Tag Archives: Pastoral Matters

Q and A: 7 September-7 October 2025

Contemporary Life

Q: What do you think of the assassination of Charlie Kirk?

A: To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Mr Kirk until he had been assassinated, apparently by Ukrainian terrorists, since he was on their death-list.

Of course, it is appalling that anyone can be assassinated, though it happens every day. Mr Trump has assassinated Iranians with pleasure, and supports the assassinations of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and tens of thousands of Russians every year.

I think this assassination typifies this intolerance which the whole Western world is now subject to, both in the US and Western Europe. In the US it is cowboy gun violence, here it is ‘cancelling’ people, creating in ex-Catholic Europe a kind of New Inquisition of censorship, just as frightening as that of the Middle Ages, or else, in ex-Protestant Europe, creating witch-hunts of those who tell the truth.

The Western world has become the new Soviet Union, as had been predicted for over 30 years. It hates the Truth. This hatred of the Truth can only be, as Christ says, because ‘the Truth will set you free’. That is why any tyranny hates the Truth.  People say: ‘I don’t agree with you, therefore I can murder you or ‘cancel’ you’.

Some people want to make Mr Kirk into a martyr. You can only be a martyr if you die for Christ. That is not Mr Kirk’s case. As far as I know, he was an Evangelical, with all the deviations that that entails. Read the lives of the saints rather than spend hours youtubing Mr Kirk. There is a big difference. The martyrs showed humility, patience and the joyful readiness to die for their Faith. People should not be bringing politics, either left-wing or right-wing, into the Church. Our belief is the Gospel, the words of Christ.

Q: What is your view of Jordan Peterson? And Paul Kingsnorth?

A: I don’t know much about Jordan Peterson, but as far as I can see he is an excellent psychologist, a thorough observer of human nature and makes many good suggestions and gives good advice to young people. It is a pity that he has not formally become a Christian and so remains an outsider.

Paul Kingsnorth belongs to the Romanian Orthodox Church, like us. Clearly, he is new to the Faith and says many of the things that recent converts say (I can remember thinking and saying the same things fifty years ago). However, because he is a writer and a speaker, he has a gift and can explain his approach to the Faith to those outside the Church. So he is a very good missionary and avoids excesses, like some misguided converts.

Q: What happens to those who get rebaptised?

A: I know one young man, who had never been baptised and then was baptised into the Orthodox Church. Unsatisfied, despite the warning words of the Creed, he then got rebaptised by an ‘Orthodox’ sect. Six months later he got rebaptised by yet another ‘Orthodox’ sect (total worldwide membership – six). Two years on, he now never goes to church. It is clear that his approach to baptism was ‘magical’, and the need to get baptised came from his pathological state, not from any spiritual reason. In fact, the priest who baptised him the first time, warned him that if he got rebaptised, he would lapse from the Church. So it always is.

Q: What do you think of the fact that the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman?

A: It is nothing to do with us. We have never been members of that religious group and, like 95% of English people, know little about it. All we can see is that it was founded by the murderous Henry VIII, so he could give himself a divorce, and that today it is an overpaid woke laughing-stock. What I do know and care about is that that there are Orthodox bishops who are not women, but who are either financially corrupt, or else sexual perverts, who form ‘lavender mafias’, or else they are both.

Q: Would you take part in anti-abortion marches?

A: I am of course opposed to abortion, as are all Orthodox Christians. Ten years ago, we had a Russian ROCOR parishioner who wanted to abort a child – she already had two children. Although it took some effort, I persuaded her to keep the child and the Church gave her £2,000 to help her with costs. Today she has a lovely little girl, now ten years old, and her parents are very happy with their decision. This is being anti-abortion practically, and not demonstrating politically in the street.

That only has negative effects, which is why I am opposed to political activism. First of all, it is a waste of time and has no effect. Secondly, it is part of a political ideology (right-wing in this case), encouraged by some clerics who are sexual perverts. Thirdly, it seems to be prevalent among converts from Catholicism and Protestantism. When not naïve, they can at times be immature, self-admiring, self-satisfied, self-important, self-righteous, middle-class, priggish, who want to advertise themselves. Others are sometimes closet homosexuals, misogynists because they are unhappy alone, and can be extremist and hateful. I would not encourage them.

Q: I have heard the statement that ‘the similarity between the bodies of apes and human-beings shows that they have a common ancestor’. What would you reply?

A: The similarity between the human body and the bodies of most animals, two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth, four limbs and similar internal organs, proves only that we were all made by the same God.

Church Life

Q: Are there different types of priest?

A: Most definitely. There are three types of priest. The first is the careerist, an ‘apparatchik’, as the Russians call him, they are the yesmen who climb the rungs of the clerical ladder and are desperate for awards. The second type are kindly and moderate, good and popular priests.

Finally, there is the third type, those who are touched by the Holy Spirit and the spirit of prophecy. It is best not to touch them and try and make them fit into some religious system or careerism. You cannot control them. The Holy Spirit does not fit into manmade religious systems. Bishops rise and fall according to how they treat such priests.

Such was the case with St John of Kronstadt, who did not receive any priestly awards for decades and only became rector of his huge church after forty years because of the jealousy of his bureaucrat-metropolitan! Such was the case also with the future St John of Shanghai, who was also persecuted by similar bishops. There are ignorant bishops who persecute and despise the saints. We know who they are.

Q: Which Local Church is going to be at the root of founding the new Autocephalous Church of Western Europe?

A: Between 1985 and 1988, I had briefly thought that Constantinople could perhaps do it, as the Russian Church was still divided and enslaved to the Communist regime. Then, in summer 1988, I clearly saw official Greek nationalism and corruption.

After 2003 and the words of Patriarch Alexei II promising such a new Local Church – and he grew up in Estonia – I thought it would be the Russian Church that could do it. After many doubts and setbacks after 2016 especially, by 2021 I saw that this was definitively not going to happen, as the Russian Church had fallen into Non-Christian centralism with its virulent nationalism and ghetto mentality, clearly refusing to give any other nationality autocephaly.

The Russian Church clearly and openly turned its back on Orthodox England and Orthodox Europe, precisely on 4 February 2022. That was a historic moment. Now it is isolated and is losing the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltics, as well as the Diaspora, all because of its centralist refusal to grant anyone autocephaly, which is its refusal for nationalist reasons to do missionary work. It is the path it has chosen, to its loss.

Today we have a situation where, with rare exceptions, the Greek Church is only for Greeks, the Russian only for Russians, the Serbian only for Serbs, the tiny numbers of Bulgarians and Georgians are also nationally exclusive, Antioch is only for the tiny numbers of disappointed Anglicans, Protestants and Evangelicals, and the new ROCOR is only for the few pathological convert fanatics. Only the Romanians are left.

I look back with gratitude to the moment when all our parishes were forced to join the Romanian Church by the ROCOR schism (and real schisms are always preceded by heresy, which in their case was the Donatism of the past. You should never return to your first errors, but learn from them). That was a time above all of liberation and relief, not of abandonment and treachery. Our local Archbishop, who is Moldovan, has as his main interest precisely Autocephaly, the theme of his doctorate. This is Providence. In the future, Russians will look back on this moment with horrified regret at their historic error.

Britain

Q: Iranians call the USA ‘the Great Satan’ and England ‘the Little Satan’. What would you say about that?

A: I would make a correction: ‘The Little Satan’ is not England, but Norman England, which is usually called ‘Britain’.

Q: Should Britain have taken part in World War One?

A: Definitely not! Though too late, that huge error was made. I blame Sir Edward Grey for his warmongering and secret promises. If it had not been done, we may not have seen either Hitler or Stalin, let alone all the rest.

Q: Should we pay other countries compensation for the crimes of the British Empire?

A: Who is we? We, the people, never had any idea what was being done abroad by the elites. It is only today when the old, load-bearing, national propaganda myths are collapsing that the people are discovering to their horror what had been done for centuries behind their backs. The asset-stripping both inside the country and abroad were acts of London merchants/businessmen soon after the Reformation. That asset-stripping was reinforced after the merchants took full power through Cromwell and the Dutch and German rulers whom they brought in after Cromwell. The only case for compensation that can be made is for the descendants of those elites to be forced to pay some sort of compensation, provided that they are still benefiting from the criminal acts of their ancestors.

Chisinau, 7 October 2025

 

From Feast to Feast: Nine Days in the Life of

Saturday 20 September

Today, the third Saturday of the month, we have our monthly English liturgy. As usual, the Liturgy is held in the little church and takes only one hour, ending at 10.20, though I do give a long instructional talk of 20 minutes afterwards. Then those who came, a mixture of English parishioners and Russian parishioners with their children – the parents want their children to understand the Liturgy – have tea together in the meeting room. We mix with those who attend the Saturday Russian School which takes place later in another room.

Sunday 21

I arrive at church, as usual, at about 7.15 am. Preparation and the Proskomidia take one and a half hours. We have many tens of thousands of names to commemorate, so we can only pray for all the names once a year. The second priest arrives at 7.30, but has to go to the hospital to give communion to a very sick elderly woman. He is back at 8.30. Then confessions begin at 8.45 with all three priests available and the two deacons helping. The Liturgy begins more or less on time at 9.20. After the Liturgy, I have a Russian memorial service, a Moldovan baptism, and then there are people to see individually. I get home at 3.30.

Monday 22

Today I am visiting Count and Countess Benckendorff at their rose-gardened thatched home in Suffolk. We have not seen one another for a good discussion for several months. First, we discuss what we need to do for next Sunday (see below). Countess Benckendorff will prepare some white roses (white because they are White Russians) for the graves, where the parish has erected new wooden crosses after nearly 100 years. Above all we speak of our favourite topic, the future of Russia and the Russian Church, against the background of the latest news from Russia.

Although both Benckendorffs were born, brought up and worked in the Soviet Union, they have worked through and understood the problems of the last century of Russian history. They are both appalled by the present civil war in the Ukraine and how the West has sponsored it against the interests of both peoples. But the peoples themselves are also responsible. We agree that all this horror is the result of the aftermath of both waves of Westernisation, the Marxist-Soviet one before the 1990s and, from the 1990s on, the Capitalist one of the oligarchs. Both were the result of the Western-organised regime change operation in 1917, known falsely as ‘The Russian Revolution’, that we should rather call ‘The Russian Degeneration’.

As regards the Military Operation in the east and south of the old Soviet Ukraine, it has always been clear to us from the outset that giant Russia would win militarily against small Ukraine, even with full NATO backing, rather as if in a conflict between Germany and Belgium, it would be clear that Germany would win, however much Belgium was backed by outside meddlers. However, from the outset it has equally always been clear that the Russian Church would lose. A Church, one third of whose members are Non-Russians, has lost one third of its members and been turned into an ever more centralised, clericalised and militarised ghetto, hostile to the people and to the spiritual. The violent and conscious rejection of Non-Russians and the Orthodox mission to Western Europe by the now nationalist Russian Church hierarchy for purely political reasons has been its huge loss.

Both the Count and Countess have a great fondness for their distant cousin, Count Paul Benckendorff, brother of Count Alexander, the last Imperial ambassador at the Court of St James (London). Count Paul was very close to the martyred Tsar, ready to die for him, and wrote the book ‘Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo.’ Their view is that in 1917 Russia committed suicide, betrayed by its corrupt aristocracy, the oligarchs of that age, and it still has not recovered from that suicide, even though we are now advancing on the road to recovery, especially compared to fifty years ago.

This can be seen very clearly in the Russian Church hierarchy, as it goes from one scandal to another, to the despairing patience of the faithful clergy and people, more and more of whom are boycotting it, as they have been let down. There is far to go to restore the original Russian Church, as it was before Peter I, the ensuing bureaucratisation and increased ritualisation. The problem is not that the State persecutes the Church or forces it into obedience, it is people inside the Church who think that the Church must imitate the State, just as in the Church of England.

Another thing we agree on is that the decadence in Russia in 1917 was shown by the fact that people no longer took communion, at best, only once a year, often indeed never after baptism. In effect, by 1917 Russia had fallen out of communion with Christ and into the ritualism of the pharisees who can express only hatred. Here is how the leaders of the once persecuted Church became persecutors.

Tuesday 23

Today I bless the home of an English Orthodox family in Bury St Edmunds. Afterwards N. comments that the alien British Establishment want us to rejoin the Globalist EU project (did we ever leave it?), continue the greedy Globalists’ war in the Ukraine in order to exploit all its natural resources, and increasingly control and censor us as they are authoritarians. N. adds that ‘the present Prime Minister claims that we have free speech and if anyone disagrees with him, they will be arrested’. I suggest that all may change, once the leaders of Germany, the UK and France fall, since they are all extremely unpopular, indeed are hated.

I listen to him with a smile, but change the subject to history and say how the problem of Western Europe is that it was conquered by barbarians like the Franks, Vikings and Normans.  As a result, the twentieth century was patterned by the descendants of these barbarians with their barbarian World Wars, fighting against neo-pagans – Communists and Nazis.

In the afternoon I collect the up-to-date statistics for our Church in Western Europe. Our two bishops in the British Isles and Ireland now have dioceses of 119 priests and 19 deacons in 95 parishes and 5 monasteries. We are part of the two Autonomous Metropolias of Western Europe, of Western and Southern Europe, and Central and Northen Europe. They include even our parishes and missions in Finland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland. We now have 10 bishops, 859 parish churches and 30 monasteries, with the number of churches increasing regularly.

We have come a long way from the days of liturgies in front rooms and sheds, with 10-20 huddlers in the catacomb churches of the 1970s. When there were more than 25 people present, they would say: ‘There were a lot of people at church today!’ However, these conditions still endure in the present Russian Church in the Diaspora, which still suffers so grievously from its past errors. Thus, the Russian Church in the Diaspora (ROCOR) may have up to 300 parishes altogether, but only about 50 of them have more than 100 parishioners for Sunday liturgies. Most have between 10 and 40 mainly converts. But we are now in the normal mainstream, in churches that have hundreds of parishioners present every Sunday.

Fr Ioan Nazarcu, our old friend, whom we have known for 15 years, and for some years now has been a priest, has just given the Economist magazine an interview. Although this Rothschild magazine is atheist in ideology, Fr Ioan, whose English is excellent, has been able to give them a first-rate interview.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/09/22/the-orthodox-church-is-thriving-in-britain-thanks-to-immigration

Wednesday 24

Today I have my day off and am at home, dealing with domestic matters and building work. 

Thursday 25

Today I bless a Ukrainian-Moldovan home in Basildon near east London. The parents are worried about transgender propaganda at school and are thinking of returning to Moldova to protect their children from it. I stop at church to get everything ready for the feast on Saturday. It takes me two hours. Then I bless the home of a Russian family in Colchester and stay for tea and conversation. They have just returned from Moscow, which is now very vibrant and generally more prosperous than Western cities, which have so many social problems and suffer from litter, graffiti and potholed roads and pavements.

Friday 26

Today I am seeing Moldovan and Romanian parishioners in Stowmarket in Suffolk and in Diss across the border in Norfolk. I will not make it to the canon this evening in Colchester, where 30-40 Romanian parishioners gather more or less every Friday evening or sometimes at midnight for a Liturgy. Fr Ioan will, as always, cope very well.

Saturday 27

Today is the Feast of the Exaltation for our Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan parishioners. About 50 people are in church. Afterwards I baptise an adult Russian. 

Sunday 28

 I head to church at 6.45. After the Liturgy, we have the meeting of St Alban’s Circle, our youth group. About sixty people attend. The subject is the life of St John of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Fr Ioan is doing baptisms in the main church, while Fr Sergey has a memorial service in the little church. At 1.20, I leave for Claydon cemetery outside Ipswich and the graves of Countess and Count Benckendorff, wife and son of the last Imperial ambassador, Count Alexander. They are distant cousins of the present Benckendorffs. People place roses on the graves of Countess Sophia, Count Konstantine and his wife Maria Korchinska. I get home at 3.30

At home I have to start getting ready for my pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania from 6 to 17 October.

 

 

Questions and Answers July 2025

The True Faith. The state of the various Orthodox jurisdictions in England today and fifty years ago. The moment when the Russian Church turned its back on Europe. The Oxford and London Russian parishes fifty years ago. Tsar Nicholas in England. The coming end of the war in the Ukraine. The consequent fall of the European elite and of its ideology versus Orthodoxy.

Q: What for you is the True Faith?

A: In my late childhood and early teenage years, I came to three conclusions about what must be the True Faith:

Firstly, the True Faith must be about Christ, as only Christ is God and man, combining East and West, North and South. The True Faith must therefore represent the spiritual reality of Him and not State manipulations of Religion and the Bible, based on nationalism, racism, imperialism, colonialism and all cultures of apostasy, like the White Supremacy Western world.

Secondly, the True Faith must be historical and not some recent invention, neither of the nineteenth century, nor of the sixteenth century, nor even of the eleventh century, for it must go back a thousand years before, to the Scriptures, to the Word of God Himself.

Thirdly, the True Faith must be universal, as is Christ. In other words, the True Faith must be for all races who seek it, accessible to all, that is, to all who are repentant and so seek Christ, and so is not some esoteric or obscurantist religion for one nationality, or for the select few or elite.

Q: Why did you not become members of the Antiochian Diocese when you left ROCOR in 2021, unlike the three Western riters who were purged by ROCOR and went to Antioch?

A: The short answer is that none of us twelve clergy, or any of our thousands of people, had ever been Anglicans, let alone Anglican vicars. You have to understand the Antiochian Diocese exists in this country for them. We have all always been Orthodox and have never known any other religion, so something for ex-Anglicans, however worthy and sincere they may be, has no interest for us. It is irrelevant to us.

Also, Antioch is not European, as we are, and cannot members of one of the four Arab families who operate it. The Church of Antioch here is tiny, consisting perhaps of only a thousand people, mainly ex-Anglicans or ex-Protestants, especially rather puritanical conservative evangelicals. (This puritanism is rather ironic given the behaviour of the former Antiochian Archbishop in the USA and also drives away normal Orthodox, who, like Arab Orthodox, are not puritans).

Another problem of Antioch being so small is that it is desperate to recruit clergy and people, with one recent disaster when they accepted a reject from the mainstream Churches, based in his front room in Liverpool, and another disaster, some years ago, in Belfast. I believe in the latter case that vicar-priest ended up in prison for fraud. Other Non-ex-Anglican clergy under Antioch eventually transfer back to the Local Churches they come from. They cannot take the Anglican mentality, however hard they try to deny their origins.

The long answer is that our first act after we learned, directly, (it was actually boasted of by the culprit!) of the ROCOR schism in April 2021 was to warn the ROCOR Synod of what was going on. As soon as we realised that the whole Synod in New York had been perverted into the new ROCOR, not leaving a shred of tradition and the old ROCOR, and misinformed, our second act was to report to Moscow. When they replied that, although they perfectly understood the insanity of the situation, for purely political reasons they could not receive us, our third act was to join the Paris Archdiocese under Moscow. This had largely been cleansed of liberal French intellectuals and we have many friends and family there.

After Paris was told by Moscow, which could not make up its mind at first, that it would not be allowed to keep us, as the Moscow aim was not to expand Paris but to close it down, our fourth act was to look at our other options. Although three different jurisdictions wanted us, the obvious and only correct option, which we adopted very quickly, was to go with our old friends in the Church of Romania. (Romania had been the original choice of the Paris Jurisdiction when they had quit Constantinople there years before, but occult forces had rejected that choice and it had joined Moscow. So we made the choice for them). The Romanian Church had been suggesting to us for years in case ROCOR turned schismatic and it was supported by Moscow for purely political reasons, we could transfer to them.

So we joined the Romanian Church with the tacit blessing of Moscow, and any other refugees who want to leave the schismatic ROCOR for the Romanian Church have been invited to do so too. We have simply paved the way for the others, who will follow us. The strangest thing about this was that there appeared a lie on the internet that the Romanian Church had not received us! There were actually people who believed this, though not in Moscow. But the lie only discredited him who invented it and those who believed it. Today the culprit for the lie is isolated, shunned and shamed as a liar.

Q: So Moscow is abandoning ROCOR behind their backs? Why did you not opt for the Russian or Greek Churches?

A: As I said, Moscow was not allowed to receive us for political reasons, even though it knew that ROCOR was engaged in its insane schism. As Moscow was not politically free (a very serious fault), it had to go along with the ROCOR schism. This was a turning point and next year, in 2026, all will see the significance of this. Later, Moscow was punished for this lack of principle and has since had to tolerate the recent horrible Russophobic attacks on the Moscow Patriarchate by both ROCOR bishops in Germany.

This is what happens when you compromise yourself with the positions of enemies of Church teaching, even if only once. It is a downward spiral, as you have to accept everything else they do later on. Moscow already regrets it, indeed it is the great loser in all of this, but that was its choice. It was clearly told what was going on, but Metr Antony Sevryuk suicidally rejected the warning and told us to join the Romanian Church. Thus, the Russian Church turned its back on Europe – I don’t think that even now he realises the scale and significance of his error. In one act he had handed over Western Europe, including the local Russians, to Romanian Orthodox jurisdiction.

As a result, the Moscow Diocese in this country is now programmed to become a small embassy ghetto, a dependency, with just its church in London and the small church in Oxford surviving, exactly as it was fifty years ago, the rest has literally been left to die out. Since the British Establishment, like the other Establishments in Europe, has blacklisted Moscow, Moscow has no hope of expansion or incarnation into Western society. Therefore, Moscow is for the time being closed down in Western Europe. There is no future for the Russian Church here. It has had to close its window on Europe, given European political hostility to it, and is looking towards Asia and Africa. It will take a generation for Moscow to turn back to Europe, if ever it does. 2022 will go down in Western European Church history as the moment when the Russian Church lost it.

As for the Greek Archdiocese, it has recently been renewed, as it was dying out. It now has several younger bishops, including one excellent one (if only he could be the next Patriarch!), still has excellent infrastructure and several big parishes in London and some outstanding priests, but it has huge problems. It is profoundly ethnically and politically Greek, compromised by its CIA Patriarch, and, like Antioch and the Moscow Church here, most of its priests are elderly and dying out.

As Archbishop Nikitas told us recently, he has 100 elderly priests to replace in the next ten years and only 3 candidates. It is now not possible to get lots of poorly-educated young archimandrites from Greece, like they did in the 60s and 70s. That source has dried up. Moreover, only one church, the newly-frescoed Thyateira chapel, actually belongs to the Greek Archdiocese. The others are all privately owned by Greek and Cypriot businessmen and restauranteurs, who do as they want.

Q: What then is the future of ROCOR?

A: In rejecting the mission of the Diaspora Church to gather all Orthodox together through its schism and racism towards Greeks, Romanians, Moldovans and rooted English Orthodox in particular, it refused to concelebrate with the mainstream and cut itself off from communion. It has instead concentrated on attracting extremists, the naïve, the vulnerable and the pathologically ill. This is the path of the sect and the cult. And that is what it has become.

Q: Did you know Fr Mark Meyrick and Metr Kallistos Ware?

A: Of course. I first met the then Fr Kallistos in September 1974. He was an old-style, upper middle-class High Church Anglican, with an incisive public school-trained intellect. I loved his lectures and learned a lot from him. But above all, he was a very kind and sincere man. I remember him and pray for him with gratitude, although I was on a quite different wavelength from him.

I first met Fr Mark in July 1976. The problem with Fr Mark, who came from a long line of Anglican vicars, is that he had chosen to live among Anglicans, cut off from the Orthodox mainstream. As a result, he had a tiny community in a Norfolk village, isolated from Orthodoxy. He mainly seemed to be interested in converting young Anglican men and encouraging them to grow extremely long beards! As I had no interest in either Anglicanism or long beards, that was not for me.

Fr Mark (later Archimandrite David), transferred from ROCOR to Moscow, I think, in 1981. This was because of the attempted Americanisation and sectarian fanaticisation of ROCOR, which began at that time and which ended in 2021 with the triumph of American convert ROCOR in Europe and its abolition as part of the mainstream. It is now an American crazy convert colony and has no future. Crazy convert Orthodoxy does not export, as it is culturally alien to Europeans.

Q: Are Orthodox bishops worse today than fifty years ago?

A: Absolutely not. Fifty years ago, I knew three of them. One was a homosexual bureaucrat who ordained his boyfriends. One of those he ordained became an alcoholic, another gave up the priesthood within two weeks. A second bishop was a lady’s man who spent time with his main mistress in a cottage on the south coast, or so I was told. I knew her. A third was an anthroposophist. So we decided to return to Paris, to people who knew the Tradition. Today’s crop of homosexuals and sociopathic narcissists created by being spoiled as children are no better, but also no worse.

Q: What do you remember of the University of Oxford in the 1970s and the Russian chapel, then inside the house in Canterbury Road in Oxford?

A: In those days (and I am told that it has not changed very much since then), there were three ways of getting into the University of Oxford as an undergraduate. In order of importance, these were: aristocratic privilege, wealth, and academic achievement. I was therefore automatically and distinctly third class from the outset. The first two types were there to complete their Norman education, so they could enter the Norman (British) Establishment.

Moreover, those aristocratic or wealthy types who had nearly always attended public schools were shockingly, to me an innocent aged 18, often suffered from Norman homosexuality, like William Rufus. Oxford was riddled with it. Another reason to keep well away. In any case, I was not there to enter the Norman Establishment, though many who had not been to public schools allowed it to happen to them, as they were venal careerists. I was there for exactly the opposite reason, to understand how to de-Normanise. By Divine Providence I studied in the Alfredian College, by tradition (even if not in reality), the only pre-Norman College in Oxford. All was right.

I attended the Russian chapel in Canterbury Road in October 1972 and again in February 1973, when I was sixteen, just before the modernistic, octagonal chapel was built in the garden. The old chapel inside the House is now the library, based on Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, which I helped put in there. That old chapel was charming.

On the other hand, the rather effete University chapel later built in the garden of 1, Canterbury Road was definitely not for the ordinary people of Oxford. The Serbs, who were ordinary people, kept well away, as did most of the Greeks. The few by then elderly Russian academics who were still alive went when they could to one or other of the two Russian churches in London.

Apart from the majority of normal people who went there, there were also wealthy Anglo-Catholic homosexuals, or else those who mistakenly thought that Church Tradition means the same as right-wing political conservatism.

Q: What was the London Russian Church in Ennismore Gardens like at the time fifty years ago in the mid-seventies? And the ROCOR Church?

A: The London Patriarchal church had been taken over by upper middle-class people from wealthy west London, owners of Cotswold cottages, villas in Tuscany or on Greek islands. These were intellectuals, Liberal Democrats, BBC directors, well-to-do academics, lawyers, journalists etc, so rich that they had the leisure time to be enthralled by ‘spirituality’, Orthodox or Buddhist, as spiritual tourists. In 2006 they left en masse for Constantinople, as their hero, Metr Antony Bloom, had died. He was the reason for them joining, so once he had gone, in 2004, it was all over. Their cliquish snobbery continues. Only five years ago I overheard one of these now elderly people saying about a very pious and simple Romanian man, who dared (once) to frequent his clubby (rented) church: ‘I hope he does not come back, but at least he has a degree’. Is that Christianity?

Fifty years ago the Emperor’s Gate ROCOR Church had twice as many people as the Bloomite church, but it was an old people’s home. Apart from two or three Anglican homosexuals, the average age of the parishioners, who were very nice, must have been about 80. The writing was on the wall. It was an ethnic club that had no future, as they had failed to pass on the Faith to their descendants.

Q: Is there anywhere you would go on to a pilgrimage to the Royal Martyrs in England?

A: There are two places: Osborne House on the Isle of Wight and Sandringham in Norfolk. Of the two I much prefer Sandringham, which is connected with the Tsar. He is still present there and he dreamed of becoming a Norfolk gentleman-farmer, if ever he had to leave Russia. Things will happen here.

For your interest, here is a full list of the five visits of the Tsar to England, with places and dates:

In 1873 the future Tsar first visited Queen Victoria as a five-year old child. He arrived on the Imperial Yacht at Woolwich on 16 June, stayed at Marlborough House on the Mall, visited Chiswick House on 28 June and on 28 July left for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, staying at Albert Cottage. On 8 August he went to Cowes Regatta, leaving England on 13 August, having spent nearly two months in England.

He visited London at the end of June 1893, having been met at Charing Cross Station, and staying at Marlborough House again. He went to Windsor on 1 July, visited Hurlingham on 4 July and Buckingham Palace on 5 July, attending the wedding of the future King George V on 6 July. He left the next day, having spent just over a week in England.

He arrived on 20 June 1894 to meet the future Tsarina. He arrived at Gravesend in Kent and travelled to Walton-on-Thames via Waterloo Station. He also visited Frogmore, Bagshot, Sandringham, Kings Lynn, London, Eton, Slough, Farnborough, Aldershot and Richmond-on-Thames. On 19 July he left for Portsmouth to cross to Osborne House and Albert Cottage, visiting Newport. He left on 23 July, after over a month in England.

1896 was his first visit as Tsar, with the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Olga. They arrived at Leith on 22 September and went to Balmoral by train via Ballater. Here he visited Braemar Castle. He then travelled by train via Preston and Oxford, taking the Imperial Yacht at Portsmouth on 3 October.

On Monday 2 August 1909 the Tsar and his family visited Cowes on the Isle of Wight for the Regatta. He stayed at Osborne House, visiting Barton Manor and leaving on 5 August, having given £1,000 to be distributed among the island’s poor.

Q: When will the war in the Ukraine end?

A: This US proxy war against Russia (as Marco Rubio has openly described it) is a war of attrition. First, the Russians ground down first the first Ukrainian Army, then the second Ukrainian Army with old Soviet equipment from Eastern Europe, and now it is finishing off the third Ukrainian Army, with its NATO equipment. Wars of attrition, like the American Civil War and the First and Second World Wars, can go on for years, but they always end very suddenly, as the Second War ended suddenly in Berlin.

We are now reaching that point in the Ukraine, as the Americans are getting rid of their actor-puppet Zelensky. He has got too big for his boots and is too corrupt, resists the puppet-master and has refused peace, which is want Trump wants. The end will come suddenly and, I think, fairly soon. This is why Trump gave him (not Putin) 50 days so Zelensky could be finished off. Either he will get out on a CIA plane or else he will finish with a bullet in his head. When will Kiev collapse? The German-led, Pan-European invasion of the USSR in the Second World War lasted three years and eleven months. So maybe the end to this war will come within the same time span. At present it has lasted three years and five months.

The only danger is that NATO may invade Russia, as it has threatened, then that will be full war. That is possible, if the crazies in NATO have their way. If so, they will be crushed, as NATO has already been demilitarised by Russia. Russia has defeated all the Western Coalitions that invaded it, that of Napoleon, that in the Crimea, that of Hitler, and now this American-led NATO one.

Q: What will happen to Western Europe, once it has been defeated in the Ukraine?

A: The consequences of the defeat of the Western puppet government in Kiev, created and used as a proxy battering ram against Russia, and so the defeat of the whole of NATO, will be tremendous. The West will never get its money back. Worse still, it will never get its prestige back. The West has gone, replaced by the multipolar BRICS world. This will feed through and the old governing elites in Europe will have to be replaced.

This is because all empires decline in depravity and perversion (from Roman emperors to the debauched King Edward VII and now the Mossad-Epstein orgies) or buffoonery (the leaders of Western Europe and Kiev today, if they are not also pedophiles and cocaine addicts). Decadence comes at the end and with it a total lack of sense of reality, as buffoons live in virtual reality, fantasy, just as Hitler did at the end. We can see this clearly in the last 35 years of US leaders, from Clinton-Lewinsky to Obama, ending with the demented Biden and the world’s greatest narcissist, the result of a materially spoilt childhood, Trump.

Q: Do you think that Europe could return to Orthodoxy?

A: Europe, no, but a small portion of Europeans, yes. In the Romanian Church we are preparing for this literally, as you will see next year. We already have ten bishops in the twenty-one countries of Western Europe and a flock of nearly five million. One of those bishops is French, all speak at least one Western European language, if not two or three.

Moreover, our bishops also have a conscience of the importance of the veneration of the local saints of Western Europe. This is unique. I remember the fierce and insulting opposition of the ROCOR bishops to their veneration until 2017, when they finally realised that the tide was too strong for them to swim against any longer and then they stopped persecuting me on that score at least.

It is clear that we are moving towards a post-American Europe, the post-1945 part of the history of Western Europe is over. The American invasion and occupation will soon end. Its old puppet governments, in the UK, Germany, France and elsewhere, will fall. And Eurasia, Russian, India, China, India and Iran, north, south, east and west, the centres of the Heartland, are now co-operating in BRICS. Thus, the Western world, which was formed in the eleventh century has after a thousand years made itself spiritually irrelevant.

Q: Are the media censored in the UK?

A: Yes. The name of the official censor is Ofcom, but censorship relies above all on editorial control. Here news editors are appointed to carry out the censorship duties imposed by the State/Establishment and journalists who are completely mercenary, ‘presstitutes’ as they say. The BBC is a classic case of such censorship, of deliberate non-reporting, deliberate misreporting, and diversion (reporting irrelevant local stories of no interest instead of reporting the actual news).

 

 

 

 

The Third Anniversary of our Adherence to the Romanian Patriarchate and the 2012 Icon of All the Saints of the British Isles and Ireland

On Sunday 16 February we recalled the third anniversary of our acceptance by His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph into the Romanian Patriarchate with gratitude to God. This has protected us from having to obey many uncanonical acts, which would naturally have divided our multinational community.

In celebration of this we have had 100 A2 prints of the 2012 Icon of All the Local Saints printed in high definition on high quality paper and framed in a golden frame. These are being given out for free to the very many parishes which have supported us over the last three years. If any individuals would like a copy – but A2 is very large for a home – it will cost £25, but it cannot be posted.

Our Archdiocese (Roarch) Has a New Website

The website of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of 870 parishes had not  been updated for ten years.

Thanks to the efforts of our dear Archbishop Athanasy, our Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland now has its own website, where of course we are also to be found: https://roarch.org.uk/parishes-england/. Listed are 65 parishes and communities in England, served by 45 priests and 13 deacons. There are also 10 priests, 2 deacons and 9 parishes in Scotland and 2 priests and 2 parishes in Wales. 23 men are currently awaiting ordination. Vladica is going to be very busy!

Prehistory, the Flood and History

Dating

Radiometric dating methods currently reckon the age of the Earth to be some 4.5 billion years and the age of the Universe to be nearly 14 billion years. However, scientists modify these figures more or less every generation according to the latest theory. The accuracy of such methods, for example carbon-14 for recent dates, or potassium-argon for long ago, is dubious. Carbon-14 sometimes gives the most contradictory dates for anything more than about 2,500 years old and even before that it can err by up to two or three centuries. As for potassium-argon, it can date a rock formed by lava from a volcanic eruption a few years ago as being 200 million years old.

This imprecision comes about because these dating methods presume that depletion of the element in question is constant. It may not be. Given this inaccuracy, suppose we suspended our disbelief and regarded such dating systems and ‘scientific’ mythologisation regarding Creation as a cultural error? What if we took literally, and not symbolically, the traditional Christian Roman dating system, as used by the Orthodox Church? Whereas the old pagan Roman calendar dated everything from the foundation of pagan Rome in 754 BC, the Christian Roman calendar dates everything from the Creation, dated to 1 September 5509 BC.

In other words, in order to convert to the Christian Roman calendar, we must add 5,508 to the current year, if it is between January and August, and 5,009 to the current year, if it is between September and December. Thus, in December 2024 the Christian Roman date from Creation is 7,533. (Fundamentalist Protestants use the much later Jewish text of the Old Testament and generally date Creation to 22 October 4004 BC, making today 6,028 years from Creation). Most Orthodox Christians treat the date for Creation and the Six ‘Days’ of Creation as purely symbolic, and none of this is a dogma. However, if taken literally, it would have some very interesting implications.

From Prehistory to History

The acceptance of such dating would completely change our understanding of what is known as ‘Prehistory’, more precisely ‘pre-literary history’. For Prehistory was transmitted only orally, as it is the period before writing systems were invented –which was soon after the Flood, as dated  according to the Septuagint (see below). Therefore, taking the Christian Roman calendar, Prehistory would have lasted not billions or millions of years, but only about two millennia, from 7,533 to 5,291 years ago (Genesis 1-5), as the Church’s Septuagint text of the Old Testament dates the Flood to 5,291 years ago, 2,242 years after Creation.

We know little of Prehistory because of the Global Flood of Noah’s time which literally washed it all away, including the corpses of the relatively few people (a few tens of thousands?) then living. However, we do know what was later written down by Moses from the oral tradition passed down from the survivors, the much-mocked Noah and his family, who alone had not consorted with demons. And we should recall that since people lived for hundreds of years (for example, Adam = 930 years, Jared = 962 years, Methuselah = 969 years) oral traditions were basically stories handed down from ancestors, whom they had personally known. Thus, Adam was Noah’s seven times great-grandfather. (For comparison, one of my seven times great-grandfathers was born fewer than 400 years ago, not 2,242 years ago).

For instance, the first Book of Moses records that between the Fall and the Flood people, often called ‘neanderthals’, at first lived primitively in caves and wore animal skins, becoming hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists (see Genesis 3, 23-24 and 4, 1-3). What is clear is that those who had such long lifetimes must have become very skilled and technologically sophisticated, especially because of the presence of half-demon giants (nephilim) with their immense strength (Genesis 6, 1-4). From this period we also have folk memories, recorded universally in folklore with its giants (Genesis 6, 1-4), monsters, dragons, demons (elves, goblins, gnomes etc), angels (fairies), wizards and witches. With a lifetime of many centuries to experience, learn and think, many things became possible. Their civilisation was surely advanced.

In recent years there have been discoveries of complex stone structures now hundreds of feet under the sea, which may indicate that such technological progress took place. Some have interpreted these as confirming the many legends of vanished advanced civilisations, now flooded worlds, such as that of Atlantis. In any case, Genesis 4, 17-20 records the first settlements and towns. Genesis 4, 21 records the first musician. And Genesis 4, 22 records the first use of bronze, dated to about 5,300 years ago by archaeologists, and the use of iron, again showing the progress from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age. Why was it all destroyed by the Flood? Because the Earth had been demonised and, apart from Noah and his family, there was no further possibility of salvation. The existence of the Earth had become senseless until it had been cleansed.

The Flood

In Chapters 5-9 the Book of Genesis records the Universal Flood of 5,291 years ago. This Flood would have formed all geological layers, or strata, of rock, formed for instance from crushed clay (shale), chalk and seashells (limestone) sand (sandstone), mud (mudstone), trees and vegetation (coal) and other geological materials. The Flood, providentially for us, formed ‘petroleum’ (literally ‘rock-oil’), that is, oil, as well as gas from buried sea creatures and coal from buried forests. This also created fossils of animals which drowned instantly and were crushed, for there was no time for decomposition, as with animals which die slowly and naturally. (Fossilisation has hardly ever occurred in recent millennia). The future fossils were buried immediately beneath the floodwaters and the silt they carried – 4.5% of all fossils are of plants, and 95% are of marine creatures, which are also found on mountain peaks. Only 0.5% are of birds, animals and mammals.

The Flood formed the continents and islands, more or less as we know them today, as the original single land mass or ‘Pangea’ (Genesis 1, 9) was separated out as moving tectonic plates divided them. Continental drift began, as mountain chains rose up thousands of metres high from plains through very violent volcanic activity and the movement of the tectonic plates, when ‘the fountains of the great deep burst forth’ (Genesis 7, 11). Meanwhile, mainly in the far north of Europe and North America, there began the Ice Age, the result of floodwaters, heated by volcanic eruptions, condensing and freezing. The volcanic eruptions would also have blocked out the sunlight in those areas and killed the mammoths by asphyxiation through dust particles, which is how they died out. This Ice Age lasted for several hundred years over northern land areas, but it continues today in the Arctic and the Antarctic, though the ice there has been contracting for at least two centuries.

All animals and mammals, including the many which are today extinct, are descended from those in the Ark and developed into different species. They had obviously been selected and entered the Ark when they were very young. These did not include any fish, like ‘the leviathan’ (recorded in Job and the Psalms) and the sea monster (the Book of Jonah, where it was mistranslated as a ‘whale’). However, they would have included ‘dinosaurs’, recorded in the Old Testament as ‘the behemoth’ (Job 40, 15-24) and ‘dragons’, (see especially Daniel 14 in the Septuagint and the Psalms), as also in all folklore. (Did St George later kill the last ‘dragon’?). As Genesis 8, 4 tells us, the Ark was deposited on the mountains of Ararat, in the far west of today’s Turkey near Armenia.

People moved down from here along the rivers and settled in what is now called Mesopotamia (the land between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates) in today’s Iraq. The Flood is also recorded in garbled legends, like that of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh, and the other 300 ‘creation myths’ of different peoples worldwide. All humanity is descended from the 8 people, 4 couples, with their huge gene pool of all humanity, who were saved in the Ark. Indeed, genetics tends to confirm the origin of humanity from those eight people. This means that all human-beings are much, much closer to one another than according to the ‘scientific’ version, which dates human-beings back hundreds of thousands of years. In the Septuagint version we are all cousins, descended from only 5,291 years ago through only 200 or so generations.

History Begins

Now we enter recorded history and parallels with the Old Testament. Interestingly, according to archaeologists, the earliest known writing systems appeared about 5,250 years ago. This was just after the Flood, as dated by the Septuagint. At that time Noah planted the first vineyard (Genesis 9,20) and in Genesis 10-11 we read of the building of a great Tower (of Babel) some 5,150 ago. After its collapse, people were scattered (Genesis 11,9) to the ends of the earth, in a confusion of tongues, which led to the development of today’s more than 7,000 languages. People moved north, west, east and south, founding new civilisations in the course of time. Thus:

Stone Age monuments in Europe, like Carnac, Stonehenge, Silbury, Avebury and Skara Brae in Orkney, date back to about 5,100 years ago.

The Indus civilisation began about 4,500 years ago.

The first Egyptian pyramids were built some 4,500 years ago and African civilisations developed, gradually spreading further south. Thus, the Bantu moved into Central Africa some 4,000 years ago, finally arriving in South Africa some 2,400 years ago.

Genesis 11,26 records the birth of Abraham some 4,145 years ago.

The first Chinese dynasty appeared some 4,100 years ago.

The African-looking Olmecs settled in Central America some 3,200 years ago.

Civilisation began in Japan some 2,700 years ago.

The first people reached Tahiti some 2,500 years ago.

Amazonian civilisation began about 2, 500 years ago.

In Australia civilisation appeared some 4,000 years ago.

The Cahotian, Aztec and Inca civilisations in the Americas appeared about 1,000 years ago.

The first people settled in Hawaii some 1,000 years ago.

Finally, people reached New Zealand and Easter Island some 800 years ago.

Most will not be able to suspend their belief in the customary secular system, which since the last century has dated the age of the Universe at billions of years. They will regard the above as fantasy. But if they took it seriously, then very different perspectives would open up before them.

 

On Metr Antony (Bloom) and Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov)

Q: You are one of the few people who knew well both Metr Antony (Bloom) and Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). What do you think of them and their disputes?

A: I am not sure that I am one of the few, but I did know them both well.

The future Metr Antony was born on the same day as my grandfather, though twenty years after him. He was a typical Franco-Russian intellectual. He was very gifted, very open, to the point of liberalism, and very sincere. His father, Boris, was an Imperial diplomat who was interested in the occult and had the gift of hypnotism. His mother was the sister of the ‘mystical’, but very unOrthodox Russian composer Scriabin.

Andrei Bloom (as he then was) came to the faith in his teens and lived it in his own way. He did not study at seminary. He was completely unmercenary and lived very modestly. His interests were intellectual and in people and was very popular, especially among women. He was widely read in Western literature, but not so much in the Church Fathers or the literature of piety and the Lives of the Saints. He was really quite emotional and you can hear this in his sermons. His approach to the Faith was emotional, even sentimental, and cultural. That approach is very important to some.

Fr Sophrony was eighteen years older than Metr Antony and came from a well-off Russian family in Moscow, emigrated to France after the Revolution and was a huge intellectual, philosopher and artist who had belonged in his youth to the Art Nouveau Movement. He came to England in 1959, when a large property was given him by the Church of England in an ecumenical spirit. At that time he was still living in France, where for some 14 years he had been under the Patriarchate of Moscow after he had been expelled from Mt Athos. He had lived there for twenty years and was expelled by the Greek authorities for political reasons, together with two other Russian monks.

In 1965 he left the jurisdiction of Metr Antony of Moscow after twenty years and returned to the jurisdiction of Greek Constantinople. This happened after he had fallen out with Metr Antony, who wanted to close his monastery and ordain his priests, so he could expand his tiny diocese. Fr Sophrony (as we always called him – never starets) is now a local saint, canonised by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and venerated in the monastery, or convent, which he founded just outside a village in the east of Essex.

So we can see that Metr Antony had an emotional approach to the Faith and is very attractive to the emotional and even sentimental, especially to women, and brought tens of thousands of Russians and others to Orthodoxy. On the other hand, Fr Sophrony had an intellectual and philosophical approach to the Faith and he is attractive to highly educated people of many nationalities, many of whom have doctorates, like his monks.

Thus, they were very different people. But both played a positive role. The point is that everyone is different and there is no reason to reject or condemn either of them, as some do. Having said that, neither was my ‘cup of tea’ personally. But so what? There is room in the Church for many different sorts of people and many sorts of people are needed. Let us not be narrow! Tastes vary.

We can see this in the views of other Orthodox. For example, the then Fr Vitaly (Ustinov), later Metropolitan of ROCOR, called, I think in 1948, the then Fr Antony (Bloom) ‘a priest of Satan’, simply because he belonged to the Patriarchate of Moscow, which had been revived by Stalin. However, we know that Metr Vitaly ended his life outside the Church in a sect. Metr Antony (Bloom) did not.

Another critic, and of both the ‘Western’ Metr Antony and of the ‘delusional’ Fr Sophrony (according to Professor Osipov), is the Russian academic, Professor A. I. Osipov. His lectures are interesting for beginners in Orthodox life and he was very popular, especially in the 1990s when 100 million Russians were baptised, virtually without instruction. Once more, he is just another personality, with his own approach, a third approach, that of the academic.

All three approaches are interesting, but I don’t see why they should be mutually exclusive. However, once more he is not my personal cup of tea. But he is the cup of tea of many others. People are different! Accept that everyone is different and stop falling into that trap of sectarian narrowness and condemnation that some Russians can be inclined to, with their cries of ‘That’s uncanonical’, ‘you’re a schismatic’, ‘that’s heretical’ etc. None of that is Christian. Moreover, it is this Russian intolerance that has caused the schism between Russians and Greeks today, all the purely political divisions in the Russian emigration (meaning that today ROCOR is out of communion with the Western European Archdiocese of the Russian Church), and all the divisions inside Russia from the seventeenth century until today, Sad.

Questions and Answers October-November 2024

Q: What would the attitude of Metropolitan Antony of Sourozh have been to the war in the Ukraine?

A: It will soon be 44 years since he tonsured me reader, in January 1981.

Although he was not a monk, Metr Antony was a pastor and not a politician, and he would have prayed for peace and helped Orthodox Ukrainians and Russians equally. He would certainly have taken in and protected any priests from Moscow who had refused to pray for victory, like his disciple Fr Andrey Korodchkin, and instead prayed for peace. He would have abhorred militaristic attitudes in the Church and, while having no illusions about the pernicious role of the US and the Kiev regime in starting the war, he would have fully supported Metr Onufry of Kiev.

He must be spinning in his grave at what is going on in today’s almost Stalinist, nationalist administration of the Patriarchate in Moscow. Do not forget how Metr Antony supported Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s. To be honest, he would have contemplated leaving such a Moscow Patriarchate and perhaps taken refuge in another Patriarchate, certainly not Constantinople, but possibly Bucharest.

Q: How do you tolerate a bishop who is filled with hatred and jealousy for you?

A: Our personal experience is that you must tolerate it, knowing that their hatred and jealousy for Orthodox will always sooner or later lead to their schism and then heresy. Such was the case with the clerics Arius (a priest) and Nestorius (an archbishop), who started with hatred and jealousy and then fell into schism and heresy through their personal vice. Vice always leads to schism and then heresy. Once it has, not only you can leave him, but you must leave him. It is your spiritual duty.

On the other hand virtue leads to Orthodoxy. This is a spiritual and moral fact. Their hatred comes from the fact that you are more popular than they are because you have compassion for the people. Their jealousy comes from the fact you have a normal family life, whereas they are homosexuals or perverts and so cannot have a normal family life.

Q: How do you deal with a sociopath?

A: Sociopaths prey on the compassionate and pastoral, any whom they consider ‘vulnerable’, trying to make them their victims, trying to make them feel guilty and enslave them, thinking that they are weak and naive. Sociopaths are control freaks who try to exploit and manipulate, losing their temper very easily in order to do so. Outwardly they can be charming, but they are in fact narcissistic monsters, who bully and punish without any empathy or sense of guilt. However, they try and make others feel guilty, even to the point where some of their non-believing victims may commit suicide.

They are helped in this by the fact that sociopaths are delusional liars, they do not even realise that they are lying. There is only one way to defeat them and that is to flee from them. Always have a Plan B ready, a sideways move. They will always be astonished by this because they think that their power is absolute and they cannot possibly lose. This is why when they do lose, they lash out like a cornered animal, slandering and maligning, and they may start drinking. Then they will portray themselves as victims! We moved sideways to escape their snobbery and we have absolutely no regrets. If we may quote a world leader, talking about the USA:

‘They clearly did not expect such insubordination. They simply got used to acting according to a template, to grab whatever they pleased, by blackmail, bribery, intimidation, and convinced themselves that these methods would work forever, as if they had been fossilised in the past’.

Q: What are the results of being on the left-hand side of Church life and on the right-hand side? (By this I mean the liberal, modernist side and the traditionalist, pharisee side?).

A: The left leads to arid, dried-out intellectualism – or rather pseudo-intellectualism. The right leads to perverted narcissism.

Q: How do you deal with jealous Establishment types who repeat slanders about you?

A: Ignore them as there is no truth in their words, as the Psalmist says. They slander themselves, eaten up by their jealousy of their own hearts. I tremble for them. They will suffer for repeating open lies. As St Paisios the Athonite said: ‘I would long ago have gone mad because of the injustices of this world, if I had not known that the last word in human history will belong to Christ our Lord’.

Q: Who is part of the English Establishment, how big is it and how do you recognise it?

A: First of all, it is not the English Establishment, it is the Establishment which is in England, just as a virus enters a body as a parasite, it does not come from here. If you prefer, it is the British Establishment.

The word ‘British’ was first used by the Romans, then by the Normans (who moved the capital back from English Winchester to Roman and Norman London) and then was revived by the Tudors and all those who followed. In other words, the connotations of the word ‘British’ are purely imperial.

However, the Establishment is not a race, but a mentality, the ‘British’ mentality. It is called ‘the Establishment’ because it was established by the parasitic Norman elite after 1066. The British Establishment is the British Deep State, the part that remains constant whatever the government, whatever the ruling dynasty, whatever the century.

It concerns firstly the elite of British society, less than 1% of the population, as the money and power are with them. However, at least another 20% or so of the population have been dragged along into the Establishment by their money, their powerful media, intimidation, inertia and especially snobbery – they want to be associated with the ruling class, as it makes them feel important. This is the origin of the word ‘snob’, which has gone into many other languages, as other cultures do not have this reality.

You can easily recognise the Establishment because it is pro-Zionist (‘Western people are the chosen people’), and therefore pro-US, pro-EU, pro-NATO, pro-British (and anti-English), pro-Israel, pro-Kiev regime and, today, pro-Woke. As globalists, they always put non-national and anti-patriotic interests first, to the detriment of their own electorates. They are also contaminated by various sexual perversions, which is why they are pro-Woke.

Such is the case of the recent globalist and woke Archbishop of Canterbury who covered up child abuse. The Church of England is riddled with sex abusers and always has been, like Roman Catholic clergy also, but like the whole British Establishment – the BBC for example. This is why they are woke – it is all in self-justification: ‘our perversions are normal’ is what they are saying. This is why we should be very careful before receiving any Anglican vicars as laypeople into the Orthodox Church. There have been too many mistakes already.

Q: In the Creed we say that we believe in ‘One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church’, Isn’t this very confusing? Surely people will understand Roman Catholic?

A: This is a very old debate. Some suggest an alternative translation, like the Slavonic, such as ‘Conciliar’. Another possibility is to change the pronunciation to the Greek and pronounce the word ‘Cathólic’, with the stress on the middle syllable. Clearly, a solution needs to be found.

Q: Do you in the Orthodox Church pray for the dead?

A: In the Orthodox Church we do not believe in death and so do not have any dead. All are living, whether on this side of the veil or on the other side. And we pray for all the living, whatever side they are on.

Q: What do you think of tithing?

A: Tithing smacks of Protestantism, the Old Testament and Phariseeism. It must never be made obligatory. All giving to the church should be voluntary, never some obligatory ‘membership fee’. Remember that the widow’s mite received praise from Christ. Years ago I remember seeing a board in the entrance to a church in the Ukraine, detailing the names of people and how much each gave each month. See where that got them.

Q: Why do Orthodox rarely have names like Abel, Sarah, Zachary, Joel, Joshua, Aaron, Jared, Ruth, Deborah, Isaac etc?

A: There is nothing wrong with such names, it is just that they are rare in Orthodox societies. Why? Because these are Old Testament names and are often borne by people in societies of a former Protestant culture. Orthodox, like Roman Catholics, do not much read the Old Testament, apart from the Psalter, which the devout know well, so these names are rarely used, except in monasticism, where the Old Testament is read. Put simply, for Orthodox the New Testament is far, far more important than the Old Testament.

We have to understand that the Protestant world has always been close to Judaism, it even uses the Jewish text of the Old Testament instead of the Christian text. In English history even the revolution of the Puritan Cromwell was financed by Jewish bankers, so that they could move from Amsterdam, where they had moved from Venice and Northern Italy, to the safer haven of London. Later, in about 1916, they moved from London to the safer haven of USA, where aerial bombardment was not then possible.

Q: What is the Orthodox attitude to nature and the environment?

A: Nature was originally created by God. However, what we see around us is fallen nature. In this, lions tear apart antelopes, cats tear apart mice, spiders kill flies. So let us not be sentimental. The present environmentalism is nature-worship, as is visible in tree-hugging. The desire for clean nature is good in itself, but what we have to is a secularist form of puritanism, the search for the pure. Originally moralistic and anti-sexual (Protestant Puritanism invented witches and their hunting and murder), today’s Puritanism is all about pure nature. None of this is spiritual. Spiritual purity gives both sexual self-control and respect for the environment. Environmentalism, like Puritanism, gives neither because they are both anti-spiritual and merely moralistic.

Q: How many Romanians live in the UK?

A: Romanian speakers are by far the largest practising Orthodox group in Western Europe and in the UK, several times more than practising Orthodox Greeks, let alone the relatively small numbers of practising Orthodox Russians and others. According to past official statistics, the number rose from 83,168 in the 2011 United Kingdom census to 557,554 in the 2021 United Kingdom census. Between 2011 and 2021 Romanian went from being the seventeenth foreign language in Great Britain to the second, just after Polish.

This is over three years ago. The number is greater now and in any case Romanian, but English-born, children are not included in it and the number does not include Moldovans, who could easily number 50,000, perhaps more. Fairly reliable estimates, such as that of Dama Laura, the Romanian ambassador whom we know well in our church and count as a friend, put the actual number of Romanian-speaking immigrants and their English-born children at over 1.1 million. This is why the UK now has a Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese with its own Archbishop.

Q: After nearly fifty years in the Russian Church, how does it feel to be in the Romanian Church? Do you have any regrets?

A: The only thing that counts is to be in a free branch of the Orthodox Church, away from bullying and narcissistic sociopaths, with their hate-filled schism, guru-led sect, vicious jealousy, and that we have canonically left them (according to Canon XV of the First and Second Council of 861) and prosper more than ever. It has felt good to be back in the mainstream, just as it felt in 2007, when we helped bring ROCOR back into the mainstream for a decade – for even then American ROCOR had been threatening to leave the Church.

What is sad and I regret it, is how some hierarchs in the Russian Church quit the mainstream, just as those in the Patriarchate of Constantinople before it, persecuting clergy because they are patriots to their own country, in my case, to England (not to Britain, which is an alien, Norman construct). The worst thing is that in Moscow they have not learned from their mistakes.

For this persecution is an exact repeat of that in the 1920s when some senior clerics in Moscow persecuted all Russian Orthodox outside the USSR because they refused to give allegiance to the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union. Now it has been happening again, with all the usual threats, aggressiveness and ‘defrockings’, whether in the Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania and Western Europe.  Non-Russians are generally not welcome in the Russian Church today. Never tell me that history does not repeat itself!

Being in the mainstream and with the majority both in England and in Western Europe, that is, from inside the Romanian Church, is very important because it is the mainstream and also the majority, who can therefore commit the most to the future Local Church. Romanians generally attend church; Russians, like Greece, far less.

Q: Why have we seen in the last generation the appearance and phenomenal growth of gender confusion and the trans-movement?

A: I think there are four reasons, though which is the most important of the last three, I would hesitate to say. Firstly, there are the rare genetic accidents. Just as there are genetic accidents which mean that some children are born blind or one-armed or with dysfunctional organs, so some are born with some hormonal insufficiency. Secondly, there is bad parenting, which the divorce epidemic since the 1960s has only encouraged. The fact is that some mothers have always had sons and brought them up as daughters (the Oscar Wilde syndrome) and fathers who have moulded their daughters into sons. Thirdly, there is vice. This is not only widespread, but, terrifyingly, actually fashionable.

Finally, there is chemical pollution by pesticides, food additives and hormones, which has entered the food chain and affected children’s hormones. This seems to have caused in part not only the epidemic of autism, but also the LGBTQ epidemic. Chemical pollutants, surely cause the appearance of ‘gay frogs’, ‘gay swans’ and ‘gay bulls’.

 

Q and A August 2024

Corruption Inside the Church

Q: Having seen the corruption of the new ROCOR episcopate, do you now think that those who, like Metropolitan Vitaly, warned that ROCOR would be corrupted by contact with the Moscow Patriarchate and so left it between 2001 and 2007, were right.

A: Not at all! You do not leave the Church, whose episcopate had at the time not yet been corrupted, to join a sect!

As for the corruption of ROCOR, that was the choice of those who did it to themselves, it was self-corruption. The episcopate of the Patriarchate in Moscow never imposed any corruption, just as the Russian State never imposed any political compromises on the part of the episcopate of the Russian Church. It is far worse than that – they imposed corruption on themselves by personal choice!

It is a bit like someone who goes to work in a jeweller’s shop, becomes a jewel thief and then blames the owner of the jewellery shop for his corruption. All bishops should know that there is such a thing as personal responsibility and a conscience. Clearly, they did not and I suspect that that is because they had lost their faith and become atheists, ‘princes of the Church’, as they liked to call themselves, Catholic cardinal-style. In any case, they live like atheists. As a result, we have ‘Orthodox’ killing each other in Russia and the Ukraine. This is the Judgement of God.

Q: How do you cope when you see open corruption among bishops?

A: The Church is like a mountain stream that goes down to the lowlands and becomes a fairly slow-moving river. The destiny of the water is to go to the sea, just as our destiny is to go to heaven. However, in the mountains the water gets mixed up with stones and in the lowlands the water inevitably gets mixed up with the mud. We have to live alongside the stones and the mud. It is our job not to get mixed up with either the stones or the mud, but to keep flowing (with the flow of the Holy Spirit) in the top half of the river, where the water is clean, though we do go up and down to some extent. Sadly, there are those who do get mixed up with either the stones or else the mud. Even so, as long as they don’t get caught up in the river weeds or else bogged down in the stagnant mud, they can still rise up away from the mud and get cleaned.

However, we must not fall into the sin of those who, disgusted by any possible contact with the mud, get out of the river altogether and sail down the river in small boats, some of them luxuriously fitted out, for the imaginary ‘pure’, while condemning everyone else in the river, who are in contact with the mud. These people are proud sectarians, pharisees and Donatists. They are disincarnate, that is, not part of the river, not part of the Church, cut off, judging others in their pride. As such they are actually worse than those who are in contact with the mud. At least they still have the chance of going upwards into the flow and of being cleaned by that flow. These people in their boats do not even have the chance of being cleaned by the flow of this river of eternal life, the streams of living water, but remain isolated in their self-pleasing ’comfort’ and pride.

Q: What do you do when you are slandered by a bishop? You have personal experience.

A: I pray for the four slanderers, three of whom have repeated the bishop’s slander, for the one in Colchester, the one in Ipswich, the one in Tiptree and the last in London. All their terrible personal problems to the point of alcoholism come from the fact that they tell lies and slander.

Q: Why have so many Irish-Americans joined the Orthodox Church?

A: What an interesting question. I can remember 50 years ago the then Fr Basil Osborne remark that many who had then joined the Orthodox in the USA had Irish names.

I think it is part of a general situation that those who join the Orthodox Church in Western Europe and Northern America come from oppressed minorities in their countries of origin. For example, in Germany many join from Saxony, in France from Brittany, and in England from those of peasant origin. In other words, those of the elitist Establishment background either do not join, or else, if they do, they do not stay the course, and soon abandon it, like so many Oxbridge professors and those from the London elite in England.

The Non-Orthodox World

Q: Will old calendarists go to hell?

A: This is the second time you have asked an outrageous question. I realise you are new to the Church of God, but where does this desire to condemn all others come from? Where does this hatred come from? If you are really concerned about the salvation of others, pray for them in silence. Last time, it was the same question about Protestants, from where you come. Save your own soul and leave others aside. It is none of your business. Stop meddling and heal yourself.

Q: I recently met an Orthodox woman who does not believe that bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ? Is this typical?

A: It is typical of an Orthodox who has become an atheist. I would not judge a Church of 200 million by one very lapsed example.

Q: I have started going to an Eastern Orthodox church, with the aim, hopefully, of being baptised eventually. I am contacting you because I’ve heard horror stories about people joining, then going through real turmoil in their lives. I understand that no spiritual journey or growth is painless, but I wonder to what extent is joining the Church going to destroy me. I’ve seen commentary like this online, people saying essentially that they’ve been ruined by joining the church. As a man of your station within the church, I just want to ask – is this reasonable? Or is it just hyperbole?

A: The Church ruins no-one’s life! Only sects and cults, which attract the proud, do that.

However, in the Orthodox Church we have long been besieged by psychopaths and sociopaths, misfits in society who think they can fit in to the Church and that they will find their place here. They do not. They seem to pick on the Orthodox Church, as they find us ‘exotic’. Though some of them have been thrown out of the Catholic Church or the Church of England, for obvious reasons.

I have myself received three such individuals in the last 35 years, so am also guilty. Sadly, what I did for them did not help them, as I had hoped it would. However, as they did not repent, it could not help them. They should have seen a psychiatrist first. Sadly, too, there are Orthodox clergy who receive many such people, with disastrous consequences, I mean several people every single year. The worst is, when one of these pathological individuals becomes a member of the clergy and begins to receive others like himself. And the worst is when of these individuals becomes a bishop! You can imagine how much damage that can do!

I hope you find your place in the Church. The main thing is to be sexually normal and be able to hold down a normal job. That makes a huge difference.

Q: Pope Francis has recently published a document stressing Primacy and Synodality. Could this be a positive opening acceptable to the Orthodox Church?

A: On the surface Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism have much in common: the Holy Trinity, Christ God-Man, the Mother of God, the saints, bishops, priests and therefore sacraments. Even the words Catholic and Pope are Greek!

However, the reality is radically different. The Roman Catholic understanding of the Holy Trinity is quite different because of the filioque, the understanding of Christ is full of ‘Jesusism’, that is, suffering human nature which overshadows the victorious God-Man, the Mother of God is called the Virgin, despite the fact that virginity is no guarantee of holiness and may express mere puritanism and forced clerical celibacy, the concept of the clergy is deformed through compulsory clerical celibacy and therefore the concept of the sacraments is deformed also. The same thing with those words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Pope’. The first means having the same faith as always and in all cultures, which is clearly not the case with ‘Roman Catholic’, which means imperialism, spreading the Roman mentality worldwide, and the second does not mean a distant tyrant, but a loving father!

Only if Catholicism first renounces the filioque and the Papal claims, can we sit down and talk. However, the reality is that Roman Catholicism is on the brink of splitting yet again, this time with Archbishop Vigano. This follows all its other splits, the most numerous being those in the sixteenth century, when protestors against its corruption broke away from it in large numbers.

Q: What do you make of the recent statement that the Church of England no longer has churches, but communities?

A: The word ‘church’ comes from the Greek word ‘kyriakon’, which means ‘the House of the Lord’. It can be said that parishes are church communities and monasteries monastic communities, but they are not simply ‘communities’. The renunciation of the word ‘church’ simply indicates that the ‘Church’ of England is now fully secularised and is officially a network of clubs. In fact, that is what many have long suspected, so nothing new here.

Pastoral and Liturgical Matters

Q: Did you bless people to get the covid vaccine?

A: The covid vaccine is not a dogmatic issue, but a question of personal choice. Thus, two people came to me for a blessing at that time, three years ago. This was because they both worked for the NHS and risked losing their jobs if they did not agree to it. Therefore, I blessed them to take the vaccine on condition that they make the sign of the cross over the vaccine as it was injected. They both did so and both have been fine ever since and, above all, kept their jobs.

Q: My name is Clyde and I am a Glaswegian. I want to keep my Scottish roots. If I enter Orthodoxy, what saint’s name could I take?

A: I presume you are called after the River Clyde in Glasgow. Why not take the name of another famous place in Scotland, which is at the source of Scottish Christian national identity: St Andrews? And so take the Christian name Andrew.

Q: What is the point of the liturgical fans? I have heard that they were basically introduced as fly swatters.

A: I think the fly-swatting was purely coincidental! The fans symbolise the wafting of the Holy Spirit over the Gospel and the eucharistic gifts.

Q: How do you explain the disastrous demographic situation in Western and Westernised countries?

A: For over two generations Western and Westernised women have been told that they should live, behave, think, speak and dress exactly like men. The only natural result is the demographic crisis.

Q: Why do so many British people have tattoos nowadays?

A: Because they partake of modern pagan culture. It seems that even the name ‘Britain’ comes from a word meaning ‘the tattooed’. This was recorded by the Greek explorer Pytheas in the fourth century BC. It seems to me that the Western world has rejected Christianity over the last century and more especially, each people has revived its native paganism. Thus, Hitler’s Germany was profoundly pagan, in Scandinavia they have revived Norse pagan mythology, in the Ukraine pagan symbolism is now used everywhere, in France they have returned to full hedonism etc. In Britain this has resulted in the use of tattoos, essentially war paint, which accompanies the aggressiveness of pagan life, both ancient and modern.

Q: When did the Flood occur, according to the Orthodox reckoning?

A: According to the Septuagint (the first parts of which were written down in 272 BC, which means that it is some 1,000 years older than the rabbinical/Protestant version of the Old Testament), the Flood took place in about 3,243 BC, that is about 5,267 years ago. If you follow the dating in the much later Jewish Massoretic text, with its chronology corrupted by later rabbis, the Flood occurred in about 2,348 BC – before the rule of Gilgamesh, who lived in about 2,700-2,600 BC, before the Great Pyramid was built in Egypt in 2,600 BC and before the stone circle was erected at Stonehenge in about 2,500 BC.

Q: I have read on the internet that Fr Andrew Phillips is ‘popular but controversial’. Why do some consider that you are controversial?

A: Because I tell it like it is. The truth is always controversial. There is nothing more hated than the truth. As they say: ‘If you tell the truth 99% of the time, you may survive, but if you tell the truth 100% of the time, they will certainly try and destroy you’. Look what they did to Christ. As He said, ‘The truth will set you free’. Those are the words I will have on my gravestone.

Q: Did you know Fr David (Mark) Meyrick of Walsingham?

A: Yes. I knew him quite well, having first met him in 1976. I have great admiration for him, some of his icons have been inspirational.  However, it was a pity that he did not found a permanent church, but just rented a room. This meant that after his death, it all began to fall apart. I also thought it very strange that he did not dedicate his tiny chapel to an Icon of the Mother of God, which would have been appropriate in Walsingham.

The Bulgarians Rout the ‘Phanar Lobby’: Next in Line – the ‘Lavender Lobby’

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2024/07/03/bolgary_razgromili_fanarskoe_lobbi

 

The following article is a translation of the above Russian article, published in Moscow on 4 July by the well-known Church journalist Anatoly Stepanov. It clearly outlines how by choosing a new Patriarch, the Bulgarian Church has come to support the canonical Church in the Ukraine under Metropolitan Onufry. Thus, it has for the moment defeated the pro-Phanariot lobby and its fake and schismatic ‘Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU), whose main sponsor is the atheistic US State Department. However, it also shows that the US-controlled liberal/ecumenist/pro-Catholic/pseudo-intellectual/celibate lobby which is trying to split the Church is also profoundly homosexual. This is not news for some of us, but it will be to many.

Moreover, this split is not a Greek-Russian split, for apart from the very well-known homosexual metropolitans, archbishops and clerics within the Patriarchate of Constantinople, there are also many others of other nationalities, such as Bulgarians and Russians. Such are also part of this homosexual (‘lavender’) lobby, for instance the notorious but only recently defrocked Moscow Abbot Peter Yeremeev. He was allowed for years and years to continue his activities quite openly in Moscow to the scandal of the faithful. As the article hints, but does not dare say openly, he and others were and are protected by powerful clerical friends of the same narcissistic ‘variety’, who, moreover, as we well know, are also very active outside Russia in corrupting Church life with their boyfriends and persecuting the faithful. Here is a translation of the article:

 

On Sunday June 30, the election of the Primate of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC) was held. This attracted the close attention of Orthodox observers and the public not only in Bulgaria. And no wonder, because the fate of not only the future of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, but also the future of all world Orthodoxy was being decided.

On the eve of the elections, we witnessed open interference in the internal affairs of the BOC by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. On May 19 an extraordinary event took place: a group of Bulgarian hierarchs headed by the most influential in Bulgaria, Metropolitan Nicholas (Sebastianov) of Plovdiv, visited the Patriarchate of Constantinople and openly concelebrated with representatives of the schismatic Orthodox Church in the Ukraine (OCU).

This was not only a challenge to the Bulgarian Church, which, as you know, does not recognise the legitimacy of the OCU, but is also a revelation of the future course of the BOC. And then Patriarch Bartholomew was invited (it is not clear on whose behalf, since there was no decision of the Synod) to take part in the ceremony of the election of His Holiness the Patriarch of Bulgaria and his enthronement.

It was a public act of interference. And how many behind-the-scenes attempts to exert influence, which, for sure, took place both on the part of the American embassy and on the part of ‘our overseas partners’, as the Russian Department of External Church Relations (DECR) has long called Constantinople, which has long been under the control of the United States.

Therefore, many anxiously awaited the decision of the Council of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which was supposed to elect its Primate. On the eve of the final voting, as is known, the Synod of the BOC elected three bishops as candidates for the post of Primate of the Church – Metropolitan Grigory (Tsvetkov) of Vrachansky, who acted as Locum Tenens, Metropolitan Gabriel (Dinev) of Lovech and Metropolitan Daniel (Nikolov) of Vidin.

According to all forecasts, experts gave preference to Metropolitan Gregory, who was considered as a kind of compromise figure, albeit a conditional compromise, since his sympathies for the Phanar were well-known. However, unexpectedly, in the second round of the final voting, Metropolitan Daniel (Nikolov) of Vidin won, for whom 69 members of the Council voted, Metropolitan Gregory received 66 votes in his support. In the first round, Metropolitan Gregory received 64 votes, Metropolitan Daniel – 51 votes, and Metropolitan Gabriel – 19 votes (several ballots were declared invalid).

The decision of the Council became a sensation for many, a joyful sensation. It testifies to the fact that the supporters of canonical Orthodoxy, and it was from these positions that Metropolitan Daniel always spoke, turned out to be in the majority in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and preferred to have as their Patriarch a person who, on the eve of the elections, again clearly and unequivocally outlined his position on the rejection of the Ukrainian schismatics. Moreover, he was the only candidate for Patriarch who spoke directly on this key question

Of course, the results of the vote testify to the shaky balance of power in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church: 69 votes against 66 is the clearest evidence of this.Nevertheless, the decision of the Council is final, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has a Primate who will defend canonical rules and norms and will not allow the Phanar to establish control over the BOC and deepen the schism in world Orthodoxy.

However, it is clear to everyone that the new Patriarch Daniel is receiving a very difficult inheritance, and his unequivocal rejection of the schismatic actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople will not go unanswered. And we are already seeing the latter answers in the form of dirty tricks. Patriarch Bartholomew, apparently dissatisfied with the results of the choice of the Bulgarian Orthodox, refused to serve the first Divine Liturgy with his newly elected brother, went home, demonstratively leaving his representative, an archimandrite, to concelebrate.

Moreover, he is one who has a very dubious reputation – Archimandrite Kharalampy (Nichev), who was once a cleric of the BOC, but was expelled after a scandal, but was accepted in his present rank in Constantinople. At the same time, this same Archimandrite Kharalampy has a reputation as a person who belongs to the ‘lavender lobby’. Moreover, during the first Divine Liturgy of Patriarch Daniel, Archimandrite Kharalampy, being the senior priest by consecration, led the service as a representative of the clergy.

There will certainly be many more such dirty tricks on the part of the Phanar. But they do not pose a danger, but an attempt to provoke a schism in the BOC from among the bishops and priests dissatisfied with the election of Patriarch Daniel is a more terrible danger. And given the results of the vote, almost half were dissatisfied. It is clear that there is a long distance from discontent to a change of jurisdiction and an attempt to split, but the problem is serious. His Holiness Patriarch Daniel will obviously have to exert a great deal of effort to prevent a split in the BOC. Therefore, it is very likely that he will take some conciliatory actions and steps first of all.

It is very likely that the opposition to the new Patriarch will be led by the already mentioned and very influential Metropolitan Nicholas of Plovdiv, who has extensive connections in political circles (there are rumours that his father served in the security service of the Communist leader of Bulgaria Todor Zhivkov, i.e. he was not the least person at that time). Metropolitan Nicholas has recently become a leader of the pro-Phanar policy in the BOC.

Metropolitan Nicholas is a visible embodiment of the failures of the policy ‘of an Orthodox direction’ of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR) of the Moscow Patriarchate, which for a long time banked on him. And it seems that there were reasons for this, in addition to the family ties of the Metropolitan of Plovdiv. He was educated at the Moscow Theological Academy and for a long time demonstratively supported pro-Russian positions in the Bulgarian episcopate. In addition to the DECR, as far as we know, our Embassy also banked on him. So this is proof of the failure of all Russian diplomacy, not only ecclesiastical. As a result, we have now received a deafening slap in the face since Metropolitan Nicholas has become the main propagandist of the Phanar in the BOC, and the DECR and the Russian embassy seem to have got it all wrong.

Moreover, Metropolitan Nicholas not only changed his political orientation, but also committed openly offensive actions against His Holiness Patriarch Kirill. We are talking about his arbitrary restoration to the ecclesiastical dignity of the former hegumen Peter Yeremeev, who was banned in the Russian Church, who has recently been seen several times at the Divine services of Metropolitan Nicholas. And this is not just an insult to His Holiness Patriarch Kirill personally, who approved the decision to defrock the former hegumen Peter, but also in fact the creation of a serious problem in relations between the Bulgarian and Russian Orthodox Churches…..

Hegumen Pyotr Eremeev is a notorious personality. In addition to the fact that he held high positions in the structures of the Russian Orthodox Church, being the abbot of the historic Vysokopetrovsky Monastery in the centre of the capital and the rector of the Russian Orthodox University, he is widely known in narrow circles as one of the most prominent faces of the so-called ‘lavender lobby’ in the Russian Orthodox Church. Believers whispered about this and spoke with sorrow. And his ban from serving was perceived with great satisfaction by many Orthodox believers as a sure sign of the cleansing of the Church from the ‘lavender filth’.

Therefore, the story of the former abbot Peter testifies to the fact that the new Bulgarian Patriarch, in addition to the ‘Phanar lobby’, has another dangerous and influential opponent – the ‘lavender lobby’. It is no coincidence that in Bulgaria they whisper about the non-traditional sexual orientation of Metropolitan Nicholas of Plovdiv. It is also surprising and sad that Russian Church diplomats considered him to be the main supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church in Bulgaria.

By the way, as informed people say, the strange inclinations of the former hegumen Peter began to manifest themselves after his studies in Bulgaria, where he met and became friends with the then vicar of the Bulgarian Patriarch, Bishop Nicholas (Sebastianov) of Znepol. These unhealthy inclinations led Pyotr Yeremeev into a scandal with students of the Moscow Academy, which was the reason for his exile from Moscow to Khabarovsk in the Far East. But then he returned to the capital, supposedly cured of the sodomite disease, a story which turned out to be untrue.

Of course, we rejoice at the election of the new Bulgarian Patriarch, especially realising that we are witnessing the manifestation of the action of Divine Providence in history, which inspires us with hope in these desperate times. But let us be aware that Patriarch Daniel faces the most difficult trials ahead. Therefore, it would be right for all of us to at least sigh before God for Patriarch Daniel of Bulgaria, who is embarking on the difficult path of struggle for the Church of Christ and for the unity of world Orthodoxy.