Tag Archives: Repentance

On the Tragedy of Metr Hilarion (Alfeyev)

The Budapest scandal which broke on 5 July 2024, revealed by a half-Russian, half-Japanese teenager, led to the downfall of Metr Hilarion (Alfeyev). Regardless of whether the Metropolitan himself was set up or is wholly guilty, it is clear that the young man involved in this blackmail case and the woman behind him are thieves and criminals. However, it is equally clear that the Metropolitan led a hypocritical life quite unworthy of a supposed monk, regardless of the details. None of this came as a surprise to us. Plenty of other careerists of his rank, and not only in Moscow, are guilty of the same, but they have not been entrapped or caught out. Their turn will come.

The case is now being tried in Moscow by three very young Metropolitans and one equally young Archbishop (my sister-in-law literally used to change his nappies when he was in summer camp). All of them are younger even than Metr Hilarion. One of them, the very young Metr Antony (Sevryuk), was sent to Japan this spring in order to investigate the family of the criminal involved in the case. Some have suggested that this proves that the whole case was a set-up. That is only a speculation. There is no proof. Whatever the case, it seems highly likely  that Metr Hilarion will be defrocked. There is however one way out for him, the way taken by so many others in Moscow, who also opposed the conflict in the Ukraine.

This would be for him to join the Patriarchate of Constantinople. On the one hand, this seems highly unlikely, as Metr Hilarion has time and again condemned that Patriarchate for its ignoble and uncanonical actions in the Ukraine. Surely Constantinople would not want him and he would definitely not want Constantinople? It would all seem like a betrayal. However, if the USA intervened on his behalf…’Metr Hilarion of the Slavic Exarchate of Western Europe of the Oecumenical Patriarchate’. It does have a ring to it…. Constantinople is desperate to control the Diaspora and Metr Hilarion is pro-Catholic. And for the Americans there is the question of the successor to the increasingly frail Patriarch Kyrill (and Patriarch Bartholomew). Here the CIA is deeply involved, as usual… However unlikely, nothing is impossible with the possibility of repentance.

First Orthodox Monastery in Scotland for 1,000 Years

First Orthodox monastery on Scottish Islands in 1,000 years consecrated on the Isle of Mull

Amid the latest terrible scandal surrounding a certain Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church, which broke last weekend, and which follows the same scandal with a still unpunished and protected ROCOR bishop, God sends us consolation. The long-overdue Great Cleansing will follow and all will be revealed. Woe unto you, scribes, pharisees and hypocrites! Repentance begins in Scotland.

Why Has the West Fallen into Atheist Culture, but not Russia?

Seeing this title, many will say: ‘Absurd! Russia fell into atheism for 75 years. Anyway, I know two Russians personally and they are both atheists and refuse to baptise their children. On the other hand, I know several Western people and they all go to church every week!’ To such, I simply reply: ‘You have misread the title’. Let me explain.

There are only a few places left in Europe where people still practise their Faith. Thus, there are still some believing Protestants in Northern Ireland, some real Roman Catholics in Malta and some active Orthodox, particularly in Moldova and parts of Romania. Outside that, church-going accounts at best for 1-2% of virtually any general population, whether in Spain, Greece, France, Russia, Italy, Bulgaria, Germany, the Ukraine or anywhere else in Europe.

Countries that a generation ago were still Roman Catholic, like Italy, Ireland and Poland, have long since dissolved into Secularism, which has long been the norm in Northern Europe. Ex-Protestant Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Britain have led the way and there the decline of religious practice has gone even faster, less than 1% of the population practise. The rest of the Western world is going the same way and rapidly, towards 0%, as the last believing generation dies out and is not replaced.

However, Christianity is about a lot more than church-going. That is only one indicator. Getting baptised, married and buried in church are others. Here again we can see that since the early 1960s, these practices too ceased, marriage ended in divorce, and Christian burial was largely replaced by pagan cremation in incinerators, like the Nazis used. With the Protestantisation of Roman Catholicism in the early 1960s, there is no real difference between it and Protestantism. However, the greatest indicator of real Christianity is your national, cultural values and the way of life you lead as a result of those values. The clearest example of this today is the acceptance of ‘homosexual’ marriage.

The acceptance of marriage as uniquely heterosexual was in fact the last Christian value left. ‘Homosexual’ marriage is the final stage in deChristianisation. It was introduced into the Netherlands in 2001 and through a range of other Western countries until Germany in 2017. After the understanding of marriage as uniquely heterosexual disappeared in formerly Protestant and Catholic countries in Europe and Northern America, others began to go. We can see this in the decision of the EU-appointed Greek ruling elite last week, when it in turn imposed ‘homosexual’ marriage on its population. Greeks are being asked to return to the sexual practices described by their pagan philosophers, writers and historians of the time before Christ.

After homosexual ‘marriage’, transgenderism, the result of the end and confusion of ‘traditional’ male/female roles, the subsequent breakdown of family life with the epidemic of divorce and so the absence of father and mother role-models for children, inevitably follows. Christianity in the countries which accept transgenderism is clearly more or less dead. In other words, in talking of Christianity we are not talking merely about church-going or about those who profess a mental atheism (‘I don’t believe in God’), we are talking about the way people live, their national culture.

For example, most people in Europe, from France to Russia, never set foot in any church, but they can still be divided into two categories, those who live values that belong to Christian culture and those who live values that belong to atheist culture. Despite Soviet atheism, their proportions between France and Russia are very different, in France an ever-decreasing minority belongs to Christian culture, in Russia an ever-increasing majority. In other words, it is the direction of travel that is significant. In this respect, France and Russia are like two trains which have passed by one another, going in opposite directions on different tracks.

Notably, a few decades ago we could see how in officially atheist Russia, ‘Soviet’ people professed Christian values. There homosexuality was banned and transgenderism was unthinkable, and people professed the ‘normal’ Christian values of social justice. ‘Social conservatism’ and social justice side by side. Indeed, the latter is unthinkable there today. This is what in today’s Western societies is called ‘social conservatism’, and yet for Christians it is what we call ‘normal’ and for us it is ‘homosexual’ marriage and transgenderism that are extremist.

Why the apparent contradiction between official Soviet atheism and actual practice in everyday life? Simply because although Soviet people were supposed to be atheists in their heads, they still professed the values of Christian culture in their hearts, that is, in their way of life. Moreover, when the Soviet regime fell in 1991, official atheism also fell and 100 million people got baptised within just a few years. They had not been baptised before, only because baptism had been forbidden, not because they did not want to be baptised. In reality, they had all the time been living largely according to Christian cultural values, an integral part of their national culture.

This is also clear from the fact that so-called ‘Soviet’ free healthcare, education and social protection had nothing to do with the atheist Soviet Union, but existed before it, in the Tsar’s Russia. They were simply an inheritance from pre-Soviet Russia, like literacy, which had reached a high level before 1917, or technical progress like electrification and industrialisation, which had all been developing very rapidly before 1917. Thus, the Soviet Union won the Second World War thanks to generals and officers from the Tsar’s Army and military technicians, military inventors, scientists and engineers, all trained in the Tsar’s Russia.

In other words, in Soviet Russia Christian culture survived, even though it excluded church-going, as the atheist elite had closed most churches. When atheism, a Western ideological import, collapsed there in 1991, Christian culture was fundamentally all that remained. The fact that a small minority of Russians are still atheists and their children are unbaptised does not mean that they do not profess Christian cultural values at all. What I am saying is that in Russia, Christianity has permeated the national culture so thoroughly that there is no real alternative to it and even those who are mentally atheists largely profess Christian culture in important respects.

In the West all is different, because for nearly a thousand years there have been two cultural spheres, one secular, the other religious. In other words, over nearly a thousand years of Western history the religious has progressively dissolved into the secular, like a religious flask that has emptied through percolation into a secular flask, through a millennial drip-feed. It is this that has resulted in modern Western Secularism. Here there is then a long-established inherently Western alternative to Christian culture – Secularism.

In Orthodox Christianity, as in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism, indeed in all world religions, civilisations and cultures, except in the Western, there is no separation into the religious and the secular. There is no separation of ‘Church’ and State. In the Orthodox context, the national culture is Orthodoxy. Thus, Russian Communist Young Pioneers said that: ‘We are all more or less Orthodox’, even as they were stopping people from going to church. The Belarussian President Lukashenko says that he is an ‘Orthodox atheist’. Unbaptised Serbs tell me that they are ‘Orthodox’. Greeks tell me that: ‘You go to church? You’re a better Orthodox than we are’. I emphasise the last three words ‘than we are’.

All these people are Orthodox by national culture, they cannot be anything else. If they are not, they denationalise themselves, like some Russians did to themselves in the 1990s and as homosexual Greek couples do to themselves today. Some who left Orthodoxy come back to Orthodoxy, saying that they cannot do otherwise because otherwise they renounce themselves. (This does not mean that they go to church. They will tell you that they are put off by money-grubbing priests, who are ordained by money-grubbing bishops – so am I, and I suffered at the sharp end of such for many, many years. That we do not care about money has always made our churches popular). However, in Orthodox societies once you are baptised or received back into the Church, it is for life. You cannot renounce that culture. You can sin, you can stop practising, you can even blaspheme, but you cannot renounce it. It is in your soul, it is in the culture which you belong to.

The question then is: Why is Western civilisation different from all others? Why does it have a secular alternative? What happened nearly a thousand years ago, when Secularism was born and made the West so different from all other faiths, civilisations and cultures, which have no secular alternative? Of a host of unanimous Western historians of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, English (Dawson, Southern, Morris, Brooke, Brown, Moore, Bartlett), French (Le Goff, Pognon, Feller, Poly, Bournazel) German (Tellenbach, Fichtenau, Leyser), Spanish (Fontana) and others, none perhaps has summed it up so well as Tom Holland in his 2008 work Millennium:  

‘The three decades that preceded the showdown in Canossa (in 1077) and the four that followed it were…a period when the ideals of Christendom…’changed in almost every respect’. Here…was the true making of the West…Pope Gregory VII (1020-1085) was…introducing to the modern West its first experience of revolution…In truth, there existed no precedent for the upheaval exemplified by Canossa – neither in the history of the Roman Church, nor in that of any other culture…there was only one break in the evolution of the West… a cataclysm without parallel in the annals of Eurasia’s other major cultures…the defining characteristic of Western civilisation. That the world can be divided into church and state, and that these two realms should exist distinct from each other: here are presumptions that the eleventh century made ‘fundamental to European society and culture, for the first time and permanently’…Certainly, to a pious Muslim, the notion that the political and religious spheres can be separated is a shocking one – as it was to many of Gregory’s opponents…Not that it had ever remotely been Gregory’s own intention to banish God from an entire dimension of human affairs…A piquant irony: that the very concept of a secular society should ultimately have been due to the papacy; Voltaire and the First Amendment, multiculturalism and gay weddings: all have served as waymarks on the road from Canossa. (Pp. xviii- xxii).

In other words, fatally split Western civilisation has for nearly a thousand years had an alternative to faith, and that alternative is inherently culturally Western. This alternative is called Secularism and it began nearly a thousand years ago when, ironically, the anti-people, pro-elitist Papacy decided to split its world into two spheres, the religious versus the secular, the compulsorily celibate clergy versus the people. This meant that, ironically, it was the Papacy with its new philosophy of ’scholastic theology’, which created an alternative to the religious – the secular, since it gave up on the concept of sacralising or incorporating the secular into the religious. And this philosophy claimed to be rational and reasonable.

In any case, today this Secularism dominates and predominates to such an extent that the religious sphere is dead and dying throughout the Western world. Moreover, the West has always aggressively tried to export this Secularism and impose it on the rest of the world. So far, outside the Western world, once the West had overthrown the Russian monarchy, Russian society fell to it for a time, but eventually it came out of Secularism because it was alien to its national tradition. Now, the Westernised Greek elite has fallen to it, though not the masses of the people. Other Orthodox too may fall to it, but in the end it will all be rejected. As for the future of the Western world itself, it has only one chance of survival. This is to return to its values of the First Millennium before the fatal choice of inventing Secularism that it made in the eleventh century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A New Booklet: The Force of Simple Orthodoxy

Recent Articles by

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

St John’s Orthodox Church, Colchester, England

‘No Cross, No Crown’

This 65-page spiral-bound booklet The Force of Simple Orthodoxy is available from: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk for £6 or $12 post-free, payable to Paypal at the above e-mail. The contents are listed below.

The last five years have been catastrophic for the administrative elites of the Orthodox Church. First, we witnessed the trampling down of the most basic canons by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and the falling out of communion with the Russian Church of almost the whole Greek Orthodox administration (not the simple clergy and people – hence the title), under foreign political threats and the financial pressure of vulgar bribes.

Then there followed no less cowardice in the face of the absurd covid manipulation and scare. The incredible and repeated scandals of Eastern Papism involved here, in terms of financial irregularity, moral perversion and the dogmatic compromises of ecumenism, have brought the spiritually weak to abandon the Church. ‘If they behave like that, why should I bother?’ However regrettable, this attitude is quite understandable, given the scandalous conduct of those on high, who were supposed to set us an example.

Then, in 2022, the American elite’s war in and on the Ukraine that had begun overtly in 2014 sucked in the Russian Federation. We witnessed at once the collapse of the once multinational, but tragically centralised Patriarchate of Moscow into authoritarian Papism and nationalism. Having discredited itself, nearly all Non-Russians, a third of the total, left it or were expelled from it. Until it purifies itself and peels off its post-Soviet, Soviet and pre-Soviet deviations of love of oligarchs’ money, fawning love of Sergianist power and love of possession respectively, nothing will change. Still stuck in the museum quagmire of the recent past, the Church administration has yet to become multipolar, as the Russian State has already become.

The Moscow collapse concerns not least its once respected American branch. In the last five years it too sold itself out for post-Soviet money, sovietising itself, then tragically fell into schism, followed by persecution, slander and open lies, and is now on the verge of repeating the Donatist rebaptism heresy. (Heresy always follows schism, just as schism always follows moral iniquity, as sure as night follows day). Many who had been faithful in blood, sweat and tears to the old Russian Church for fifty years and more have been expelled from it. The rest, like its last ever-memorable Metropolitan, are spinning in their graves.

Given the shameful apostasy of Heterodoxy over the last sixty years, what are Orthodox to do in the face of the no less shameful spiritual and so moral collapse of both the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox administrations, supposedly responsible for the majority of the Church? Have we really come to that point when, ‘When the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth? (Lk 18, 8). Indeed, ‘Let them that are in Judea flee into the mountains’ (Matt. 24, 16). This booklet suggests some answers, to be found from the Hebrides to the Carpathians.

Contents

Foreword: Memories are Made of This

  1. The Force of Simple Orthodoxy
  2. The First 250 Years of Orthodox Suffolk
  3. The Fen Thebaid
  4. Who Betrayed the Europeans?
  5. The Struggle for the Inevitable Local Church
  6. How the Orthodox Church Was Restructured
  7. An Interview
  8. Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Afterword: On Edmund the Martyred King

 

The End of a World

Politics

Catastrophic predictions and apocalyptic undertones are here. Even the name of a place in the Holy Land, Armageddon, is on some people’s lips. The US elite is threatening to invade Chinese Taiwan ‘in order to protect it from China’. In the US-backed ‘democratic’ Ukraine, that ‘bastion of Western ‘Civilisation’’ the most corrupt country in the world, which is now banning Christianity, 20,000 untrained and poorly-equipped Ukrainian conscripts are dying every month for the sake of dependence on the US, thousands more are shot in the back by the Ukrainian secret police for retreating, or else are deserting or surrendering. The Ukrainian birthrate has plummeted to 0.7 per woman and the population is now under 20 million, whereas just over thirty years ago it was 52 million.

Then there is the Holy Land, where Israeli colonists, 100% backed by US and Western European financial, and therefore political and media elites, but not by their peoples, are planning to genocide two million native Palestinians. Men, women and children are being murdered or dismembered by US bombs, dropped by US aircraft with Israeli insignia. The whole once disunited and warring Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan, from Iran to Turkey, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, from Yemen to Syria, is united against the Israeli military machine and its Western sponsors. Mass demonstrations in support of the genocided Palestinians, largely unreported by Western State media, are taking place all over the world, including in Western countries. The US is isolated, faced down by the Global Majority, from Brazil to South Africa. Heads of countries even refuse to speak to the senile President Biden. It has sent aircraft carriers, but China has sent warships, as Russia also. Iran is threatening isolated Israel and its corrupt political leaders with destruction, if Israel invades Gaza. In Syria, part of which is illegally occupied by the US Army, which is pumping out stolen oil, Russian forces, present at the invitation of the Syrian government, are threatened by the US. They will react.

The problem is ‘Gentile Zionism’. This is the Non-Jewish, Western fantasy that all political decisions taken by Western countries are infallibly correct and that the superior Western ‘liberal’ world, as ‘an exceptional civilisation’ with ‘a manifest destiny’, must rule the planet as the unique model for all. All Non-Westerners are as nothing, just folklore to look at in a Disneyland zoo. The Global Majority, seven billion out of eight billion, do not agree with this Nazism and is at this moment preparing to intervene in the Holy Land to bring about a ceasefire. There has only ever been one way out of this, ‘the two-state solution’: one homeland for Jews and one homeland for Palestinians, as was agreed by Resolution 181 of the UN in 1947, but which has ever since been vetoed by the US.

Christianity

The largest nominal religion in the world, though still covering only a minority of the world, is Christianity. Two forms of it used to predominate in the Western world. The first, Roman Catholicism, invented a thousand years ago, has been undermined by unending scandals involving papal and episcopal corruption, clerical pedophilia and crime, misogyny and racism. Few Roman Catholic laypeople actually believe in or observe its controversial ideology. The second form, Protestantism, invented 500 years ago after dissatisfaction with Roman Catholicism, has nearly completely dissolved into the anti-Christian Secularism which both spawned. Protestant leaders widely predict that their own religion will die out by 2050. Who believes in the Western form of Protestantism any more? Most Protestant churches in the Western world are empty and many have been sold or are for sale.

As for the Non-Western, Orthodox Church, some of its main leaders are only politicians and not pastors, whose only concern seems to be power and money. Thus, the Greek Patriarch, out of communion with the Russian Church, set up an uncanonical Church in the Ukraine for a $25 million bribe from the US and his Patriarchate has been undermined by incessant sexual and financial scandals. Meanwhile, the Russian Patriarch, out of communion with the Greek Patriarch, thanks St Seraphim of Sarov for nuclear weapons! (1). His once multinational and united Church, undermined by centralisation and Russian nationalism, is utterly divided. It suffers from constant moral and financial scandals with bishops, divisions or schisms everywhere outside Russia, in Estonia, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova (2). Tomorrow divisions may well begin in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Moreover, the Russian Church’s small, sectarian American branch has been in schism from its even smaller French branch for nearly three years. Nothing has been done about this schism except to encourage it, despite the appeals of its clergy to its now wealthy bishops to return from schism, the consequent collapse of the American branch in one country and the open persecution of theologically-educated and conscientious Orthodox. One of the American bishops scandalously and openly rebaptises, not just Non-Orthodox, but even other Orthodox (!). This is a sect, not part of the Church. Yet, apparently, the leaders of the Russian Church find this arrogant Americanisation and ‘One True Church’ sectarianisation normal.

We have seen it all before. Those who have not seen it all before can read about it in the history books. Although all may become a lot worse, we do not believe the apocalyptic hype. In the Holy Land the Global Majority (miscalled by some the ‘Global South’), Russia, China, India, Africa, Latin America, can still make peace between the two warring sides in the Holy Land. If US dollars were to be withdrawn from troubled places, Taiwan would peacefully return to China, the Ukraine would peacefully return to Russia, and the south and west of Israel would peacefully return to Palestine. There are solutions.

As for Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, these were only ever temporary, politically-shaped Western deviations of Christianity, with some very strange traits. Having served their time, they can now disappear and be replaced, perhaps even by historic Christianity and the historic Church. Their roots from the first millennium are still present. As for the Orthodox Church, we have also seen all the polarised divisions and sectarianism before (3). Leaders come and go. The head of the Church is Christ, not men. When men refuse to deal with the problems they have created, Christ will step in. All racism, schisms and sects can be overcome and dissolved by new, Christ-appointed leaders. We do not believe that this is the end of the world. However, it is the end of a world. We are surely present at the remaking of the world, at its reconfiguration, not at its end.

 

Notes:

  1. In French: https://orthodoxie.com/le-patriarche-cyrille-les-armes-nucleaires-par-linexprimable-providence-de-dieu-ont-ete-creees-sous-la-protection-de-saint-seraphin-de-sarov/
  2. Summarised in Romanian in: https://tv8.md/2023/20/10/dornici-sa-invete-limba-romana-6500-de-persoane-s-au-inscris-la-cursurile-organizate-de-stat-din-ce-domenii-vin-participantii/242307.

The full version of the still unanswered letter from 5 September, which is in fact an urgent appeal for autocephaly, with its clear emphasis on continuing Russian racism towards Moldovans, is available in Romanian-style Russian (Metr Vladimir’s native language is Romanian) on Facebook. If the Russian Patriarch ignores the appeal, the whole Moldovan Church may well join the Romanian Church. The absurd and uncanonical ‘defrockings’ of Moldovan (and other) priests who have already joined the Romanian Church will be rescinded – as they always are when they are purely political.

  1. For example, there was the scandal of the rebaptism of Orthodox by the selfsame Americanised branch of Russian Orthodoxy of neophytes in Guildford, England in 1976. The remnants of that Guildford group of pseudo-Orthodox are still rebaptising Orthodox today. Just another story of primitive neophytism, openly encouraged by its bishops, of whom some are themselves neophytes, despite the canons against the consecration of neophyte bishops. But the heretical rebaptism of Orthodox is itself only a repeat of the age-old phariseeism of the sectarian heresy of Donatism from the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. There is nothing new under the sun. What is disgraceful that the leadership of the once theologically respectable Russian Church countenances such a heresy in its midst and the persecution and slandering of those who oppose it. Those who start receiving Non-Orthodox Christians by baptism end up receiving Orthodox by baptism too!

The World on the Brink

With events in the Holy Land following their course, America’s war in the Ukraine is now on the back burner. The Russian Federation is engaged in mopping up operations and President Zelensky will soon no longer be a useful asset and so will be disposed of, in one way or the other.

In West Asia (the former ‘Middle East’) Western propaganda has taken over. It is notorious for its lies. The First World War was justified because the propagandists proclaimed that ‘German soldiers are murdering Belgian babies’. Arming and training Islamists in the 1980s, including Bin Laden, was justified by the US because ‘The Soviets are parachuting bombs disguised as toys into Afghan villages to murder the children’. (More lies) NATO atrocities against Serbia were justified because ‘Serbian soldiers have raped 60,000 Muslim women’. (More lies). The first Western genocide of Iraq was justified because ‘Iraqi soldiers are killing Kuwaiti babies in their incubators’. (More lies and anyway Kuwaitis are Iraqis). ‘All Russians can be killed because of their atrocity in Bucha’ (in fact a Kiev atrocity against Russia-supporting Ukrainians). And so it goes on.

Now Palestinians can be genocided because ‘HAMAS has beheaded 40 Israeli babies’. (More lies, which also ignore that HAMAS was created by MOSSAD, the Israeli secret service and armed with US guns bought in the Ukraine). The last statement also ignores the fact that thousands of babies are murdered by abortion every day in the USA, but that is legal. Let alone that the Israeli Air Force, the creation of the USA, has already murdered hundreds of Palestinian children beneath their bombs. Moreover, according to the Israeli President: ‘There are no innocent civilians in Gaza’. If so, then there are no innocent civilians in Israel. Such extremism means total war. It was the same extremism that led to Anglo-American bombs murdering half a million German civilians between 1942 and 1945. Although civilian deaths are a war crime, the victors are never charged with war crimes, they are still war crimes and will be judged in the Court of the Most High.

Sadly, ‘everybody hates the Jews’, as the Jewish-American singer Tom Lehrer sang nearly sixty years ago. There has to be a reason for the hatred by many (in reality not by all). Could it be because so many Jewish leaders (clearly, Jewish people are another matter) are stuck in the blood of the Old Testament – ‘an eye for an eye’, and firmly reject Christian forgiveness, as also, ironically, did the neo-pagan Western leader Hitler. In 1947 the UN voted for two States in the Holy Land, a Jewish State and a Palestinian State. That resolution has still not been acted on and so here we are today.

However, are so-called Christian leaders any better? The latest disgraceful statement by an Orthodox Patriarch, welcoming the persecution of the Church in the Ukraine and the arrest and imprisonment of its bishops (1) by an atheist Jew suggests that certain so-called Christians are also stuck in the worst parts of the Old Testament. They still do not know Christ, on the same level as the present extremist and very unpopular minority Israeli leader. (Yes, there are lots of Jews who do not support him; there are good and bad everywhere).

That warlike Orthodox Patriarch is not the only Orthodox Patriarch to behave so strangely. Another scatters his faithful bishops to exile in the four winds and scatters his most conscientious clergy to other Local Churches. He also leaves his American Orthodox branch to be rent by extremism and the consequent unresolved American schism, now approaching its third anniversary, with its bishops warring with each other about the heresy of the ‘rebaptism’ of other Orthodox. Sad times. As for us, we shall keep our integrity and not enter the murky swamplands of anti-Orthodoxy, which now appear to be filling with Orthodox bishops.

Sadly, there is nothing new in any of this. Israeli leaders only treat the Palestinians as the Spanish and the Portuguese treated the peoples of what is now called Latin America, as North American settlers (most of them of British origin) treated Native American ‘savages’, as the British treated the natives of Australia and New Zealand (even making extinct the natives of Tasmania, hunting them ‘like vermin’), as the French treated the Arabs, as the Belgians treated the Congolese. And it was the treatment of Native Americans, which Hitler took as his example for his genocide of thirty million Slavs eighty years ago. He needed ‘living space’. That meant ethnic cleansing. And that is what is happening today in Gaza.

The world is on the brink. President Putin is in China, talking about West Asia. Moreover, these two Superpowers of Russia and China are closely allied with the Muslim world, India, Iran and Africa. Meanwhile, the US Secretary of State, the Jewish Antony Blinken was humiliated by the Egyptians and the Saudi Arabians and the octogenarian President Biden had to be called in to Israel to avert (or cause?) a Third World War. But now, after the latest atrocity at the hospital in Gaza, the senile President has nobody to talk to except the Israelis. Unlike President Putin, who in one day spoke to two Arab leaders, the President of Iran, the President of Israel, the President of Vietnam, the Prime Minister of Hungary and the President of China, President Biden is, like Israel, completely isolated – like all narcissists, whether secularists or in the Church.

Did the extremists really think they could get away with this?  We in the mainstream stand for moderation. There is no reason either for chaos in the world or in the Church. I am often asked why the world has gone crazy. I only have one answer: Because its leaders and many others have lost their faith in God. And when you stop worshipping the King of the Universe, you begin worshipping the prince of this world. This also needs saying to certain Orthodox bishops.

Note:

  1. https://spzh.news/en/news/76512-patriarch-bartholomew-approves-criminal-cases-against-uoc-hierarchs

 

A Message from a Churchman

When God wants to speak to men, at the beginning He whispers, only when they don’t listen to Him does He throw rocks.

Proverb

Everything has fallen apart. Educated society has lost all understanding of what Christianity is. Every day I can see before my eyes the ongoing corruption of our clergy. There is no hope at all that they will come to reason or understand their condition. Everywhere among them there is drunkenness, debauchery, simony, extortion and secular interests. The last remaining believers are trembling with repugnance over the condition of their clergy. And there is no one to finally realise just what brink of destruction the Church is standing on or what is happening.

The opportune time was missed. A disease of the spirit has taken over the entire State organism. The moment of recovery cannot recur and the clergy is rushing headlong into an abyss, having no strength or desire to stop the process. Just one more year, just a little while, and there won’t even be any simple people left around us. They will all rise up and reject such insane and repulsive leaders. And what will happen to the State? It will perish along with us. It no longer makes any difference who is in the Synod, who is its Head, what seminaries and academies there are – our agony and death are near.

The future New Hieromartyr Seraphim (Chichagov) of Petrograd, 1910

 

Who Betrayed the Europeans?

Who Betrayed the Europeans?

By the geographical centre of Europe, at Dilove in the Carpatho-Russian hills, an Orthodox shepherd, clad in his embroidered Hutsul sheepskin, plays his mountain pipe and sings of all the sorrows and of all the joys of the Europeans.

 

Far to the north-west, in the wild Hebrides, where the Atlantic wind comes blowing over the sunshone and deserted shell-white strand, bagpipes play out the tunes of the old piety for Mary and her servants Brigid and Columba, whose servants in turn brought the Word of God here nearly twenty thousand moons ago.

Far to the south-east, on the dry hills of eastern Cyprus, looking across the azure sea towards the centre of the world in Jerusalem, just over the horizon, a choir sings the folk songs about Christ, whom the old ones on the island loved and revered before the times changed.

On the cliffs of Cabo da Roca, not far from Lisbon, the most westerly point of the Eurasian landmass, by the old lighthouse, where twenty-five years ago I stood with Archbishop Seraphim and our Russian parishioners sang to him Many Years, they pray for the Europe which lost its soul and still seeks it.

Far to the north-east, in Romanov na Murmane, for now still miscalled Murmansk, by the Arctic shores of the White Sea, where St Tryphon of Kola converted the Lapps, a balalaika lament and a triumphal hymn can be heard for all the churches that the enemy of mankind began to burn and for all the saints that the enemy of mankind began to make, these one hundred years ago.

 

In the Ural foothills on the border of Asia and Europe, just outside Ekaterinburg, which became the spiritual capital of martyric Europe on that fateful night of 4/17 July 1918, a choir sings in praise of the Great Martyrs, a Russian-Dane and an Englishwoman from Hesse and all their beautiful children and faithful servants, who showed Europeans the path of repentance they must take for the salvation of their souls. Let him who has ears, hear.

Who betrayed the Europeans?

Popes, Luthers, Napoleons, Marxes, Kaisers, Hitlers and all who were deluded by the promises of the evil one and went and followed them over this thousand years. They preferred the spiritually ugly to the spiritually beautiful. That is why all of them are called apostates.

 

St John of the Ladder and the Virus

Some are talking about the virus to the exclusion of everything else – and of far more important things. There is an obsession of depression and anxiety. If this is the case, turn off the so-called ‘news’. Let this not become a drug! The internet abounds with theories, no doubt because States have often lied to people throughout history with their ‘fake news’. Distrust is the normal attitude among many. Hence, social media are awash with conspiracy theories: that the origin of the virus was with the USA, China, Russia, the Rothschilds, Rockefeller, Gates, Soros, is a move to world government of oligarchs, or is some government conspiracy to kill off all elderly people because governments want to save money. Each theory grows more absurd and more paranoid than the next. In fact it is a waste of time speculating on its origin. That a Chinese man ate bat soup and the bat was infected, may be the best one. However, let us turn to facts.

There are at least 30,000 abortions throughout the world every day. This means every a million every month, twelve million every year, 120 million every decade….. The media do not even mention this. The virus is nothing like as bad as this.

Eight days ago we were one of only seven churches open in the whole of the UK. Now, with the ban on assemblies of people, the clergy and a singer celebrate the Divine Liturgy once a week behind closed doors and prepare the Holy Gifts, so that we can give communion and prepare communion for all those who wish to partake individually, whether in the church or at home.

Let us think of St John of the Ladder. In the Gospel we read for his feast yesterday, we read the story of how ‘this kind (of demon) can only be cast out by fasting and prayer’. Now no-one has forbidden us to fast and to pray. Why do some complain?!

St John wrote his book ‘The Ladder’ and explained that we can climb up to God step by step. And so it is. We do not enter Heaven suddenly within a few weeks or months, as some neophytes assert. All takes time and patience is the mother of virtues. And this virus will disappear, just as it appeared, step by step.

All Orthodox Christians can take communion by contacting our priests for confession and communion. And so individually we can proclaim Christ’s Resurrection, as St Basil the Great says in his canon at the Liturgy.

If Christ returns tomorrow, will we be ready for Him? Here is the real question, what we should be talking about. Let us battle to free ourselves from the virus of sin. Here is the one thing needful.

 

On the DeSovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church

There was a time when some people called the (Patriarchal) Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia ‘The Soviet Church’. This was of course absurd. Whereas Soviet means atheist, Orthodox means Christian, and you cannot have atheist Christians. It is absurd as saying ‘Secular Christians’ (although they exist outside the Orthodox Church and are even proud of it). For us Mammon and Christ do not mix. You are either one or the other, as the New Martyrs of the Church inside Russia witness. On the other hand, it is true that some people in the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, oppressed by the illegitimate Soviet regime, did take on certain deformities. What were they?

Firstly, the Soviet Union was an imperialist power. Its ideology was that of the Third International, whose agenda was world conquest. Thus, still today among some individuals, supposedly Orthodox, we see a mentality of imperialism and domination, a racist arrogance towards Non-Russian nationalities. More than this, we see a certain love-of-money and prestige careerism with pseudo-intellectualism and banditry among certain clergy, who, as clericalists, treat the faithful with contempt, as a mob or cattle who have to be hosed down, as it were.

Secondly, as a result of this kow-towing to an imperialist ideology, there is among some a centralisation and bureaucracy of paperwork: nothing can be done without authorisation from a distant above and until huge numbers of forms have been filled in. As a result of such a delocalised, top-down system, many good bishops and good clergy can be transferred somewhere else, unsettling and making protest their flock, for whom they have shown pastoral care. This is because the Church administration is run like a corporation or department of State.

Thirdly, there is the disease of superstitious magic, the search for ‘miracles’, which is the result of 75 years of enforced ignorance by the Soviet regime. However, Soviet oppression ended thirty years ago and its continued existence today, in the age of free information on the internet, is simply a sign of voluntary ignorance, laziness and inertia. Therefore, still widespread is holy water idolatry and many other forms of ‘magic’ animism, comparable to those in pagan Africa.

These three attitudes, the will for domination, bureaucratic centralisation and superstitious magic, are evidence not of Christianity, but of love of power and love of money. These attitudes are opposed to the pastoral care for the faithful, to love. And without love, everything else, infrastructure, organisation, administration, websites, books, statistics, photographs, is merely a hollow shell, a house of cards and ‘sounding brass’. If there is no love, as the Apostle says, they are as nothing.

Of course, these attitudes are not at all unique to the Soviet and now post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church dependent directly on Moscow. They can be found in every nation, in every age and in every Church, including in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, as a result of the desire for power and money. For example, they were all clearly manifest in the re-Revolutionary Russian Orthodox Church, as any historian, or anyone who knew the now departed representatives of that age, can tell you. Indeed, many would agree that if that Church fell victim to the Revolution, it was precisely because so many of its representatives confessed not Christianity, but an arrogant racism, a bureaucratic centralisation and a superstitious magic Beware: revolutions can happen a second time.