Category Archives: The Future

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What phenomena?

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

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

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Which are these injustices?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Why have they stopped?

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

Q: So there are no more converts?

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

Q: How are people being converted today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Which are?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bright Monday 2014

Euroatlantic Aggression Against the Unity of Holy Rus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The West Further Isolates Itself: Russia Faces its Eastern Destiny

US global influence outside the club of the world’s seven most insolvent nations – the now irrelevant G7 – has declined dramatically in the last few months. Firstly, there was the Western threat to bomb Syria, which failed when it was proved that the poison gas attack in Damascus had been carried out by Western-backed terrorists. Secondly, there were the bullying Western threats against the democratic and bloodless decision of Crimeans to return to Russia after the frightening Neo-Nazi coup d’etat in Kiev, which has so frightened so many other Ukrainians. Russia had already warned the tyrannical West several times that sanctions against the self-determination of the Crimea would be counterproductive and now three geopolitical shifts are afoot.

Firstly, with the United States and much of the US-controlled European Union rejecting Russia, it is turning east for business, contracts and alliances. The US-staged and funded (5 billion dollars) coup d’etat in the Ukraine has already brought Russia and China together, encouraging bilateral trade and in the future possibly marginalising the dollar. With China refusing to vote against Russia over the Crimea at the UN (it has Taiwan in mind) and suing the bankrupt Ukraine for $3 billion for a loan repayment, the Chief Economist of Russia’s largest bank has stated that ‘China’s yuan may become the third reserve currency in the future’. If such a joint, commodity-backed reserve currency bypasses the dollar, Russia will become independent of Western financial markets.

While Europe seeks alternative sources of energy, in case Russia stops gas exports to it (the imminent rise in gas prices to the Ukraine by 40% is of great concern), Russia is preparing to announce a huge natural gas supply deal with China that is apparently close after years of negotiations. If it can be signed when President Putin visits China in May, he will be able to hold it up to show that global power has shifted eastwards and that he does not even need the West for exports, so binding Russia and China in an axis. It should be noted that China has already overtaken Germany as Russia’s biggest buyer of crude oil thanks to oil supplies via the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline and another crossing Kazakhstan.

Secondly, as if pushing Russia into the embrace of the world’s most populous nation was not enough, there is also the second most populated country in the world, India. The Russian government has taken the time to thank it too for its understanding over the Crimea – saying that India had shown restraint and objectivity. President Putin has called the Indian Prime Minister to discuss the crisis, suggesting that there is room for Russia’s ties with traditionally non-aligned India to flourish. Russian moves to regain the Crimea were seen very favourably by the Indian Establishment, which suffered enough from British colonialism and has little time for Western bullying and patronising.

Thirdly, the neo-conservative oligarchy that governs the Western world has also managed to undermine the European Union’s once good relations with the Russian Federation. Since, as they see it, Russia stands in the way of their New World Order hegemony and so has to be destroyed, if the Eurozone has to be destroyed in the process, then that too can be done, as Victoria Nuland has so ineloquently put it. Relations between the European Union and the US are, to say the least, cool, apart from with the UK government, which alone has always played the role of poodle to the US. The elite that runs the European Union has never been so unpopular with the peoples it dictates to and it risks being rejected in the May elections.

It should be noted that China and India are the two civilisations which have always resisted Westernisation and its Frankish Catholic/Protestant filioque ethos. If China and India should draw close to Russia, it may be that Russian Orthodoxy will at last become free to play its destined role in both those countries, bringing many souls to Christ. Having in its quest for global hegemony attempted to destroy Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the neocon elite has in the Ukraine now declared war on the Russian Orthodox world, where it has no power to appoint masonic patriarchs, as elsewhere. In so doing, it has further isolated itself from the Church of God and is setting its Sodom against Jerusalem. That is to play with volcanic fire. Frankly, the Western elite seems to have been so blinded by its hubris that all it is doing now is re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Reconstruction Begins (1914-2014)

1914 – 1939 – 1964 – 1989 – 2014. The hundred-year nightmare of four generations of decivilisation is coming to an end. The generational change is becoming apparent and the cycle of historical injustices is being broken. True, we are now witnessing only the first timid signs of this transformation, but there is the promise of much more to come. After the recent expression of the free choice of the people of the Crimea, we are now witnesses to a historic moment throughout the Russian Federation and indeed throughout the Eurasian Union. The attempt to westernise, that is, to secularise, Christian Russia by violence, that which began 100 years ago in 1914 by dragging the then Russian Empire into the contagion of a decivilising Western imperialistic war, has failed.

The attempt to destroy the millennial underlying belief system which held together the East Slav and other peoples of the Russian Empire had begun with the influx of Western materialism among the upper classes long before 1914. What was new in 1914 was the spread of Western materialist ideology in a most extreme form. First, from 1914 a foreign invasion (as in 1812 and 1854) led to weakness. However, this time the weakness became so great that in 1917, just as the Russian Empire was on the brink of victory, it led to the overthrow of the legitimate government by upper-class traitors, orchestrated from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg (just as the recent overthrow of the legitimate government in the Ukraine has been orchestrated from the US Embassy in Kiev). lmmediately, after a good many deaths, this ‘bloodless’ revolution took the legitimate ruler captive and pressure was put on the Church to compromise and accept the coup d’etat.

This first coup d’etat was followed some six months later by the seizure of power from these upper-class incompetents and traitors. This second coup d’etat was operated by a group of extreme and violent materialists, the brainwashed heirs of Voltaire, Darwin and Nietzsche, imported into Russia through and by Germany in a train (not sealed, as the myth would have it). lmmediately, the Church, which had always supplied the belief-system of the Russian Lands, came under bloody and unheard of persecution and the former ruler and his family were slaughtered. The materialists abolished the Russian Empire and founded the Soviet Union. There followed a generation of the most violent persecution, sweeping away millions of innocent lives, including 600 bishops, nearly 200,000 priests, monks and nuns and millions of faithful Christians. Mass shootings, artificial famine in Russia and the Ukraine to enforce collectivisation (on the model of the ‘Enclosures’ in England and the ‘Clearances’ in Scotland), torture chambers and concentration camps were the rule of the day. The Western world, birthplace of the ideology behind this holocaust, was mainly silent and eagerly traded with the new country.

This generation of violence ended in 1941, when the contagion that had yet again started in Western Europe, this time in 1939, also spread to the Soviet Union with yet another invasion, the fourth bout of anti-Russian Western imperialism in the five generations since 1812. On the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands, expansionist Nazi Germany invaded the former Russian Empire, causing 27 million mainly civilian victims, the greatest holocaust and genocide known to the history of humanity. However, it was also this holocaust that began to bring the new rulers of the Soviet Union to their senses. lt was a very slow and extremely painful process that lasted two generations and although direct persecution of the Church more or less ceased, indirect persecution continued most viciously. However, during that period, most stopped believing in atheism – when they had believed in it at all – and even their atheist rulers began to realise that their ideology was bankrupt.

It was in 1989, exactly two generations after the Second European War of 1939, that the signs of imminent collapse became obvious. This culminated in 1991, exactly two generations after the most recent Western invasion of the Soviet Union, that the atheist regime collapsed and the country fell apart. The West was triumphant and now, having divided, it tried to rule through its present ideology. So there began that disastrous period when Western materialism, now in its liberal consumerist form of individualist egoism, spread anarchically into the newly divided countries of the old Soviet Union. The spiritual and so moral decivilisation of the West took over. There was a decade of shame, when capitalist oligarchs (the old nomenklatura, the new aristocracy) stole the public assets and the poor were created. ABCDE – alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs and emigration – prevailed. Many of the best left, many of the worst seized assets and power. Only in recent years have we begun to see light, culminating now in the freedom and return home of the Crimea.

Four generations, one hundred years, since the attempt to destroy the Russian Orthodox world began in 1914, its geographical reunion has started. Christianity, in its original form and not in the apostate and compromised forms of the second millennium, is rising up against the whole tide of atheist secularism that seized power in Saint Petersburg in 1917 and in Kiev in 2014. lf those who are apostates and those who are compromised do not wish to join this movement, they are free not to do so. Thus, if the Roman Catholics of former Poland, now the far west of the Ukraine, wish to leave the Ukraine for the Poland of the secularist and bankrupt EU, let them do so, taking their Galicia with them. But let them leave the rest of the Ukraine, the other 80%, alone. As regards the rest of the smaller and weaker Orthodox Christian world in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it can now look to the Russian Orthodox Church to lead it away from the mess of pottage of the European Union and the USA, back to Orthodox Christian roots and the free and uncompromised calendar and practices of the Orthodox Tradition in the coming Inter-Orthodox Council. The Restoration, Reconstitution and Reconstruction of the world that was lost in 1914 are in the air. Our vision is clear.

The Victory of Martyrdom and the Victory of Confessordom

In the 20th century the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia won a great victory against Western materialism in its Communist form, a victory won mainly through martyrdom. With 600 martyred bishops, 200,000 martyred priests, monks and nuns and millions of martyred laypeople, its sacrifices were an immense example to the whole world, as long as that world wished to see it and not be blinded by its cultural prejudices causing it to hate the Church of God.

At the same time, living in outward freedom, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia won a great victory against Western materialism in its secularist form, a victory won mainly through confessordom. With figures like Metropolitans Antony, Anastasy, Philaret and Laurus, Archbishops Averky, Antony of Geneva, Tikhon, John and Antony of San Francisco, and a host of faithful priests, monks, nuns and laypeople, it resisted the ways of the Western secularist world, remaining faithful to the best of the Tsar’s Russia.

At one point, during the decadence of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the Church Outside Russia was indeed virtually alone in speaking on behalf of authentic Orthodoxy and combatting the modernist and ecumenist compromises of new calendarism, while the Church inside Russia was paralysed, a hostage of the Soviet atheist regime. The Church Outside Russia opposed Frankish-style ‘Orthodox’ ‘theology’, which fills the brain with mere academic theories, but does nothing to nourish the heart, and the attempts to create a Western Establishment Halfodoxy, in fact an anti-Orthodoxy, instead of real Orthodoxy.

The victory of the Church Outside Russia is apparent in that the now free Church inside Russia is speaking with the same voice and spirit as the Church Outside Russia. Ecumenists, immoral bishops, personality cultists, syncretists who wish to merge Hinduism with Orthodoxy in ashrams, are all of the past. Today the old decadent modernism and ecumenism, so prevalent in the Patriarchate of Constantinople for example only a few years ago, is dying out, its remaining representatives mostly in their 80s.

This double victory of both parts of the Russian Orthodox Church is apparent in the forthcoming Inter-Orthodox Council to be held perhaps in 2016. (The 2015 date prematurely announced was always unrealistic, given the amount of work there is to do in preparation). This Council was unthinkable, as St Justin of Chelije pointed out in the 1970s, as long as Eastern Europe suffered under Communist persecution and the Greek Churches were chattels of the CIA. If the Patriarchate of Constantinople can be persuaded to accept the autocephaly of the Churches of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and of America, and if the Patriarchate of Jerusalem can renounce its imperialist ambitions in Qatar, then a Council as early as 2016 is still possible.

With the Patriarchate of Constantinople now having accepted the Orthodox principle of consensus, as against the papist system of majority voting, the Local Orthodox Churches together will have to prepare an agenda, as the old one was long ago hopelessly discredited. It is true that because this Council is to be held in Constantinople, where resources are very limited, only about a third of the 800 or so Orthodox bishops will be able to meet. However, it may be that after this initial Council there will come another and more significant Council, which could be held for example in Russia, where there is the infrastructure to hold a Council of 800 and more bishops.

However, it is good that this Council is to be held. The heterodox world will learn something. It will help to put an end to the decadent drift in the smaller and spiritually weaker new calendar Local Churches and could also end US and EU meddling in Orthodox Church life. This could also put an end to the cultural isolationism and nationalism of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the other new calendar Local Churches. It was, after all, the cultural isolationism of Western Europe that brought it into the Great Schism in the 11th century, when it replaced God by Western man with its filioque heresy.

Then the Western world cut itself off from the Church of Christ and the Holy Spirit and propelled itself forward into fallen humanisation. It entered the ever deepening and tragic ideology of its filioquist civilisation and its ensuing inevitable secularism and atheism. If the new calendar Churches can be brought back to the Orthodox calendar and its ascetic and liturgical ethos, this will be a mighty example for the heterodox world. Perhaps the Council, gathered together in unity, could even speak prophetic words to the contemporary world, like St John the Baptist before the First Coming – repent for your sins before the Second Coming.

Victory in Presov – but the War Continues

The enthronement in Rusin Presov in Slovakia on 9 February of Archbishop Rostislav (Hont) as the new Metropolitan of the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia marks a victory for Orthodox consciousness against the modernist, US-dictated policies of the present regime of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The failure by the Phanar to subjugate this Local Church with its 300 parishes, founded by the Russian Orthodox Church on 23 November 1951, is another defeat for the ageing episcopate of Constantinople and its unOrthodox, American policies.

The former head of this Local Church, the totally unreliable Metropolitan Christopher (Pulets), who seemed to have no firm bearings in either Church life or his personal life, was rejected in April 2013 for his compromises with Constantinople. Constantinople’s 87-year old candidate, the embittered, half-Serb Archbishop Symeon, was outvoted by the three young members of the Czech episcopate. The cause of Orthodoxy was much helped by Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of the Russian Orthodox Church. On 9 December 2013 he outwitted the two Greek Metropolitans, sent by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to outvote, slander and discredit the three Czech bishops, when interfering Greek bishops have no legitimate vote, and so take over and colonise the Local Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.

Of course, this victory has to be set in the context of the wider anti-Orthodox movements of the US/EU-instigated and -subsidised rioting in Kiev, the attempt by Brussels to divide and rule the Serbian Orthodox Church, the US military threats against the Syrian government and the Schadenfreude attempts by the Western media to discredit the success of the Sochi Olympics. Only today the US-loathed but truly Orthodox Metropolitan of Montenegro, Metropolitan Amphilochiy, has called on the so easily bribed and venal politicians of Montenegro to stop ‘worshipping the golden calf of Brussels’. The victory also has to be set against today’s announcement by the aggressively anti-Orthodox new papacy in Rome that it is setting up a Uniat Exarchate in the Russian Crimea.

All these events come against the proposed March meeting in Constantinople – during the first week of Lent! – of the heads of the fourteen Local Orthodox Churches and the increasingly desperate attempts by the ageing Patriarchate of Constantinople to hold a US-dictated ‘Inter-Orthodox Conference’ in 2015. (Two Patriarchs have already said that they will not attend the March meeting and it is rapidly descending into a Pan-Hellenic club meeting). It seems unlikely that the free Orthodox Churches, uncompromised by Turkish politics, Greek philetism and US foreign politics and subsidies, will yield to Phanariot papist threats that their tiny Church is ‘without equals’.

Led by the Russian Orthodox Church. which has already recently had to endure Phanariot-inspired and US and EU-backed schisms in Estonia and England, as well as threats to Church unity in the western Ukraine and even in Russia, increasingly led by the dissident and semi-renovationist Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev, the free Local Churches are unlikely to accept the politically-inspired claims of the Phanar to be an Eastern Papacy.

For long the Russian Orthodox administrative services in Moscow have concentrated on diplomacy and openness to others. With all the above events, it is now realising that its truest and closest friends are precisely those who have long warned them of too open an approach to ecumenism, especially the Russian Orthodox patriots in the worldwide Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. It is typical that the enthronement of Metropolitan Rostislav was attended only by the Patriarchate of Antioch, freed over 100 years ago from Greek colonial tutelage by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Polish Orthodox Church.

It is clear that there is now a bloc of free Local Churches which will resist any US-orchestrated claims by the Phanar to papist hegemony over the Orthosphere. With the coming completion of the international Orthodox centre at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, the time is coming when the Russian Orthodox Church, multinational and multilingual, will return to assume its natural and obvious leadership of the Orthodox world.

Notes on the Restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church

Introduction

At this present time of Church restoration, our Russian Orthodox consciousness and ambitions are clear – our aim is not the restoration of the Church to what it was in 1917. That is not good enough, or else there will be another Revolution. Our aim is more than historical restoration, it is also to make better. What specifically do we need to see?

1. A Patriarchate

Already in 1905 the future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II proposed the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate after a sorrowful 200 year interval. Sadly, those who had grown used to the old uncanonical system refused his offer – they were not yet ready for restoration and preferred the bittersweet captivity of the Protestant system of Oberprocurators and Synodal government. Nevertheless, in 1918 the pro-Patriarchate forces, long led by Metropolitan Antony of Kiev, were triumphant. However, this restoration was reversed by Soviet atheism and even after its second restoration during the Second World War, it made little difference, as the militantly atheist Soviet religious affairs bureaucrats dealt with the Church in even worse ways than the worst masonic oberprocurators of the eighteenth century. After the tragic Soviet period, today it is clear that the restoration of the Patriarchate is permanent.

2. Freedom

The freedom and independence of the contemporary Patriarchate from the Russian Federation State, subject to the whims and fashions of democracy and party politics, and from other successor States, must continue as it is in today’s post-Soviet times. None must fear any State interference. This principle is all the more important inasmuch as the Patriarchate is by nature and title multinational, representing not merely the Russian Federation, but the whole of Rus and its canonical territories, covering most of the former Russian Empire, as well as Japan and China, as well as shared territories of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia – altogether 62 different nationalities. The Divino-human Church must everywhere resist subjection to the whims of westernising or other States and plainly show her freedom to preach the Gospel of Christ and not to become some mere State institution for moralism.

3. Financial Independence

Next comes the thorny question of Church finance. Before the Revolution clergy often lived in poverty and the Church was often subjected to the whims of wealthy merchants, the equivalent of modern businessmen and ‘sponsors’. Here contemporary States have a role to play. Churches have to be rebuilt by the successor States to the Soviet State which destroyed them. Successors to those responsible for destruction have moral obligations and here there is a long way to go even to return to pre-Revolutionary numbers of Church buildings. Once this task has been carried out, there are questions concerning clergy and choir finance. It is not good enough to allow clergy to live in poverty and force them to work in secular jobs and to rely on choir directors who are never free during the week, meaning that all weekday services have to be sung by priests. There must be financial security.

4. Education

The question of clergy education is connected with the previous problem, as we saw both before the Revolution and with certain erroneous ordinations of the post-Soviet 1990s. If the Church cannot pay her clergy a living wage, it will find talent going elsewhere. Thus, many study theology, but do not make use of their knowledge as clergy, for they can find better pay and much better conditions elsewhere. Some may be shocked at this, but it is only realistic; inasmuch as parish clergy are married and have children, you cannot torment them even more by depriving their wives and children of sustenance. As regards the nature of clergy education, it must be of due and moral level. Otherwise Church life may be reduced to ritualism. To reduce the Church to external ritualism may be an easy way out, but it is an error and even a heresy, which turns away the faithful who look for inner content.

5. Church Culture: Music, Iconography, Furnishings, Art and Architecture

For two centuries before the Revolution Church music was dominated either by Italianate concert-type professional singing, inaccessible to the faithful, or else by solo singing for lack of choirs. At the same time iconography was also dominated by Roman Catholic imagery of a realistic and humanistic style which expressed nothing of Orthodox iconography. The quality of vestments, at times over-ornate and excessively heavy, and Church furnishings also suffered. On the other hand, just before the Revolution there was a revival of traditional art and architecture. It is to be hoped that traditional forms will continue to revive and that the bad taste of certain ‘sponsors’, in love with gold, can be overcome, in such a way that available funds can be used not to build a few over-elaborate or luxurious churches, but many more functional churches, albeit simpler and more modest in form.

Conclusion

Restoration does not mean the blind repetition of mistakes. Authentic restoration means a return to the best models of the past. The restoration of the free, independent, educated, worldwide Patriarchate of Rus, multinational and multilingual, the protector of the other Local Churches, and a model of Church culture and practices, is our aim.

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.

The Gathering of the Nations

Fear not, for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west.

Isaiah 43, 5

What is astonishing to the still loyal and uncompromised Orthodox heart and mind is not that the Western world lovingly cherishes its illogical prejudice that the Russian Orthodox Church is wild, backward and lacking in culture, as it so clearly expressed in local media coverage of the 2006 Sourozh schism. What is astonishing is rather that the Western world lovingly cherishes Antichrist and unstintingly and at every turn consistently advances his cause. For his primary aim is the destruction of the integrity of the Orthodox Church, a cause already advanced by the venality of some in many smaller Local Churches outside the canonical territory of Rus, and which he is desperately trying to advance inside that territory, especially on its outer fringes, using as his tools the madcap schemes of his Western and Westernised dupes.

What the Western world does not understand here is that the downfall of Orthodoxy would lead automatically to the last stage of its own spiritual and so cultural suicide, followed by the eradication of all Christian Faith universally. This is because the Western world, like the rest of the world, is wholly dependent on the rays of light that shine, as if from the Sun, from the Orthodox Church, the One and Only Church, the One and Only Spiritual Sun.

The Western world has long been enslaved to Antichrist, worst of all, without even noticing it. This is the most perilous of states because it indicates total self-delusion. This is the self-delusion of him who says ‘the devil does not exist’, so proving not only that the devil does exist, but also that he is his main servant. The destruction of Russian Orthodoxy, attempted, but by not attained by the Western world from 1917 on, would mean that the forces engulfing it would then engulf the Western world and the rest. Russian Orthodoxy sees the fate of the Western world in its latest foolish outburst of short-sighted self-destructiveness, called consumerism, and knows that thus it dooms itself to destruction – unless it repents before the end, so redeeming itself from its repeated sinful attempts to destroy Sovereign and Imperial Rus since 1917.

If this repentance is weighty enough, then there is still even the chance before the end of gathering together the remnants of all the nations, Orthodox, heterodox and even pagan, and bringing them under the spiritual reign of a restored Sovereign and Imperial Rus. If not, then we will be forced to take refuge, fleeing ‘into the mountains’ from the floods of iniquity and the tides of destruction, our last hope remaining only in the Second Coming.

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.