Spiritual But Not Religious

Apparently, the new mass religion is: ‘I am spiritual, but not religious’.

As regards the last half of this statement, I can safely affirm that as an Orthodox Christian priest, I too am of course not religious and indeed I am opposed to religion.

Perhaps I need to explain that, as some may misunderstand.

As far as I am concerned, religion is an invention of States, a power-grab made in order to manipulate, brainwash and exploit their subject peoples. Whether it is Roman Catholicism (invented by the new Vatican Church-State in Rome in the 11th century) or Protestantism (invented by various kings and princes in the 16th century in order to steal power and money from the Vatican Church-State, so making in turn their own State Churches) or any other ism, religions are manmade. Therefore they inevitably die out, just as these particular religions, now bankrupted because they have lost their roots in Orthodox Christianity from which they are distantly descended, are today dying out. This death is as a result of the new manmade religion of Secularism (see below).

Here is why I have always said that I am not religious.

However, I do have faith, in Orthodox Christianity – which is not an ism. I not only believe that God exists, but know that God exists, through personal experience. Faith is totally different from religion. Faith is natural and experiential, either you have that experience or else you do not and it is absent. In that case you must admit that you simply do not know if there is a God or not. On the other hand, religion is an artifice, an invention used for the manipulation and exploitation of the masses by the power-seeking, the greedy, the narrow-minded, and by censorious, self-justifying moralizers. In this sense, of course Marx was right: Religion is the opium provided to the people – just as Secularism is the opium provided to the intellectuals.Anything to make people and intellectuals into self-pleasing zombies.

Thus, I also reject the new manmade religion of Secularism – and make no mistake it is a religion, for there will always be a religion, since nature abhors a vacuum. Secularism is an especially absurd and illogical religion, as it does not believe in Almighty God, but in mere fallible man, whose blood-soaked failings and injustices have been so obvious throughout history! Secularism is the only religion that does not have a Perfect Being to worship but irrationally believes in His absence.

This concept of this man-worship or humanism defines Secularism. Its natural modern extension is political correctness or self-censorship: you must not tell any human-being the truth about themselves because that would be offensive to their fallible human nature. As Orthodox Christians, we know that the Truth sets us free, but Secularism with its self-made mythology and legends does not know this, preferring the enslavement of lies.

Secularism justifies itself on an incredible and laughable irrational superstition – that everything that exists in the whole Universe is the product of random chance. In reality, even the likelihood that a single rock could be produced at random must be about one quadrillion squared to one. Secularism, the offshoot of a heresy of a heresy of Orthodox Christianity, has its Scriptures: The Theory of Evolution. It also has the Antitrinity Dogma of liberty, equality and fraternity, the Antichrist Dogma that fallible man, not the sinless God-man, must be worshipped, its propaganda, called the media, its high priests, such as Dawkins and other atheist celebrities, and its prophets, doom-saying atheist scientists who would bring humanity into despair, if they were believed.

Of course, Secularism is all superstition. As Chesterton said a century ago: ‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything’. And this is the nature of the modern religion of Secularism, it is just anything. Today, people believe in anything: Money; New Age; environmentalism; tree-hugging; magic crystals; fengshui; ley lines;horoscopes; sport and physical health (‘wellness’, ‘fitness’, ‘my body is my temple’ – words which are a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit); and immoral and amoral celebrities, the ‘stars’ of screen, music and sport, who are the new saints.

The modern religion of Secularism says: ‘I am spiritual, but not religious’. However, ‘spiritual’ here does not mean the Orthodox Christian Faith, it means listening to the voices of those spiritual beings who are called demons. It means that you can do whatever you want, so guaranteeing your ‘human rights’ of enslavement personal laziness and immorality (which, ironically, it self-justifyingly calls ‘freedom’). Secularism is a completely effortless religion, it requires nothing except the practice of your sins. There is therefore nothing so regressive as this new (in fact very old) religion of Secularism. It is merely the idolatry of vulgar self-worship, for it bans the words sin and repentance, making all spiritual progress impossible and so spiritual regress inevitable.

 

 

 

 

Pentarchy Plus: A Generation after the Great and Holy Council of Moscow a Historian Recalls the Great Cleansing and how the ‘Ukrainian Overreach’ Became a Blessing in Disguise

Looking back twenty-five years on from 2020, it is difficult for the young to imagine the state of decadence into which the Church had fallen at the end of the last millennium and which lasted into the early 21st century. For over 100 years, between 1917 and 2018, the Church had been paralysed; for over 75 years by the captivity of the Russian Church to the Soviet and Post-Soviet State; for over 100 years by the captivity of the old Church of Constantinople to the Western Powers, since 1948 to the USA. Once the Russian Church had been freed, after a very long and painful wait at the end of the 20th century, we then had to wait for the liberation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the US-controlled Phanariots. This became a very frustrating wait, as there was an accumulation of nearly two centuries of problems to be resolved, notably in Eastern Europe and the Diaspora. Everything began to move only in 2016, with the generational change 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

By trying to impose its masonic policies on the Church in Crete in 2016, the Phanariot ‘Council’ there became a laughing stock. Both the Vatican and the USA realized that the Phanar had no authority in the Orthodox world, that it was not an Orthodox Vatican, as they had repeatedly been told by the Phanariots and as they had naively believed. Then, in 2018, with one last desperate throw of its dice, by threatening schism in the Ukraine the Phanariot bishops found that they could no longer concelebrate with the Russian Church. By threatening schism in the Ukraine, its assemblies of bishops in the Diaspora, already become expensive but futile talking-shops for the Phanariot fantasy of imperialism, were boycotted by the Russian Church.

The Phanar had played with fire – and was burned. One word from the then President of Turkey and the elderly Phanariot Patriarch would become a refugee. One word from the US ambassador in Athens or Ankara and he would be sacked. By the end of 2018 the position of the Phanar had become very, very fragile – its demise in the form that it had assumed since the Russian Revolution of 1917 had become inevitable. All progress has been blocked for so long, so when the Phanar, compromised by its calendar and all sorts of modernist innovations, did finally collapse like a weakened dam under the pressure of vast amounts of water, the accumulation of problems was overcome. What happened?

First of all, in 2019 the highly impoverished and corrupt Ukraine finally collapsed into its constituent parts. Most of it returned to the Russian Federation, other small parts returned to Romania and Hungary and the extreme west to Poland, only a small central-western part remaining as an independent country and returning to its historical name of Malorossiya. When this happened, and the corrupted Western world realized that it had backed a bunch of thieves and murderers all along, the structure set up by Constantinople in the Ukraine also collapsed in scandal and disgrace.

As a result, in 2020 a long-awaited Church Council was called in Moscow and the Church restructured, as of old, into Five Patriarchates, with four new Autocephalous Churches, the order of precedence of the Patriarchates reconfigured in conformity with 21st century reality. Sometimes called ‘Pentarchy Plus’, these are the same Five Patriarchates and four Churches as we have today, in 2045:

 

  1. The Patriarchate of Rus. Patriarch Tikhon II.

The canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Rus (as it was renamed, the old name of ‘Patriarchate of Moscow’ being dropped as narrow and compromised) was recognized as Eurasia, except for the territories of the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem and the Church of Europe (see below). It continued for the time being to include the autonomous Churches of Japan, China, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the Exarchates of Belarus and Malorossiya. The Patriarchate of Rus was joined by the Church of Georgia, which had faced great difficulty and isolation and so also became another autonomous Church within the Patriarchate of Rus. The Patriarchate of Rus was given the immense task, with the closest co-operation of the other four Patriarchates, of organizing four new Autocephalous Churches, following the spiritual and moral collapse of the old heterodox institutions of Catholicism and Protestantism. These were in order of size:

  1. The Church of Europe. This included the former Autocephalous Churches of Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, which were absorbed into the new Autocephalous Church of Europe. Therefore this included the territories of all the ex-Catholic/Protestant countries westwards from the borders of the Empire of Rus (as it was renamed in 2028, when the Empire was restored and Tsar Nicholas III was anointed). So it stretched from Finland and Hungary to Iceland and Portugal.
  2. The Church of Latin America. This included South and Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. It used Spanish and Portuguese, with some Dutch, French and English, especially in the Caribbean.
  3. The Church of Anglo-America. This was composed of Canada and the USA and used English, French and some Spanish.
  4. The Church of Oceania. This used English and some native languages (notably Maori).
  5. The Patriarchate of New Constantinople. Patriarch Chrysostom.

The flock-less institution of the Patriarchate of old Constantinople was moved from Istanbul and most of its bishops retired, once they had been threatened with details of their lives being revealed. A new ‘Patriarch of New Constantinople’, the first Patriarch being a Bulgarian by nationality (in recognition for the bravery of the Church of Bulgaria in refusing to attend the 2016 meeting in Crete), the Orthodox calendar returned, and so the old calendarist schisms in Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria overcome. The canonical territory of New Constantinople (as it was now called) was defined as that of the old autocephalous Churches of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia (its nationalist schisms in Macedonia and Montenegro overcome), Albania, Cyprus and Greece (together with areas of Greece formerly under old Constantinople). With an Orthodox population of just over 40 million, the new Church of Constantinople, seven old Churches in one, decided that the nationalities of its Patriarchs and their sees would rotate. Thus, instead of absurd provincial rivalries (each nationality trying to build the tallest church in the Balkans), at last there began a period of Balkan and Cypriot Confederation, co-operation and prosperity, as Tsar Nicholas II had foreseen in 1912.

  1. The Patriarchate of Alexandria. Patriarch Moses.

The Patriarchate of Alexandria’s canonical territory remained All Africa. However, it began to be aided in its task of at last missionizing Africa by the other Patriarchates, especially the Patriarchate of Rus with its generous Imperial funds. From now on its Patriarchs became black Africans.

  1. The Patriarchate of Antioch. Patriarch John.

Centred in Russian-rebuilt Damascus after the Western war which had tried to destroy Syria through its puppets Saudi Arabia and Qatar (as they were then called), this Patriarchate was renewed. Its canonical territory was defined as the whole Arab world of the Middle East, outside Palestine (see below), together with Turkey.

  1. The Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Patriarch James.

This was now established again as the Patriarchate of the Holy Land and its canonical territory was defined as that of the lands of the Palestinians, Israel and the Jordan. Its old dispute with Antioch was overcome and its Patriarchs from now on were all to be Palestinians.

 

So it was after the great cleansing of the Church at the 2020 Great and Holy Council of Moscow (as it is now called) that the Church was reconfigured and the mission to the Non-Orthodox world began.

4 October 2045

The Music of My Life

Now there are exactly one thousand pieces of writing here in less than six years, over three a week on average, some articles short, some long, most original, a few simply links to other articles of interest. Here is something personal, which explains something of the musical inspiration behind how I came to write these articles (and many others) over the last forty-five years.

About every four years, between the ages of 4 and 48, twelve pieces of music came to me and reflected and revealed my understanding of the world. These were:

 

The Third Man – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEsWi88Qv0

This is the music of the 1949 British film, set in post-War Vienna, where my father had ended his War. This music, expressing at the same time tradition and uneasiness, sums up my childhood, which was haunted by tales of the catastrophe that Hitler had brought. Later I understood that it also sums up the mystery of Europe, seen from the East, and its failure to return to the Tradition of Orthodoxy. Instead, it was diverted from the Tradition by its provincial, pseudo-intellectual Western rationalism, which had first misled the Christian Empire, and then chose to die at the hands of an American racketeer.

A Nightingale Sang – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RRNlBGL89g

My father, like all the soldiers of the Eighth Army, loved Vera Lynn and her songs. This was a song that he sang.

Dr Zhivago – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Yd2PzoF1y8

In 1968 I was taken to see this film. It had the usual Hollywood absurdities and self-satisfied Cold War anti-Russian stereotypes of ‘Asian barbarism instead of European enlightenment’ (that same European ‘enlightenment’ which brought two World Wars, concentration camps, the genocide of Non-Western Europeans and the A-Bomb). However, it did introduce me to Pasternak, to Russian literature and music. Indeed, the composer, Jarre, officially French, actually had two Russian grandmothers, which is why the music expresses the Russian spirit so well.

Vltava – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G4NKzmfC-Q

By the patriot Smetana, this music expresses the lost spiritual beauty and nobility of the Czech Lands, the original missionary lands of Sts Cyril and Methodius, so cruelly snatched and separated from Orthodoxy by the heretics.

Solveig’s Song – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR3N1yBEGbw

When I was 21, I was introduced to the fresh beauty of Norway, to it mountains and fjords. This music sums up for me the beauty of the North.

Je Ne Regrette Rien – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKPvx38D4GM

Living in France in 1980, I came to know Piaf. Of course, every Christian regrets their sins, but this is not the theme of this song. Piaf herself became Orthodox towards the end of her life.

Vocalise – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuBexGEe1S4

By the extraordinary Rakhmaninov, whose music is so full of Orthodox values, this expresses the melancholy of Russian exile and yearning for the lost Empire.

Jerusalem – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKRHWT6xdEU

Here is the vision of faithful Old England, summed up by William Blake, and our rejection of ‘the dark satanic mills’ of faithless modern Britain, invented in his age of Imperialist exploitation and slavery.

Fado Português – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARS7Zi-Zpkw

Spending several months on missionary work in Portugal over several years from 1992 on, I came to know the melancholy in Portugal and the South, summed up by the fado.

Mes Jeunes Annees – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB7HI2n0MgY

Trenet, still alive and singing at the time, expresses nostalgia for a lost childhood in the Pyrenees.

Bells – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G4NKzmfC-Q

Bells Across the Meadows is perhaps the finest piece of music by the little-known English composer Ketelby and expresses the love of the real England.

God Save the Tsar – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEOyvvKhb9k

The Orthodox anthem expresses the Christian Empire to which we all belong. We all have our national flags, but in the centre of each one, we place the unifying double-headed eagle and the hope of the Coming Tsar, who alone can protect us from the global evil that the Western heresy has created.

 

Since then I have heard many other beautiful songs and melodies, but none that has better reflected or revealed my understanding of the world.

How a Church Was Divided

Introduction

Sadly, here have been several cases of decadence among Orthodox clergy in the Diaspora, especially since the 1950s, no jurisdiction excepted. Clerical scandals have at times turned people away from the Church. People have said: ‘If that is how certain clergy behave, then the Church is no different from the world’. Certain bishops and those ordained and then supported by such bishops have shown a lack of love through weakness of faith or even absence of faith. Such a weakness of faith or absence of faith has resulted in spiritual catastrophes.

Unprincipled careerist political compromises, simony, theft of Church money, moral iniquity and narcissistic jealousy leading to the persecution of honest priests and people, we have seen them all. As a result, the Church on earth has not been able to witness to the world as it could have. Terrifyingly, the culprits will have to answer at the Last Judgement. Thus, in this period, God gave an opportunity for all English-speaking Orthodox in the British Isles at least to be united, but the opportunity was lost. Where did those rejected go in order to survive?

ROCOR

Despite being brought up outside the Church, some of the most zealous and principled, with a sense of Truth and of the Tradition and missionary impulse, joined ROCOR. This was, after all, always part of the Russian Orthodox Church, where they would not have to compromise themselves. However, here, as non-Russians, they were sometimes treated as second-class citizens and also faced petty persecution by those who, under political and sectarian influence, wanted to make ROCOR into a sect. Today, such elements have mainly left ROCOR for their full-blown sects. Freed of them, the new ROCOR can return to normality, to being the old ROCOR with its pre-War roots in the Tradition, abandoning the theological and canonical absurdities of post-1945 Cold War polemics. If ROCOR can show leadership and love, repenting for the injustices and errors of the past, it will bring hope. In the meantime, as a result of the past, others went elsewhere.

The ‘Greek’ Church

As a desperate compromise rejecting ROCOR, Anglicans such as Timothy Ware joined the Church of Constantinople and, after a serious argument in 1965, Fr Sophrony (Sakharov) and his then three monks followed him. As well as them, others, living outside the London-Oxford corridor, were usually turned away and told to ‘go to the Greeks’. This was the result of the refusal to commit to Orthodox missionary work. Today, however, those who made these forced compromises are having to face canonical isolation, the consequence of the contemporary actions of the Phanar, which has trampled over canon law in the Ukraine. Here we see the results of compromising consciences, taking ‘the middle way’ (which is definitely not ‘the golden mean’), the way between Truth and lie, so ending up with Halfodoxy.

Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian

Only very few joined these other Balkan Churches, realizing that they are mononational, so not for English speakers.

Belarussian and Ukrainian

A few joined uncanonical groups, Belarussian and Ukrainian, in protest at mistreatment. In general, they did not linger long, realizing that there was no place for them in temporary nationalist groups, which were the results of the Second World War.

Antioch

When in 1995 ten or so unhappy Anglican vicars with some 300 disillusioned Anglicans approached the Church, they were rebuffed and so set up their own ex-Anglican jurisdiction. But here, as they have told me themselves, they had difficulty learning the Tradition and so integrating the Church, remaining on the margins, often not learning how to think, act, serve and sing like Orthodox, still trapped in alien Anglicanism.

Sects

A few sectarian-minded individuals left for various curious sects, Greek or Russian, usually because their unrealistic idealism was dissatisfied with the mass of Orthodox who were ‘not strict enough’ for them. Cut off from the Tree of the Church by their own perfectionism, judgementalism and lack of forgiveness, they left themselves to die out.

Exarchate

The final result of compromise was a schism, when in 2007 some 300 joined the Russophobic Paris branch of Constantinople. This had itself been founded through schism by the selfsame aristocratic émigrés, who had betrayed the Tsar and the Christian Empire in 1917. This group now finds itself pitted against the rest of the Orthodox Church and the canonical foundations of Church life, as a result of current bribery and blackmail in Constantinople.

Conclusion

Do we belong to Paul or Apollos or Cephas – or to Christ? Whenever a strong personality, regardless of whether he is talented or not, takes the place of Christ, there is division. At the present time it does not seem likely that locally the Russian Patriarchal Church will recover. Lack of leadership and lack of love may have done long-term damage. The flock was scattered. The Mother-Church behaved like an unloving stepmother. However, if instead of compromise repentant leadership and love are shown by the Patriarchal Church, as it now faces its worst nightmare with the Phanariot schism and bloody persecution in the Ukraine, then there will be the miracle of unity. If it cannot show this, then little ROCOR, with its tiny means and sometimes still unresolved difficulties from the past, will be left to try and take responsibility for this Diaspora.

Could There Be a Schism in the Church?

At the present time, there are those who fear a schism in the Ukraine. However, there can never be schisms in the Church, only schisms away from the Church; the Church is never divided, but groups can fall away from Her, losing Her grace. We can at once identify three schisms in history, all of which took place for nationalistic reasons.

Roman Catholicism

This was an invention of the Western European elite developed in the eleventh century, though it had already been prefigured at the very end of the eighth century under the Teutonic tyrant Charlemagne. Essentially it was an attempt by Western European barbarians to usurp the Church and replace the Mystery of Christ with provincial Roman pagan rationalism. In order to justify their schism, they invented with their rationalism a new and heretical doctrine about God. Amazingly, many fell for this myth, even to this day believing in it as part of their ‘European’ racial ‘superiority’.

Uniatism

First spread in the seventeenth century, though invented a few years earlier, this was an attempt to make out that you can still be an Orthodox Christian under the heretical Bishop of Rome. It attracted only those on the western fringes of Orthodox Civilization, who could be oppressed and bribed and who were so ignorant and superficial that they thought that Christianity is a mere ritual.

Ukrainian Nationalism

Invented for imperialistic reasons at the end of the nineteenth century by Roman Catholic Austro-Hungary, this was a purely political method of flattering an ethnic group into believing that they had their own religious identity, neither Roman Catholic nor Orthodox Christian. It was later used by Fascist Germany to massacre Jews and then by the Fascist United States, again for imperialistic reasons, to try to undermine and destroy multinational Holy Rus. This myth attracts only those for whom Christ has no importance, but their folklore does.

Every schism is tragic and only individuals return and then with difficulty. It is quite different from a division. This is temporary and occurs only for political reasons – such as the division between the Church inside Russia and the Church outside Russia between 1927 and 2007. Everything that is possible must therefore be done to avert a schism.

 

Two Criticisms of Tsar Nicholas II

  1. The Tsar smoked.

This is a common modern objection. Yes, of course, Tsar Nicholas II was a heavy smoker, probably about forty a day. Some today are scandalized by this, forgetting that at that time virtually all men smoked and it was considered unhealthy not to smoke. Indeed, the more you smoked the better. In the early part of the century women also smoked, but in private. After the evening meal, well-off men would retire to a purpose-made ‘smoking room’ in order to smoke – this was normal, the way of life of the time. And some well-known clergy, including bishops, smoked in that period.

Later film stars and politicians (Churchill’s cigars) all smoked. Soldiers in both World Wars were issued with a generous daily ration of cigarettes – they were expected to smoke. Those who did not smoke were considered to be abnormal.  I can remember the old generations of clergy (both those born before 1917 and those born in the emigration in the 20s and 30s) smoking quite openly. We have to consider the fashions of the time. No-one then knew about the links between smoking and cancer and heart disease; indeed right up until the 1950s Western doctors were still advertising smoking as ‘good for you’. As they say, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

  1. Through weakness of character and indecisiveness Tsar Nicholas II did not take tough enough measures to prevent the 1917 Revolution and so he failed to protect his own family from death.

This is a common accusation, both from the past and from the present, but without foundation.

Anyone who has read the history of the 1905 troubles (Tsar Nicholas never called them a Revolution) and how he suppressed the terrorism of that time through military means and field courts that issued the death sentence within 48 hours will know that he could be very tough. He had to be – in order to protect his more than one hundred and fifty million subjects from a few thousand ruthless foreign-financed terrorists and amoral anarchists. Soviet historians called the Tsar cruel and bloodthirsty for so doing: now we have the opposite extreme of criticism – he is said to have been not harsh enough! But why did he not do the same in 1917 as he did in 1905?

In fact, he did try to do in 1917 as in 1905, but this time the military elite refused to obey him, committing treason. It was the betrayal of the generals which meant that Tsar Nicholas’ orders to put down terrorism in Saint Petersburg were not obeyed, so guaranteeing the success of the bloodthirsty terrorists. Without the loyalty of the generals Tsar Nicholas was lost. This explains why a relatively small revolt led by a few thousand activists in the capital lost the whole Empire. It also explains why Tsar Nicholas’ family was murdered with him – none of them ever thought that the elite would show such ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’. It was all unforeseen.

Here again, hindsight tells us that Tsar Nicholas underestimated the scale of the treason of the elite, above all, of virtually the whole elite of his beloved Army. Here we should remember that hardly anybody, including the Kerenskyites and the Bolsheviks, thought that a Revolution would be successful in 1917, let alone that the Empire would collapse into chaos so swiftly. Here too is another reproach that the worldly-minded make: Tsar Nicholas should have known and forestalled the Revolution, arresting all the traitors. This reproach is on the same level as those who blasphemously say that Christ should have known that the pharisees would arrest Him and crucify Him, that He should have called on the legions of angels – therefore Christ Himself was to blame for His own crucifixion.

The Kerenskyites, well-off professors, lawyers, pseudo-intellectuals, aristocrats, bourgeois Duma politicians, freemasons and generals, who all betrayed the Tsar, soon discovered after their Revolution that if they had escaped death from the Reds, they were to find themselves in unexpected and melancholy exile and often great poverty. This exile was their self-inflicted punishment, though, tragically, only a few of them showed repentance for it. Instead, they blamed the innocent Tsar for their misfortune by claiming, for example, that through weakness of character and indecisiveness he had not been tough enough on the revolutionaries (i.e themselves!). This was all hypocritical self-justification for their own betrayal.

The punishment for this betrayal was shared by the Great Powers of Europe. The mystical history of Europe shows us that the betrayal of the Tsar in 1917 led to the collapse of the seven Western Empires, first the German and the Austro-Hungarian, and then a catastrophic Second War which led to the collapse of Mussolini’s fantasies and Hitler’s racist Reich, and then that of the British, French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese colonial Empires. All were punished by history. After 1917 there followed in Western Europe a century of Americanization and vassalization, as seen by the entry of US forces into Europe in 1917 and their occupation of Europe since 1942-1945. This contributed to the 1914 suicide of European culture and the degeneration of Europe into its state of loss of spiritual and moral being, the loss of national identity and culture, futile decadence and powerlessness, the EU.

 

 

How the US prepared the split of the Orthodox Churches. Horsemen of the Apocalypse for Ukraine

Now we can observe in some way unique events. The last time this happened was in the Middle Ages. When the power of one country is blackmailing the representatives of the Church to obtain a certain political effect, not particularly considering that this dramatically leads to a  large split in the Church itself and unpredictable cultural and social consequences.

The question of faith is very delicate. This  matter is not a fashion, not a hobby. Faith affects such deep structures of consciousness and subconsciousness that it is much easier to spoil than to create something new and sustainable.

Now the US, not particularly reflecting, with rough boots trample on the territory which they do not understand.

The harm they methodically inflict on Orthodox Christianity can ultimately be reflected in both Catholicism and Islam.

In order to obtain the necessary results in Ukraine and to sever the cultural and religious ties between the Southeast of the Ukraine and Russia as much as possible, the US began to use the Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople in the same way as they usually work with drug traffickers or minor politicians in  Third World countries.

Washington using blackmail actively pressures the ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo coordinates this activity.

When the Americans noticed that the Patriarchate of Constantinople was too sluggish about the demands of  Filaret Denisenko and President Petro Poroshenko, they decided to remind Bartholomew of a number of points.

In the last days of July 2018, Mike Pompeo held a meeting with the head of the American-Ukrainian Diocese of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Dimitri Trakatellis. At the meeting, Mike Pompeo reported that Washington is aware of the theft in 2017-2018 of a large amount of money (about 10 million US dollars) from the budget for the construction of the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas in New York. Mike Pompeo noted separately for the Patriarchate of Constantinople that the US Attorney’s Office has documentary evidence confirming the withdrawal of these funds abroad on the orders of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. Mike Pompeo suggested to the Patriarchate of Constantinople that he would “close his eyes” to this theft in exchange for the realization on the part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople of the idea of providing the Ukrainian Church with autocephaly. After this “American kindness” and “closing eyes”, the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew acted in the accelerated mode in the interests of Filaret Denisenko. The Patriarchate of Constantinople sent two exarchs to “… help with the construction of a local independent church. The two exarchs are called to pave the way for autocephaly. It should be noted that in this case the process is no less important than the goal. In fact, thanks to this process, the various branches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church can be brought together, “said Metropolitan Emmanuel of Gaul, the Locum Tenens of the Western European Exarchate of Constantinople.

According to Metropolitan Emmanuel, Patriarch Bartholomew intends to defend the Ukrainian Church, for which he “is responsible, since the Metropolitan of Kiev canonically depends on the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, despite the fact that in 1686 the Moscow Patriarchate was granted the right to ordain the Metropolitan of Kiev.”

But the most interesting are the personalities of the exarchs. Archbishop Daniel of Pamphylia from the United States and Bishop Hilarion of Edmonton from Canada.

First, both Archbishop Daniel of Pamphylia (Vladimir Zelinsky) and Bishop Hilarion of Edmonton (Roman Nikolayevich Rudnik) were born in Western Ukraine, in the very center of veneration of Bandera, Dontsova and Shukhevych.

Bishop Hilarion was born on February 14, 1972 in Lviv. Archbishop Daniel was born on September 28, 1972 in Ivano-Frankivsk. Ivano-Frankivsk has always been considered the most endangered in the anti-human Bandera ideology in Ukraine. Now, of course, everything has already been smeared.

Archbishop Daniel spent his childhood in Bucha, Ternopil region. Upon completion of secondary school in September 1993, he entered the first year of the Ivano-Frankivsk Uniate Seminary, and then in 1996, to continue his education, he left for the United States, where he studied at the Catholic University of America, and also at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington.

October 3, 2007 was elevated to the rank of archimandrite. May 9, 2008 in the Vladimir Church of Parma, Ohio, the name of Archimandrite Daniel Bishop was held.

In January 2006, Daniel Pamphyli was appointed an officer of the US Army (Corps of Chaplains). Thanks to Boris Filatov, who never watched the language, it is known that Archbishop Daniel Pamphyli gave Dmitry Yarosh the books of authorship of Dmitry Dontsov – the Ukrainian Nazi at the beginning of the XX century. It was Dmitry Dontsov who was the first to translate Mein Kampf of Adolf Hitler into Ukrainian.

Bishop Hilarion spent his childhood and youth in Lviv. He was enrolled in the 2nd year of the Kiev Theological Seminary, which he graduated in 1992. On the recommendation of Archbishop Vsevolod of Skopels (Maydansky) and with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, he was sent to continue his education in Thessaloniki. He graduated from the Theological Faculty of the University of Aristotle in 1997. He defended his thesis on the theme “The Canonical Connection of the Kyiv Metropolia with the Ecumenical Patriarchate until 1240”.

On January 11, 2005, Patriarch Bartholomew and the Holy Synod of the Constantinople Orthodox Church elected him Bishop-Assistant Metropolitan of Spain and Portugal  with the title “Bishop of Telmissos”.

On June 9, 2005, while in Turkey, where he was an interpreter during the meeting of Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople with the Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, he was detained by the Turkish police. The bishop was accused of traveling on forged documents and that he was a “Chechen rebel”.

Metropolitan John (Stinka), First Hierarch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada, asked Patriarch Bartholomew I and the Synod of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to release Bishop Hilarion to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada. Bishop Hilarion arrived in Canada in 2007. In August 2008, the Extraordinary Council of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada elected him Bishop of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada. October 21, 2008 Bartholomew I and the Holy Synod elected him the diocesan bishop of Edmonton and the Western diocese.

Both Daniel and Hilarion are long-time preparations of the American special services for work in Ukraine. Hilarion was helping Yushchenko in his first attempt to banditize Ukraine.

Now these “blanks” are useful to the US for activating the split among the Orthodox Churches.

 

The Onslaught on Holy Rus and Our Response

Introduction

Having destroyed the multinational Russian Empire in 1917 and then 75 years later its successor, the Soviet Union, there remained for the Western Powers only one further thing to destroy, the Russian Orthodox Church. This was openly proclaimed after 1991 by Samuel Huntingdon (‘Torn Countries: The Failure of Civilization Shifting’ in Chapter 6 of his ‘The Clash of Civilizations’) and by the Russophobe Pole, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as ‘the enemy’. In fact all hell had been let loose against us since 1917 with the illegal overthrow by treason and then martyrdom of the last Protector of Christian Civilization, Tsar Nicholas II.

The Onslaught on the One, Holy, Apostolic and Catholic Church

  1. Against the Unity of the Church, already before the Revolution, especially in Saint Petersburg, there were divisions caused by internal traitors (renovationists and ecumenists), many of them clerics who after 1917 defrocked themselves. Indeed, after 1917 renovationism was fed by atheist Communism and soon appeared among the schismatic Saint Petersburg emigration in Paris and elsewhere, fed by pounds and then by dollars. Both inside and outside Russia they were openly supported by the British-run, and from 1948 on, US-run, Patriarchate of Constantinople. This was also active in meddling and creating divisions in Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Americas, Western Europe and Australia.
  2. Against the Holiness of the Church there was the Soviet onslaught from 1917 on (though there were many cases of martyrdom as early as 1905), with 600 bishops, 120,000 priests, monks and nuns and countless laypeople martyred.

Since the fall of Communism especially, two new threats have appeared in force:

  1. Against the Apostolicity of the Church there have appeared schismatic groups of sectarian and pharisaical extremists, ‘zealots’, both inside and outside the Russian Lands.
  2. Against the Catholicity of the Church there have appeared nationalists, especially in the Ukraine but also elsewhere, as in Estonia, fed by dollars through Constantinople.

Our Response

  1. In order to affirm the Unity of the Church, we defeated the renovationist traitors by our firm confession of Orthodoxy and so the humanist heresy of Sophianism of the fantasist Fr Sergiy Bulgakov was universally condemned as such by the whole Russian Church. Tiny elderly groups, stuck in the past, still survive here and there, but they are dying out in irrelevance.
  2. In order to affirm the Holiness of the Church, the New Martyrs and Confessors defeated the Soviet onslaught by their holy patience.
  3. In order to affirm the Apostolicity of the Church, schismatic groups of sectarian and pharisaical extremists, both outside and inside Russia, were defeated in 2007, when both parts of the Russian Church united against the ways of the world. Tiny elderly groups still survive here and there, but they are dying out in irrelevance.
  4. In order to affirm the Catholicity of the Church, we now face Inherently anti-Christian, nationalist divisions which go against the multinational nature of the Church (Catholicity), creating nationalistic and politicized ethnic fragments in place of multinational Holy Rus. The canonical territory of the Church of Holy Rus (the ex-Soviet Union minus Georgia plus China and Japan) is over 32 million square kilometres, well over one fifth of the world’s land surface, and is united against the schismatics fed from Constantinople. Therefore, in time, there is no doubt that Patriarch Bartholomew and his Sanhedrin will be judged by a Church Council and their anti-canonical papalist heresies will be condemned.

Conclusion

In the meantime, one response for the reunited Russian Church would be to establish a Metropolia in Western Europe in order to organize missionary activity here. Constantinople miserably failed to do anything like this, when the Russian Church was paralyzed for three generations by atheistic Communism. It had its chance and failed. However, a Metropolia cannot be built on obvious injustices, the promotion of bad priests, bad candidates and bad people over good priests, good candidates and good people, the discouragement and demotion of the good, reliance on money and ornate church buildings instead of on the pastorship of human souls, who are so despised and neglected. There must be the ability to apologize for crass mistakes, made through the refusal to consult locally, and to thank those who have suffered for so long from these mistakes as a result. The reunited Russian Church now has a chance to act. Let it not be said that it too failed to seize the moment.

 

 

Why We Are Russian Orthodox Christians Although We Are Not Russian

Why Christian?

Humanity has always needed to worship something greater than itself – be it the sun, the moon, rivers, emperors, kings, heroes, ‘celebrities’ or film ‘stars’. Of all the founders of faiths, Christ alone was God and man and so defeated death. All the other founders of faiths, the pagan gods of India and Egypt, the Buddha, of Greece and Rome, of Africa and Scandinavia, and Mohammed, are dead – they were simply sinful men: Christ alone is living because He alone is beyond sin. Despite the spiritual realizations and abstract moral truths which can be found beneath the layers of spiritual impurity in other faiths, the fact that Christ is alive makes Christianity unique. If you believe in the unique and Absolute Resurrection of Christ through His victory over death, then all other faiths fade into relativity and even irrelevance. They are unable to deliver us from practical enslavement to the devil, seen in death and our captivity in hell.

Why Orthodox?

To anyone with any historical sense, it is clear that Christianity must go back to the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago. Thus, all the myriad Protestant sects pale into insignificance because they were all founded less than 500 years ago, sometimes much less, by one particular provincial culture. And indeed, as they put that local culture above the Gospel of Christ, we can see that they are aggressive manmade religions of great spiritual impurity, deformed by a fantastic greed for money, pharisaical moralism and censorious sectarianism. They persecuted Orthodox Christians, each other and arrogantly destroyed the cultures of native peoples all over the world through their ruthless exploitation and asset-stripping of natural resources. These Protestant sects were and are the foundation of modern capitalism which is polluting and destroying the whole planet and leading directly to its end, which it has now made inevitable.

Similarly, Roman Catholicism is not the original Christianity because it was founded less than 1,000 years ago by one particular provincial culture situated at the Western tip of Eurasia. It put its cultural blend of pagan Roman imperialism and crude Germanic barbarianism, above Orthodox Christianity, which it rejected and attacked, pretending to be older than it. Having transformed itself many times, from the very outset it intolerantly and aggressively persecuted and murdered those who disagreed with it in organized violence. It has used worldly politics – armies, crusades, inquisitions, invasions, imperialist colonialism, wars and unprincipled behaviour – in order to attract greater numbers and so gain power. Clearly faith here has been reduced to a mere manmade and centralized religion and has little to do with Christ. Not Christians, but Catholics, slaughtered Orthodox Christians.

History confirms that only the Orthodox Church is the Christ-founded Church, as only She goes back to the first millennium, keeping the fullness of Christianity despite the attempts of States, emperors and politicians to meddle in Her affairs and misuse Her for their own evil ends. With Her near 2,000 years of history, the Church has confessed the Faith without alteration since the start. Geography also confirms that the first Christians were Orthodox. Thus, the words of Christ Who lived in and around Jerusalem were written down in Greek and Greek Christians and all those who have lived for generations in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Asia have always all been Orthodox. For Christ was in his human nature Asian, not European. It is therefore clear that if we want to be with the Church that Christ founded, then we must be Orthodox Christians, the only true Christians, for all others are not complete Christians.

Why Russian Orthodox Christian?

The family of 14 Local Orthodox Churches together form the Orthodox Church because they all confess the identical Orthodox Christian Faith. Without the Lord’s Orthodox Faith we cannot be in the Church, the Body of Christ. The Church is made up of 13 small mononational Local Churches (far fewer than 13 even two centuries ago) and one very large international, not mononational, Church. This is the Russian Orthodox Church which for centuries has led and protected all the others at the cost of great self-sacrifice. Present on every continent, with over 70 nationalities, both inside and outside Russia, it accounts for 164 million Orthodox Christians (75% of the total). It alone is inherently multinational and tries to avoid the pitfalls of nationalism, which is only worldliness under a different name. It not only accepts and welcomes Non-Russians but has always led the field in missionary work worldwide.

Moreover, the Russian Orthodox Church has remained faithful in every detail to the Orthodox Faith, despite vicious persecution and martyrdom by Western ideologies and atheism, of both the Communist and the Capitalist varieties. On the other hand, over the last hundred years some of the 13 very small and so weaker Local Churches have been forced by geopolitical pressures into some lax compromises, for example, abandoning the Orthodox Christian calendar for that of the State, altering the services, abandoning confession and fasting, failing to respect local people and their languages, imposing nationalism. It follows from all the above that if we are conscious Christians, then we should participate in the Russian Orthodox Church, defending Her from the treason, cowardice and deceit of both internal and external enemies, supporting, confessing, living and spreading her Faith, which is the Faith of Christ.

The First 300 Years of Russian Orthodox Churches Outside Russia: 1617-1917

Introduction

Although several Russian churches in Europe date back to well before the Russian victory over the atheist tyrant Napoleon and the liberation of Paris by Russian troops in 1814, ignorant and ethnocentric Western Europe only began to understand the reality of Russia then. The Russian Empire was not after all some kind of Asian khanate, but a fully-fledged modern Empire. Russian science and art flourished with names of world renown and the theological academies brought fame to the Russian Church, amazing obscurantist European scholarship. Although the treason of 1917 put an end to this, today, with freedom come, we are once more seeing Westerners taking a more enlightened attitude to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose presence among them now dates back 400 years.

1617-1817

The 1617 Peace Treaty established the legal status of a Russian priest in Stockholm’s Ryssgarden. Services were conducted in premises which merchants rented. A real and more or less permanent Russian church was founded in 1700, with a diplomatic representative in Sweden, and from then on services were conducted almost continuously. In 1684 an embassy mission to China opened. Church life began in Berlin in 1718. In 1721 a church opened in London. In 1727 the embassy in Paris started Orthodox services. That same year under Anna Petrovna, Grand Duchess of Holstein, a church was set up in Kiel and lasted until 1799. A church which lasted briefly was founded in Tokaj in Hungary in 1749.

From 1759 till 1765 there was a church in Königsberg. A church was set up in Madrid in 1760 and in Vienna in 1762. A church opened in Copenhagen in 1797. The Russian embassy in Constantinople (1802) marked the establishment of the church there. That same year two more churches were founded, one at the court of Ekaterina Antonovna, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and the other in Üröm, near Budapest, the location of the burial vault of Alexandra Pavlovna, Palatine of Hungary and sister of Emperor Alexander I. In 1804 a church opened in Weimar and in 1808 in Ludwigslust (Mecklenburg-Schwerin). A church was founded in The Hague in 1816.

1817-1917

A church opened in Bern in 1817, later moving to Geneva. That same year a church opened in Teheran. The Stuttgart church was organized in 1819. The church in Rome was founded in 1823 and in Rothenburg (Kingdom of Wurtemberg) in 1824. Emperor Nicholas I sent an ambassador to newly liberated Greece and a Russian church was set up in Athens. In 1844 churches were set up in Naples and Wiesbaden. In 1847 Archimandrite Porfiry (Uspensky) opened the Mission in Jerusalem. A church was set up in Amsterdam in 1852, Baden-Baden in 1858 and Nice in 1859. Two churches were set up in 1862, in Brussels and Dresden, and in 1865 in Karlsruhe and in 1867 in Pau in France. In the following year churches in Karlsbad and Florence were built. In 1870 the mission to Japan began under the future St Nicholas of Tokyo.

In 1874 a church opened in Prague. There was a church in Coburg-Gotha from 1874 to 1905. In 1876 a church was set up in Bad Ems and in 1878 in Vevey in Switzerland. The church in Marienbad opened in 1882. An Orthodox community opened in Argentina in 1888. A church was set up in Franzenbad in 1889, in Biarritz in 1890 and in Menton in France in 1892 and in Merano in Italy in 1897. Two Church missions were founded in 1897 ─ one in Urmia in Persia and the other in Seoul in Korea. In 1898 a church was built in San Stefano, near Constantinople, and in the following year in Darmstadt and in Homburg. Three churches were founded in 1901 ─ in Hamburg, Herbersdorf (Silesia) and Kissingen. Finally, by 1910 there were churches in Sofia and Budapest. Several churches were attached to the main ones in cities like Berlin, Constantinople and Nice.

Conclusion

Thus, by 1894 the Synod and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs oversaw 51 churches with 96 clergy and during the reign of the Tsar-Martyr, this increased to 56 churches. In addition, in 1912 the United States Diocese had 286 churches, while the Japanese Mission had 266 communities, the Beijing Mission fifteen, the Urmian Mission seven and the Korean Mission one. Since the flood of refugees from atheism after 1917, hundreds more churches have opened, and not counting the thousand or so in autonomous Japan and China and in autocephalous Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia and North America, the total in 2017 is about one thousand, all dependent either on Moscow or on the Church Outside Russia, now based in New York.

(Our thanks to Deacon Andrei Psarev for information supplied for this article)