Category Archives: Turkey

On President Erdogan and the Church of the Holy Wisdom

I have been asked by a US correspondent about our attitude to President Erdogan of Turkey, who has recently spoken about the massacre of Muslims by a Fascist fanatic in New Zealand and about turning Agia Sofia into a mosque again. Now, we have in our parish three Turkish Orthodox parishioners and soon there will be a fourth. Interestingly, they all have the same attitude to President Erdogan, the neo-Ottoman ‘Sultan of Turkey’: they consider that he is a nationalist dictator and find him very unpleasant and distasteful.

In this way, he is perhaps similar to many another tyrannical Middle Eastern ruler. We think immediately of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, who behead people by the dozens every year, keep most of the people dirt-poor and the rich ultra-rich, and have carried out a huge genocide (with enthusiastic Western backing) against the people of the Yemen. Not to mention the fact that they tortured and cut into little pieces a Saudi journalist in their consulate in Istanbul last October. Apparently this barbaric behaviour is quite agreeable to the Saudis and their Western sponsors and guardians. In other words, there is always worse than Erdogan, but, true, there could be better, only be careful – you may end up with worse. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine are outstanding examples. Thus, in Turkey, the US attempt to assassinate President Erdogan in July 2016 would surely have led to incredible strife and thousands of deaths.

Of course, there are Orthodox who strongly dislike President Erdogan, not because they are Turkish, but because they hate his threat that the Church of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, for long a tourist site, may yet again become a mosque. However, this is a false problem. The real problem is that the Orthodox have shown themselves unworthy of having an Empire and a Capital. Until the Russians repent for their betrayal in 1917, there will be no Orthodox Emperor, and until the Greeks repent for their betrayal of Christianity which led to 1453, they will never have any power, and until they repent for their latest crimes in the Ukraine in 2019, Agia Sofia will become a mosque. The same is true for apostate Greek Cypriots, the northern third of whose island was occupied 45 years ago by Turkey, with full Western backing, and true for the Serbs in Kosovo, who forgot their Faith and were outpopulated by Albanians.

You always lose your territory when you show yourselves unworthy of having it. You bring it on yourself. Territory does not belong to us, it belongs to God and is only on loan to us for as long as we remain faithful to Him. Thus, Belgium was devastated in the First European War because of its crimes in Central Africa (millions of Africans mutilated or murdered), Britain lost its Empire because it swapped the Bible for the exploitation of natural resources and the same can be said for umpteen other empires throughout history, ancient and modern, from China to Babylon, from the Hindus to the Egyptians, from Timbuktu to Machu Picchu, from the Mayas to Zimbabwe, from France to Austro-Hungary. Power hangs by a thread; it is an illusion to think we have any power, we only have what is granted by God. The USA will lose its power for the same reasons. Spiritual and moral decadence is always followed by catastrophic collapse.

When Greeks or Russians begin converting Turkey to Christ, instead of hiding in their ethnic corners, then Istanbul will become Constantinople again and the Church of the Holy Wisdom will echo to praise for Christ in Turkish from the Turkish Orthodox faithful. But until then, expect only worse and worse. The fruit of non-repentance and self-justification is humiliation. It is the only thing that can bring humility to the unrepentant. In other words, there will be no Church of the Holy Wisdom until you have shown Holy Wisdom.

 

THE DEATH RATTLE OF GLOBALISM?

The neocon globalists, led in the USA by the defeated Clintons and Obama, in the EU by the discredited Hollande (popularity rating – 4%) and the reviled Merkel (as for Cameron, who has heard of him?), are showing all the signs of being bad losers. Having lost the war in Aleppo, they are now turning to desperate measures and not just propaganda lies about hacking or Russian ‘threats’. Having failed last summer in the CIA-run Gulenist coup to overthrow and murder the Turkish President Erdogan, they have now had the Russian ambassador, Andrey Karlov, murdered, a terrorist shooting him in the back in typically cowardly fashion.

Designed to spoil Russian-Turkish cooperation, it will not. This situation is not the same as last year, when a Russian pilot was killed by the Gulenist network. After the murder of the ambassador by a Gulenist, the Turkish side sent its apologies to the Russian people and government immediately. Vladimir Putin directly blamed the CIA-backed network of Islamists that were behind the murder and sympathized with the anti-NATO President Erdogan. On the same day there was a terrorist attack in Germany, organized by ISIS. We are witnessing the death throes of anti-Christian globalism, forced out of the White House by popular consent.

The US organizer will pay a huge price for this assassination. Russia and Turkey will work together in Syria and create peace in the cradle of Christendom, the Middle East. The Russo-Turkish alliance is deepened, as is the acceleration of the Turkish withdrawal from NATO, creating a new Central Asian alliance, together with Iran. Our enemies – the globalists – fear this more than anything else. Nothing will stop progress to the creation of a multi-polar, democratic world order against the globalists and their pathetic, Neo-Cold War, bad loser propaganda. The regiments of CIA hackers always accuse their enemies of doing what they do.

Having thrown off the Western-imposed, Soviet yoke, Russia’s agricultural exports are now returning to those before 1917, the exports bringing in more than its arms sales: Russia is independent. Obama, who supported the terrorists (‘resistance-fighters’) in the Middle East, especially against the democratically-elected and very popular Assad government (‘regime’ in CIA mediaspeak) has lost. The neocons’ meddling has lost the USA not only Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt and Syria, but now also Turkey. Eurasia will now be united under Chinese and Russian leadership. A diplomat assassinated: a new Empire is born.

The Failed US Coup d’Etat in Turkey has Further Weakened Patriarch Bartholomew

Rumours on the the internet suggest that the Patriarchate of Constantinople is in a fragile state. It has been suggested that the situation of Patriarch Bartholomew has been compromised by his close relations with the US political elite, several Greek-American billionaires and the CIA. The intermediary between them all is the Greek-American priest Alexander Karlutsos, who is in charge of financing the Patriarchate from the US. In this way the US political elite strongly influences the Patriarch’s policies. (This would explain the strange (from an Orthodox viewpoint) and divisive policies it tried to promote at the recent failed Orthodox meeting in Crete).

It has also been suggested that the Patriarch entertained close relations with Fethullah Gülen, the Turkish preacher who lives in Pennsylvania and who directed the recent failed coup d’etat with help from the US base in Turkey, which has now transferred its nuclear weapons from there to Romania. Gülen was helped to flee to the US by the same Fr Alexander Karlutsos with CIA assistance and it is widely believed that the whole coup was an attempt by the US to make Gülen Turkish President, after assassinating President Erdogan. The Patriarch met Gülen on several occasions and even called him ‘my friend’. Many observers noted that Patriarch Bartholomew quit Turkey on the eve of the coup and went to Switzerland, which they did not see as a coincidence.

Some say that the Patriarch’s fate now directly depends on how Ankara views the use they can make of the Patriarch’s circle of contacts in the US. However, the Patriarch’s influence in the Orthodox world is fairly weak, as was demonstrated by the failure of the Crete meeting. It has been said: ‘We saw that Patriarch Bartholomew is unable to unite the Orthodox world. Apart from this it has become obvious that his influence does not even touch half (sic – in fact not even 80%) of Orthodox Christians. The reasons for this are his authoritarian style, his stubbornness and enmity towards the Russian Orthodox Church’.

It is difficult to know whether such rumours are true, but they come from multiple sources.

On the Curse of Ancestral Sins and Cultural Healing

Introduction: On Healing from the Sins of our Ancestors

Sins always have consequences. Thus, once we have realized that we have sinned, attaining the consciousness of our sinfulness, we have to repent for the sins and make up for, that is, to make reparation for, their consequences. Only thus can we be healed. But what can we say of the consequences of the sins of our ancestors? Although we did not commit the sins, we still have to live with their consequences, which have become an inherent part of the reflexes and attitudes of the culture in which we live. Until we have made an act of cultural repentance and reparation for the misdeeds of our ancestors, our repentance and reparation are not complete, we accept a stained, even cursed, culture, agreeing to live amid spiritual impurity, and the impure consequences of the original sins continue. In other words, we must seek cultural repentance and reparation if we are to heal the consequences of ancestral sins.

Let us take one concrete and most tragic example from European life, the centenary of which has just been recalled, the Battle of the Somme, with its one million victims. Why did that War, of which that Battle was one of the bloodiest events, take place in Northern France and Southern Belgium (Flanders)? Why were millions of Belgians, Germans, Frenchmen and British troops sent to their deaths by their political and military elites in such a cruel, futile and utterly inhuman way, so much so that the shattered bodies of hundreds of thousands of them could never even be found? Because those were the very countries were cursed by the most terrible exploitation and massacres of native peoples in colonies. Thus, just tiny Belgium stood accused of maiming and murdering between one million and ten million Africans in the Belgian Congo. Sins carried out far away still lie like a curse close to home.

Let us take more recent examples. Why did the terrorist massacre of innocents of 2001 occur precisely in the USA on 9/11 that year? Because the USA is where modern Islamist terrorism was invented and it has never been repented for and made up for, 9/11 being the feast of the Beheading of the innocent St John the Baptist by the evil Herod. Why did the demonic terrorist atrocity in Nice occur precisely in France on 15 July this year? Because France is where terror was invented, on 14 July 1789, and it has never been repented for and made up for, but tragically it is actually justified and celebrated – in France every 14 July. Why was Patriarch Bartholomew, forewarned by Washington, forced to flee Turkey on the eve of the recent failed US-organized coup? Because he has still not repented for and made up for the heretical meeting he oversaw in Crete last month and so has lost his spiritual protection.

Cultural Repentance and Reparation Among Lapsed Russian Orthodox

Let us take other, longer-lasting examples. ‘Only repentance will save Russia’. Like the call of St John the Baptist, such was the call of St John of Kronstadt and many others before the so-called Russian ‘Revolution’ of 1917. After it, this was also the unanimous call of countless others, both inside and outside the former Russian Empire, not least of St John of Shanghai. Otherwise, they said, the bloodletting would go on. Indeed, it was only 25 years after the Revolution, with the unspeakable suffering of the Second World War and its 27 mainly civilian million dead, that repentance began, but even today reparation for the impurity is not complete there, as we see below. For he who says repentance for sins also means reparation for, that is, making up for, the consequences of the sins, changing the culture in which people live. Until the consequences of sins are made up for in all aspects of life, repentance is not complete.

In the ex-Soviet context of the twentieth and twenty-first century, repentance has precisely meant people stripping themselves of a whole cultural layer of spiritual impurity. This was the layer of atheism imposed by force by the Soviet-style Westernization of Russia since 1917, which assimilated the spiritual impurity that had gone before it. Thus, in the 25 years since the fall of the Soviet Union and the coming of religious freedom, we have seen massive numbers of ex-Soviet citizens being baptized, that is, mass repentance. Over 100 million lives have begun to change – but not fully. For the Churching of these masses has been harder and slower, as Soviet cultural reflexes, the ABC of alcoholism (drug-taking), abortion (child murder) and corruption (systematic lying), still like a curse. Though several millions have been Churched in Orthodoxy so far, cultural reparation and so healing is only beginning.

In another Russian context, that of the deep-rooted political prejudices of the anti-Russian emigration, repentance would mean descendants of émigrés stripping themselves of two layers of spiritual impurity. The first is the layer imposed by modern life in the West where they have been born and lived all their lives. The second, much deeper, is the cultural layer of impurity, that of the Russophobic Westernization inherited and continued from their emigre ancestors who absorbed that impurity inside Russia well before the Revolution which they greeted. Two layers makes the task of repentance and reparation twice as hard and this is why the politicized descendants of émigrés have still not returned to the Russian Church. Indeed, there are those among them who actually justify their lack of return to the Church, their lack of cultural repentance and reparation, which lies like a self-imposed curse on them.

Cultural Repentance and Reparation Among Western People

Similarly, for Western people to repent and make reparation for their ancestors’ abandonment of the Orthodox Church means not just words, but reparation, that is, actually returning to their ancestral Faith and cleansing their culture of spiritual impurity. And that means not just repentance for personal sins that have blinded them to the Faith in the past, but also making up for the consequences of those sins which infect the culture that they have inherited. We can sum this up by saying that there must first be personal repentance and reparation and then cultural repentance and reparation. In other words, returning to the Orthodox Faith means forming and obtaining a new view of the world and everything around us and living according to it. Only if enough people follow this path, will a whole culture be purified and healed of its deformations, lies and hypocrisy and will the world be transfigured.

In an English context, returning to the Church means stripping ourselves of no fewer than three layers of impurity. The first is the Secularist culture imposed by the last 50 years of modern life in the West where people have lived all their lives, the second is that imposed by some 475 years of Protestant culture before that, the third that imposed by some 475 years of Roman Catholic culture before that. (In a Roman Catholic context, returning to the Church means losing only two layers, but the second is a double layer – as it is 950 years ‘thick’). Such repentance and reparation mean rejecting the inherent spiritual impurities in English culture, all its alien reflexes and mentalities. Just as someone cannot be baptised if he has not first emptied himself of all that is unworthy of baptism, so also a culture cannot be baptised if it has not first emptied itself of all that is unworthy of baptism.

Let us take concrete examples of the three layers that have overlaid Orthodox culture in England. The first layer is the secularism which says that faith is a barely tolerable private delusion or psychological disease that has no objective reality – modern relativist amoralism. The next layer is the secularism which says that faith is a set of private interpretations and personal moral rules that have no consequences in social, political and economic life, which are ruled only by utilitarian self-interest – ruthless Imperialism, the right to theft because ‘we’ are superior. The final layer is the secularism which says that faith is dependent on external obedience to and dependence on an individual. It is only underneath all these three layers that we can find True Faith, which is made up of the revelations of the Holy Spirit, made continually to the community of all the saints, who together are called the Church.

Conclusion: Consequences in the Last Times

There are no fewer than three levels of cultural repentance and reparation here, three layers of cultural attachment to falsehood which people have to rid themselves off to return to the Church and so be healed. And threefold cultural purification is the only repentance and reparation possible for the thousand year curse, for it is precisely on the basis of these three layers of error that Antichrist will come. Firstly, he will ban all ‘private delusion’ (faith in the real God), secondly, he will enforce consumerist self-interest (the law of the jungle) and thirdly, he will ensure that all are obedient to and dependent on his external authority. In other words, the three layers of impurity that deform modern culture create the conditions for Antichrist to come, frighteningly, the ultimate cultural curse. But we should not despair – he will come only if we do not repent for lapsing from our ancestral Orthodox Faith by returning to it.

Prophetic Times

As for the lion whom you saw rousing up out of the forest and roaring and speaking to the eagle and reproving him for his unrighteousness and all his words that you have heard, this is the Anointed One, Whom the Most High has kept until the end of the days against them and their impieties…He will denounce them for their ungodliness and their wickedness and will cast up before them their contemptuous dealings…He will deliver in mercy the remnant of My people, those who have been preserved within My borders, and He will make them joyful until the end comes, the Day of Judgement…

(3 Esdras 12, 31-32 and 34 – the last book of the Russian Orthodox Old Testament; in the Protestant RSV this appears as 2 Esdras)

The shooting down of an anti-terrorist Russian aeroplane by Turkey’s anti-Kurdish, NATO-run forces has implications far beyond the obvious one – that it was preventing IS from selling cheap oil to Turkey’s corrupt businessmen-politicians and therefore had to be destroyed.

First of all, it reminds us that Western secularism has always allied itself with militant Islam against Holy Rus. It was thus in the thirteenth century when St Alexander Nevsky fought simultaneously against the Teutonic Knights, who stabbed Christian Russia in the back while it was already fighting the Mongol Tartars from the East. It was thus in the nineteenth century when Imperial Britain fought against the liberation of the Balkan Christians by Russia, and allied itself with the Muslim Ottoman oppressors.

It was thus in 1915 when German’s ally, Turkey, massacred a million Armenians, who had been protected by Russia alone. It was thus in the 1970s when the US and the UK allowed Turkey to invade and occupy northern Cyprus, wrecking its Christian shrines. It was thus in the 1980s when the CIA created, funded, trained and armed Al-Qaida in Afghanistan and in the 1990s when its Western-funded and protected offshoots fought Serbia in the Balkans and Russia in the Caucasus. It is thus today in Libya and Syria. Western secularism and Islamic fundamentalism are simply the two sides of the selfsame coin.

Secondly, it reminds us of the prophecies of the saints, of St Cosmas of Aitolia and, more recently, of St Paisius the Athonite (+ 1994), who foresaw war between Russia and Turkey, the Russian liberation of Constantinople from its physical enemies and also from internal enemies who, though Orthodox in name, are in fact apostates from the Faith, being rather paid agents of the Washington-Vatican axis. These prophecies speak of bloodshed, of a third of Turks converted to Orthodoxy, a third being driven away to Mesopotamia and a third dying.

Thirdly, it reminds us that Eden, Paradise, was ‘in the east’, somewhere in Mesopotamia, and that anti-Eden, anti-Paradise, is also in the east, in today’s blood-drenched Iraqi Mesopotamia. It reminds us that the war that is going on in western Syria, created by the West, is dangerously close to the place in occupied Palestine called Armageddon and that the war that is continuing there is a war against those who hate Christ and His teachings, including those who are planning to rebuild the Temple on Zion, ready for the enthronement of their master Antichrist.

The consequences are far-reaching. The Church meeting that the US-guided Phanariots want for next year may now not happen. With the meeting already threatened by the Phanariot rejection of the Carpatho-Russian Metropolitan Rostislav in Czechoslovakia, how now can Russian delegates enter Turkey? Does this mean that the Russian Church will instead hold a real Council for all free Orthodox in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, as we suggested in our speech in Moscow in 2007? The situation in the Ukraine, on the northern shores of the Black Sea just across from Turkey is also concerned. The CIA-installed and funded junta in Kiev looks ever more discredited, as it welcomes the illegal Turkish aggression, but it is also fragile and bankrupt. How can the weak Western world still support the junta when isolated Western Europe is faced by mass Muslim invasion and the isolated USA by the joint might of Russia, China and India?

Today the minority of Orthodox, for so long undecided and ambivalent on the fringes of the Church, as well as all others who call themselves Christians, are being asked to face reality and decide whom they support: the pro-Islamic Western elite and its bandit consumerism, or resurgent Holy Rus, the Christian Empire. No more so in the Paris Jurisdiction, whose Archbishop Job has just been removed. Those on the fringes can hesitate no longer. Are they Halfodox apostates from Orthodox Christianity, or are they patriots of the worldwide Holy Rus that is, by the grace of God, being born?

Today is the time of St John the Baptist. We are being called on to prepare the way for the enthronement of the new Emperor of the Christian Empire of Rus. He will be, by the grace and anointing of the Church, the only protector of Christians from those who are preparing the coming of Antichrist on Zion, even arranging in Paris the largest gathering of world leaders in history. Our destiny is to fight in the mystical battle against spiritual impurity and slander.

Last week I prayed in Odessa as a pilgrim at the grave of the humble Elder Jonah (+ 2012). Are his prophecies regarding the Ukraine and all Rus in 2016 to be realized? All depends on our repentance. All the fragments of Holy Rus, ‘the footstool of the Kingdom of Heaven’, in the words of St John of Kronstadt, are to be guarded, propagated and gathered together before the end. All Orthodox of all nationalities who know what is prophesied in the holy book of Esdras (3 Esdras 12, 30-34 and 3 Esdras 15, 8-63), the enthronement of the last Christian Emperor before the end, are to repent and show the way.

Sad News and Hopeful News

The Eurozone is bankrupt, so much so that it now has to go to the inflationary last resort of printing a trillion euros (a process known by the euphemism of ‘quantitative easing’), just like the bankrupted US and the UK before it. And yet many colonized countries in the feudal Eurozone, like France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, have already been ravaged by the debt caused by printing money before, debt which they will never pay off. Much of the eastern and southern Eurozone, although much less in debt than the US and the UK which will never pay off their debt either, has become a region of inevitable emigration for the young. It has reverted to poverty beneath the austerity programmes imposed on it by Berlin, which is at the top of the feudal Fourth Reich pyramid in Europe.

In countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland especially, young people are being forced to flee abroad to seek work as wage-slaves doing jobs that local people no longer want to do. Then their governments can declare that ‘unemployment is falling’ (only because the population is falling) and the young in question can send money home to their elderly parents, thus propping up the governments. In France, governed by a supposedly Socialist regime, almost every day they pick up the frozen corpses of those who died in the streets the night before (15,000 last winter). Even in the apparently prospering UK, as in the US, tens of thousands of people are living off foodbanks in a situation unthinkable only a few years ago.

Meanwhile, in the luxury resort of Davos, outside the ravaged Eurozone, it is said that 1700 private jets have flown in many of the world’s billionaires, including the arms-dealer Poroshenko, to talk about the state of the world. Elsewhere in Europe a war between the US-financed separatist Galician junta and the Ukrainian people rages. Thousands are already dead. American arms are found by the liberators of the Ukrainian people at Donetsk Airport. Ukrainian children are dying in bombardments at the hands of that neo-Nazi puppet Poroshenko and other murderous and anti-Christian oligarchs, most of them based abroad. They are keenly supported by the grandchildren of US and Canadian Galician Nazis who guarded Auschwitz, liberated 70 years ago by heroic Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians.

The US has launched anti-Russian economic sanctions and a currency war, a declaration of economic war, against Russia because the people of the Crimea massively and democratically voted to join Russia. Now, at US behest, Saudi Arabia is pumping so much oil that the oil price has fallen by over half in the last few months. The objective is to bankrupt oil-rich countries perceived by wealthy neocons in Washington as enemies – countries like Russia, but also Venezuela and Iran. The objective behind this is ‘regime-change’ – manipulating and setting up pro-Washington puppet regimes in those countries, whose natural resources can then be stripped, or, if not, simply creating chaos and mayhem in them, as has so successfully been done in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Yemen, the Sudan, Nigeria etc.

The first problem with all this is that both US-imposed sanctions and cheapened oil are more likely to bankrupt EU vassal states and even US oil corporations first. The second problem is that the US elite seems to have learned nothing from the fate of the puppet governments in the banana republics it has always created in Latin America, as well as in South Vietnam fifty years ago and in Iraq and Afghanistan ten years ago. It has forgotten that as one corrupt oligarch after another fell there, Washington had to send ever more of its young men to kill and then die there in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’, but in reality all for nothing. The result of it all is that a now bankrupt (by $17 trillion) USA is reducing itself to becoming no more than a regional power, with an economy already second to that of China.

The First World War, whose inglorious centenaries of the slaughter of the youth of Europe are being so noisily remembered just now, is commonly considered a war of futile deaths. And yet what could be more futile than the deaths of the millions of men, women and children who are dying today at the hands of pseudo-Muslim psychopaths and criminals, trained, armed and financed by the anti-Muslim West, its secret agencies and its allies? Has the West not understood that the terrorism of the pseudo-Muslim fanatics it has created in Syria and elsewhere will rebound on it again and again? In the globalized world that the West has created, it is no longer insulated from its own crimes. The secularist and atheist West has made its own worst enemies and dug its own grave for itself in its self-imposed old age.

Fortunately, outside the insular-minded West, healthy forces are gathering, not just in Russia, but in Iran, China, India, Brazil, in several Muslim countries including Turkey, as well as on the disillusioned fringes of the EU and Europe itself, in Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Greece, Serbia, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia. And those forces are all saying the same thing – enough. Thus, ignored by the enslaved Western media which has no free speech, in the Chechen capital Grozny, 800,000 Muslims and Russian Orthodox Christians march hand in hand against the Western blasphemies of spoilt infantiles. Here is hope for the future, that spiritually healthy forces worldwide will yet unite against the Great Western Apostasy, which Satan has so cunningly prepared these last thousand years. All is not yet lost.

Woe unto You

Pope Francis has visited Turkey. This is surprising; Turkey is a country where historically he has never had a flock or any jurisdiction. Since he did not go there in order to visit the handful of Catholic diplomats and foreigners who do live there, his visit was clearly politically and not spiritually motivated. Despite the pious spin put on the visit by his PR advisors and parroted by the subservient, ethnocentric Western media, we can guess what may really have been behind it.

Since the Pope’s recent visit to the Strasbourg ‘Parliament’ of the Eurokommisar puppets and his recent contacts with US politicians, we suspect that that his visit was organized by his American masters. Otherwise he would have gone to Ferguson, where there are real, resident Catholics and the services of a pastor are more urgently needed. We believe that the Papal visit to Turkey had two aims:

1. To help ensure that the Turkish government, in the past pro-EU and pro-US, does not fall to Islamism. This seems possible given its imperialistic support for anti-Syrian terrorism and now its refusal to attack Islamic State.

2. To negotiate the further Uniatization of the Greek Orthodox remnants in Istanbul for their absorption into the Vatican meat-grinder.

This second aim is indicated by last week’s visit to the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul by Joe Biden, who gave his instructions for the Papal visit. For despite the canons of the Orthodox Church which forbid political appointees, since 1948 the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul has been run by Washington.

Here the world’s powerbrokers are barking up the wrong tree. Patriarch Bartholomew is not ‘the spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians’, as reported by the ignorant Western media. In reality, there are 215 million Orthodox Christians, 164 million of them in the Russian Orthodox Church, and Patriarch Bartholomew is only the much-contested representative of a small minority of 3 million Greek Orthodox, essentially outside Greece and Cyprus, mainly in the USA.

Despite the fantasies of the apparently uneducated mandarins of the US State Department, who imagine Patriarch Bartholomew as a political pawn able to snatch the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the multinational Russian Church, so helping to undermine Her, the tiny Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul is largely irrelevant in today’s world and has been since 1453.

As for the first aim, the Pope’s visit has surely done more harm than good. The Pope spoke against Islamist violence (which has in part been carried out by thousands of European-born Muslims and has largely been financed by US allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. We too utterly condemn all violence, including Islamist. And that is why we, unlike the Pope, also utterly condemn Western violence. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya never invaded the West. The West invaded them and slaughtered hundreds of thousands, if not millions. In Iraq’s case, the West invaded twice and is now meddling there for the third time. This is the same hypocrisy as in the Crimea. For the West also invaded the Crimea twice, once in 1854, urged on by the then Pope, again in 1941, and then tried to meddle there in 2014, planning to set up a NATO base in Sebastopol with which to threaten Russia.

The Pope’s speech is all the stranger since he is the representative of the very organization which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Muslims (and Orthodox Christians) in the blood-soaked Crusades. In other words, the Pope represents the grandfather of Western violence against Muslims (and also against the Orthodox Church). We can therefore think of no-one less appropriate to call on Islamists to cease their violence than this ‘ecumenical’ Pope, who during his visit honoured Kemal Ataturk – responsible in part for the deaths of some two million Greek and Armenian Christians.

Only when Western and Western-supplied bombs, shells and bullets have stopped tearing apart the bodies of innocent Muslim men, women and children all over the Middle East, will fanatical Islamists stop slaughtering Non-Islamists in revenge. ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity (Matt. 23, 27-28).

On Being in Communion and Ecumenism

Question:

Thank you dear father for the quick response.

What do you think, is it time to leave communion with Constantinople because of the heresy of ecumenism? This is my personal opinion, but I admit I may be wrong… I am looking for answers to my questions about the consequences of communion with bishops who consider ecumenism as a path to the union of all Non-Orthodox with Orthodox.
Look at Patriarch Bartholomew’s meeting with a New York rabbi:

http://www.patriarchate.org/documents/2009-parkeastsynagogue
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN5TFb9fzvo (Preview)

…But the Jews still do not confess Christ!

I have also been a little bit confused when I saw a video with the then Metropolitan Kyrill in Canberra at the WCC in 1991:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTq7u0CEj6U (Preview)

“The World Council of Churches is the cradle of the One Church of the future… it is our common home”, he said, “and we bear a special responsibility for its destiny.”

Could you help me to understand these things?

X

Answer:

Dear X,

I now understand your confusion. There are two points to make here:

1. We do not leave a whole Patriarchate just because a few individuals in it speak heresy. Can you imagine falling out of communion with the fathers of Mt Athos and the many excellent and faithful laypeople and clergy in Constantinople just because of a few heretical, politically-appointed individuals? Fr Paisios on Mt Athos stayed in communion with that Patriarchate. So should we too.

Forgive me, here I think you do not understand what the phrase ‘to be in communion with’ means. What does it mean to be in communion? For example, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is in communion with ROCOR, but I have never celebrated on the new calendar and no heretic has ever celebrated in my Church. This is because when new calendar priests come to our churches to concelebrate, they immediately have to change to the old calendar (though the new calendar is not a heresy, just a mistake) and if ever a heretic came to our church, I would not invite him to celebrate. This is something I practise, since we know a nearby priest who is a heretic, giving communion to heterodox. (Of course he is not part of the Russian Church (or of Constantinople) and is totally isolated from all other Orthodox – basically because he has excommunicated himself). To be in communion does not mean that we concelebrate with heretics and they concelebrate with us. To be in communion means that we are in communion with other Orthodox, who can be found in abundance in every Local Church, and that they are in communion with us. In any case, heretical individuals do not come to our churches and we do not go to their churches to concelebrate and they do not invite us. So in fact those individuals have already cut themselves off from communion with us and the rest of the Church. They have already excommunicated themselves.

2. 22 years ago, in 1991, the hierarchy of the Patriarchal part of the Russian Church was still under the control of the Communist Party which had imposed ecumenism on it in the 1960s. Its hierarchy was therefore not in communion with the free ROCOR. It is true that the then Metr Kyrill did make this statement about the WCC in Canberra. Since then, however, he has become free and he has renounced this heretical teaching several times, for example, in 2000 when he accepted the statement called the Social Concept of the Church at the first free Council of the Patriarchal Church, again in, I think, 2004, when the Patriarchal hierarchy repented publicly before ROCOR for falling under the influence of Communism and making invalid political statements, and again in 2008 when Metr Kyrill openly called Non-Orthodox ‘heretics’ at a speech at the Trinity St Sergius Lavra. The Patriarchal administration today publicly rejects all prayers with heretics, in tune with the masses of bishops, priests and people, and Patriarch Kyrill today is a free man who is openly Orthodox, without any of the old compromises of the past.

In other words, we must allow for repentance. Since God allows for repentance, so must we, especially since we too are imperfect sinners, needing repentance ourselves. It is no good quoting statements from 22 years ago made by people who were then slaves of an atheist State, in order to try and incriminate them, if they have repented since then. And this is exactly the case. We do not live in the past, but in the present and we look forward to the future.

Similarly, it is useless quoting Patriarch Bartholomew, since he is the slave of the Turkish State (an American puppet) and of the American State Department. This took over the Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1948, deposing the last legitimate Patriarch, Patr Maximos, flying in their American puppet on the US Presidential jet to replace him, and funding it ever since. Simply, Patr Bartholomew is not free, so of course he makes heretical statements as a political appointee. What he actually believes we do not know, he is not free – and that is why we pray for him, just as we pray for all, including all our enemies. Indeed, this is how we recognise sects – they refuse to pray for the people they see as their enemies, which is against the Gospel. After all we all pray for the government authorities which rule the country where we live, whether we agree with them or not, for they may be atheist, homosexual or Muslim. This is because we want God to influence them so that they avoid making mistakes and acting against the Faith.

May God keep you in His Church!

Fr Andrew

Syria: A Watershed

It is now clear that the brutal war in Syria has become a watershed in twenty-first century history. 2013 is becoming an acid test, just like the events of 1913 in twentieth-century history. Thus, the elites of some countries have adopted a most hostile view towards the Syrian government and supported the terrorists; others, however, have supported the government and denied the terrorists. The same is true of all countries and institutions, from South Africa to the Vatican, from China to NATO, from Sweden to the Establishment BBC. More relevantly to us, the leaderships of various Local Orthodox Churches have also had to define their attitudes towards Syria and the merciless war there.

For example, the Arab-speaking Antiochian Orthodox Church is now drawing ever closer to the Russian Orthodox Church as a result of the Syrian crisis. On the other hand, there is the deafening silence of the US-backed Patriarchate of Constantinople – like the city of Antioch, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is in Turkey, the last remnant of the Ottoman Empire, and so is not free. Even more shocking are the anti-Christian and Russophobic criticisms of Russia by members of the immature OCA group is North America. However, unlike these, most Local Orthodox Churches are now realising that they have only one true friend – the Russian Church. They are leaning towards us and away from their pro-Western regimes.

As for the two parts of the Russian Church, the small Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the enormous Church Inside Russia (which we may here call ROCIR) are also drawing together. We have come a long way from our reconciliation of 2007. Since 2007 ROCOR has drawn closer to the Church Inside Russia, losing its politicised, Russophobic elements, whereas ROCIR in turn has been losing its old Soviet tinges. The two parts have been coming together, recognising how much we have in common. The same is true of individuals. Thus, one notable personality inside Russia, previously a pro-Western critic of the Tradition of his Church, has intelligently made a 180 degree turn and now fully supports his own Church.

It is indeed time to come together. A great question is now facing all the Local Orthodox Churches and, for that matter, all conscious Orthodox: whose side are we on? Previously, it was possible to dither and hesitate, to put off. Previously, it was possible to ‘be open’ and not take sides. But the opportunity for indecision is now rapidly coming to an end. The fact is that all who have not yet decided will have to make a decision – and soon. The Western elites have opted for the suicidal devaluation of marriage and at the same time support for Islamic terrorism. What do we do? Are we on the side of the Russian Church and Jerusalem – or are we on the side of the Western elites and Sodom?