Category Archives: The Diaspora

Russian Orthodox are Pro-European, Pro-Greek and Pro-American because we are Pro-Christian

Although the revolution in the values expressed and lived by the Russian Federation over the last generation is far from complete, nevertheless it is not an exaggeration to call that transformation in question a revolution. From a consistently militant atheist ideology, that which produced the horrors of the Gulag and lasted for seventy-five years, it has passed in twenty-five years to an ever more Christian stance, one which shames the modern West. Little wonder that today’s militant atheist Western governments, whether in the US, Western Europe or among their nationalist puppets in Eastern Europe and Istanbul, are annoyed. This revolution in values has taken place through mass baptism and the return of many Russian Orthodox to uncompromised Christian values, known as Russian Orthodox values.

This means that we sympathize with all who confess those values or values close to them, whatever their label. As the Western ruling class has ever more quickly abandoned those Christian values in recent decades and reverted to the pagan values of Ancient Rome, it has distanced itself and isolated itself from its own faithful people, the patriotic Christian minorities of Western Europe and North America. Moreover, at the same time that ruling class has distanced itself from the faithful in countries which are at least formally still respectful of Christianity, whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or in still free, non-EU Eastern Europe, in Serbia, Montenegro, Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, the Ukraine and, above all, the Russian Federation, which stands apart because of its size and importance.

Here we speak not only of the apostasy of the Western ruling class by its imposition by force and intimidation of State-run abortion and euthanasia, ‘gay parades’ and ‘homosexual marriage’ or of the establishment of satanic organizations. Here we speak not only of the moral and cultural imperialism which ends the freedom of other countries to live by their traditional values. Here we speak not only of political correctness, that intolerant, neo-puritan ideology just as Spirit-less as the materialism of the old Soviet Union. We also speak of imposing sanctions on other countries for their Christian behaviour and fomenting civil wars in them, supplying arms, indebting them, supporting genocide in them and invading them either militarily or economically in order to exploit their natural resources and markets.

These Russian Orthodox, or uncompromised Christian, values tie in not only with traditional Western Christian, but also to a surprising extent with traditional Islamic, Judaic, Hindu and Buddhist values. The Russian Orthodox support for Tradition is all the more striking when we look at certain smaller Local Orthodox Churches, members of whose elites have under political pressure shown tendencies to abandon the integrity of the Faith, despite the Universal Orthodox Tradition dating back nearly 2,000 years and the views of their own faithful. Having lived and worked in Greece for one year, learned Greek, loved Greece and made pilgrimages to Mt Athos and in 1979 met there Fr Ephraim (now in the USA), I have in recent days been warmed by the support of the Greek faithful for the Tradition.

Thus, the current petition against the ‘new’ pro-Vatican ecclesiology of the Phanar (in fact an ecclesiology that was evolved in the 1920s) with its neo-imperialist, eastern papist interpretation of Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon, is spreading through Greece and Cyprus and the Greek Diaspora. Although an internal petition addressed to the Greek faithful, it has the full support of Russian Orthodox faithful and the faithful of many other Local Churches whose hierarchies are free and have not been subjected to foreign political and financial pressure. For just as the Russian faithful are pro-European inasmuch as we support the True West, the Orthodox West of the first millennium, the Russian Orthodox Church cannot be anything but pro-Greek Orthodox, for She received the faith from Greek Orthodox.

And just as the Russian faithful support True Greece, Orthodox Greece, the Athonite elders, not the fake, masonic Greece that the Western elites are trying to foist on Greeks, so also we support True America, not the warmongering, anti-Christian America that we see today. Thus, the present visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) to the Russian Church is symbolic of the Russian Church’s love for all who confess Orthodoxy. After years and even decades of internal troubles, the OCA may at last be returning to the confession of Orthodoxy as her new relations with the Russian Orthodox Mother Church show. For the OCA, the time of decision is here – to reintegrate the Russian Orthodox Tradition by giving up the fantasies of the decadent past or else to remain outside the mainstream on a compromised limb.

Resisting and Delaying Antichrist: The Prophetic Vision of the Russian Orthodox Church Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence and Conversations

Q: What do you think from an Orthodox viewpoint of the recent G-20 meeting in Brisbane, where much was made of the war in the Ukraine.

A: In Brisbane Western politicians – not world leaders, as they pretentiously call themselves – made much of the civil war in the Ukraine. This was because they caused it and are continuing it. At Brisbane a clear message was given to the Western bullies by the free world, led by Russia: If the West continues to destabilize, overthrow democracy by bribing mobs and destroy the sovereignty of the Ukraine, then Russia will extend its sanctions against the Western world, possibly closing Russian air space to it. The Obamas, Bidens, Camerons, Hollandes and Merkels of the West face self-imposed isolation.

The Russian Federation, the Eurasian Economic Union, China, India, much of Latin America, nearly one half of the world, are working towards a new world order and will not tolerate arrogant Western bullying. That has already caused so much bloodshed and chaos in genocidal bombing, invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan and in CIA-organized ‘coloured revolutions’ in Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. Libya was the last straw, but even now there are aggressive individuals in the US, whose minds are so power-crazed that they openly talk of starting a Third World War against Russia and China.

Q: Do you think there is any hope that heads of some countries in the European Union will speak out against this US-centred bullying?

A: The EU has more or less become an island off the western coast of the USA, in other words, a US colony or ‘protectorate’, in effect its next state, and is governed by puppets and economic thugs, as we saw in Greece and Spain. The US has isolated Europe from its own roots and its own interests. Until the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is restored, as in the early 1900s, there is no hope for Europe. Remarkably, however, the leaders of some small countries in the EU have protested, notably the leaders of Hungary and the Czech Republic. They have of course been condemned for that by the US-run EU media.

Q: What about the leaders of once Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and Non-EU Serbia and Montenegro?

A: Apart from Serbia, where Orthodoxy is still to some extent a political force, the elites of all those countries have betrayed the Orthodox Faith and their own peoples. We can expect nothing of such elites. They can only think of payments from Brussels into their Swiss bank accounts.

Q: When you say ‘the US has isolated Europe’, what do you mean by the US?

A: The US means the plutocratic financiers, industrialists and arms-merchants who saw their opportunity and immigrated to the US from Europe, from where they had already financed slavery, over 200 years ago and now run the US. I do not of course mean the American people. Until the end of the 1950s there was still among many ordinary Americans a small-town, Bible-based culture, however deficient and partial. That has been more or less destroyed by the plutocrats and is lamented by such popular American singers as Don McClean and Johnny Cash in nostalgic songs like American Pie and Family Bible. Americans were the first victims of the plutocrats, the first victims of the ‘US’, as we saw already in the US Civil War. There is nothing that Satan loves more than wars where brother kills brother, whether in the US or the Ukraine.

Q: Has not Russia suffered from the Western sanctions imposed because of the Ukraine?

A: There are naturally problems resulting from them, but the main result of Western bullying because of Russia’s protection of the Ukraine, so-called ‘sanctions’, has been for Russians to refind their identity. Providentially, the Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy, is preparing Russia for the future, preparing it to overcome the confusion and decadent westernization of the last 25 years, to realize that Russia has its own identity, path and role. If the Western elite really wants to start a Third World War, it must now realize that Russians will no longer simply lie down and agree to lose that War, their country and, above all, their Christian Faith to Mammon.

This is the same situation as in the thirteenth century when the Mongols invaded Russia. Until then Russians had been divided; everything changed afterwards as they found unity against the common enemy and petty squabbles were forgotten. So today Russia was divided before the Western invasion of the Ukraine, now it is finding unity once more. Today’s extraordinary consensus of national unity around President Putin has not existed in Russia for exactly 100 years, since the First World War, when Russia also united against aggressive Western enemies.

Q: To move on, there has been talk recently of the forthcoming All-Orthodox Council in 2016 and much worry has been expressed about it. Do you share in those worries?

A: No. To worry about this is really to show a lack of faith in Divine Providence and in the Church, which is not a mere human institution, but a Divino-human organism. First of all, nobody knows if there will be a Council, let alone whether one is forthcoming; remember that ‘man proposes but God disposes’. True, a meeting of several Orthodox bishops is planned in two years’ time, but a meeting is not in itself a Council. And no-one knows with the situation between Constantinople and the Czechs and Slovaks if even that meeting will take place. And who knows who the Patriarch of Constantinople will be in two years’ time.

Even if a meeting does take place and politics takes over, it will remain an ineffectual without any consensus. However, if a ‘Council’ takes place, why should that be bad? Surely a Council – rather than a mere meeting – will proclaim the Church and our Orthodox Faith to the whole world, anathematizing all isms, atheism, consumerism, ecumenism, globalism etc. How can that be bad? Remember that only canonical Orthodox will attend, those of disputed canonicity like the OCA, those in schisms, as in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia, those in sects like the old calendarists, as well as heterodox, will not take part.

Q: So why do some worry?

A: I think that those who are worried, for example old calendarists, have a psychological and not theological motivation. They are really just seeking to justify their schisms. For example, they point to the decadence inside the Patriarchate of Constantinople but then forget that Mt Athos and many faithful clergy and people outside the convert fringes are under that Patriarchate. The old calendarists want a Pharisee-like, black and white world, in which they are white and everyone else is black. Such a world does not exist and has never existed. The wheat has always grown alongside the tares. Look at the twelve apostles: most of them betrayed Christ, one did not even repent, but still eleven of them became saints. Old calendarist criticisms are psychologically-motivated self-justification.

Q: But we know there are many real problems between the Local Churches, for example there is the problem of the new calendar.

A: I can recall reading the words of St Justin (Popovich) in the 1970s who denounced the concept of a Council then because the vast majority of Orthodox were living under the yoke of Communism. Then he was right of course, but now the situation is quite different. Today most Orthodox, some 85% of all, are free. True there are some 15% who are not free, who live under what may be called ‘CIA Churches’, but they are a small minority.
Who knows, if this meeting does take place and does become a Council, this may mean that the new calendar hierarchies will repent and return to the Orthodox calendar, giving up the Roman Catholic calendar. Mt Athos gave up that calendar decades ago and now the Polish Church has done so. Others will surely follow. And remember too that the CIA Churches, subject to all manner of Uniatizing and Protestantizing manipulations, are mainly small and their senior representatives elderly. Most of the free Local Churches are young and follow the Tradition. Time is on our side.

Q: What do you mean by ‘CIA Churches’?

A: Those whose leaders are appointed by the CIA, or bribed by the EU and masonic circles, which amounts to the same thing.

Q: What is the role of the Russian Church among the other Local Churches?

A: As three-quarters of the whole Church, we have a special responsibility: our vision, mission and task are prophetic. Our vision, mission and task are resistance and delaying tactics in order to oppose the coming of Antichrist, towards whom the world has been hurtling for the last hundred years and especially for the last fifty years. You remember how Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’? Well, where did the demons who had entered the Russian Empire by 1917, tipped the balance against it and created that evil empire go? They did not disappear back to hell, but, seeing their battle largely lost in Russia, they went to infest the West, where, tragedy of tragedies, they were shown no resistance and even made welcome.

Here is the message of Russia to the West: After 1917 demons took over in Russia but we eventually fought them off because of the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors, because of the strength of the Orthodox Faith and Orthodox culture. Russia says to the West: Follow our example, return to the Orthodox Christ and you too can shake off the demons. But of course the West is so blinded by its towering racial and nationalistic pride that it cannot even see that is being tormented by demons. Indeed, it does not even believe in demons and it rejects the sweetness of the Resurrection of Christ, Whom it considers to be an ‘uneducated Asiatic’.

Q: To say that the Russian Church’s role is to oppose the coming of Antichrist is a very serious statement, with many implications.

A: Yes, it is very serious because it means that the Russian Orthodox Church is a sort of litmus test. The world can be divided into two parts, on the one hand those who are with us, our friends, those who are also resisting and delaying the coming of Antichrist, and, on the other hand, those who resist the Russian Church and, consciously or, more usually, unconsciously, are working for Antichrist’s coming. Those who unconscious and naively think they are working for ‘freedom, democracy and humanity’ etc are pawns in Antichrist’s game. They would be shocked if they realized it and then they would repent.

In that respect the Pussy Riot incident, so completely and so obviously stage-managed by the West, was highly symbolic. There we clearly saw who is for Antichrist and who is against. Those who supported Pussy Riot, words which are simple code for the sex and violence of modern Western ‘culture’, including fifth columnist, nominally Orthodox intellectuals, some of them even clergy, modernist heterodox, the Western media and so-called human rights activists, are all working for Antichrist.

Q: You say that to resist and delay Antichrist is the task of the Russian Church. But what practically can the Russian Church do that the other Local Churches cannot?

A: The Russian Church alone is able, when the time is ripe, to set up the infrastructure for Metropolias in the Americas, Asia, Australasia and Western Europe and also help the Patriarchate of Alexandria to become the true Church of Africa and stop being a Greek colony run by the EU-controlled Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens. The other Local Churches are too small, too weak, too nationalistic and, in the cases of the CIA Churches, too unfree, to do this.

Q: This sounds like papism, setting up a worldwide Church?

A: Not at all. Papism is about empire-building and centralization, which, true, has become the ethos of many in the modern Patriarchate of Constantinople and also in its time affected careerist, nationalistic State appointees in the Russian Church before the Revolution. Today the Russian Church is about setting up Metropolias as foundations for new Local Churches, as has already happened in Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and as is under way in Japan and China. These countries are parts of its canonical territory, but will remain so only for as long as the Churches there are too small to gain autocephaly.

The aim is not empire-building, which is centralization, but decentralization, through laying the foundations for and then establishing new autocephalous Local Churches, as His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II said in 2003 when speaking of a future Metropolia in Western Europe. We have as our model not the manmade, papist, unionist, filioquist, rationalist god of Western philosophers, but the real Christian God of the Holy Trinity revealed in all Power and Glory in the New Testament, unity in diversity.

Q: Do you think that other territories will be added to the canonical territory of Rus apart from China and Japan?

A: Certainly. I think that eventually in Europe Hungary may be added, and outside Europe in South-East Asia, with the Russian Orthodox missions already there, Thailand and Laos, and I think perhaps one day Iran too.

Q: So the rest of the world, except for Africa and the other territories in the jurisdiction of the other 13 canonical Local Churches, can be covered by the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)?

A: Yes. The Church Outside Russia actually means the Church Outside Rus, outside the Russian lands. And Rus at present only covers lands of the former Soviet Union – except for Georgia – including the Ukraine, Estonia and so on, and, as we have said, China and Japan. ROCOR can cover the rest, except those countries that form the canonical territories of other Local Churches.

Q: But those countries ‘outside Rus’ often have Orthodox populations which are under other Local Churches. So how can they come under ROCOR?

A: They cannot ‘come under’ ROCOR, I said, ‘can be covered by ROCOR’, not ‘come under’. ROCOR is the Church Outside Rus. Unlike the Church inside Rus, which has a canonical territory, the Church Outside Rus has no canonical territory. However, we do have a shared territory, a territory which we can cover, and where we can have a canonical flock.

Q: What do you mean by canonical flock?

A: All those of all nationalities who live outside the canonical territory of Rus and freely belong to and confess the Russian Orthodox Church and Tradition. And at present nobody, including the US and EU elite, can stop us from belonging to ROCOR.

Q: With such a definition, where does the ‘Orthodox Church in America’, the OCA, come? That after all is in North America, on a territory covered by ROCOR, and the OCA was founded through the Russian Church.

A: I don’t know where the OCA comes. You must ask its members. The OCA was a temporary Cold War creation of Soviet times, largely made up not of descendants of subjects of the Russian Empire, but of descendants of subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For nearly 45 years now its canonicity has been disputed and it has been torn by internal dissensions. Like all conglomerates, its different parts are torn in different directions.

I think that instead of sitting between two (and sometimes more than two) chairs, one day it will split apart, with a small majority, especially but not only in Alaska, ‘Russian America’, returning to the Russian Church and spiritual freedom and integrity, and a large minority, under the influence of sectarian American nationalism and possibly under the direct influence of the US administration, going off to liberal, ecumenistic convert groups, the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople and some to the Uniats.

Q: And what about the Paris Jurisdiction? It claims to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’. Where does that fit into such a definition?

A: It too left the Russian Church and therefore our affairs do not concern it. As regards its claim, as someone in Paris said to me earlier this year, although the Paris Jurisdiction may claim to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’, the Russian Tradition has not even ‘stayed overnight’ in most of its communities. When you live, as some do, on the Roman Catholic calendar, want the Roman Catholic Easter, have no iconostasis, wear Greek vestments, abbreviate the Liturgy, give communion to Roman Catholics, write against and condemn the Russian Church, refuse to venerate Her martyrs and belong to Her, what sort of ‘Russian Tradition’ is that? That is Uniatism, not Orthodoxy. Apart from in a few last outposts, that claim is a fiction.

Thus, it is very interesting to think back before 2007, before ROCOR and the Church inside Russia entered into canonical communion with one another. Then the Paris Jurisdiction – and its members who colonized the OCA in North America – used to condemn ROCOR as ‘a sect’ for not concelebrating with the Church inside Russia because ROCOR considered that the bishops of the Church inside Russia were not free and therefore could not act canonically. However, as soon as freedom came and ROCOR and the Church inside Russia did start concelebrating, the masonic ethos of the propaganda of the Paris swung around 180 degrees. Then representatives of the Paris Jurisdiction started condemning ROCOR precisely for concelebrating with the Church inside Russia, which they then said was not free!

So they went from criticizing ROCOR for being anti-Moscow to criticizing ROCOR for being pro-Moscow, never recognizing the transformation and liberation of Moscow. It is clear that the point of view of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction is mere self-justification, which is the same psychology for all extremists, whether for the Paris new calendarists or for the Greek old calendarists. In other words, their views are a political manipulation, conditioned by anti-Russian Western political propaganda, whether sent out to manipulate weak hearts and irrational minds by the CIA or by the Vatican, and has nothing to do with spiritual values.

Q: What was it that brought ROCOR and the Church inside Russia into canonical communion?

A: The August 2000 Jubilee Council of the Church inside Russia, which met all three conditions of ROCOR, the canonization of the New Martyrs, the condemnation of collusion with the atheist State, known as sergianism, and the complete rejection of the branch theory, known as ecumenism.

Q: In that case why did ROCOR not enter into communion with the Church inside Russia straightaway in 2000?

A: Very simply because it is one thing to proclaim something at a Council, but quite another to put it into practice. For example, even after the Jubilee Council, at the London Cathedral belonging to the Church inside Russia they still refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs, on the pretext that they had no space on their bare white walls! They also forbade the sale of books written by Fr Seraphim Rose, which were at that time so popular inside Russia. In England ROCOR had to wait for the death of one individual in 2004 and then the departure of other modernists in 2006 to the Paris Jurisdiction before a new Orthodox bishop could be sent from Russia, a bishop chosen on ROCOR’s recommendation, and so we could have local unity.

Many representatives of the Church inside Russia but who lived in the West had been betraying the Russian Church and Tradition for decades, they were compromised. This is partly why ROCOR was so popular. I can remember nearly forty years ago when on a Sunday 600 Russian emigres would be standing in the ROCOR Cathedral in London and at the Patriarchal Cathedral there would be perhaps 200, over half of whom were naïve Non-Russians and visitors who knew no better. In Brussels and Paris the Patriarchal churches were also no more than house chapels. Russians and those who knew the Tradition did not go there.

Remember how, just before the Church Outside Russia and the Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, in 2006 a small convert part of the foreign representation of the Church inside Russia in England and France abandoned Her. Why did this betrayal of the Church which, ironically, was just about to be reunited, take place? Because of two local personality cults, mainly among unintegrated converts, who placed those peculiar cults above the Russian Church and unity with Her. The individualistic mantra of cults and cultishness came before the Church of Christ.

The manipulative leaders of the naïve and misinformed who left had been doing a disservice to the Church inside Russia for decades while Moscow, paralysed by an illegitimate, militant atheist regime, had been able to do nothing about it. The lesson we learn from this is that those who are not integrated into Church life, but have their own agendas, always disintegrate. Interestingly, those who left in England were ardently supported by a rabidly Russophobic British press and, naturally, the State-run BBC.

In other words, locally, it took years for the decisions of the Jubilee Council to be implemented. There were similar situations in other parts of the Church inside Russia, where Soviet-minded individuals and their followers had to leave the scene for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. That is why fundamentally it took seven years for us to progress.

Q: But that was not the only reason for seven years’ delay. ROCOR too had committed faults on its part too, didn’t it?

A: Of course, individuals in ROCOR and in the ROCOR hierarchy had made their mistakes too. This mistake was the confusion between the Soviet Union and Russia. Emigres who had been mere children before the Revolution or who had been born outside Russia or who had been born inside the Soviet Union before 1945 and been cruelly persecuted for the Faith, often could not tell the difference between the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and Russia. In reality, despite the anti-Russian Bolshevik ideology, imported from the West, the Soviet Union had kept much of Orthodox culture.

1917 was not a light switch when the light went off – there was continuity. The victory over Fascism in the Second World War, the education and medical system, the reflexes of justice for the poor and for the Third World, the qualities of generosity, hospitality and mercifulness – they were not Soviet, they are Russian, and come from the Orthodox world view and Orthodox reflexes. On the other hand, the materialistic philosophy of the Soviet Union, the vicious persecution of the Church, the Gulag, all that was of course profoundly evil, satanic. Communism was Orthodoxy without God, just as Mammonism is Protestantism without God.

The mistakes made by some in ROCOR were why the ROCOR hierarchs and those of the Church inside Russia asked each other forgiveness before 2007. Being human, we all make mistakes. No-one is perfect. As a result of mutually asking one another for forgiveness, since 2007 the Church inside Russia has become ever more ‘de-Sovietized’ and ROCOR has become ever more ‘de-ghettoized’, more open and more international. Both parts have benefited enormously, making great strides forward. To ask for forgiveness is always beneficial, creative and dynamic. God gave us all grace for repentance.

The failure of the Paris Jurisdiction to admit its mistakes, unlike the two parts of the Russian Church inside and outside Russia which admitted theirs, is precisely the essential problem of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction. This is due to the unrepentant arrogance usual for intellectuals. In Paris the heirs of those who caused the Revolution through treachery in 1917 are still justifying themselves and their ancestors. For those who are in control in Paris are the heirs of the degradation of the Westernized Russian intelligentsia before the Revolution and their mercilessness. For example, the sins of individual representatives in the Church inside Russia were the sins of political hostages, not of free men. And if you refuse to recognize the repentance of such, you make yourself like the elder brother of the prodigal son, a merciless mountain of towering pride, refusing to take part in the banquet of the loving Father.

Q: So you distinguish between those who ‘control the Paris Jurisdiction’ and its members?

A: Of course. I have been an eyewitness of the process of return of many from the Paris Jurisdiction to both parts of the Russian Church since the 1980s. Sadly, the process of Uniatization that began there, above all from 1981 on, and which I personally tried to combat, has gone much further since then. I personally know of eight priests and deacons and four parishes which have returned from the Paris Jurisdiction since the late 1980s, when they saw through the betrayal of those in control and understood their underlying lack of love for the Russian Church.

Q: Why did Uniatization speed up there from 1981 on?

A: The disintegration of the Paris Jurisdiction began in 1981 after the repose of the ever-memorable Archbishop George (Tarasov), the last Archbishop who had been an adult before the Revolution, indeed a Russian pilot on the Western Front in the First World War. Those who returned after that to the Russian Church in order to keep their integrity, despite the slander that they faced, had realized that the Paris Jurisdiction would not return en masse as a group to the Russian Church, understanding that there were forces in it which were profoundly politicized and Russophobic, the very forces which proudly claim to be ‘apolitical!’ In fact, they are not apolitical, but simply disincarnate, ‘useful’ only to the enemies of the Church, such as the Vatican and Western spy agencies. Indeed, one of those who was in control in the Paris Jurisdiction in the 1980s has recently been proved to have been a senior agent of the French Secret Services. The exodus from there has been such that there are now only two ageing priests left in the Paris Jurisdiction who were brought up in ROCOR and so have a sense of the Tradition

Those of the Paris Jurisdiction who have now departed this life, Metr Evlogy and Vladimir, Archbishops George (Tarasov) and Sergiy (Konovalov), Bishops Methodius (Kulmann), Roman (Zolotov) and Alexander (Tian-Shansky), Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, Archpriests Alexander Rehbinder and Igor Vernik and a mass of others, clergy and people, would have returned to the Russian Church, if they were now alive. Some of these people I knew personally and I am convinced that they would be outraged by the attitude of those who refuse to return to the Russian Church today, 25 years on after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Q: Why?

A: Constantinople had for them only ever been a temporary refuge. It had always been their intention to return to the Russian Church, once She was free, just like us in ROCOR. Today there is no spiritual justification for staying in what is largely not just a Non-Russian, but an anti-Russian jurisdiction. And what is left of that jurisdiction? By and large, apart from a few unintegrated converts in each of a few dozen temporary premises and tiny chapels scattered across France and in neighbouring countries, there are only Rue Daru, mainly populated by those from the ex-Soviet Union, a tragically bankrupt St Sergius Institute, some four small Russian chapels in Paris, two convert groups in Paris, the crumbling church in Biarritz, which undemocratically has not been allowed to return to the Russian Church, and the convent in Bussy. Perhaps 5,000 people in all, and most of them arrivals from the former Soviet Union who have nowhere else to go. Since the 1980s the vital forces have left the Paris Jurisdiction. One priest who left, dear Fr Nikolai Soldatenkov, even took out Russian nationality, partly in order to be able to leave.

Q: Can you give other examples of those you mentioned above who you think would have returned to the Russian Church by now?

A: Yes. Take Metr Evlogy – he himself repented and returned, on paper, to the Russian Church twice, in 1934 and 1945, but was prevented by the freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction from actually doing so. In the 1960s and 1970s both Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev actively tried to return to the Russian Church and suffered for their efforts. As for Bishop Roman (Zolotov), he was a Cossack by family – we had no doubts about him. As for dear Fr Igor Vernik I remember how he used to support the Russian football team against the French football team! And Archpriest Alexander Rehbinder refused to move to the USA in the 1950s because he knew that his many children would lose the Faith in the land of mammon. Archbishop Sergiy (Konovalov), whom I knew when he was a priest, was about to persuade the whole Paris Jurisdiction to move to the Church inside Russia when he died. His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II had hoped that his jurisdiction would become the foundation stone of an autonomous Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe.

Q: Let us get back to ROCOR. Why did only 95% of ROCOR enter into communion with the Church inside Russia in 2007? What about the other 5%?

A: When I left Moscow after my second visit to Soviet Russia in 1976, I promised myself as a Russian Orthodox layman that I would not return until the Russian Church was free from an atheist leader and regime. And indeed when I did return, thirty-one years later, in 2007, it was to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where I concelebrated as a priest of the Church Outside Russia, together with a great many others, with his Holiness Patriarch Alexei II and in the presence of the Orthodox President of the Russian Federation. When in 2007 some 95% of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the by then free Patriarchal Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, true, some 5% of ROCOR did not follow precisely because they were in denial of the huge changes in Russia between 1976 and 2007. Some simply abandoned the Church, but others fell away into pro-CIA, schismatic sects based in the Ukraine, Russia and Greece. Why?

Firstly, there were the naïve idealists and the good-hearted but misinformed who were hoodwinked and have mainly since returned. Secondly, there were those who put personal grudges against individual ROCOR bishops, who had misunderstood their non-integrated convert ideas, above their own salvation. Thirdly, there were those who were on an ego trip, seeking a career. And finally, there was most of the 5% or so who left and have not since returned, who did so because they were politically-minded, as they were anti-Communist rather than pro-Orthodox. Among them were some extremists who had consciously and freely sided with Hitler in the 1940s.

It must be said that many of the ringleaders here were actually employees of the CIA or the Canadian Secret Service, just as there was at least one case of an employee of the French Secret Services in the Paris Jurisdiction. So politics and salaries paid by Western spy services, presented by the ringleaders as ‘freedom’ and an ‘apolitical stance’, were the real reason for their schisms. When Communism fell, such people had no further reason to frequent the Church, as for them the Church had mainly been only an expression of nationalistic anti-Communism. They ended up being anti-Russian, as they had not understood that anti-Soviet could also mean anti-Russian. They were unable to discern the Russian through the fog of the Soviet.

This was because fundamentally they had little loyalty to the real Russian Orthodox Church and her international ideal of Holy Rus, but rather to narrow-minded political nationalism. Their behaviour had always been the greatest discouragement to Non-Russians joining the Church. Many of us who came to the Church seeking bread were indeed actually told to go away by them and in no uncertain terms, in other words, we were given stones. As one ROCOR bishop, speaking of one well-known to me ROCOR parish in the 1980s, told me recently, ‘those people were not Christians’. As is usual, their lack of love towards others ended up by driving them themselves to leave the Church in 2007 and even before, starting in the 1990s. Today we are still here in the Church; they are the ones who have abandoned Her.

Q: To come back to the idea of a Metropolia for Western Europe that you mentioned above, how important is that concept for Western Europe itself?

A: It is vital. I know that I am about to give an absurd example because it touches such a tiny detail, but I have to tell you it because it is symbolic of the degeneration of Europe. Two weeks a Russian woman in Germany wrote to me and told me that for many Germans a woman wearing a skirt is seen either as a Russian or else as a prostitute. What I am saying through this perhaps ridiculous symbol is that even the culture of Christian vestiges that was alive in Europe 50 years ago in the normal way that people dressed then is now dead.

Young Western people whose souls are at least still alive today turn to strange subcultures or even Islam and even fight for Islamic State, since that counters the spiritually empty West of today. Their disaffection and alienation are so great that even such bizarre and lethal choices seem more logical to them than the deathly conformist consumerism, hellish vampires, aliens, monsters, drugs, drink, sex, obesity, depression, mental illness and suicide that is the modern West. Europe has zombified and infantilized itself by accepting Americanization, it has been robbed and stripped naked of its own culture and is on the point of spiritual death. Europe is the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho was robbed and left for dead. Only a Good Samaritan, one from outside the West but still linked with its roots and understanding it, can save Europe; no false priests can do anything for it, for they pass by on the other side.

How can Europe be regenerated without the Church and Her prophetic vision? It is not possible. Europe desperately needs to be raised up from the deathly spiritual filth of its vulgar, fleshly, bread and circuses consumerism, the tyranny of its Babylonian culture of death, the fruit of its thousand-year apostasy, to the vision of spiritual beauty, to spiritual purity and the culture of the soul, to the nobility of human destiny, to the heavenly Jerusalem, which are offered by the Russian Orthodox Church. We are talking here about salvation, about life and death.

Now I am reminded here of the events of 200 years ago, on 11 April 1814. This was when liberating Russian Orthodox troops celebrated Easter Night on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where a field church had been set up. Having defeated Napoleon, who had taken a burned-out Moscow only some 18 months before, Tsar Alexander I stood in that great square, where the King of France had been beheaded less than a generation before, in 1792, and where the crowned Napoleon had stood in 1804 in front of a five-pointed red star, and heard thousands of Russian troops answering the priests’ ‘Christ is Risen!’ with the words ‘Truly He is Risen!’ This was the spiritual victory over the degenerate heart of atheist Europe which followed the physical victory over atheist Europe. This spiritual victory needs to be repeated in today’s atheist Europe. Otherwise geriatric Europe will go under completely, swept away by its own atheism and the tide of Islamic immigration.

Q: Why instead of subcultures and Islam do Western young people not choose Orthodoxy, when Orthodoxy is at the roots of the West, in its first millennium?

A: Firstly, because modern Western people have been cut off from those roots, their own history has been concealed from them, they can often mentally go no further back than 1945, let alone 1,000 years. And secondly because it is so difficult to find authentic Orthodoxy in Western Europe.

Q: Which countries would a Metropolia in Europe consist of?

A: Only those in Western Europe. Slovenia and Croatia already come under the Serbian Church. The Baltic States already come under the Russian Church. Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia already have their own autocephalous Churches. As for Hungary, given the fact that its first faith came in the tenth century from the East and not from Rome, then to my mind it too should one day have its own Local Church, just like Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, which also originally received their faith from the East. Even today Hungarian Catholicism, as in certain neighbouring countries, is coloured by Orthodox values and, for example, the veneration of icons.

Twenty Western European countries are left, all post-Roman Catholic or post-Protestant, and where the Russian Church, in one or both its parts, is already present. They are: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland; Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria; Portugal, Spain, France, Italy. They, together with the tiny Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino, would form the territory of this Metropolia.

A: Why can’t those countries have individual Local Churches?

Q: That is a hopelessly insular, narrow and nationalistic idea. It is the sort of thing that narrow, nationalistic ex-Anglicans dream of. Western Europe is a whole and individual countries in it are far too small to have their own Local Churches. Western Europe was the territory of a single Orthodox Patriarchate. We will never divide it. A Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe is the foundation for the restoration of the single, historic Local Church on this territory. We wish to keep that historic unity. Here in Sweden, for instance, you have two great saints, St Olaf and St Anna, and they are precisely part of the whole history of Europe, not narrow, nationalistic symbols, cut off from the rest, but linked in their cases with England and Russia

Q: What is the realistic hope for the foundation of such a Metropolia?

A: Officially today there are said to be 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox in Western Europe. That is far more than the four ancient Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem combined, more than the Georgian, Polish, Cypriot and Czechoslovak Orthodox Churches put together, let alone the 30,000-100,000 who make up the OCA. Yet the infrastructure for us is pathetic. We still do not have the new Cathedral in Paris and we really need a large, purpose-built Cathedral in central London.

Altogether in Western Europe I doubt whether there are even 200 church buildings and 200 priests for these 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox. That is scandalous; at most one church and one priest for every 35,000 people! As I have said many times before, we need a huge church-building and infrastructure programme across a network of at least 500 cities and towns in Western Europe. Today, wherever you go in Western Europe, even in small towns, the flood of immigration has been such that you will meet at least one Russian Orthodox. Provision has to be made. Let every Western European town and city of over 100,000 have its own full-time bilingual Russian Orthodox church and let there be at least chapels elsewhere, so that nobody, whatever their origin and native language, is more than 50 kilometres from their own bilingual Russian Orthodox church and centre.

Q: Who is to blame for the present situation?

A: First and foremost, we are ourselves to blame for this situation. We have to make our own Church. The Church works from the grassroots. We should never blame others for this. However, it is true that if we can first show that we are motivated, then we can attract the attention of the hierarchy. Then we can attract help from above and, in terms of our Russian Orthodox world, that means help from Moscow. Economic refugees and their children, who make up the bulk of the 7,000,000, are by definition not the wealthiest people in the world. And how are Western Europeans, already Russian Orthodox or potentially Russian Orthodox, to be integrated into the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe, if there are so few churches, so few centres of Church culture?

Q: How do you see such a Metropolia?

A: For nearly a decade now I have belonged to an informal group of Russian Orthodox priests in some major towns and cities in Western Europe. We look at Western Europe as a whole, we want to draw the Orthodox Cross over Europe. We have a love of and an attachment to the Russian Orthodox Tradition but also a knowledge of local languages and local heterodox culture. We want to create bilingual oases of a Russian Orthodox Europe, where all can feel at home.

This is the opposite of the policy of the Paris Jurisdiction, which suffers from a lack of love of and a lack of knowledge of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, but instead an attachment to local languages and local heterodox culture. However, you cannot be Orthodox and at the same time have an attachment to heterodox culture. This is not Local Orthodoxy. Local Orthodoxy is created by integration into the Orthodox Faith, not by integration into heterodox culture, which disintegrates. The latter is salt that has lost its savour. Local Orthodoxy cannot grow by being attached to heterodoxy.

Q: What does this mean in practical terms?

A: All my adult life I have fought for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, Who is a mother gathering her chicks, like Jerusalem. I see a time, though it may still be far off, when there will be a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe, whose church buildings and infrastructure will initially be financed from Russia, but whose clergy will be paid entirely locally by the faithful, thus remaining free and independent. But we need to form a grassroots Europe-wide Russian Orthodox Brotherhood or Russian Orthodox Union, blessed by our local bishops, to advance this process.

Q: You still have not answered my question: what is the realistic hope for such a Metropolia?

A: I have answered it, but here is my answer more directly. It is in a new consciousness, both here Europe-wide and in Moscow, at the grassroots and at the level of the hierarchy, a consciousness of the international calling of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here our Europe-wide unity is vital. And what is that unity based on? Our unity is based on our love for the Russian Church, just as disunity is in a lack of love for Her. We should have a patriotism for the Church, which by principle of the Incarnation spreads to every country inasmuch as that country is part of the Church.

In other words, Holy Rus is to be made global. For this we need spiritual purity, the pre-revolutionary Church purified – we must not forget that the pre-revolutionary Church had careerist traitors in Her who supported Kerensky. We must not forget that disunity is always caused by narrowness, whether sectarian or nationalist, as today in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia. Disunity is caused by the primacy of fallen, human, political concerns instead of the primacy of the Faith and the lack of a coherent Russian Orthodox world view. We need unity around the Church.

Q: Who are you grateful to for this vision of Europe-wide Russian Orthodox unity that you have?

A: Four people in particular have inspired me and to them I will always be grateful. Firstly, to the ever-memorable Archpriest Lev Lebedev, whom I first met in Krasnodar in Russia in 1976, and, despite his later illness and tragedy, was one of the finest thinkers in the Russian Church; secondly to the ever-memorable Baroness Maria Rehbinder (Cattoire) of the Paris Jurisdiction, a young woman before the Revolution, a daughter of a New Martyr and a fine Russian European, whom I first met in her little flat in Passy in Paris in 1983; thirdly to the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, born in Kiev, a Belgrade disciple of the great Metr Antony of Kiev, once a priest of the Patriarchate and whom I first met in 1986 and who ordained me. And finally, to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, whom I met in Moscow in 2012 and who strengthened in me the understanding of the need for this Metropolia. Thank you to them all.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Representative of the ROCOR Missionary Department for Western Europe,
Halland, Sweden, November 2014

Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again

This anthology of 100 essays, first published in 1995 and now with a new foreword, is at last available again from:

frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. 3rd Edition A5 495 pp.

Price: £15.00 + £2.80 p & p in the UK. Unfortunately, Air Mail to the USA is now £12.85 (surface post, which can take up to two months, is £8.00). Please make payments by Paypal button from the website: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk

From the Back Cover

Today many search for an Undivided Christendom and the traditional teachings of the Early Church, which go beyond the latter-day divisions and disputes of Roman-Catholic, Anglican and Protestant. And amid the chaos of recent years many have discovered the Orthodox Church and Her Faith, drawn from the first millennium of Christianity. In this book the author, an English Orthodox priest, looks at the authentic Orthodox Faith, beyond the historical and cultural vicissitudes surrounding it, and pinpoints its relevance to us. He writes: Orthodox Christianity is the Faith revealed to the repentant in their quest for the Holy Spirit. Should we accept it, we would thus accept the struggle for the Holy Spirit; and in so doing we would accept the struggle to build Jerusalem here, ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Foreword to the Third Edition

For we hope that the Lord will deliver Russia and the Russian people from the dread years of evil which have now lasted for 70 years. Russia can be reborn only through the repentance of the Russian people, through faith in God, through living the Divine commandments. Therefore the rebirth of the Russian people – the rebirth of personal, social and national life – must be founded on the Holy Orthodox Faith and their life must be built on this. And then once more, as of old, Russia will be Holy Rus, the House of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Prophecy of the Ever-Memorable Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Laurus (1987)

All my life I have been haunted by the European world that was lost by the consequences of the tragic events and sacrifices of August 1914, now exactly 100 years ago. Growing up with nineteenth-century grandparents and great-uncles who had fought in the First European War and with tragic maiden great-aunts, I knew that all of us had to live with those consequences. There has been no peace in the world since then, since the profound injustice of the victory so cruelly and ironically snatched from the Russian Empire in 1917 by Allied treachery and then the German treachery that made the slaying of the Russian Royal Family inevitable. And that, in turn, made the destruction of Germany in the Second European War inevitable, with Russian troops taking Vienna and Berlin. And that, in its turn, made the Cold War inevitable.

That War dragged on until 1991. Then the Slav, Romanian, Georgian and Albanian Churches all lived beneath the yoke of atheism and had virtually no free voices. As for the smaller and weaker Greek Churches, they were compromised by US control. Thus, the impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, at one time financed by Anglicanism, had come under US control in 1948, when Patriarch Maximos was deposed by the CIA with threats to his life and despatched into a generation of exile in Switzerland, uttering as he went the words, ‘The City is lost’.

Those were dark days of the betrayal of the Church and, virtually alone, the Church Outside Russia spoke on behalf of us all. For during the Cold War proud anti-Incarnational modernism and ecumenism (heresies, like sects and cults which are created by heresies, are always based on pride), in either their crass, pseudo-intellectual, humanist Protestant/Catholic form, as often in the US, or in their subtle, pseudo-spiritual, personalist Buddhist/Hindu form, as often in Europe, were everywhere. ‘Orthodox’ academic theology was then dominated by that spiritual decadence which may be called ‘captivity theology’. In its intellectualism that ‘theology’, ignorant of the Lives of the Saints, utterly failed to see that Orthodoxy is a striving for holiness, which is simply a life lived with prayer in conformity with the Tradition

This was the academic theology of ‘Orthodox’ intellectuals, who had studied either in Protestant centres (Oxford, Cambridge, Strasbourg, centres in Germany etc) or else in Roman Catholic centres (especially the Gregorian University in Rome, but also Paris, Louvain, Jesuit Fordham etc). The academics infected naturally reflected the proud cultural prejudices of those establishments where they had studied, resulting not in an Orthodox, but a ‘Halfodox’ vision of the world. An associated mixture of ecumenists, liberals and modernists, those intellectuals wished to reduce the Church to a mere religion, a theory and an institution, just like the Western denominations. This was, consciously or unconsciously, spiritual treachery.

Their ‘theology’, in fact philosophy, reflected the humanistic personalism and spiritually empty symbolism of that age. Most of those intellectuals have now died, if not, they are very elderly. The generation of disciple-imitators that succeeded them has even less conviction or talent. It is hardly surprising – modernism is incredibly old-fashioned in a post-modern world. With the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, that age of decadence seems increasingly distant. I remember at that time, and I mean nearly 40 years ago, being told by an ‘Orthodox’ academic at one of those above-mentioned universities that if I was not satisfied with their food that did not satisfy my soul, I should ‘go and live in Russia’. During the Cold War that was not possible; therefore I took the next best option, to frequent the last emigres of the first generation of the White emigration in Paris and the Church Outside Russia.

This anthology of essays was written between 1974 and 1995, precisely at that time when the Church Outside Russia was isolated, indeed virtually besieged, under attack from all sides and from inside, by the extremes of modernism and ‘traditionalism’ alike. Indeed, as I came to realize, the Church Outside Russia was then one of the few points of freedom anywhere in the Orthodox Church. Figures in it expressed words of truth similar only to those of the lone Serbian theologian St Justin of Chelije, canonized in 2010, and other figures on the Holy Mountain and in the monasteries of the Carpathians.

Rejoicing in the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in New York in 1981, when the Orthodoxy hierarchy was still paralysed in the homelands, at that time we also tried to reclaim for the Church the ancient holiness of Western Europe. We knew that all holiness can only come from the Church, as we daily confess in the Creed. Our task was to help gather together the remaining living spiritual and cultural forces of the dying West and to call it back to its roots in its ancient holiness that it had for the most part renounced. This desire is very much reflected in this book. Sadly, since that time we have seen the final death-throes of once Christian-based Western civilization, witnessing the disappearance of the old culture.

For after 1991, and with great speed, the demons that had operated in the atheist Soviet Union migrated to the atheist European Union, whose spiritual deadweight has been reinforced by the atheism of North America. Only a few years ago President Putin of the Russian Federation, made wise by the failure and defeat of atheism, warned the then Prime Minister Blair that demon-inspired atheism was literally a dead end; naturally, he was ignored, for deluded arrogance never listens to wisdom. Indeed, ever since 1988 the Church that President Putin belongs to, the multicultural and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church of God, has been reviving, re-opening or building three churches every day somewhere on the planet.

Together with it there is reviving the social, political and economic life of the Russian Federation, the Russian Lands (Rus) and even other parts of the Orthosphere. In 2007 in Moscow we witnessed the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the re-establishment of canonical communion, a long-awaited miracle of our times. Our great hope of 20-40 years ago for the messianic restoration of Holy Rus, so great that it was a belief, has been coming true through repentance. We have no illusions that we may not see our hopes for the full restoration of the Sovereignty of the Tsar realized, or, much less likely, Europe liberated from its self-imposed ideological yoke, but at least we know that we are on the way. There is much to do, very far to go, but the direction is the right one.

Nearly twenty years on now since the first edition, this book is here reprinted, a few typographical errors corrected, spelling updated, long paragraphs divided and a few minor precisions and corrections made. May this third edition of these essays be a help to all those who seek. May it guide them to the spiritual awareness of the Church and Civilization of Holy Rus and that Orthodoxy is Christianity and that all else, whatever its legacy from ancient Orthodox times, is ultimately but an ism, a distortion and a compromise. ‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith’ (1 Jn. 5, 4).

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

August 2014
St John’s Orthodox Church
Colchester, Essex, England

Towards a Russian Orthodox Brotherhood in Europe (R.O.B.E.)

Introduction

It is one thing to be a theoretical member of the Church, but it is another to practise the Faith in life. As we can see from schismatic Uniatism, which keeps many outward observances of the Church, it is possible to observe a ritual but to be spiritually separated from the Church and so degenerate. Of those who remain in the Church but want to reduce the Church to outward observances like Uniatism, it may be said that they are in a ‘pre-Uniat’ state. Indeed, in our own times, we can see from certain ideas and even practices which have entered the Church from the outside world that it is possible to be nominally or intellectually (the same thing) Orthodox, but practically to deny both Christ and the Holy Spirit in one’s heart and so in one’s life. Such temptations are schismatic because ultimately they separate from the Church, as we can see in Estonia, for instance, where a small group of Estonian Orthodox spiritually separated from their canonical Church and Her traditions. Such temptations are present everywhere, although here we are concerned with Western Europe.

The Denial of Christ

Recently a young Moldovan parishioner showed me on his iPhone pictures of an ‘Orthodox’ church (in a large city in the USA). It had no iconostasis and had frescoes which looked as though they had been painted by a child. The child had thoroughly mastered the outward technique of icon-painting but did not understand that icons are intended to make us pray, thinking that their function is purely decorative. In other words, the technique was perfect, but there was no feeling and no content, just as in Uniatism, a ritualistic or intellectual Orthodoxy. Quite naturally the parishioner asked me if the picture was of a Catholic church which was copying the Orthodox Church. I had to tell him, since I recognized the photo, that in fact it belonged to a group whose Greek Catholic (Uniat) ancestors had returned to the Church over 100 years ago, but had not yet left their Uniat mentality behind them and acquired the Orthodox spirit. He told me that although this might be ‘good for Americans’, he personally would not attend such a church if he lived in the USA. I sympathized with him.

The problem with groups which have not acquired Orthodox culture and copy heterodox culture is that pastorally they reject rooted Orthodox in favour of ethnic (in this case, American) cliques and clubs of converts. They may attract a few Non-Orthodox or Orthodox who have lost all their roots, but they do not attract Churched Orthodox. We can think of divisive convert groups in Western Europe which have made the same mistakes. Thus, in one convert chapel in England, Greek is forbidden, since the whole service ‘must be in English’. In another convert chapel of the same group, the Sunday service, the only one, has been described as ‘the Book of Common Prayer with extracts from St John Chrysostom’. In a third convert chapel of a jurisdiction in France, local Romanians are made to feel unwelcome because ‘they don’t behave like us’. And in a fourth case in the same jurisdiction there is in a large town a convert chapel, whose congregation numbers six, but over 100 ‘ethnic’ Orthodox living nearby who do not attend the chapel because ‘it doesn’t feel right’.

Such cliquish and self-serving attitudes, no ‘foreigners’ allowed, ‘go back to your own country’ (to quote the actual words of one convert) is typical of small, inward-looking groups with an ethnic Establishment superiority complex. Their pride is responsible for their jurisdictional separation from the rest of the Church. Such Anglican ethnicism is of course matched by the ethnicism of certain immigrant clergy, who categorically refuse to receive English or other people into the Church, because, I quote literally, ‘you are not dark enough’, or who tell them to ‘go away and become Anglican or Catholic’. In all these cases, the lack of desire to serve others, the lack of any missionary witness to other nationalities or ecumenist compromise, shows that such individuals fundamentally do not believe that the Orthodox Church is the Church of Christ and consider that their mission is only to those who have a certain secular passport. They have put their nationality (their worldly identity) above Christ. In other words, they deny Christ, the heavenly passport, in favour of this world.

The Denial of the Holy Spirit

In the last century there also appeared a subtle form of the denial of the Holy Spirit in a theory of ecclesiology called ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’. In origin this is a sociological reflection of the highly abnormal, uprooted conditions in which Paris Russian émigrés lived in the mid-20th century. It involves deliberate and political disincarnation and separation from their Church and State of origin through the domination of highly politicized and sectarian personalities (who, ironically, claimed to be ‘apolitical’!), without a normal episcopal presence and so without episcopal ecclesiology, without normal monastic life and so without monastic and ascetic ecclesiology. This quite cultish, personalist theory, or rather philosophy, of disincarnate spirituality was elaborated among others by the late Fr Nikolai Afanasiev. At best, such a philosophy was one-sided, but at worst, in the hands of the Protestantizing, like the late Fr Alexander Schmemann, or the politicized in Constantinople, it very rapidly became a form of Protestant congregationalism.

For the latter, extraordinarily, the centre of Church life was not repentance, which is what St John the Baptist and the whole Church Tradition calls us to, but the eucharist. However, the eucharist is not a cause, but a result, in fact a result of repentance; to invert the two in such a way is to put the cart before the horse, for there is no eucharist without first repentance (without preparation, including confession). In other words, this eucharistic ecclesiology had no ascetic sense, it was triumphalist and ‘charismatic’ – in the negative sense of self-exaltation. This Protestant/congregationalist cast of mind of the ‘we are already saved’ variety is why this philosophy was influential at the protestantizing Second Vatican Council. It is also reflected in the protestantizing, French-language liturgical books put out by a politicized lay fraternity in Paris. It is notable that the ever-memorable Fr John Romanidis rejected such a 20th century philosophy, after being influenced by it in his youth, and that most of those who still talk about it are now very elderly.

This also explains why spirituality-less modernism (like its ancestor Protestantism) rapidly descends either into boring and futile secularism and/or boring and futile moralism. The fact that moralism, which has so poisoned generations of Western people and often reduced them to amoralism and immoralism by reaction, is due to a lack of spirituality, explains why many modernists, deeply secular, are also moralists. However, although moralism can be modernistic, this does not mean that it is always left-wing; moralism can very easily descend into deep conservativism (the right-wing). And conservatism of the right is no more traditional than modernism of the left. Standing above both isms, the Tradition of the Church is instead radical, for its stands above all worldliness, whether it is left-wing and liberal or right-wing and conservative. And this we can see very clearly in the lives of such saints as St John of Shanghai, who, as a saint was obviously not a modernist, but was not at all a conservative either. This was because he was radical, that is, he belonged to the Tradition.

Conclusion

It has long been my hope, for I believe that it is long overdue, that one day we shall see a multinational Russian Orthodox Brotherhood in Europe (R.O.B.E.). If it has not been for the enslavement of Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, it would surely have come about two generations ago. Such a Brotherhood would be under Russian Orthodox episcopal supervision, uniting all Russian Orthodox of both parts of the Russian Church, of all nationalities, in other words, uniting all of us who follow the One Tradition, together with Serbs, Georgians and lovers of the Tradition from other Local Churches. Being united, we would be witnesses to the integral Faith, able to counter ethnicism (convert or other), the anti-episcopal, anti-monastic and anti-ascetic prejudices of the older generation and the schismatic Uniatizing and protestantizing modernism prevalent in certain jurisdictions. This would mean the assertion of the Incarnation and the Ascetic, the assertion of Christ and the Holy Spirit, without which a Local Church in Western Europe can never be founded.

Towards New Local Churches in the Diaspora

Introduction: God’s Will

There will never be any new Local Churches in the Diaspora, if it is not God’s will. What is manmade, therefore in some way essentially denying God and replacing Him with a human institution, crumbles and becomes a Church in name only, calling itself after some human-being or nationality, for example: Papism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, Anglicanism, Wesleyanism etc. Man proposes, but God disposes. Therefore the questions that must be answered are what we can avoid from the past and how we can prepare for God’s will to be done amongst us in the future?

Anti-Missionary Principles

The development of new Local Churches in the Diaspora has been prevented in the past by nationalism and its squabbles – by anti-missionary principles. This can be seen particularly clearly in North America, where, until soon after the Russian Revolution, all Orthodox were in one Church. This Church was the Russian Church which contained autonomous ethnic dioceses and deaneries under a Russian-appointed Bishop. Why under the Russian Church? Because it was the first present there, the biggest, had the best infrastructure and the most multinational mentality. However, it is true that since 1917 this has by no means always been the case. Today’s Russian Church, suffering in both its parts from the consequences of the Western-planned and provoked 1917 Revolution, still, even 25 years after the collapse of the direct results of that Revolution, often has infrastructure and a multinational mentality which are severely compromised.

Deviations from the Past

There have been other anti-missionary principles at work in the past of the Diaspora. Firstly, there has been the problem of simony. Certain bishops of certain nationalities have been willing to ordain unworthy candidates for money – in 1991, for example, $20,000 was the going rate in one ancient Patriarchate to become a bishop. Secondly, there has been the problem of ego trips – front room Orthodoxy, garden folly Orthodox, the one man show, the big fish in the little pond – the individual who gets himself ordained by one means or another not in order to serve other Orthodox, but to serve himself. Thirdly, there has been the problem of convert ghetto Orthodoxy, in this country ex-Anglican ghettos, ‘Anglican vicar beard competition Orthodoxy’, often with as few as 5-10 individuals with a private club mentality or in inaccessible premises. None of these deviations from the past, examples of which are scattered throughout the Western world, have been of any help to genuine Orthodox missionary work and service to the Orthodox people.

Missionary Principles

Any new Local Church to be built in the Diaspora must be built on the fullness of the Tradition, on the maximum. Nothing can be built on compromises. New Local Churches are built on monastic life and holy life – examples are Sts Cyril and Methodius, St Herman of Alaska and St Nicholas of Tokyo. Any new Local Church in the Diaspora must therefore be built on the Orthodox (and not Papal/Protestant) calendar, on vigil services, in a word on the Tradition, and not on compromises. It must be clearly understood that there are not two traditions in the Orthodox Church – there is only the One Universal Orthodox Tradition. Anything else, with modernistic practices of doing away with confession before communion, the Orthodox calendar, the iconostasis, correct priestly dress, traditional liturgical language etc, is not at all part of the Tradition, of Orthodoxy, but merely part of decadence and compromise, of Halfodoxy.

Directions for the Future

To expand Church presence, we need to observe some basic Orthodox principles. Firstly, any new church must be based on the Gospel ‘where two or three are gathered together in My Name…’. In other words, there must be no ego trips and moreover at least one of these two or three must be able to sing prayerfully and form a choir – again in order to avoid ego-tripping. Premises used must be public access and located in a central city or town so that the church there can become a Regional or at least County Church centre. Premises must also be such that they can be converted for Orthodox use, so that an Orthodox atmosphere can be established in them. Little missions should not be set up from them for many, many years, otherwise this will merely disperses efforts and energies. One should be able to process around these premises, which should have facilities, toilets, and ideally a children’s room with baby changing, parking, a hall and a kitchen. These premises (owned or, if need be initially, rented) must be one’s own – they must not be shared with, for example, an Anglican church.

Conclusion: What is a Local Church?

An ethnic church is one that aims to gather together only one nationality and in a racist way has no time for those of other nationalities – a situation that is clearly against the spirit of the Gospels. An ideological church is one that aims to gather together only in the name of a narrow ideology, often personality cultish or sectarian, and not in the name of Christ – a situation that is clearly against the spirit of the Gospels. An authentic Local Church, however, is one that is made up of many local churches that gather together all local Orthodox, regardless of nationality and background, on the basis of the uncompromised Tradition, on the basis of Orthodoxy, not on the basis of Halfodoxy.

An End to Pan-Orthodox Assemblies: Now it is Time to Start Seriously

Post 200:

The news that the Patriarchate of Antioch has withdrawn its participation in the so-called ‘Pan-Orthodox Episcopal Assemblies’ (to be translated into our plain English as ‘Inter-Orthodox Bishops’ Meetings’) is not surprising. Fed up with heavy-handed Greek Imperialism, it has quit. It is ironic since certain Antiochian converts, quite unrealistically, saw them three or four years ago as panaceas (admittedly, to largely non-existent illnesses). This event was all too predictable given the way in which the Patriarchate of Constantinople took over everything in the so-called ‘assemblies’, ‘presiding’ and issuing decrees, even giving the meetings the name ‘Pan-Orthodox’ – ancient, and not so ancient, code for ‘All-Greek’. Perhaps the only surprise is that it was Antioch that went first.

The withdrawal is hardly surprising, since the other five groups – Bulgarians, Russians (both parts) and Serbs (and probably the Romanians and the Georgians) felt much the same. As one commentator in the USA put it, in its recent polite letter to the North and Central American group the Russian Church (ROCOR) took a fly swatter to the problem of Constantinople’s philetism, whereas Antioch took a hammer. Probably all (except Constantinople) are now relieved, as the abscess has been pierced. However, this does not mean that the process is over. All it means is that the primitive and crude attempt of US-backed Hellenist Imperialism to take over the Orthodox Diaspora is over. Now that that is out of the way, we can make a serious attempt to organise the Diaspora on an Orthodox, and not a papist, basis.

What have we learned? Firstly, we have learned that no Local Church should attempt to take over the Diaspora. Imperialism, however much it may be dressed up in pseudo-theological, in fact philosophical, terms is not part of the Church. That may seem obvious – but to some it appears to be an astounding revelation. Secondly, we would suggest that all Inter-Orthodox meetings be presided by a different Church in turn. Thirdly, we would suggest that the bishops and committees meet only once a year – otherwise they risk turning into mere talking shops and empty photo-opportunities.

Finally, we would suggest that the bishops should encourage the grassroots to work together; Church unity will not be founded top-down but bottom up, as the very word ‘found’ suggests. This, like the rest of what we have said, is nothing more than the obvious, obvious to even the least of our parishioners. Unfortunately, ideology never takes into account the least of our parishioners or the obvious. Therefore, we suggest that all ideologies be thrown out of the window and we start again, with Inter-Orthodox Bishops’ Meetings, and forget the highfalutin ‘Episcopal Assemblies’ of the past and all their philosophical jargon on ‘being and communion’ and talk instead about the life in Christ.

A Council?

How well we recall the letter of Fr (now St) Justin (Popovich) of 7 May 1977, ‘On the Summoning of a ‘Great Council’ of the Orthodox Church’. In fact, we still have translations of it in Russian, French and English. In it he stated that there could be no Council of the Orthodox Church because most of the Orthodox Churches were not free and those that were, (he cited the Russian Church Outside Russia, the Church in America and the Japanese Orthodox Church), were not being invited. Instead, the seats were to be filled by a host of titular bishops from the Patriarch of Constantinople and KGB-vetted bishops from, as it was then called, the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’. The Saint’s plea was heard, perhaps not in the courts of men, but by the angels above, and the Council never took place. Now again, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is pushing forward for yet another ‘Pre-Conciliar Meeting’ in March this year and for the Council to take place next year.

It seems to us that although the situation of the Local Churches in Eastern Europe has radically changed since the fall of atheistic Communism, since when freedom has come to them, in other respects little has changed. The Patriarchate of Constantinople has, if anything, even more become a colony of the US Department of State. The latter has misused it ever since they installed their own US Patriarch in 1948 and exiled the legitimate Patriarch Maximos to Switzerland (who said on his ejection ‘The City is lost’) in order to undermine the Russian Orthodox Church by setting up schisms, for example, in France, Finland, Estonia, England and the Ukraine. In no way can there be a formal meeting of the Orthodox Churches, while the Patriarch of Constantinople and its allies are enslaved by the CIA (and also the Turkish government).

The US Administration appears to think that it can deal with the Orthodox Churches as it dealt with the Vatican, which accepted US Protestantisation in its Second Council fifty years ago and then saw imposed on it an anti-Communist Polish Pope for the 1980s Reaganite Crusade against Communism. Significantly, Roman Catholic sources, like the papist AsiaNews, are pushing Constantinople to arrange this so-called Council so that it will become a modernist Orthodox (therefore pseudo-Orthodox) Second Vatican Council. This would make the Orthodox Church into a mere Uniat department of the Vatican and, in that way, of the US Department of State. This is not going to happen. (In any case a meeting of bishops is not a Council; to become a Council the meeting must first be ‘received’ by clergy, monks and people; paradoxically, Church Orthodox Christians are a lot more democratic than the Non-Church Protestants and Roman Catholics, and always have been).

Thus, the attempts by Constantinople to make the recently set up Regional Inter-Orthodox (called ‘Pan-Orthodox’ by enemies of the Tradition) Assemblies of Bishops in the Diaspora into bridgeheads for their conquest of the Diaspora have failed miserably. Thus, for North and Central America, Archbishop Kyrill of San Francisco has eloquently voiced the opposition of all free Orthodox to such attempts (http://www.synod.com/synod/eng2014/ 20140115_ensynodletterarchbpdemetrios.html). Indeed, in some places the Assemblies have virtually closed ‘for lack of things to talk about’. Much more than this, the agenda proposed for a future Inter-Orthodox Meeting (illogically called a ‘Council’) is looking increasingly tired, a leftover washed up from 1960s liberalism, denounced at the time, even more so now. Let us remind ourselves what the ten items on the agenda are – or were: The Orthodox diaspora; The granting of autocephaly; The granting of autonomy; The diptychs; The Church calendar; Marriage; Fasting; Relations with Heterodox; Ecumenism; Peace, Brotherhood and Freedom. (See our article of several years ago: http://orthodoxengland. org.uk/panorth.htm).

The last six questions are absurd, because the canons are clear and of course unchangeable; the tenth is in particular a piece of masonic nonsense from the 1960s. As regards the fourth issue, the diptychs, if people want to argue about what place they should have on an irrelevant, artificial and anachronistic list, then we say they should first read Mark 10, 37-45. In fact, only the first three issues are discussable – and there will be no agreement on them because they have already been discussed, and with Constantinople in the pocket of the US State Department, a former senior representative of which (Brzezinski) has already declared that the Russian Orthodox Church is its greatest enemy, what point is there in discussing them?

Thirty-three years ago a saint prophetically wrote: ‘Should this Council, God forbid, actually come to pass, only one sort of result can be expected from it: schisms, heresies and the loss of many souls. Considering the question from the point of view of the apostolic, patristic and historical experience of the Church, such a Council will, instead of healing, open only up new wounds in the body of the Church and inflict on Her new difficulties and new misfortunes’. We will not contradict the voice of a Saint.

The Future of Orthodoxy in Western Europe

Russian Orthodox in Western Europe often suffer from the lack of infrastructure and disorganisation of their Church. For example, many parishes suffer because they have no local bishop who speaks the local language, visits his parishes and understands local difficulties, including financial ones. One part of this problem goes back to a time when the KGB (which then controlled Patriarchal churches outside Russia) used Western Europe (and the USA) as a place of exile. In order to counter isolation which results from the lack of local episcopal pastoral care (inter-parish meetings, pastoral conferences etc), parishes have themselves to build up contacts with other parishes. Isolation, parochialism and provincialism are dealt with by being pro-active in this matter.

On account of the lack of understanding local structures and a slow and bureaucratic centralism that can take its place, a lot of patience is needed. Sometimes central authority only reacts if it thinks that it might be losing its parishes. For example the Patriarchate in Moscow was warned for several years about the situation in the Sourozh Diocese in London, but did not react in time or adequately. As a result there was schism. On the other hand, it is disturbing that some believe the Western media’s anti-Russian propaganda that portrays the Patriarchate as compromised with or even feudally controlled by the anti-oligarch Russian State, which is ironically portrayed as mafia-bound, oligarch-ridden and thoroughly corrupt. Why are such absurd things believed?

They are believed because of Western European pride, the idea that in Western Europe Orthodoxy can be done differently, ‘better’, without reference to the Church and the Tradition. This is ‘Schmemannism’, ‘Orthodoxy Lite’, ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, ‘Halfodoxy’, as in parts of Finland, the Paris Jurisdiction, other parishes of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and also of Antioch (and in parts of the OCA). This is in fact a form of Uniatism, a simplified, homogenised and neutered rite without Orthodox content. It means abbreviated services, no confession before communion, Protestant-style clergy, no iconostases, intercommunion etc. This is the ‘legacy’ of the emigres of the Paris School and their disciples who follow their path. It is the path to schism and apostasy.

This School is the path of illusion, the tediously dry and Spiritless rationalism that does not feed the soul, but only the unspiritual mind, the imagination and sometimes the emotions. This ideology (and it is an ideology) is extremely Russophobic. This is because the Russian Church, which has above all others kept the Tradition intact and uncompromised, is the only thing that stands in the way of ‘Orthodoxy Lite’. Thus, Russophobia exists as self-justification for apostasy. The Paris School, liberal, ecumenical, academic, proud, loves itself and its personality cults, imagining that it loves Christ and His Church. There is enormous spiritual danger in this delusion. Real Orthodox mission in Western Europe is the way of integrity and faithfulness to Orthodoxy, but in the local language.

Обращение к священноначалию Русской Православной Церкви

Открытое письмо

«Передайте всем, что зло, которое в мире, будет еще сильнее, но не зло победит, а Любовь.»

Царь Николай II

С опозданием в несколько лет из-за трудностей с планированием, в новом году мы узнали о том, что на весну 2014 года намечена закладка фундамента нового русского православного кафедрального собора в Париже. В связи с этим мы хотели бы обратиться к Отделу Внешних Церковных Связей Русской Православной Церкви в Москве. Также надеемся, что в поддержку этого письма, возможно, будет составлено прошение. Это обращение посвящено тому, в честь кого будет освящен будущий кафедральный собор с прикрепленными к нему семинарией и духовно-культурным комплексом.

Вспомним, что новый собор будет построен в сердце Парижа – культурной столицы Западной Европы – и недалеко от самого красивого моста в Париже, который построен и назван в честь императора Александра III. Вспомним также, что Париж расположен в историческом сердце русской эмиграции в Западной Европе, и у нас есть все основания считать, что этот комплекс с семинарией станет центром будущей Русской Православной Митрополии в Европе, даже если оставшиеся храмы “Парижской юрисдикции” не пожелают возвращаться в лоно матери-церкви и к традициям Святой Руси. Новая митрополия будет включать в себя приходы Русской Православной Церкви за Границей, храмы в Каннах, Ментоне, Женеве, Лозанне, Брюсселе, в Лондоне и западной Германии, а также храмы, все еще зависимые от Московского Патриархата в Ницце, Мадриде, восточной Германии и других местах.

Но в честь кого будет освящен собор? В Париже уже есть православные храмы, освященные в честь таких известных святых, как Александр Невский и Сергий Радонежский. Некоторые могут подумать о преподобном Серафиме Саровском – еще более известном во всем мире святом и проповеднике покаяния. Но и в его честь в Париже уже освящен храм. Возможно, святому Серафиму следует посвятить одну из часовен нового собора. Другие могут подумать о самых известных святых Парижа – Дионисии и Женевьеве Парижских (последняя переписывалась в V веке с преподобным Симеоном Столпником). Однако оба угодника жили очень давно; хотя они великие святые, но не наши современники, и в их честь, вероятно, можно было бы освятить часовню при семинарии.

Мы считаем, что собор является настолько значимым проектом, что его следовало бы освятить в честь более чем одного русского православного святого. И это должны быть не местночтимые святые, а всемирно значимые и почитаемые всей церковью угодники. Наконец, мы предлагаем, чтобы новый собор был освящен в честь святых, живших в недавнее время, скорее всего – в честь угодников, пострадавших в сильнейшие за всю историю гонения, породившие новомучеников и исповедников. Нам думается, что наиболее очевидными, или, точнее, единственными претендентами здесь являются святые Царственные Страстотерпцы. Только они соответствуют вышеупомянутым критериям. Император Николай II, сын императора Александра III, уже увековеченного в Париже, был поистине международной фигурой, говорил на русском, английском, французском, немецком и датском языках, имел два высших образования – военное и юридическое, а царица Александра была внучкой королевы Виктории и воспитывалась в Гессене в Германии.

Было бы наиболее подобающим, если бы центр православной митрополии в Западной Европе был увенчан собором, освященным в честь царской семьи (которой неправославная Западная Европа не показала ничего, кроме “измены, трусости и обмана”). И для почти дехристианизированной Западной Европы, ставшей такой в результате «измены, трусости и обмана», семья из семи человек, все члены которой молились, держались вместе и стали святыми, является, несомненно, идеальным примером – иконой семьи, в которой мы сегодня нуждаемся. Весьма вероятно, что, ко времени постройки нового собора исполнится сто лет со дня героического и жертвенного мученичества Царственных Страстотерпцев в 1918 году. Ведь именно пример этой семьи вдохновил английского учителя их детей присоединиться к Русской Православной Церкви и стать архимандритом Николаем Гиббсом, а французского учителя, Пьера Жильяра, – написать такие слова:

“Царь и царица думали, что умирают за Россию, но они умирали за все человечество”.

Освящение нового собора в честь Царской Семьи может стать призывом Западной Европе к покаянию, отказу от всей лжи XX века и возвращению назад с нынешнего рокового пути, по которому она пошла в XXI веке.

A Plea to the Russian Orthodox Church Authorities

An Open Letter

Tell everyone that the evil that is in the world will grow even stronger, but that it is not evil that will triumph, but love’,

Tsar Nicholas II

After several years of delay caused by planning difficulties, news has reached us in this New Year that the foundation stone of the new Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Paris is to be laid in spring 2014. It is in this connection that we wish to make a plea to the External Relations Department of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and also hope that a petition might even be drawn up in support of this letter. This plea concerns the dedication of the future Cathedral with the seminary and spiritual and cultural complex attached to it.

Let us recall that the new Cathedral is to be built in the heart of Paris, the cultural capital of Western Europe, and not far from the most beautiful bridge in Paris which was constructed and named in honour of Tsar Alexander III. Let us recall that Paris is at the heart of the historic Russian emigration in Western Europe and if the complex is to be built with its seminary, there is every reason to think that it will become the centre of the future Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe (ROME), even if the remaining churches of the ‘Paris Jurisdiction’ do not wish to return to the Mother-Church and the Tradition of Holy Russia. Thus, such a new Metropolia will be based on the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, with churches in Cannes, Menton, Geneva, Lausanne, Brussels, London and in western Germany, as well as churches still dependent on the Church inside Russia, in Nice, Madrid, eastern Germany and elsewhere.

But who will this Cathedral be dedicated to? There are already dedications in Paris to such obvious saints as St Alexander Nevsky and St Sergius of Radonezh. Some may think of St Seraphim of Sarov, a better known saint internationally and preacher of repentance. But he too already has a church dedicated to him in Paris. Perhaps a side chapel in the new Cathedral could be dedicated to him. Others may think of the foremost saints of Paris, St Denis or St Genevieve of Paris, who in the 5th century corresponded with St Simeon the Stylite. However, these both lived long ago; although they are great saints, they are not contemporary – perhaps the chapel of the seminary could be dedicated to them.

It is our suggestion that the Cathedral is such an important project that it should be dedicated to more than one figure of Russian Orthodox holiness. Moreover, these figures should be not only locally venerated, but of international and universal significance and veneration. Finally, we suggest that the new Cathedral should be dedicated to saints who lived in recent times, most obviously figures from the greatest wave of persecution in history, which brought forth the New Martyrs and Confessors. It seems to us that the most obvious, indeed only obvious, figures are the Royal Martyrs. Only they meet all the above criteria. Tsar Nicholas, the son of Tsar Alexander III, already commemorated in Paris, was a highly international figure, speaking Russian, English, French, German and Danish, with a double education in both military affairs and law and Tsarina Alexandra was a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria and brought up in Hesse in Germany.

How appropriate that the Cathedral at the centre of the Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe might be crowned with a Cathedral dedicated to a family to whom Non-Orthodox Western Europe, allied with the Tsar’s Russia or not, showed only ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’. And in the almost totally deChristianised Western Europe that resulted from treachery, cowardice and deceit, surely a family of seven who prayed together, stayed together and so became saints together, is the ideal example, a literal family icon, that we need today. Moreover, it is highly likely that by the time the new Cathedral is built, it will be the centenary of their heroic and sacrificial martyrdom of 1918. After all, it was their example that inspired their English tutor to join the Russian Orthodox Church and become Fr Nicholas Gibbes and their French tutor, Pierre Gilliard, to write of them:

‘The Tsar and the Tsarina thought that they were dying for Russia. In fact, they died for all mankind’.

To dedicate the new Cathedral to the Royal Martyrs would be a call to Western Europe to repent and renounce all the lies of the twentieth century and to turn back from the present fatal course which it has undertaken in the twenty-first century.

Orthodox England

events 'blog