The priest must be above the lordly arrogance of the well-born and overprotected and not cringe or fawn before that arrogance; he must not lower himself or be cowardly before the powerful of this world, but conduct himself with a sense of his clerical dignity, gravely, evenly, in a pastoral manner – and serve unhurriedly, not to please people. He must denounce whims, lordly arrogance and any coldness towards matters concerning the faith.
St John of Kronstadt
Local Transformations Since 2014
Fifty years since the first of the essays in Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition was written and nearly thirty years since the first edition was published, we have been asked to reissue the anthology, as the third edition has sold out. We are hoping that this will be ready by Easter.
Since that third edition appeared in 2014, we have bought and established more new churches in Eastern England, in Norwich and in Little Abington, just outside Cambridge. These followed the foundation of the new inter-Orthodox parish in my native Colchester in 2008, though we received not a penny from the Church authorities. Indeed, quite the opposite. We bought this extremely large wooden building and opened it as a church for Orthodox of all nationalities against the views of the clerical doomsayers, who later became jealous and tried to close us and even told others that we were closed (!), just as we gained ever more parishioners. Thus, we now have permanent parishes in Essex, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. This still leaves Suffolk without our own permanent church building. There is work to do here, though we do have a special, indeed mystical, place here in mind.
Not having closed our main church in Colchester during the covid persecution – at one point we were apparently the only church to be open in the country – our multinational parish community thrives. Furthermore, my native Colchester was made a City in one of the last acts of the old Queen. And once we were safely anchored inside the Romanian Orthodox Church in February 2022, we received another influx of Orthodox, including refugees from the tragic deviation of a schismatic and a spiritually alien ‘Russian Orthodox’ sect. (You do not obey schismatics). Today, in 2024, with a throughput of 5,000 Orthodox a year, an average Sunday brings 200 Orthodox to church and there are Sundays with as many as 400. Then the church building begins to look too small.
The Patriarchate of Bucharest allowed us to defend the church from the swaggering foreigner and ‘confound their politics and frustrate their knavish tricks’. First, the money-obsessed wished to take the church from us by legal subterfuge, then, power gone to their heads, he persecuted us and tried to close all our churches and missions and prevent us from providing services and books in understandable English. All this went against the fruit of our life’s work, forty years of struggle, which they tried to destroy. Thank God for the canonical protection of the Romanian Orthodox Church, as agreed by the two Patriarchs, in view of the new narcissistic cowboy culture of the psychopathic schism which we opposed.
With its repressed homosexuality (which is why it is so aggressive), bullying, betrayals and total lack of respect for local people, language and culture, it made the CIA task of destroying the Russian Church from the inside so easy and at no cost. It was all so different from the old and noble White Russian culture of the past. To this new mentality we repeat the old English saying: Tell the truth and shame the devil. We are English, our forebears fought against Hitler because we love freedom and we the people shall not be persecuted by any more arrogant foreigners.
International Transformations Since 2014
However, our small struggle in the East of England against a proud foreigner has been mirrored on a vast scale in world-shaking events. For the publication of this new edition comes at what we can only call a millennial turning-point in history, one which we already sensed was coming in the seventies of the last century and which is now here. The headlines succeed one another at breathtaking speed: Protestant apostasy, Brexit, Trump, a schismatic American-founded ‘church’ (another one) in the Ukraine, covid, transgenderism, the African Exarchate, the corruption of Washington, Prince Harry in a narcissistic trap, the proxy war in the Ukraine, the death of the Queen, the fall of Germany, genocide in Palestine, BRICS expansion, the apostasy of the papacy, the cancer of the new King. Astonishing tectonic shifts are turning the world upside down, the Angel of History is looking East, while the West, corroded and paralysed from the inside, looks on.
300 years after the Russian Orthodox Lands (Rus’) became an Empire, based on Western aristocratic ideology, and 100 years after the formation of the USSR, based on Western proletarian ideology, the now Russian Federation has been forced by Western aggression to choose between the West and the Rest (of the world). At the receiving end of Western bullying and betrayals in the Ukraine, the Federation was welcomed by the Rest, that which used to be called ‘the Global South’. This is a historic moment, the long-awaited restoration of the sovereign and multipolar world, the attack on which began not 500 years ago, as some wrongly write, but 1,000 years ago.
The ‘cancellation’ of Russia, illegally-sanctioned by the aggressive West, and the Shakespearian tragedy of the American war against the Ukraine and Russia in the Ukraine are precisely the processes which both the Russian Federation and the Russian Orthodox Church have to go through, in order to be cleansed of their spiritual, moral and financial corruption. Only then can the unity of the threefold Russian Lands be reconstituted. This war is precisely existential for this reconstitution of Rus’. Only thus will a renewed, de-Sovietised, decentralised and financially and morally cleansed Russian Orthodox Church be made ready for its real destiny after three long centuries of tragic losses, illusions, misdirections and divisions. The schismatic traitors and bullies, including those who have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church, have been revealed. Indeed, we were used as one of the baits used to trap the naïve narcissists, who thought they were destroying us, before the Great Cleansing could begin.
The unnecessary American war against the tragic Ukraine and Russia, indeed against the whole of Rus’, which started in 2014 and is still being fought in the Ukraine, largely by Ukrainians on both sides, could have ended within a few weeks. Instead, the war is taking over two years, as the West has in fact demanded that the Russian Federation not only liberate, demilitarise and denazify the American-occupied Ukraine (its original aims), but the whole of NATO. Delusional narcissists and their lies (narcissists are by definition always delusional and always tell lies) will be driven out as the real enemies of both Ukrainians and Russians, just as we drove out the delusional narcissist here. As regards Europe, now a vassal of the USA, its spiritual and so moral self-destruction, which began in Sarajevo in 1914, continued in Warsaw in 1939 and was renewed in Kiev in 2014, continues apace.
The Hubris of the USA and Its Vassals
In Greek mythology Hubris, the narcissistic demon of insolence, violence and outrageously rude behaviour was, according to some, the daughter of Dyssevia, which means Impiety. And so it is in Biblical language too – the impiety of pride always goes before the fall. Hubris is the superiority complex of arrogant pride – we are better than you, exceptional, and therefore you must do whatever we want. This is in fact the cruel racial pride of Roman paganism which, revived, began to reinfest Western Europe in the eleventh century. It was the same delusion of hubris as had infested the builders of the Tower of Babel, then the eleventh-century Papacy, Great Britain before the Titanic and 1914, then was renamed Nazism in Germany, and from there contaminated the USA, indeed many ‘ex’-Nazis were at the founding of the CIA. This last infestation became especially severe after the fall of the Marxist pseudo-paradise, established in the former Russian Empire after 1917 and falling in 1991, whose fall the elite in Washington wrongly credited itself with.
This is not the end of history, as falsely announced in 1991, but it is the end of the history of that hubristic Western elite. For the great loser of the tragic war against the Ukraine and Russia, the result of 1991 and still ongoing in the Ukraine, is precisely the US elite. This war is existential for the elite, whose first victims are not the poor Ukrainians, but the longsuffering peoples of Northern America and Western Europe. The elite will have to dissolve its fragmenting NATO pact and flee back across the Atlantic in order to struggle to keep American unity, which is threatened by the current internal disintegration of the USA and its huge debt. Will Alaska return to Russia, as some believe?
All the US vassals in East Asia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia, will be freed, just as those on the now sinkable US aircraft carrier of Israel. Other losers will be the Baltics, Scandinavia and the UK, that is, the whole basically ex-Protestant North-Western and North-Eastern Europe, which so deludedly backed the ex-Protestant USA. Impoverished Europe has made itself not only the political and military graveyard of the United States, but also an economic graveyard.
In North-Western and South-Western Europe
The for now twenty countries of Western Europe (North-Western and South-Western Europe) will become a Confederation after the collapse of the US-made EU and after they have rebecome nation-states. These countries are for the moment: its leader, Germany, then Switzerland and Liechtenstein; Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland; the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; the UK and Ireland; France and Monaco; Andorra, Spain and Portugal; Italy, San Marino and Malta. Artificial unions like the UK and Belgium may not survive, new nations, like Catalonia, Scotland and Wales, may re-emerge. The tiny population of Scandinavia will have to back down from hostility to the reality of the reunited Russian Lands. In the UK, the US-manipulated British Establishment elite will be cast off, new leaders will appear. Hopefully, the liberation of the UK will lead to a reunited Ireland, to an independent Scotland and Wales and, above all, after a thousand-year wait, lead at last to a Sovereign England. Thus, the Isles of the North Atlantic (IONA) can be cleansed of the parasitic, vampire-like British imperial myth, which enslaved it after the 1066 tragedy and has sucked on our blood ever since.
In North-Eastern Europe
In North-Eastern Europe, the three tiny, impoverished and depopulated Baltic States and Finland may yet become truly independent republics, allied with the future Union State of Rus’ in order to survive economically. Certainly, they will all have to rid themselves of their US-appointed puppet elites, stop behaving like disruptive teenagers, come to terms with reality as mature adults and, with Russian help, become prosperous once more. The fifth country here, largely ex-Catholic Poland, already has its own Local Orthodox Church, and is where remaining traditional Catholics have worked out what is really going on. It will also have to make its peace in maturity with the reality of a reunited Rus’ and stop wasting money on useless weapons. This will be all the more urgent for the Polish Republic, once Germany returns to sanity from anti-German hysteria and commits anew to mutually beneficial agreements with the Russian Federation.
In South-Eastern Europe
The great victors of the American war in the ‘borderlands’, which is the translation of the Russian word, ‘Ukraina’, will be Hungary and Slovakia. Then, by repentance, can come a reunited Serbia and Montenegro, (North) Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova, Greece and Cyprus, followed by Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Czechia, with a Bosnia-Herzegovina reintegrated and an at last prosperous Albania, attracting like a magnet Albanians at present living outside it, especially those in Serbian Kosovo and Macedonia. Thus, all the for now sixteen countries of South-Eastern Europe, many of them Orthodox, can be drawn into a Russia-friendly but independent Confederation, part of BRICS, supplied by Russian energy. All of them have a Local Orthodox Church except for Austria and Hungary, which will surely form a new Austro-Hungarian Local Church.
The Return of the Church
I apologise for the long geopolitical digression above. However, it is necessary, for the results of geotheology are precisely geopolitics and pastoral. Whereas once people could find some sort of spiritual refuge and survival in parts of the Protestant denominations, and then in Roman Catholicism, today most can see that in the Western world where those two decadent structures are not entirely dead, they are rapidly dying. The tragedy of the second millennium Western world is that it ended up by voluntarily and suicidally renouncing the values of its own Civilisation, thus ensuring its own death. However, this also means that the Western Lands now have an opportunity to return beyond those to their real roots in the first millennium.
When the masses return to the Church of their ancestors, we must be ready for them, like forerunners, who prepared the way for them. Schismatic psychopaths whose evil deeds have already gone down in history, will have to stop persecuting their own clergy, trying to close their own churches, forbidding their own clergy from doing missionary work, and receive former Roman Catholics and Protestants into the Church canonically, as the 1,000 canonical Orthodox bishops in the world do, outlawing such schismatic novelties as ‘corrective baptism’ and ‘corrective ordination’, as practised by at least one Russian bishop in the USA, and using accessible books written in accessible English, not in a pseudo-archaic American jargon.
Orthodoxy, which has providentially returned to Western Europe, must make ready to receive the believing remnant after it had been usurped for a millennium by structures which are now rapidly disappearing into the black hole of apostasy. The Orthodox Church, severely battered, bruised and abused after a thousand years of persecutions from both inside and outside, has returned. We are indeed at a turning-point. We have made ready for the return of many here in Eastern England, preparing the way against all the extremists of the secularist left and the arrogant foreigners of the secularist right, ever keeping to the Royal Path.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
City of Colchester,
England