I have on occasion been asked why I am a priest of the autonomous Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and not of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia. The answer is simple: I live outside Russia. True, for historical reasons there are still for the moment parishes of the Church inside Russia which are outside Russia, however illogical that may seem. Therefore, in theory, I could be part of them. However, when I was younger, I found that they were infected by various anti-Orthodox spiritual diseases and cults.

Although we live in very different times when the Church administration of the Church inside Russia is free and no longer held hostage, even today there are some less than Orthodox individuals who still sometimes frequent Church inside Russia parishes outside Russia. They appear, in theory at least, to favour ecumenism, renovationism and the new calendar and do not want to see a strong Russian Orthodox Church converting the Russian State to Christian values. They seem to live a very different life from the life in the parishes inside Russia. But these are isolated individuals who have no official support and represent only themselves, not the mind of the Church. They are the last few leftovers of a decadent past.

However, such vestiges explain why, at a different moment in history, at a time of persecution, I found refuge in the Western European Diocese of Archbishop Antony of Geneva of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia among true bishops, priests and faithful. The best and most loyal friends of the now free Church inside Russia always have been and are today in the Church Outside Russia. Some may object that there have been in the past individual members of the Church Outside Russia who were not loyal friends of the free Church inside Russia. That is a fact, but such individuals, who put politics above Churchliness, were also always few in number and did not represent the mind of the Church.

At the Fourth All-Diaspora Council in San Francisco in May 2006, held to discuss reuniting the two parts of the Russian Church, inside and outside Russia, I was an eyewitness to such individuals. Behind me stood a priest from the Ukraine, then a member of the Church Outside Russia, and John Herbst, the then US ambassador to Kiev, conversing and plotting schism. They did not want to see unity in the Russian Church. It was quite open. And of course a tiny and spiritually irrelevant schism in the Ukraine, financed with a small drop of the $5 billion which the US embassy in Kiev spent on subverting democratic government in the Ukraine, was the result.

Now today we have yet another case of a CIA scheme to introduce schism into the multinational Russian Orthodox Church, only this time from inside Russia. Yesterday in Moscow it was announced that one Evgeniy Petrin, a former employee of the Church’s Department of External Affairs, whose head is Metr Hilarion (Alfeev), has been placed under arrest for another two months until 5 April, accused of treason and passing information to the CIA. Arrested in June 2014 in an affair ‘connected with the Ukraine’, Petrin, who also turns out to have been a major in the FSB (Russian Security Services), denies everything.

According to his brother Aleksei, Petrin worked for the Church Department in 2013. His brother explained that while working for it, he discovered individuals planted there who were in fact CIA agents aiming to foment schism between the Church in the Ukraine and the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church. His brother added that their plan was to weaken the influence of the Russian Church in the Ukraine by provoking conflict between the main part of the Church based in Moscow and that in the Ukraine. According to him, one of the organizers of the plan was a certain Daniel Bilak, an executive in the international law firm CMS Cameron McKenna LLC, whose company represents foreign corporations such as Shell and Exxon.

Whatever the truth, it is clear that at least one US spy, and possible more than one, infiltrated the Church’s Department of External Affairs and that the White House is still intent on creating a schism within the Russian Orthodox Church in order to further its plans to destroy the Ukraine. Just as it protestantized the Vatican just over fifty years ago, so as to make it as spiritually weak and malleable as Protestant groups, it now wants to do the same with all the Orthodox Churches. So far it has infiltrated only two of them at a high level, but now it is trying to do the same in by far the largest local Church, the Russian.
Source: RIA Novosti