Tag Archives: Responsibility

How a Church Was Divided

Introduction

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

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

ROCOR

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

The ‘Greek’ Church

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

Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian

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

Belarussian and Ukrainian

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

Antioch

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

Sects

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

Exarchate

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

Conclusion

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

Actions Have Consequences

After the huge success of Tsar Nicholas’ 1916 offensive against the Austro-Hungarians (known to post-1917 history as the Brusilov offensive) which could have taken Vienna (29 years before it happened in a very different way in 1945), Western capitals decided on regime-change in Russia. As the British Prime Minister Lloyd George stated in the London Parliament after the success of the British-orchestrated 1917 coup, ‘we have achieved one of our war aims’, for rival Russia had to be destroyed. However, in usurping the legitimate Russian government of Tsar Nicholas by backing corrupt aristocrats and stupid intellectuals, the West created for itself the Soviet Union, its greatest enemy. Actions have consequences.

Sadly, Western powerbrokers have learned nothing from their mistakes. Thus, in 1960s and 1970s Vietnam, their support of ultra-corrupt Vietnamese led to the victory of Communism there. In the 1990s, their crass mishandling of Yugoslavia produced the terrorist and mafia enclave of Kosovo. More recently, in the Ukraine, where again the West usurped a democratically-elected government and replaced it with a clique of oligarchs who are bleeding the country dry, the impoverished country faces a war against the regime’s own people, a massive refugee problem, endemic corruption and bankruptcy. Actions have consequences.

Western support of corrupt Afghans and Iraqis has killed and maimed and forced to flee millions, given birth to corrupt puppet regimes in both countries that have little control over their countries outside their capitals, destabilized the whole of the Middle East, especially Libya and Syria, and produced ISIS. Now an insane terrorist, prepared precisely in Libya and Syria, has struck Manchester. Former British Prime Ministers Blair (who helped ruin Afghanistan and Iraq and so Syria) and Cameron (who helped bomb Libya back into the Stone Age) must take responsibility. Actions have consequences.

Immigration: The British Political Class Its Own Worst Enemy

Current political debate in the UK is focused on immigration from the EU. So the very politicians who are responsible for mass immigration, without popular consent, now outdo each other to be as anti-immigrant as possible. The infrastructure of this overpopulated little country, especially that in its south-east corner, is bursting at the seams. Huge pressures are being put on housing, transport, roads, schools and hospitals, as the population has increased by millions in just a few years and is continuing to bulge ever faster. Who is to blame? Definitely not the EU. And definitely not the immigrants themselves, who are victims, not culprits. British politicians, forbidding a democratic referendum over forty years on joining and remaining in the EU have again and again betrayed the sovereignty of the UK, selling it for the mess of pottage that is the EU empire, when its terms and conditions of membership were abundantly clear, are to blame.

Worse still – the whole Western world, which gleefully and irresponsibly bankrupted the Communist bloc by a very costly arms race and by artificially lowering oil prices (also bankrupting itself in the process, for which future generations will have to pay), is also to blame. The Western destruction of the economies of Eastern Europe, done to create new markets for Western countries, and the refusal to allow those economies to protect themselves from the ravages of the alien law of the jungle capitalism (the so-called ‘free market’, in fact debt enslavement) has had catastrophic effects on Greece, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. Families are tragically divided, skype-mothers and fathers sadly having to leave their children, friends and homes to the care of impoverished grandparents, as the young are forced to head for wage slavery in Western Europe, to do the low-paid jobs that Western people do not want to do.

Worse still – the Western world is extending its meddling economic tyranny to the Balkans, Moldova, the Caucasus and particularly the Ukraine. Now ruled by a US-installed junta of oligarch-puppets, mostly with US or Israeli passports, led by a Mr Waltzman (who calls himself Poroshenko), the Ukraine has lost over two hundred and fifty thousand citizens this year alone. They are fleeing the civil war created by the US, which has ringed the Russian Federation with NATO bases, and its EU vassals. Ukrainians are fighting for their lives, homes and identity. Many, trying to earn more than the $100 a month which they may be lucky enough to be earning at present, are fleeing. Once the breadbasket of Europe and an industrial hub of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine has been ruined by imperialistic Western meddling and its citizens are fleeing political, social, economic and military chaos and bankruptcy for Russia or for Poland and then Western Europe.

Worse still – the Western world refuses to back away from the catastrophe that it has created, let alone take responsibility for it. Elements in the US military-industrial complex actually want to unleash not just a new Cold War, but a Third World War and are sending in warships, planes, tanks and infantry for ‘exercises’ all over Eastern Europe. As for the German-run EU, all it wants is to create new markets for German economic imperialism. December 2014 marks a turning point; either NATO will continue its aggression and preparations for war – or else we shall go towards peace. In that case Eastern Europeans will no longer be forced to uproot themselves from their ancestral homes, friends, families and way of life, as the only alternative to unemployment and food banks, and will continue to live their family life together. As for xenophobic British politicians, they will be able to stop moaning about immigration. For that they have only themselves to blame.