As we enter the forty days of Lent, we recall that for forty years now we have consciously and actively been fighting for the truths of the Russian Orthodox Church from inside the Church. Forty years ago the adversary of the Church was the atheist materialism from the West which had conquered the Russian elite by 1917 and through it also penetrated parts of the Russian emigration. Since then the atheist regime in the former Russian Empire has fallen, since parts of that elite have repented and much more of the emigration is free of compromise. Today, the adversary is the same atheist materialism, but it has now altogether penetrated the Western (and Westernized) elite worldwide. With its global consumerism this atheism is now trying to destroy the whole Orthodox Church. It is trying to westernize Orthodox Christians, making us too into zombies who have only one desire – to live for our stomachs, comforts and animal passions, thus enslaving us to the prince of this world.

This means in particular the destruction of the last bastion of Orthodox Christianity – the Russian Orthodox Church. The ideologues and leaders of the West like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carl Bildt and Tony Blair have quite openly said this. For them the restoration of Orthodox Rus is as abhorrent as it was to Lenin and his followers. For forty years we have fought all these adversaries, for they are all motivated by the same Satan, who is the only real enemy – all others being but pawns in his hands. We know that the only way of fighting Satan is to defend and build up the Church, fighting against secularization. Satan’s aim is to deprive the world of the Holy Spirit, as he so effectively did in the Western part of the Church beginning a thousand years ago, for he knows that the aim of the Russian Church is ‘the acquisition of the Holy Spirit’, as St Seraphim of Sarov said. And if the Russian Church can be deprived of the Holy Spirit, then we will no longer be able to prevent the enthronement of Antichrist.

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