The millennial Western institution of the Vatican is now in crisis and is threatened by a formal split. Some say that the present 88-year-old, wheelchair-bound Pope, is the last one. He appears to many pious Roman Catholics to be more concerned with the secular world than with the spiritual world. Many of them are scandalised by him.

After his fall in a pedophile cover-up scandal, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called by some ‘The Archbishop of Woke’, resigned and the survival of the Church of England is in doubt. Thousands of its churches are empty, most of its members are elderly. Those who appointed this Archbishop wanted him because he had been an executive in an oil company before he became an Anglican cleric. They appointed him because they wanted a manager, as they think of the Church as a Business. Next time how about appointing someone who actually believes in God? Managers will not help churches. Only pastors will help churches.

However, the foundation of the Antichurch is not some uniquely Anglican or Roman Catholic problem, it concerns all Christians. There are individual Antipastors, who are not just Roman Catholic and Protestant, but also Orthodox. The Orthodox concerned have been infiltrated into the Church by the CIA and other such agencies, with the predatory and debauched spirit of Capitalism.  Their only interest is creating from the Church a Business. The most prominent among them is Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, notorious for setting up with a large amount of US money ($25 million?) the ‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’. This is a fake Ukrainian nationalist organisation, not a Church at all, but a gangster mafia which steals church buildings from the Church by violence.

This elderly Patriarch Bartholomew, almost as old as the Pope of Rome, publicly declares that he wants to apostasise from Orthodoxy and become a departmental manager in the Vatican in 2025. Let him. Real Orthodox will not follow him. All those who consider that the Church is a Business – including some clerics of the Russian Church, anti-Russians, who are contributing to building the Antichurch, “the character of their relations with their nearest circle and their way of life incompatible with their status of monk and cleric”. They are building an institution worthy of the Antichrist, whose path as his forerunners they are preparing.

These forerunners are the Antipastors. They are opposed to the people, just as their brother and sister Antipoliticians are also opposed to the people. They practise the faith of the State, even though the State has long since abandoned them. They operate the dead hand of bureaucracy and protocols of the State. Among them are sexual perverts and crooks. These bureaucrats are the servants of the father of lies, the prince of this world, which is why they consider themselves also to be princes (‘princes of the Church’).

It matters not if the Antipastors use left-wing or right-wing politics to fulfil their aims, it matters only that they use politics. For politics, the anti-spiritual masquerading as the spiritual, is their realm and they are expert in it. They have never heard that we must ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s’.  A Pastor is he who unites the faithful with love, but an Antipastor is he who divides the faithful with hatred.

The task of the Antipastors is to eliminate all pastors, who have given their whole lives to the Church and built and rebuilt churches without payment, gathered together the scattered people, built parishes, and whose devotion is unquestioned. The Antipastors declare that the Church must be converted into a Business. There is no room among them for Faith in Christ, monastic life, sincerity and compassion. The Antipastors are ruthless in trying to destroy anyone who is sincere. The Church must be destroyed as a Christian society. Therefore, the Antipastors betray and slander the pastors, so they can replace them with their own fake pastors, their handpicked yesmen, the careerists and businessmen, who can make money for them. The Antipastors are experts at lying, for they are the faithful servants of their father the devil.

Just like the Pope of Rome – birds of a feather flock together – they try to close all the churches where the spiritual is practised, they either sell them to make money, or else they put in new ‘managers’ for their ‘Church-Business’. They may even open churches, but only those where the Faith has been transformed into a mere rite, outward, money-making ritualism, playing on superstition, without any inner content. This too is in order to raise more money for the Antipastors, who are wolves in shepherd’s clothing. They still do not know that ‘though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’.

Now they have achieved their aim. Once they have destroyed their part of the Church, they will move on to their next victims, flattering and cajoling to make their next career move.

What will happen to them?

They will all be swept away in the coming Great Cleansing and will face the Judgement of the Coming King. For now is the time of the fulfilment of the prophecies. Let us pray and tremble!

«Antichrist will make Church life possible, he will allow her services, will allow fine churches to be built on condition that they recognise him as the supreme being and worship him. There will be a mass falling away from the Faith, as many bishops will betray the Faith and in self-justification will point to the flourishing situation of the Church. The search for compromise will be the characteristic mood among people. Straightforward confession will vanish».

St John of Shanghai

 

 

 

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.

On the Extinction of the Church of England

https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2022/27-may3-june/news/uk/church-of-england-r-number-suggests-bleak-future-says-mathematician

The news that the Church of England, and other Protestant denominations, are facing extinction in the UK over the next forty years is not news. It has been predicted for generations. The Church of England was after all just an expedient Establishment invention by Henry VIII 500 years ago, a property and land grab by the King and his cronies, a piece of convenient nationalism, an outward, pretend Roman Catholic Church, which was at heart Protestant, devised to keep the masses under State control. The only surprising thing is that the temporary sticking-plaster of the Church of England has lasted so long. Thus, when the secular media accuse the Church of England of being ‘out of touch with public opinion’, which is a way of saying ‘out of touch with media manipulations’, we are given the hope that it may survive a bit longer. However, it is not just the secular media who say such things, it is most of the Church of England.

Everybody knows that the Church of England has always swum with the tide. In the 18th century many of its bishops were slaveowners and proud of it. In the early 20th century many of its bishops and vicars were keen fox-hunters, but definitely against buggery, but the greatest sin of all for them was definitely divorce. Sexual morality was the only real sin for the Puritans. In the 1970s its bishops were enthusiastic about the Common Market, though in 2016 many of them were against its successor, the EU. In the early 21st century its clergy were universally against slavery and fox-hunting, but keen on same-sex marriage, which some of them lived in and divorce really did not matter any more. It is all the classic ‘Vicar of Bray’ syndrome. ‘Which way is the State directing us to go? The reason we ask is because we must follow it’. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Bray)

This is not an attack on the Church of England and the other Protestant denominations which face extinction at the same time, or even before. It is just facts. And neither is it written in favour of Roman Catholicism. That denomination is also in a state of chronic decline, literally dying out for lack of clergy and because its present clergy are, sometimes quite unjustly, suspected by a great many of being pedophiles. Just as Protestantism, of which the Church of England is merely a part, has come to the end of its 500-year shelf-life, so has Roman Catholicism, which is coming to the end of its 1,000-year shelf-life. The time of all the dinosaurs is up.

Is this a plea then for minority Orthodox Christianity? No. Far too many of its bishops live in small and ever smaller nationalist ghettoes, or else are bullies, Soviet-style thugs who live in luxury and are all stick, but no carrot, who threaten, intimidate, punish and try to steal from and rob real Christians. They are the corrupt spiritual descendants of those who martyred Orthodox Russia from 1917 on and try to martyr Christians today. Their ‘example’ is why Orthodoxy is so small. The time of all those schismatics dinosaurs is up. They too face extinction – or else a very long stay in a monastery to reflect on their sins and find repentance before the Church.

So what is this a plea for?

It is a plea for the authentic Orthodox Church, the Church of God, the Church of the Saints.

 

On the Birth of New Local Churches

Introduction

Church life is at present in chaos because of the politicians of this world. But this is hardly the first time. We shall get through it. God can make light out of the present darkness, after the eclipse at Christ’s Crucifixion came the light of the Resurrection. The Russian Church and the Church of Constantinople in particular can come out of this present situation, renewed and purified. For if the Church is alive, new Local Churches will inevitably be founded outside the homelands of Orthodoxy. But what are the criteria for a Local Church? What pitfalls are there to avoid? Let us remind ourselves of the present significance of the four essential definitions of the Church of God, which remain just as essential for any Local Church as for the whole Church.

ONE

The Church is One. This means that any Local Church must be in communion with all others. If you are not in communion, then you are in some way not part of the Church, your Orthodox Faith is deficient. In order to know the limits of the Church, you simply have to ask others if they confess the One Orthodox Faith in the Creed. Either people confess it or they do not. The lack of the confession of the Creed, established for all time in the fourth century, is why the Roman Catholic/Protestant world, the first part of which was founded only in the eleventh century, was split off from the Orthodox Church and so has never been and will never be in communion with Her.

This is also to a lesser extent the tragic fate of old calendarists and other exclusivists like them, among whom there are some sincere and pious people, but who are not in communion with the rest of the Church. Many of them, most tragically of all, do not want to be in communion with others. Here we are not talking about people who do not want to be in communion with you personally or do not even recognise you because of their personal hatred, greed or jealousy. That is their problem. We are talking about deliberately cutting yourself off, being in isolation from the whole or even parts of the whole of the Church, which means that you have no long-term future and that you will eventually, in time, die out.

Being in communion with all others also means that you have to accept both calendars which are in use in the Church. You should not make the error of several in the OCA in the early days. Some showed aggressiveness towards those using the traditional calendar and even openly mocked them. Immediately they broke the unity of their own Church by being exclusive and so lost many to the OCA, which was supposed to become a Local Church, gathering all together. Instead of gathering together, they expelled. Fifty years later they are still paying the price for the foolishness of disunity caused by their contempt for others more traditional than themselves. But this works both ways. What has to be avoided is exclusivism, for it disunites.

HOLY

The Church is Holy. This means that the spiritual, and not the material, power, money and property, must be the most important vector in the life of the Church on earth. For since the Church is One (see above), the source of that unity can only be in the Holy Spirit, away from any kind of human deviations. But what do the words ‘the Holy Spirit’, Who is invisible, mean? The Holy Spirit is revealed to us and made incarnate and visible for us in the acts of the Saints. There are those who call this Incarnation of the Holy Spirit, its visible manifestation in the life of human-beings and their creation, ‘spirituality’. This is too vague to be a Church term. The Church term is ‘Churchliness’.

Churchliness means the life of the Spirit in the saints of God, both old and new saints. The veneration of all the saints, of all ages and in all places (in every nation), not just of one or two saints (which can produce unhealthy cults) is the vital guarantee of Church life. Moreover, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit in human life is the authority of the Church. Thus, there have been periods in Church life when the voice of just one saint has carried the Church. We can think of St Athanasius the Great and St Basil the Great in their time, later St Leo the Great, St Maximus the Confessor, St Symeon the New Theologian and St Gregory Palamas.

However, more recently, only in the last century, there were St Nectarius of Pentapolis, St John of Shanghai, St Justin of Chelije and St Paisius the Athonite. They have been saints and are saints, despite all the voices of so-called ‘Church people’ who rejected them and persecuted them. Thus, the authority of the Russian Church in its older saints has been confirmed in Her New Martyrs and New Confessors. Much the same can be said about all the Local Churches which suffered persecution in the last century and produced New Martyrs and New Confessors.

CATHOLIC

The Church is Catholic. This does not mean that the Church is some centralised institution like Roman Catholicism. It means that the Church remains essentially, in Her spiritual ethos, the same in all places and at all times, but in other respects, in language and customs, She may be hugely varied. This means that we do not accept innovations which contradict the ever new Tradition, but we accept the renewing inspirations of the Holy Spirit which revive and make sense of our lives through the actions of the Holy Spirit for our own time.

‘Catholic’ also means that the Church is multinational – the Church is for all. The Church does not have national ideologies, whatever some individuals may declare. Such racism (in Greek, phyletism) with its flag-waving is not part of Church life, whatever some individuals may do and think. Ideologies are always divisive, but the Church is unitive, bringing together. This is what we pray for in the great litany: ‘For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all Orthodox, let us pray to the Lord’.

We do not encourage or participate in offensive wars against other races or their languages and we do not mock others or feel superior to them. (Though we may defend others from aggressors). Christ calls all to come together in unity in diversity. He accepts us as we are, only moving us to live without sin, we must accept each other as we are, before we can improve ourselves. We do not want dictatorial, oppressive and centralised organisation, as the heterodox and political- and secular-minded Orthodox want, because we should be united in and by the Faith. That should suffice. Our unity is not necessarily outward, but it is inward, real and spiritual.

APOSTOLIC

The Church is Apostolic. This means that the Church refers back to the Apostles and apostolic life, the life of the missionary. Apostolic also means apolitical, as the apostles were not bound to some State and worked both inside and outside the Roman Empire. This was the case in the first century, but also in the last century, for instance, in the case of St Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles, who during the Japanese war against Russia in 1904-1905 simply shut himself away and was in no way anti-Japanese. He kept out of politics. The Church is not to be aligned with some political ideology, whether left-wing or right-wing, least of all with the ideology of some foreign State.

This was the principle of the Russian emigration, where temporary Church independence was declared during the Soviet period, when the authorities of the Church inside Russia were scandalously forced to demand political subservience to the atheist State from those who lived in freedom outside it. Part of the emigration declared that it was self-governing and another smaller part took refuge under the Patriarchate of Constantinople. In the same way today, large parts of the Russian Church have been forced to declare independence (the Ukraine, Latvia), small parts have been forced to take refuge in other Local Churches (England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy).

It is always shocking when State Churches go out and publicly tell their flocks which political party to vote for at elections. I have seen this in the Church of Greece. The 2020 elections in the USA were equally shocking, when the Greek Archbishop endorsed the Democrat Party, even having his photograph taken with the future President Biden. He literally told his people who to vote for. However, it is equally shocking when some right-wing ideology is endorsed by bishops of other Church groups. There are small, inward-looking parishes and dioceses which do not accept those who do not have the same political views as their totalitarian leaders. So the faithful are forced to leave them, simply because they desire faith and freedom.

Conclusion

The Church is and remains One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, whatever mere men may try and make Her into. The Church is all four of these together. For example, a group may be multinational, but if it is out of communion with the rest of the Church, or if it has renounced the Tradition, or if it has replaced holiness, with some political ideology, left or right, it is not of the Church. There are those of us in all jurisdictions, without exception, who are trying to build a Local Church. Why have we not succeeded yet? Simply because there has not been enough Oneness, Holiness, Catholicity and Apostolicity and instead there has been disunity, rejection of the saints, national or political ideology and politics. Today is such a time. But we shall win in the end and those who only care for power, money and property shall be vanquished, for the Spirit is not with them, and new Local Churches will be born despite them.

 

The Main Problem of the Contemporary Orthodox World

Introduction

From time to time over the decades I have heard conversations among Orthodox about ‘What the problem with the Orthodox world is’. Some I have heard say: ‘The episcopate’. Others say: ‘Lack of leadership’. Others: ‘Lack of pastors’. Others: ‘Uneducated clergy’. Others: ‘Infrequent communion’. Others: ‘There are not enough churches’. Others: ‘Politics’. Others: ‘There’s not enough money’. Others: ‘Too much money’. Others: ‘Ecumenism’ (how old-fashioned that word sounds now). Listening to such conversations among those older than myself, many years ago I came to my own much more radical, but perhaps also much more obvious, conclusion which I present below. Let me give some examples.

The Problem of the Episcopate

Here one of the great problems is that, with very weak monastic life, Orthodox bishops are drawn from a very small pool of candidates. Here we must also recall that, even if there were strong monastic life, most monks are in any case not at all suitable to become bishops: the very ‘monastic’ monk makes a disastrous bishop, as he has no concept of family life and the general realities of life in the world. If they do become bishops they make the most crass decisions out of naivety, ordaining bandits and perverts and not ordaining the suitable.

Indeed, real monks flee even the possibility of the episcopate and have to be taken kicking and screaming for consecration. In some Local Churches, the situation is so dire that just any celibate can become a bishop, especially if he belongs to the right local wealthy family (one of four?). His faith is not very important, but being celibate and being from the right local wealthy family are. As a result, there are a lot of bishops who are bureaucrats, diplomats or just academics. Faith in Christ really does not count very much with them at all.

The main aim of the bishop-bureaucrat, ‘administrator’ or ‘effective manager’ (the Russian jargon) is to collect money and property, so gathering power into his hands. After all, marble, gold and flashy vestments, flats and cars need hard cash. How else can you show off how prestigious and powerful you are? A few years ago we saw one who had been appointed to another diocese. His first act was to buy himself a very fancy car.

That was him finished. Half the flock turned away at once and never returned. And frankly, why should they have? The previous bishop had travelled by public transport and had been respected for that, though admittedly he had travelled very little. The new bishop still could not understand how he had alienated half his flock in his first week (he only realised this about a year afterwards). Some years later he was removed after a large amount of money had disappeared……Another failure in a long line in that particular diocese, which appears to have a suicide wish, ordaining the incompetent and banishing the competent.

But why does a bishop need a chauffeur or a cook or a chancellery and to issue decrees (which are usually ignored anyway)? Ordinary people do not have a chauffeur or a cook or a chancellery and does not issue decrees. If they did, they too would soon find themselves as despised and ignored as their bishops.

Bishops are given power, which some of them think means suspending, depriving of living and home or defrocking righteous priests (and others) and ordaining their corrupt yes-men favourites in their place. Some cultivate this power into a kind of feudal arbitrary rule, the ability to strike terror and intimidate. It is impossible to pray with such bishops because they are bullies who simply traumatise. Little wonder that in one Local Church there is actually a trade-union for priests to defend themselves against such bullies.

The fear of some Synods of bishops to stand up to such bullies whom they themselves appointed discredits the episcopate because there are whole Synods which fall into cowardice and let the corrupt go on for years. There has to be another way, the way of justice. Let us make clear that we are not talking about those who deserve suspension and defrocking according to the canons. The very real fear of priests of being utterly unjustly suspended and defrocked is not their fault. It is the fault of tyrannical and unChristian bishops, who do not know the word Love. Trauma reigns. As for trust, that went out of the window decades ago.

Then there are the bishops who are mere diplomats or book-lovers, who hide in their cathedrals, never visiting their crumbling dioceses, and remain unknown to their flocks. They prefer speaking at conferences for intellectuals.

We have witnessed the conduct of certain bishops in the last year in relation to covid. Terrorised by the vague possibility of death with covid, they have closed themselves down and closed down their dioceses, threatening their priests with suspension and defrocking, if they so much as serve the liturgy or visit the sick, as in one group in one Diaspora country.  These conformists are those who, wishing to swim with the atheist State tide, go over and above even the demands of the atheist State in closing down their churches. The concept of churches in the catacombs is totally alien to such bishops, as they are totally integrated into the local Establishment (and local masonic lodge). I have had people asking if such bishops have any faith at all. In answer, I shrug my shoulders and look to the heavens. The fact is, I just don’t know.

On ordination 36 years ago I was told by an elderly Russian priest that ‘whatever you do, don’t contact the bishop unless it’s an emergency, you will annoy him’. Indeed, there are bishops I have heard of who actually forbid their clergy to contact them or make contact impossible because they refuse to answer any form of communication. They don’t want problems, and yet they are happy to interfere in the details of pastoral life and upset clergy and people alike, thus creating problems. Their heavy-handedness defies definition. One new and power-crazy bishop we know managed to alienate his whole diocese in just nine months. A quite remarkable feat. Surely a record? Unless you know better….

The Problem of the Priesthood

There are priest-careerists. You can tell them a mile off. Even the most unchurched person knows them. It is as though they carry an odour about them. And the odour is not that of eau-de-cologne, but the foul stench of money.

On the other hand, if you allow a married priesthood, as Christ did, it is only natural that the priest should earn enough money to look after his family. There are Orthodox bishops who condemn the cash-saving Roman Catholic solution, that is, imposing celibates only (sometimes homosexuals, sometimes worse). And that is exactly what some bishops do: ordain a 22-year-old, make him archimandrite and there you have it: a cheap parish priest.

Only, as happens quite often (I have known many examples), by the time they are 30 they want to get married. And they do. Not so far from here, we know a married archimandrite with two children, though his bishop left him priest. And actually I don’t blame him for doing so, but the bishop who ordained the married archimandrite at an uncanonical age. Another bishop we met would only ordain priests with two children or fewer. Those who did not use contraception could not be ordained: they were too expensive.

The problem is that such events do nothing to create respect for the clergy and parish life. The simple solution: in a small parish with 100 wage-earners, ask them to contribute 1% of their salary to the priest’s salary. This would mean that the priest would earn exactly the average salary of all his parishioners. If it is a medium-sized parish with 200 wage-earners, they will contribute 0.5% of their salary. Etc.

This brings us to the next and massive problem.

That is the lack of parishes. There are quite a few (though probably only a fifth of the number required) church buildings, but a parish is a different matter. A church is a building you ‘go to’ as often or as rarely as you want, for five minutes once a year (like the thousands who, I am told, ‘go to…’ (a church where there are never more than 200 present at any one time). There are others who attend a church at least three times a week and come before the start and leave after the end. Only they are parishioners. A parish is a community to which you belong, of which you are a member. And parishioners are people who socialise and help each other outside Sundays.

In Russia and most of ex-Communist Eastern Europe, parish life was almost completely destroyed by the Communists. Though, in truth, often parish life was very often very weak even before the Communists came. Which is precisely why the Communists came…..

To create a Church family, which is what a parish is, is not easy. It takes years. There are different nationalities, different ages, people live in different places, often far apart. And this brings us to our next section.

The Problem of the People

Most Orthodox Christians the world over are only nominal. This nominalism is the ‘hatch, match, dispatch’ variety. In other words, they go (at best) to church three times in a lifetime, for baptism, wedding and funeral. They are not Churched Orthodox, who belonged to the Church, whose priority is the Church. Some people ask why a Revolution in ‘Orthodox Russia’ took place. It was because of nominalism. When there is an attack on the Faith, the first people to lapse and even overnight become enemies of the Church are the nominal. Thus, in Soviet Russia, most of the militant Communists, from Stalin downwards, were baptised Orthodox. They were obviously not Churched Orthodox. Thus, we can see the fragility of ‘Orthodox countries’, where the majority are only nominal Orthodox. We can see the same fragility today where  clergy are State-paid. A fragility which worries. Those countries hang by a thread.

Nominalism is precisely why confession and communion are infrequent. Confession and communion, though two separate sacraments, together form a statement that we are Christians, that we repent and that we partake of Christ, the Head of the Church. Both are equally important, which is why they are so frequent and so closely linked. Some common questions of the baptised but unChurched are: What is confession? What is communion? I have never had them. Why can’t you give communion to my (unbaptised) baby? We now have the extraordinary Roman Catholic practice in some churches of communion always, but confession never. And they actually justify that as normal! What is this world that we live in?

Many people like to blame ‘the Church’ for everything. This sounds like a blasphemy, as the Church is Christ’s, His Mother’s (Who is the Mother of the Church), His saints’ and His angels’. However, by ‘the Church’, they do not actually mean Christ (which is what ‘Church’ means), but the clergy.

Yes, we are aware of the faults of the clergy (see the extensive lists above), but what about the faults of the people? The people statistically make up 2,444 out of every 2,445 Orthodox (90,000 bishops, priests and deacons out of 220 million), 99.945% of the Church. Where is the responsibility for the Faith of the people, their consciousness of belonging to ‘the royal priesthood’? Why this passive, consumerist attitude? This is not the attitude of Church people.

Some people blame the clergy for the obvious lack of missionary work. But it is much more their responsibility, as they are the vast majority. If nothing is done inside parishes, in internal missionary work, nothing can be done outside parishes, in external missionary work. Why is that we have to wait for bishops and priests to set up parishes, buy church buildings, do missionary work? All should start at the grassroots. And where do the clergy come from? They come from the people. Clergy are not born clergy! Is there truth in the old and harsh saying that: ‘The people get the clergy they deserve?’ The lack of zeal among the people for upright bishops surely results in what we have. We should not complain about our situation when it is our own fault.

Conclusion

What is the main problem of the Orthodox world? In my view, it is undoubtedly its sheer lack of Orthodoxy. At all three levels, as described above. This means the lack of dogmatic understanding and the lack of works of love, in other words, the lack of love, which in fact are the result of each other. For if you do not love God, you will not love your neighbour or yourself. Put simply: No respect for God = no respect for others = no self-respect.

Whenever in Church history the faithful people, most parish priests and monastics and the freely-appointed bishops have combined to defend the Faith against tyrants and monsters, they have created an unstoppable force, a force which radically changes the course of history. Why? Because they realise that they, only together, are the Church.

 

The Battle for the Holy Spirit

All who are hostile to the Orthodox Christian Faith, whatever label they may carry, including a superficial label of ‘Orthodox’, are hostile to the Holy Trinity, though in different ways.

Thus, Pagans reject God the Father, preferring instead to make idols of mere creation, so worshipping itself. Like the Hindus, in a multitude of gods and goddesses, a sun-god, a moon-god, an earth-god, a king-god, a wind-god, a sea-god, a river-god etc. As animists, they worship spirits, including their own bodies and minds, like the Buddhists, not understanding that any such spirits are fallen human spirits or else, worse still, the fallen spirits of the demons. The only Spirit we can know and worship is the Holy Spirit.

Thus, Heretics reject God the Son, rejecting either His Divinity, like the Jews, the Arians, the Nestorians and the Muslims, or else His humanity, like the Monophysites.

Thus, Western Secularists reject God the Holy Spirit, preferring the values of this world. Therefore they replace the Holy Spirit, Who is the Authority and the Power and the Spirit of the Church, with a Pope in Rome, then with any white man, including Stalin or Hitler, and finally with any human-being who thinks himself equal to the Holy Spirit according to his ‘human rights’. So the world turns full circle and reverts to Paganism, under the humanist delusion of being clever, it narcissistically worships itself.

Thus, lapsed Orthodox replace Him with worldliness, disguised either as a flag-waving nationalism, or as a post-Soviet, get-rich-quick culture which in all practical terms is atheist, or as a spiritually feeble imitation of Western culture, or as a mere right-wing conservative ideology of dictatorial power. All these reject the Revelation of the Holy Spirit.

In order to battle for the Holy Spirit, for nearly 50 years we have called on Christ, the Mother of God and on the Saints of all ages and lands. For though not of this world, the voices of the Saints are the bearers of the Holy Spirit in this world, and in all ages and in all lands, thus witnessing against Pagans, Heretics, Western Secularists and lapsed Orthodox.