Come, Holy Spirit! Over 5,000 Words on over Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Church

Fifty Years of History; 2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia; The Ukraine; The Suicide of ROCOR; Eastern Papism; A New Local Church

Fifty Years of History

Q: Why is 2025 a significant year for you personally?

A: 2025 marks fifty years of faithfulness to the Orthodox Church and Faith, forty-seven of them in the Russian Church, three in the Romanian Church, and forty years as an Orthodox clergyman.

Q: When did you begin this journey?

A:  My conscious journey began in 1968, when I was twelve years old. I realised then that my destiny was in the Orthodox Church and set about studying Russian, though there had been contacts with two local White Russian families before that. However, as I was under age, I was not able to join the Church until I was eighteen. Six years of waiting. In 1973 I at last managed to visit an Orthodox church. This was the Russian émigré chapel inside the house on the corner of Canterbury Road in Oxford. Soon after, the chapel became a library with the late Rev Derwas Chitty’s books and magazines, as the new octagonal University chapel, now Greek, had been opened in the garden outside.

Q: Why did you join the Russian Church?

A: Hobson’s choice, as they say in Cambridge! The only other Local Churches present in this country then, the Greek and the Serbian, would just tell you to go away. ‘You are not one of us’. They were ethnic clubs. Therefore, you had no choice. Only the two Russian jurisdictions would accept you. Not that they were very gracious about it either. They gave you the impression that they would accept you, but they would have preferred not to. Only because the elderly Russian emigres had no political power or money and were dying out, did some of them accept you. Many told us they would sooner die out than accept ‘foreigners’. They also entertained bitter political divisions and polemics, which you just had to put up with and make sense of.

2022: Departure of the Majority to the Romanian Orthodox Metropolia

Q: In 2022 three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England, the so-called ‘Colchester Diocese’, though it stretches to Coventry and Manchester, that is, many ROCOR parishes, 5,000 people and 15 clergy, including three Western rite clergy, left ROCOR and 12 of you (all except for the Western riters) joined the Romanian Church. So do you regret that you had worked for forty-seven years for the unity of the divided three parts of the Russian Church?

A: No, not at all! To work for unity is always good. Without unity Churches fall out of communion and eventually become sects. This is my real experience, I have seen this and lived this. This is what began to happen to the two Russian émigré Churches, the smaller one based in Paris and the larger one based in New York, after the last emigres who had been adults and known the realities of Russia before 1917 had died out and direct contact with reality was lost.

After them, by the early 2000s, the sectarian fantasies, to the left and to the right, in both of them became ever stronger. The Paris group began falling away definitively towards liberal secularism under masonic sponsorship and the New York group began falling away definitively into old calendarist sectarianism under CIA sponsorship, like that of the elderly CIA Colonel Magerovsky. We were eyewitnesses to both and knew all the personalities involved, writing vigorously against both extremist tendencies. There was only one way out for them, to rejoin the broad Centre, which could hold everyone together.

Indeed, we finally got both parts into communion with the Centre in Moscow and so with each other, just in time, with many of the extremists falling away, 47% of the Paris group and 5% of the New York group. However, ironically, our triumph lasted only a little more than one year, for they fell out of communion with each other again. The fault here was entirely that of the very aggressive, old calendarist pharisee-bishops of New York, who had remained in ROCOR or infiltrated it after unity and were wreaking havoc. This took place after set in the dementia of the ever-memorable Metr Hilarion, who had no idea what they were doing in his name. The schism came in December 2020. Only one bishop resisted, the anti-sectarian and anti-rebaptiser Archbishop Peter of Chicago, who had been an altar boy to St John, but who has since died. His see is now without a permanent bishop and many there are now out of control.

Q: Why did the Centre in Moscow not try and hold the two émigré parts together?

A: As the Russians say of themselves, ‘We are slow to harness, but quick to ride’. In other words, Moscow is very passive, it does nothing for, say, twenty years despite all the warnings of the coming explosion from the grassroots, and then, too late, after the explosion, it overreacts to the extreme. This is the result of not working incrementally and being pastorally interested, only politically interested. Firstly, Moscow had, and refused to have, little or any understanding of the provincial Russian emigration and its petty political arguments. Secondly, Moscow was distracted from pastoral care by international politics, for by that time Moscow had itself fallen out of communion with the Greeks, after the grossly uncanonical actions of the Greeks in the Ukraine, breaking the first canons of the Apostles. Again, here too, Moscow overreacted.

Here we see how the fall from communion with the Greeks by the Centre affected the rest. Lack of communion is like an infection, a virus. So all our work for unity was undone by the Moscow error of overreaction to the Greek error, splitting off from the Church. Then, not having turned the other cheek, Moscow ‘did a Constantinople’, by interfering in the jurisdiction of Alexandria in Africa. Little wonder that people then began to say that ‘Moscow is as bad as Constantinople’.

Q: What do you do, if even the Centre is infected by the spirit of disunity and without principles tolerates sectarianism, and ignores schism and even the heresy of rebaptising Orthodox?

A: In such a case, you must transfer to a canonical Local Church which is not infected with the disease of schism and has a Diaspora structure. Today, that means neither the Russians, nor the Greeks. As I had been to seminary in the 1970s and a couple of the seminarians had become bishops, namely in the Serbian and Romanian Churches, and since I had been around for a long time and had met lots of other bishops since then and many had read the translations of my writings into Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, German and Czech, we had a choice of where to go. After the Russian betrayal of us in the Non-schismatic Diaspora, all the others offered to protect us from the new, brutal, sectarian, uncanonical and anti-pastoral ROCOR. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword.

The Ukraine

Q: What was the connection between your departure for the Romanian Patriarchate and the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: None, directly. We were received by our old friend, the very experienced Metr Joseph (Pop) of the four-million strong Autonomous Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe of the Romanian Orthodox Church on 16 February 2022, as proved by the documents issued on that day (despite the blatant lies of others on the internet who said that those documents were forged (!), much to the shock of Metr Joseph – he did not know that bishops can lie). Now that was eight days before the new phase of the Ukrainian conflict began on 24 February.

It was providential that we had left before that conflict, because then we did not have to face the deep and bitter divisions among the flock which the commemoration of Patriarch Kyrill has brought to all Russian parishes, especially in ROCOR, though it happens even inside Russia. There anti-war Orthodox are also boycotting the Church in very large numbers, not least after the ‘defrocking’ and exiling of liberal but popular priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky.

The reason why we left was the schism which occurred with the official introduction of the heresy of rebaptism of Orthodox under old calendarist pressure, not the problem of the Ukraine. Our departure was clearly not directly connected with the intensified conflict in the Ukraine eight days later, on 24 February, but there was still an indirect connection. This is because both the heresy of rebaptism and the scandalous support for a war against other Orthodox were caused by exactly the same lack of pastoral leadership. The chasm between the bishops on the one hand and the suffering priests and people on the other hand, whom the bishops have been persecuting, opened up for exactly the same reason.

Q: But you seem to support the Russian side in the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: Not at all, that is not true. No clergyman can support war and violence. However, as a political observer and cultural historian, who knows very well both Russia and the Ukraine, both officially and unofficially, and has met both recent Patriarchs and President Putin, and who also perfectly well knows the aggression and hypocrisy of the West, several things were obvious.

Firstly, it was obvious from the very outset that, as a Great Power, Russia would win that deeply tragic and catastrophic conflict. That is not support, it is just a recognition of an obvious fact. It was also clear that the Kiev regime was Fascist and atheist and was acting simply as a proxy of the highly aggressive USA and the EU. It was obvious that the anti-Ukrainian regime in Kiev existed only because NATO was using it to try and destroy Russia and grab its wealth, for the Ukraine is the last chance of the West to dominate the world and pay off its colossal debts. It was also plain for all to see that the Kiev regime had been persecuting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and all the minorities there (and the Russians in the Ukraine are a minority of 40%!) for years. Blood is on their hands – the Russians did not start this.

Moreover, the CIA and Constantinople support for the fake Church, the OCU, under Dumenko, is an abuse of the canons, on the same level as the abuse of the canons by others, as is the present ‘defrocking’ of bishops of Cyprus for their faithfulness to Christ in refusing to recognise the fake Church. The latter has totally discredited the Church of Cyprus, which kowtows to discredited Constantinople and the local US ambassador. Frankly, there is something quite satanic in the Kiev regime, as it closes hundreds of churches, threatens to turn them into casinos and propagandises LGBT.

It was also obvious that the Ukrainian people, especially the real Orthodox there, were the victims of that war. And finally, it was manifest that the ignorant and arrogant Western mainstream media, financed by the CIA and MI6, which are themselves financed by the Military Financial Complex of the USA and the UK, supported the Kiev Nazis because they could make a lot of money out of such a conflict. They told plain lies. It was the same in Britain in the First World War, where the newspapers which were owned by millionaire arms merchants told the same type of lies.

The Suicide of ROCOR

Q: How did ROCOR come to discredit and destroy itself?

A: All too many in the Russian episcopate now appear to want to suck money out of the parishes in order to finance their ‘superior’, oligarchic lifestyle and then in return sadistically punish the selfsame priests and parishes for telling the truth and living as Christians, also trying to destroy their families. Such bishops, whether inside or outside Russia, claim that they are acting according to the canons and that any who refuse to accept their vicious persecutions and slanders are committing the ultimate sin of refusing to participate in their evil. That apparently is ‘uncanonical’!

Clearly, these people are not Christians. It would be laughable if it were not so sad. We are obedient to Christ, not to those who are de facto filioquists, that is, who claim to have replaced Christ and so put their clearly twisted interpretations of the canons above the Holy Spirit. Their lust for power and money is what has temporarily corrupted the Russian Church, just as it has Constantinople. The Russian émigré Churches had never suffered from that disease, as they had neither power, nor money, which was precisely their glory, but they had died out by the early 2000s. We saw their last generation between 1975 and 2000.

The local example of a recent convert was of one who suffered from narcissistic rages and tantrums, throwing his toys out of his pram and acting as a typical unprincipled bully. Uneducated and ignorant, humiliating those who had been in the Church before he was even born, he threatened all with a metaphorical baseball bat. He was a kind of ecclesiastical Trump, wanting only to ‘grab property’ (the words of our outraged solicitor who examined his shameless claims in astonishment – she had never seen anything like it, even in the secular world) and dominate, without any understanding of local languages, history, geography, customs etc. Moscow now knows all about him, since the scandal he caused in the altar of a church in Paris last year, when he had to be restrained by another bishop from his aggressive rage and threat of violence.

Q: Was ROCOR’s entry into schism and even heresy inevitable?

A: No, not at all. As far back as 1997, a friend of mine, the late Fr Roman Lukianov in Boston USA, warned that ROCOR risked becoming a sect, as the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, successor of St John, had reposed in 1993. For decades Vladyka Antony had been the great moderating influence inside ROCOR against the American crazies. He was rightly concerned, as were others of us.

I remember one old aristocratic émigré in London, who had worked for MI6 (so many of them did) in Iran in the 1950s (himself he just said that he had worked for ‘The Foreign Office’, which was well-understood code). He said that no unity between ROCOR and the MP was possible because ROCOR was like a glass of pure water and the MP was like a glass of dirty water. I asked him then why St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of the Crimea had been in the MP? Then I asked him why were there so many scandals in ROCOR, with the Grabbe affair, his ‘six million dollar’ son, and the defrocking for good canonical reasons of immoral priests and why there were so many ROCOR parishes that did not have priests? He simply answered that he had never heard of any of that! In other words, it was all ignorance and bigotry. It was the usual phariseeism of those who see the speck in others, but not the log in their own eye.

In fact, despite such people, ROCOR did not become a sect and ten years later it even entered back into communion with Moscow, then presided over by a former émigré, the ever-memorable Patriarch Alexis II. That was a miracle. I witnessed it. ROCOR through the ever-memorable Metr Laurus had received the most generous canonical agreement from the Patriarch, becoming a self-governing part of the Russian Church. ROCOR had basically become an Autonomous Church of the Diaspora. This had been exactly our hope all along. My only regret was that it had taken so long. Patriarch Alexis, whom I knew, had already made the same offer in about 1995! Seven years had been wasted after the revolutionary 2000 Jubilee Council in Moscow when all our just demands had been met.

With such an agreement to autonomy, ROCOR could therefore have avoided all the controversy of the later Russian schism with the Greeks and the conflict in the Ukraine and not broken communion with but co-operated with the other Local Churches. (By other Local Churches, I do not include the leadership of the Greek Churches, whose policies were purely political, dictated to them and paid for by the CIA).

But instead of using its autonomy and working with the concert of the politically free Local Churches, self-governing ROCOR showed no independence from Moscow at all, except to express CIA views of the Kiev regime! It not only entered into schism from the Greeks, but also took several priests from the Greek Church without letters of release, and accepted in silence the persecution of priests like Fr Alexei Uminsky. All this was because it did not want to recognise the Catholicity of the Church, but to be a schismatic ghetto-group, actually denying the sacraments of other local Churches, against its own people.

Q: But you must admit that ROCOR had long been a breeding ground for schism?

A: Yes, there had been the Bostonite old calendarist schism in, I think, 1986, when about 2,000 left, the tiny old calendarist schisms in France in 1987 and 2001, then the four schisms in the USA and England of 2007. But each time the numbers who left for all these various warring ‘True Orthodox’ sects were minute, often fewer than 500, sometimes as few as 50. The ROCOR Centre had remained firm.

And all those schisms proved just how necessary it was for ROCOR to enter into canonical communion with Moscow and to eliminate the sectarian spirit of hatred and division for ever. Those schisms also proved how ROCOR had for years been attracting the wrong sort of people, pathological extremists and the dissatisfied, sometimes second-generation immigrant Russians with their inferiority complexes and fantasies about pre-Revolutionary Russia, sometimes weird converts from Protestant sects, very often with sexual problems.

These are the sort of people who call normal Orthodox ‘World Orthodox’ and themselves, in their narcissistic and pharisaical pride, ‘True Orthodox’. There is no such thing as ‘World Orthodox’. True, there can be worldly or lapsed Orthodox, but they do not go to church and therefore, they are not Orthodox. An Orthodox is one who goes to church, unlike so many of the internet Orthodox who dare to call themselves ‘True Orthodox’. The only ‘True Orthodox’ are the saints of God, to whose state all Orthodox aspire.

Today, there are all of us who left ROCOR from 2021 on, in the USA, in England and elsewhere. Only this time we left not for weird and schismatic sectarian groups, but for the mainstream Local Churches, anti-Bartholomew Constantinople (those who joined Constantinople in the USA and Paris refuse to have anything to do with his fake Ukrainian Church) and then Bucharest, which welcomed us all with open arms and great sympathy, as heroic witnesses and refugees from ROCOR schism and heresy.

This time it was the scandal-ridden ROCOR itself which had become a weird and schismatic sectarian group. True, there were others in ROCOR who were too weak and fearful, including one bishop and several clergy, who did not leave for other Local Churches, but simply gave up and resigned in disgust at the lack of canonicity and corruption they had seen inside the new ROCOR. This is the end of ROCOR, its suicide. It has outlived its sell-by date.

Q: But what do you think about the anti-Moscow Patriarchate ROCOR Synod statement of 5 June?

https://www.synod.com/synod/eng2025/20250605_ensynodstatement.html

A: This was a clearly provoked by the very recent Sister Vassa debacle and the numbers of Russians leaving ROCOR in the USA and withdrawing their donations, since the documents contains nothing new and could have been written years ago. (Why wasn’t it written then? Well, as American say, ‘Follow the money’). It was clearly written by the German Metr Mark and his entourage, who have been running the Synod ever since they removed Metr Vitaly in 2001.

It is a document that deals only with the past of 70-90 years ago and fails utterly to address the present, the elephant in the room, the war in the Ukraine. The liberals will rightly mock the document as too little, too late. However, there is even worse.

From the Moscow viewpoint, the ROCOR document is scandalous. It is well known that the German Diocese of Metr Mark still has many children and grandchildren of Vlasovites (Russians who fought with Hitler) in it. For Russians in Russia Stalin was the victor of 1945, just as for British people Churchill (who was just as racist as Hitler) was the victor in 1945. And Vlasov was a traitor. Any attack of this manner on Stalin is seen as Nazi and therefore as support for the Nazis in Kiev, who are have been killing Russian civilians and children ever since 2014, with the support of the grandchildren of Nazis in Berlin and Brussels.

This statement has quite rightly outraged Moscow, especially since it has Vlasovite and CIA connections. It was 27 million Soviet citizens who were massacred by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945. Victory came when Stalin was the Soviet leader. Why is ROCOR, with its close Vlasov and CIA connections meddling in internal affairs in Russia? If Moscow ditches ROCOR, then it will lose its last shreds of a claim to canonicity and become officially the schismatic sect that it already is. For the quite correct Russian reaction, see:

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2025/06/06/sinod_rpcz_nastupaet_na_te_zhe_grabli

Q: Today ROCOR is attracting many young men. So ROCOR is not finished?

A: All Orthodox dioceses in the Diaspora are receiving many young people today. This is due to the internet effect of various influencers. But we have to be very careful and receive only the serious, not the beardy-weirdy. With such people the lapse rate is extremely high. I am now receiving at least one young person a month, though as many young women as men, including refugees from ROCOR sectarianism, now that they have understood their mistake. ROCOR is once more attracting the wrong sort of young men, the terminally online, the exclusivists, incels, woman-haters, closet homosexuals, bisexuals, extremists, narcissists, internet Orthodox. You cannot build a Church on their exclusivist pathology and hatred, and yet ROCOR usually ordains such young men, preferring them to the normal!

Thus, they claim that Orthodoxy is ’manly’ and ‘masculine’. But what about women? Are they not allowed? Why are they against family life and children? Clearly, all this is internet fantasy. Russian churches especially have always been filled with women, 80% or 90%. But you will not learn about that reality from the internet. Those remaining in ROCOR just never learn. They are just making it worse for themselves. All we can do is to pray for their repentance despite their schism and heresy.

Eastern Papism

Q: Why did some Russian hierarchs fall into exactly the same error as the Greek (Constantinople) Church before it, by proclaiming themselves to be some sort of Eastern Papacy?

A: Only about 2% of Orthodox belong to the Greek jurisdiction of Constantinople, whereas 70% (140 million) belong to that of Moscow. Moscow therefore thinks that it is No 1. However, Constantinople maintains that as the Church of the former Imperial Capital (which fell nearly 600 years ago!), it is the ‘first without equals’, that is, No 1.

Now promoting yourself as ‘No 1’ is precisely the heresy of Papism, which directly contradicts the Gospel, where Christ calls on us to serve others, not to lord it over others. The First Rome fell because it wanted to dominate. Those who call themselves the Second Rome and the Third Rome have learned nothing from its fall and have instead chosen to imitate that exact same ‘Roman’ fall. It is the sin of Rome-ism, even though you may call it worldliness, secularism, erastianism or Sergianism.

Fortunately, the Church works through Catholicity, not through becoming a State (the First Rome), ancient prestige (the Second Rome) or through size (the Third Rome). A Council of the whole Church, all sixteen Local Churches, is the solution to this childish division. In any case, as a result, both Moscow and Constantinople have punished themselves. Today Moscow is being reduced in size, losing a third of its territories and parishes, and as for Constantinople, it is losing the last shreds of its prestige, making itself into a laughing-stock, as one bishop after another in the Church of Cyprus is ‘defrocked’ for the ‘heresy’ of disagreeing with Constantinople!

Both Moscow and Constantinople are punished by the sin that they sinned with, as the Book of Proverbs says. God is not mocked. Meanwhile the real Church, the other fourteen Local Churches, goes on together with the many healthy elements within both Moscow and Constantinople are in accord. This is not a sickness unto death, for repentance is possible.

A New Local Church

Q: What after fifty years of struggle do you think of the chances of a new Local Church being established?

A: I have always believed that I would not live to see it, but I have always fought for it, for the sake of our children and grandchildren. It is still for the future and despite the present Greek and Russian squabble we are far closer to it than fifty years ago, when it was an impossible dream and even services in local languages hardly existed. The present schism does not fill me with pessimism because people in their eighties die. What is frightening is that people of that age appear to feel no repentance.

The point is that over the last fifty years I have seen both the Russian Church in the Diaspora and the Greek (Constantinople) Church dying out. Why? Because they stuck to what for the new Western-born generations of Russians and Greeks were foreign languages, Slavonic and Greek. They do not understand a word of them. The decision not to use local languages was suicide, the ethnic funeral of the Church.

On top of that, what possible missionary witness do you give to Non-Orthodox, if you do not even speak the local language and understand the local culture? Did the Apostles go around speaking in a foreign language to preach the Gospel? No, they spoke in the local language. This is one of the meanings of Pentecost. To speak in tongues does not mean to speak in gibberish in a wave of hysterical self-exaltation, like crazy Evangelicals and Pentecostalists. It means to work in order to learn another language, its culture and customs, in order to inculturate the Orthodox Christian Faith and so bring people to Christ.

St Nicholas of Japan, St Tikhon of Moscow and St John of Shanghai are recent examples, for they did exactly this. They did not impose, they set examples. All we have to do is follow them. For instance, when Japan started its proxy war against Russia with its undeclared surprise attack on Russia, St Nicholas told his Japanese clergy to pray for their armed forces and locked himself away to pray for the duration. Here is our example.

Q: And what about the chances of achieving an Autocephalous Local Church today?

A: Firstly, most Local Churches do not even have a Diaspora jurisdiction, so they are not concerned by the question.

Secondly, many of the Churches that do have a Diaspora jurisdiction would never give autocephaly to their Diaspora jurisdiction for ethnic reasons, especially if that jurisdiction is small. So there is no hope that in Western Europe, for example, the Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian or Antiochian Churches will ever grant autocephaly. This means that only the big three, the Greek, Russian or Romanian Churches could ever give autocephaly in Western Europe. True, the Romanian Church gave autonomy several years ago, but not autocephaly for very good canonical reasons, for which see below.

Thirdly, there is the question of local people who have joined that Church. This is all about missionary work. Ghetto-churches will never give autocephaly. Why should they? They are precisely not local and do not want to be local! But if there were large numbers of local people in a Church, then it would have to receive autocephaly. This so far is not the case anywhere, the numbers of native people accepting Orthodoxy have been very small.

Fourthly, there is the question of size. For example, the Greek Church is by far the largest in North America and Australia, the Antiochian the largest in South America, whereas the Romanian Church has in the last 15 years become by far the largest in Western Europe. In those regions, we must hope that the largest group would take responsibility and draw towards autocephaly. However, more of this in the final point below.

Finally, there is the issue of ability to get on with others, i.e, the absence of nationalism and narrow jurisdictionalism and even worse, of sectarianism. This disqualifies the Greek and now the Russian Churches, one of whose bishops told our Romanians and Moldovans that, ‘I don’t like Romanians and I only half-like Moldovans’. This is racism, chauvinism on the same level as Constantinople’s.

The fact is that the Greek Church of Constantinople has never voluntarily given or recognised genuine autocephaly to anyone because of its centralising tendencies, neither to the Serbs, nor to the Russians, nor to the Romanians and, most obviously, nor to the Bulgarians, nor to the Poles, nor to the Czechs and Slovaks, nor to the Macedonians today. Even the ‘autocephaly’ the Greeks recently gave to the Ukrainian schismatics is completely fake. Their fake Church of gangsters and thugs has no independence and depends entirely on CIA cash. Even in history, when the Copts and the Armenians broke away from Orthodoxy, the main reason was their nationalist reaction to Greek racism.

With the suicide of ROCOR and its schism from the Paris Archdiocese of the Russian Church, in Western Europe the Russians have now done exactly the same thing as the Greeks, excluding most Ukrainians, Moldovans and normal local Western Europeans from the Russian Church, that is, becoming like the Greeks a nationalistic ghetto-Church. There is only one option left – the Romanians.

Are the Romanians up to the job? I can affirm that many are, the publishing efforts in English and French of the Romanian Dioceses are formidable. But is that enough? Only time will tell. What is certain that no one Local Church can give autocephaly. It must be done in concert, which is why Bucharest did not give us autocephaly, only autonomy. Thus, there is no room either for nationalism, nor sectarianism.

Q: What might a new Local Church look like?

A: I see it as a group of bishops, with their flocks of different nationalities, presiding in turn for a fixed term over the new Local Church, its autocephaly granted collectively by all the Local Churches concerned. Each bishop would have his own diocese, Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek, Georgian, Romanian, Russian and Antiochian. We must avoid the error of the Greeks who set up episcopal assemblies. These failed and no longer operate because the Greeks wanted to dominate them and sat in permanent control over them, heavy-handedly trying to impose their views. That is not the way to go. There must be complete respect and freedom for different languages, calendars and customs, not to mention different attitudes towards ecumenism. There must be no interference from the Mother-Churches. Autocephaly must mean autocephaly. There is no other way.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Pentecost 2025

 

 

 

 

The Consequences of the Russian Victory in the Ukraine

The Origin of the Western Delusion

The elites of Western European countries have always tried to invade and then colonise and exploit the lands nearest to them. This means the invasions, mainly from the lands between the Rhine and the Loire or else from Northern Italy, of Sardinia in 1015-17, then of Greek Sicily and Southern Italy, the Frankish-led 1064 Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, the Norman-led invasion of England in 1066 and from there the invasions of the Celtic lands, the Frankish ‘Crusades’ in the Holy Land and the Teutonic Knight invasions of the Baltic States and Russia. These aggressions against Russia were later repeated in every century, by the Poles in 1609-18, by the Swedes in the Great Northern War, by Napoleon in 1812 and then by Hitler in 1941, both with Collective European invasions, which became routs of Western Europe. Now history is repeated in the Ukraine.

Originally, such imperialism came about because Western Europe began to consider that it possessed a superior religion under its leader, the infallible Pope, who had by dogma replaced Christ and from whom alone the Holy Spirit comes into the world. Then it laid claim to a superior civilisation, because it had superior military and industrial technology. Next it claimed to be a superior race (most visibly among the ‘Aryan’ Nazis), and today it considers that it is superior because it has ‘liberal’ values. In fact, like all its other ‘European values’, its liberalism is Fascist, as it denigrates others. Among them, even the word ‘liberal’ has come to mean intolerant. Indeed, unsurprisingly, the grandfathers of many of the unelected, but ‘infallible’, ‘Papist’ and Neo-Carolingian EU leaders were Nazis, for example those of von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Baerbok etc.

The End-Game in the Ukraine

The ill-advised Trump has lost the US proxy war against Russia, whatever the PR drone stunts of Kiev. Ignorant of the geography, history and politics of all countries outside the USA, he believed the propaganda lies which were fed to him, that Russia was losing the war with huge losses and sacrificing ‘human waves’ of its soldiers, its leader was dying, its ‘tiny economy’ (‘the same size as Spain’s’) was ‘in meltdown’, its forces had no arms, no fuel, no weapons, no soldiers, that it ‘was a gas station masquerading as a country’. Trump may be a poker player, but he has ‘no cards’, so he cannot win. He has and never had any ‘leverage’ and the latest EU threats of piracy are laughable. Russia’s economy is in fact the fourth largest in the world, at least four to five times larger than Spain’s, indeed, the largest in Europe. Perhaps slowly, but reality is dawning.

Russia is not a poker player, but a chess player. Thus, in the Ukraine there will be no frozen conflict, no stalemate, no ceasefire, no DMZ, as there was in Korea, in that war which the Western world also lost. No, the Ukraine will be another Vietnam or Afghanistan, a humiliating capitulation, as in Saigon or Kabul. Millions of Ukrainians who had to flee to Russia from the genocidal Fascist regime in Kiev will return to the New Ukraine, once peace has come there, as well as many of the more than six million Ukrainians who took the politically-motivated bribes of the West and emigrated there after 2022. When peace comes, there will be a New Ukraine and it will be remade as a neutral State, with very deep suspicion of the West which wanted to genocide the Ukraine ‘to the last Ukrainian’, for clearly Ukrainian lives do not matter to the racist and anti-Slav Western world.

The conflict in the Ukraine has been a civil war and also a war of attrition. The Russian aim from the outset was to wipe out the NATO-trained, -armed and -financed Ukrainian armed forces. This is what Russia meant by ‘Demilitarisation’. Russia, by far the largest country in the world, needs no new territories, but the ‘Ukrainian’ territories inhabited by persecuted Russians will become part of Russia. Trump is no mediator in this conflict, the USA has always supported Kiev in every way and is still doing so, so his PR peace efforts to try and win a Nobel prize, funded by the CIA, are all in vain. The war will end on the battlefield. All wars of attrition end suddenly. This one will end suddenly too and that end may come in the next few months. In that case the conflict will have lasted about as long as the Second World War in Russia (June 1941-May 1945).

Consequences: A World of Spheres of Influence

Given NATO aggression, which caused the war in the Ukraine through its sponsorship of the puppet Fascist regime that it set up in Kiev, and the imminent NATO defeat, there will be great bitterness and a spirit of revanchism against Russia in defeated and humiliated Western Europe. We can imagine a barbed wire fence being laid out along the border between the New Ukraine and the Uniat Galician far west of Stalin’s old Ukraine, which will be separated from the Russian world by that fence. This will prevent invasions and terrorist attacks, perhaps planned, as so often happens, by the British MI6 and SAS, from Galicia or Poland. This situation will last until such time as there is a new pragmatic and realistic elite in Western Europe, the old ideological one swept away by its long-suffering peoples, who want good relations with their neighbours.

The post-Ukrainian world will be a multipolar world of spheres of influence, dominated by the three Great Powers and perhaps later by a fourth, India, if it can overcome its narrow Hindu nationalism. Thus, the USA will dominate or control Greenland (to be invaded by it), Canada (seceded Alberta may well become the 51st State of the USA), Mexico, Central America as far as Panama, the ‘Gulf of America’ and the Caribbean. China will dominate East Asia and its influence will become ever greater in Japan, Korea, South-East Asia, the Western outpost of Australia, South America (which the US is about to lose to China) and, together with Russian arms and diplomacy, Africa. Russia will help all Northern Asia, from Europe to the Sea of Japan, including the Caucasus and Central Asia and any in Western Europe (see below) who wish for co-operation.

Consequences: An Isolated Western Europe

Now Europe has for a millennium been divided into two halves. The Western half (‘Western Europe’ – see above) consists of the former Catholic and Protestant countries. The Eastern half belongs to Eurasia and consists of Russia, Belarus and the future New Ukraine, whose precise borders are yet to be set. Western Europe is sociologically and ideologically divided between the tiny bankster- and oligarch-controlled ruling elite, supported by and consisting of some 20% of the population who benefit from the elite, 20% who oppose the feudal, oligarchic and exploitative nature of the West and then the 60% inbetween. This 60% swims with the tide, looking only for its own survival and benefit. Nobody can rely on the support of this unprincipled mass. However, we do not condemn them, they too have to eat and feed their children.

The tragedy of Western Europe is that its elite has actually believed in its own lies, known variously as ‘propaganda, spin, narrative, fantasy, fairy tales, wishful thinking, virtual reality, a parallel universe’. All of these such fantasies are delusion, more precisely self-delusion. The result is that Western Europe will be defeated and then will separate from its artificial ‘Union’ into its various constituent parts, north, west, east and south. For example, the sixteen countries of south-eastern Europe, from Austria to Cyprus, could leave for the sphere of influence of Russia, with all Northern Eurasia, linking them with the New Silk Road of China. Many in Hungary, Slovakia and Non-EU Serbia are already thinking of doing this. This will leave the twenty-five countries of the rest of Western Europe even more abandoned and isolated.

They will have to define themselves afresh, retrieving their roots. It will then be quite possible that the six countries of south-western Europe, Italy, Malta, San Marino and then Spain, Portugal and Andorra will leave the EU, in that order, to join south-western Europe and the BRICS world led by the Russian Federation. This will leave the nineteen countries of north-western Europe, from Iceland to Estonia, even more isolated. Only through such isolation and self-examination can come repentance and the decolonisation and devassalisation of the Western European peoples, the French, Bavarians, English, Poles, Dutch, Swiss, Scandinavians, Finns, Balts and all the others, from their corrupted and barbarian Neo-Carolingian elite, which today is centred in Brussels. For some, like the long-oppressed Irish, this repentance will be easier than for others.

The Consequences for the Russian Orthodox Church

By allying itself with the State of the Russian Federation, the Sovietised and nationalistic Moscow Patriarchate (and its New York ROCOR satellite) have lost their influence outside the Federation, in the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic States, just as it lost the Orthodox in Finland, Poland and Slovakia after the 1917 Revolution, when those countries were recreated. In other words, a bureaucratised, clericalised, nationalised and militarised ideology replaced pastorship in the Russian Church. In bitterness Western countries may yet ban any Russian Orthodox churches in Western Europe. This is already happening in the Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia and its Patriarch has already been officially banned from the Ukraine, Lithuania, Canada and the UK. It is becoming a ghetto-Church, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

The problems of the Patriarchate of Moscow and its ROCOR subsidiary all came about through the desire of certain of its leading bishops to create an Orthodox Vatican. They have long admired the Statist ideology of the Vatican, espoused by Patriarch Sergius. This meant competing against Constantinople, which had already advanced much further along that same Statist path, that of replacing pastors with political ideologues, replacing Churchmanship with politics. The Vatican is a Church-Business, a Church-State, a Church of the filioque, according to which the Pope is the Head of the Church, replacing Christ, from Whom ‘proceeds the Holy Spirit’ and who has the right to persecute real Christians. But the real Church of God, Orthodoxy, is not a State, not a Business, not the filioque. The elitist Vatican model is alien and rejected by all sincere Orthodox.

 

 

Questions and Answers (January-May 2025): On Pastoral Work, the Church and other Christians, Miaphysites, Homosexuality, the Russian Church, Sister Vassa, the Suicide of ROCOR, English and England

Pastoral Work

Q: On the internet you have been called ‘popular but controversial’. Do you think that is fair?

A: That question again! My answer is that I don’t know if it is fair. It is not for me to judge. Popular? Our church is always packed with hundreds, but many other Romanian and Greek churches in this country are also packed in the same way, so that does not mean anything. Controversial is a more interesting comment. Let me explain why.

My priority over 40 years as a clergyman of the Church has always been pastoral work. Therefore, I have always been ideology-free and nationality-free. All are welcome. And for some that may be controversial. For instance, I have always said that if tomorrow 1,000 Chinese people turn up wanting to be baptised, then I will set about that and learn some Chinese on the way. This is exactly what we did when 1,000 Romanians and Moldovans turned up some 12 years ago. I learned some Romanian and found a pious Romanian who was able to become a deacon and then a priest. Since then he has completed seminary and is now completing his masters.

Another example. During the covid scandal (for that is what it was), all the bishops closed down their churches. Not a single one resisted the fraud or went to prison for remaining open. I kept our churches open. True, we hid as in the catacombs, we forbade parking in front, entrance was by the side door, we did not turn the lights on and did not ring the bells and people came in and went out in twos and threes. People of all nationalities came from all over the eastern side of England, from up to 150 miles away. I also went to give people communion in their houses in that area, including all over London, which had turned into a church desert. The others were hiding, ‘for fear of the Jews’. Western and Westernised secularist and atheist governments had achieved what Stalin had not achieved. I suppose my actions were perhaps ‘popular but controversial’.

Some will say that that was irresponsible, I could have spread covid. I did not. I told those, and nearly all of our people are under 40, who felt ill or had weak health to stay at home. But that was only common sense, I am sure they were doing that anyway. Just like ‘social distancing’, which in fact was anti-social distancing, which was also common sense. When we are ill or risk falling ill, we stay at home, we avoid others, especially the vulnerable. We don’t need governments to tell us that! We are not zombies.

Throughout history the Church authorities have had to make up their minds whether they are with Christ or with the State. So it is today. I am with Christ. So were the fools in Christ in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (the capitals where the State authorities did not allow other saints), like St Basil the Fool and St Xenia. St John of Kronstadt worked in a port with its bars and brothels. The snooty aristocrats did not want him, a dirty peasant, in Saint Petersburg.

Likewise, St Seraphim of Sarov lived in the middle of nowhere with bears – the authorities did not want ‘a dirty peasant’ among them and when the pious Tsar had him canonised, the atheist aristocrats, who later overthrew the Tsar, mocked the Tsar’s ‘obscurantism’. Bears liked him more than aristocrats. As for the very recent Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), the Soviet and also post-Soviet Church authorities not only kept him away from towns, but exiled him to a tiny island on a lake, as far away as possible from where large numbers lived. Contempt and persecution by furious bishops who love money and power over Christ have always been our lot, they have never wanted us in a large city. Popular but controversial?

The Church and Other Christians

Q: Where is the True Church?

A: The True Church is where there is Love. Wherever there is hatred, there is no True Church and so no Orthodoxy.

Q: Which Christian group is closest to the Orthodox Church, the Catholics or the Protestants?

A: Neither! Let me explain.

There is an absurd black and white belief, usually adopted by self-justifying converts who know very little and understand even less, that outside the (Orthodox) Church there is nothing. If, on the contrary, we are to make a very broad generalisation, perhaps we could say the following in answer to your question:

The Miaphysites, who are made up of the six groups known as Ethiopians, Eritreans, Copts, Armenians, Syriacs and Malankara Syriacs, totalling some 50 million people, are by far the closest to us. Very crudely speaking, we could say that they have three-quarters of Orthodoxy, whereas the Roman Catholics (who do have the concepts of bishops, priests, saints and sacraments) have only half, and the Protestants (who have only the misinterpreted Scriptures) have only a quarter of Orthodoxy.

The Miaphysites (Non-Chalcedonians) believe what St Cyril of Alexandria also expressed, that Christ has One Nature (‘mia physia’), which is both Divine and human. This was refined by him and all Orthodoxy into the Dogma of the Universal Council of Chalcedon in 451 that Christ is One Person in two natures, Divine and human. For some Orthodox, that seems like the same thing as Miaphysitism, the difference is only semantic.

For many others, however, this is much too vague and unrefined. Apart from the central questions of the Miaphysite attitude to the Council of Chalcedon itself, to the following three Universal Councils and the issue as to whether for them Christ is fully Divine and fully human, with Divine and human souls, minds, wills and energies, there are questions of the Canon of Scripture, the recognition of saints, circumcision etc. These issues divide the Miaphysites from Orthodoxy.

Thus, Miaphysitism disagrees with Orthodoxy about the Person of Christ. Official Roman Catholicism disagrees with Orthodoxy about the Holy Spirit, through Whom the Head of the Church, Christ, is present, replacing both Christ and the Holy Spirit with the Pope of Rome, then the ‘leader of the West’. And Protestantism has no Church, it does not know the Body of Christ, which is why it says strange humanist things like, ‘the Church is wrong’, ‘the Church made a mistake’, ‘the Church has to change’, ‘we must reform the Church’ etc

Q: The new Pope has taken the name Leo XIV, apparently since he wanted to balance conservative and liberal forces in his Church. What do you think of him, and if you were elected Pope, what name would you take? And what would you change, if you could?

A: Your second question greatly amused me, as there must be several billion people who could become Pope before me!

I had obviously never thought about it, but maybe on reflection I would take the name Zacharias II, as Pope Zacharias (741-752) was the last Greek Pope of Rome. Above all, he is an Orthodox saint. I would certainly start by reverting to the Creed, that is, abandoning the filioque, and allowing married men to become priests, stamping out the perversions caused by compulsory celibacy.

As regards your first question and what I think of the new Pope, I don’t know. He may wear a Russian priest’s cross and have an appreciation of liturgies other than the new Roman mass, but that does not mean anything. Actions speak louder than words. Give him a year.

Q: What went wrong with Catholicism in the 1960s? Why did it abandon so much from before?

A: I was not there, but I have understood the following from eyewitnesses.

In the 1960s, rationalist intellectuals seized hold of Catholicism and decided that it needed ‘updating’, as though it were some sort of corporate secular organisation that needed rebranding. They forgot, or probably never even knew, that the Church services are made to inspire prayer, contact with the other world, and so must have the sense of the sacred, the mystical, the otherworldly, the numinous. Instead, they made their Church resemble the world, destroying any sense of the sacred. And so they discouraged prayer and people stopped going to their churches. Why go there? It resembled the world around them. It was no longer different, ‘special’.

But let us not get it out of proportion. There was much that was wrong with it centuries before the 1960s.

Q: Who do you hope will become the next Archbishop of Canterbury after the pedophile scandal with Welby?

A: I have no idea. I just hope the next one actually believes in God, unlike the last one

Q: Why is there so much homosexuality among the Orthodox episcopate today?

A: Homosexuality always come in times of decadence. That is your reply.

As Fr John, the rector of the very large Mayfield parish (3,000 Orthodox) in the USA, explained to me in 2007, the worst thing is when bishops form a gay mafia (in the US, this is called a ‘lavender mafia’) and then gang up against married priests and their solid families. Closet homosexual bishops are jealous of their common touch, experience and knowledge.

In those days, this concerned the OCA, today it concerns the Russian/ROCOR and Constantinople Churches. Thus, in the Russian Church inside Russia, another three bishops have just been deposed, though it is not clear whether this was for embezzlement of money or again for perversion, as in the Grindr scandals previously.

Q: Why did the Orthodox Easter coincide with the Catholic Easter this year?

A: What you mean is that in 2025 the Roman Catholic Easter coincided with the Orthodox Easter. This happens every five years, when Catholicism observes the Paschalia and the canons.

Q: What do you think of the icons that have been displayed in recent years in a great many Non-Orthodox Churches?

A: Sadly, they are used only as superficial decoration and you cannot venerate them. The Non-Orthodox would not venerate them, do not even know how to venerate them or actively prevent Orthodox from venerating them in horror at our veneration. Icons there are only a fashion from the 1970s, but it has gone no further than a fashion.

Q: What for you is religion?

A: Religion is State manipulation, as Marx said in his definition that ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’. (What he did not mention is that mass murder is the opium of the Marxists).

As a priest, I am not a man of religion, but a man of faith, for faith is defined as the perception of spiritual reality.

Q: Do Orthodox accept conspiracy theories?

A: Some surely do. But the problem with such theories is that they always identify a human enemy – the Jews, the Freemasons, the Catholics, the Trilateral, the City of London, the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese etc. Therefore, they are all wrong, because they have partial or temporary truths. There is only one enemy; the devil, and he can and does work through all and any of us or them, not just through one group.

The Russian Church

Q: Should we pray for Patriarch Kyrill, inasmuch as he has stated that the Russian war against the Ukraine is a ’holy war’?

A: Your question contains so many misunderstandings that I hardly know where to begin!

Firstly, we should all pray for each other and especially for our enemies, if you consider that you have any. Secondly the Ukraine and Russia have been at war with each other for years, since 2014, when the Kiev regime began its genocide of Russian-speaking Ukrainians. It is above all a Kiev regime war against Russia. It is catastrophic, for it is a civil war.

However, this war was only possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. To present the war as a war between an Orthodox side and a Non-Orthodox side is absurd. Neither is Orthodox, the masses are atheists, with abortion rates twice that of ‘decadent’ Western countries, divorce rates at the same level and social decomposition and an ultra-low birthrate current. This is in reality a proxy war, a geopolitical struggle which pits US-based atheist Globalism against Russian-based Nationalism, which nobody except Russian nationalists can support.

The conflict is only a religious question inasmuch as the Kiev regime, strongly supported by the Globalists, persecutes the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and, on the other hand, inasmuch as certain priests inside Russia have been persecuted and exiled for having different political opinions to the warlike Russian nationalist views promulgated among others by certain Russian bishops. The grounds for the persecution in the Ukraine could have been avoided, had there been a canonical, autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its autocephaly granted by Moscow. For thirty years nationalist Moscow refused to grant this autocephaly, thus creating the Kiev nationalist accusation that the Ukrainian Church is a slave of Moscow and to some making it appear true.

Our sympathies naturally go to the persecuted, not to the persecutors, wherever those persecutors are. However, that does not mean that our prayers do not go to the persecutors too. Indeed, quite the contrary. For example, we pray publicly at every liturgy ‘for this land, all the Royal House, all those in seats of authority and the armed forces’, with whom we may not at all agree. Prayer for others does not mean that we agree with them! That is a purely secular, not to say atheistic, understanding. We pray especially for those who disagree with us so that their hearts may be softened. That is why the first Orthodox prayed for the pagan Roman emperors, such as Nero. Such prayer is good for us too, as it protects us from ill feeling. All the more do we pray for those who persecute us. We do that all the time.

There is no such thing as ‘a holy war’. In that Sister Vassa Larina and all the other liberals right. Why do they have to persecute so cruelly such an innocent and harmless, if misled, head in the clouds idealist as Sister Vassa? The ‘defrocking’ of her and experienced pastors, outside Russia, where ROCOR is systematically purging itself of all the old traditional ROCOR and replacing them with crazy lickspittle converts, fobbing the experienced off with meaningless medallions and then retiring them, however young they are. This is the same as inside Russia, where experienced pastors are ‘defrocked’ for holding different opinions to narcissistic bishops is sacrilegious. In Russia and in the Netherlands they even threatened pacifist clergy with criminal courts. However, whether inside and outside Russia, it is exactly the same Stalinism.

For the bishops who defrocked Sister Vassa were not forced into persecuting her by Moscow – it was worse than that, they did it voluntarily. With their greed for money and power, they too are merely Sergianists, like those in the USSR who persecuted the New Martyrs and Confessors. That is spiritual suicide. ROCOR bishops pressed the self-destruct button some years ago, in about 2017, when they cast aside Metr Hilarion in an internal coup d’etat and the crazies took over.

However, Sister Vassa, who has quite rightly called the attitude of the new ROCOR ‘Neo-Sergianism’, has now made the mistake of joining those who, financed by the CIA, want to invade Russia and also openly persecute the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Since Sister Vassa is American, does this mean that she too supports the CIA and is anti-Russian, like the ROCOR bishops? Some ROCOR bishops and priests are CIA – is she also CIA? That too is Sergianism – putting pro-Ukrainian political beliefs above the Church. Sergianism is not only Russian. Its origins are after all in Protestant Holland, whose Erastian attitudes were taken to Russia by Peter I. We must pray for Sister Vassa that she will come to understand. To be anti-Russian is the same as being anti-Ukrainian. We must be pro-Christ.

Q: What did the Church of the Russian Emigration have to teach the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: Very simply, that we must always put Christ above the State. This includes the pre-Revolutionary Russian State (all too many in the Emigration suffered from cultural nostalgia for that uncanonical and unjust system, but it too was also in part run by practical atheists – 90% of the emigres simply wanted the old, corrupt system, and their money and land, back), as well as the Soviet atheist State or the post-Soviet atheist State. We render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

That is what we teach them, that is what St John of Shanghai, the greatest saint of the Emigration taught and still teaches today through his life. Even less universal and even somewhat controversial figures from the Parisian Emigration, like the locally-venerated Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), who had nothing to do with Essex (I know, I was born in Essex!), Mother Maria (Skobtsova), and Metropolitan Antony (Bloom) taught this, the first as a rather inaccessible art nouveau period philosopher, the second as one who like so many others sacrificed her life for someone younger, the third as a conscious convert presented the logic of Orthodoxy to other converts.

Instead of teaching that Christ is above the State, after 2007 many of the remnants of the Russian Emigration and their naïve converts did the opposite. They copied the Sergianist vices of the Moscow Patriarchate (which had their roots entirely in the uncanonical, Protestant-style, Erastian administration of the pre-Revolutionary State), falling prey to the love of power and especially of money. It is very, very sad. The ‘Church-Business’ inside Russia is why even in the last six years Church attendance there has halved from 2.6% to 1.3%. They have restored the pre-Revolutionary Church – yes, the worst of it!

The reconciliation of ROCOR with the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) in 2007 was absolutely vital as ROCOR was on the verge of becoming a sect, already many in ROCOR were saying that they would join the MP in any case, if there was no reconciliation. Some had begun leaving in the 1990s. The new ROCOR shows utter disloyalty to St John, about whom one new, very effeminate, luxuriously dressed, ill-educated ROCOR bishop, who does not know even the basics, told us that he walked without shoes only because his shoes were uncomfortable!! It is interesting to see how such bishops today persecute the legacy of love of St John even today, trying to close churches dedicated to St John, persecuting and bullying his spiritual descendants, threatening them with incredible violence and rage (‘Cut their heads off’) and only paying lip service to St John, as his relics are a source of income. ‘By their fruit ye shall know them’. And these people call themselves Christians…

Today we see resistance to the State above all only in the Ukraine through the heroism of the much-persecuted Metr Onufry of Kiev. But Tsar Michael will come and sweep the old post-Soviet vestiges in both the Russian Federation and the Ukraine away.

Q: Why does the Russian Church have relatively strict practices?

A: We must recall that Russia was converted by Byzantine monks, so it lacks the parish tradition, which is so much alive in Greece and Cyprus and is much freer and easier than the monastic tradition and its practices. Today, the Russian Church is often obsessed by rules and a certain militarisation, for nearly all there today are converts. This is also a sociological phenomenon.

Q: Why in Russian churches in Russia are there women who come around and clean the icons with cloths every few minutes?

A: This comes from Soviet accusations about hygiene, that Orthodox are dirty. So the Church in the USSR reacted to it with this over the top hygiene obsession.

Q: Who do you prefer of the two sister-saints, the Tsarina Alexandra or the Grand Duchess Elizabeth?

A: Both were converts, but the Tsarina went further into Orthodoxy than her sister, who got stuck in the convert politics of trying to mix Orthodoxy with a Western mentality, hence her ‘reforms’, specially designed nuns’ uniform, deaconesses, and her support for murder. However, Elizabeth was finally purified by her sacrifices for the poor and, above all, by the blood of her martyrdom.

Q: What exactly is a mass baptism?

A: For me, it means the baptism of hundreds or thousands. When it is just a matter of a ten or twenty, or fewer than a hundred, that is a group baptism.

English and England

Q: What version of the Bible do you recommend for home reading?

A: The Revised Standard Version, or RSV, as blessed by some Orthodox bishops back in the 1960s.

Q: In English do you write matins or mattins?

A: The English word comes from the Latin ‘matutina’, which does have two ts, but I think that matins with one t is the most common spelling.

Q: As you appear to dislike the House of Windsor, do you consider that you are a Jacobite?

A: I support only one Royal House, the House of Wessex. All the others came after the Schism and the near-millennial Norman Occupation.

 

 

The Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine, the Russian Federation and the Émigré Church

Introduction: National Demons

Just like every person, so every country also has its demons. France has its absurd narcissistic vanity (Louis XIV, Napoleon, Mitterrand, Macron), Britain has its overweening delusional arrogance (Churchill, Thatcher), surrounded Germany has its crazed bouts of bipolarity (Kaiser Wilhem, Hitler), the USA has its freakish urge for global domination (Clinton and Biden), and Russia has its fits of suicide, heightened by the host of totalitarian demons of its great suicide from 1917 on, when even the name ‘Russia’ disappeared until Hitler restored it.

On the other hand, the Ukraine has its ever-grasping and outrageous sense of entitlement, heightened by the injustices of Soviet persecutions, especially of the territory Stalin stole from Poland, directed from Moscow from 1939 on. Tragically, these old demons of the post-Soviet and atheised Ukraine and of the post-Soviet and atheised Russian Federation brought the two countries to war with each other in 2014. That war worsened in February 2022, after the Western sponsors of the Kiev regime had refused peace talks for eight years.

The Atheist Tragedy in the Ukraine

The demons love and laugh at human bloodshed and suffering, which they create, and have especially been mocking fallen Orthodox since 1917, toying with the Church of God through the passions of certain bishops of various nationalities. The demons gloat at human misery and the despairing souls they capture as a result. And the demons continue to mock today. The conflict in the Ukraine is a geopolitical struggle which pits US-led Globalism, parasitically feeding off Ukrainian nationalism, against Russian-led Nationalism.

The latter treats all Non-Russians as second-class citizens. The conflict in the Ukraine is catastrophic, for it is a civil war, a war between former brothers. It was made possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith, the result of the demons that entered the Russian Empire in 1917 and which have still not been exorcised. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. Now the tragic conflict in the Ukraine is in its fourth, probably final, year. Over 1.2 million Ukrainian soldiers and 100,000 Russian soldiers are dead.

Communists and Nationalists

The three Russian aims were stated very clearly from the very outset, as the Liberation from Neo-Nazi Kiev of the purely Russian Donbass in eastern Ukraine (still not achieved after over three years, though this aim has had to be extended to other provinces), and the Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine. After all, the war was caused by the categorical refusal of the Nazi Kiev puppet regime, installed by frightening violence in 2014 against the democratically-elected government, to allow the Federalisation of the multiethnic Ukraine.

Instead, the regime imposed a centralised NATO system, just like that of the Communists before it. They no longer call themselves Communists, but instead Nationalists, but spiritually those are still Communists. Clearly, as a result of that refusal to decentralise, the Ukraine would fragment and fall apart, as is always the result of Stalinist centralisation, whether in the Ukraine or in the Russian Federation. There the new militaristic and clericalist trend of erecting statues of Stalin is growing, a clear sign of its reviving nationalist centralisation.

The Atheist Tragedy in ROCOR

The situation in the Ukraine is mirrored in other Stalinist-style centralising organisations all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and even outside it, in, for example, in the Russian Church and even in its New-York based émigré fragment, the so-called Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). It is known as the American Synod, for today it is Russian only in history and name. In reality, its main language is American English, and its ideology is right-wing Protestant Americanism, a Disneyfied Russian Orthodox fairy-tale.

With large chunks of hellfire Lutheranism of the convert type thrown in, this ideology is appropriate for ‘the Republican Party at prayer’, but not for the Orthodox Church. The old ROCOR of Russian emigres has been substituted by the new ROCOR, a process which can be dated back to its internal coup d’etat, which took place approximately in 2017. In the case of the new ROCOR too, Orthodox aims should be Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification. For like the Kiev regime, it too has replaced Faith with a political ideology.

Liberation in the USA and England

First of all, there must be liberation from the ‘Persecuting ROCOR’, the mentality of pharisaic sectarianisation, which led directly to its schism from the fullness of the Russian Church as well as from the rest of the Orthodox Church, and its rejection of the Local Orthodox Churches, which ended in a ghetto of self-isolation and the Donatist heresy of rebaptism. This we have seen in the USA, with the escape from ROCOR of Fr Alexander Belya, who is now in charge of a Vicariate of over twenty Slav clergy and parishes in the Greek Archdiocese.

That situation was mirrored in England with the planned escape of over 90% of the ROCOR diocese to the Romanian/Moldovan Orthodox Church, since well over three-quarters of its 5,000 parishioners were Romanians and Moldovans. It was there received without hesitation on 16 February 2022. The fake Russian nationalism of the new ROCOR (fake because it is in fact American!), its insatiable greed for money, its heresy of rebaptism, its hatred for all Orthodox of the Tradition and outright, shameless lies, define the new American ROCOR.

Liberation Elsewhere

There are also the many clergy and people who have left ROCOR in France and Germany, profoundly unhappy with the anti-Russian, American mentality of the new ROCOR. That unhappiness is almost certain to spread throughout the remaining ROCOR parishes in Western Europe over the next few years, as the clergy and people refuse to become Americans. Now there is also the sad case of Sister Vassa Larina, herself an American-Russian, but in Europe, who rejected the new arch-Republican American Synod, which she calls ‘disgraceful’.

However, rather than returning to the Tradition of the old ROCOR of her father (whom I knew well), she made the strange choice of a liberal ideology, leaving ROCOR for the schismatic Ukrainian nationalist sect, known as ‘The Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU). Instead of simply letting her go to such liberals, whom she has always so admired as a liberal feminist academic, the American Synod punished her. In all these cases, it is freedom and respect for other opinions that are missing in the new ROCOR – just as it is in the former USSR.

Demilitarisation and Denazification

The best of the old ROCOR was always politically neutral, not partisan. Now we have ROCOR bishops who are openly anti-Russian, pro-NATO, or belong to the CIA or work for its anti-Orthodox front organisations. True, this process began in the 1960s with the then Fr George Grabbe, but he was a one-off. The new ROCOR explains the decision of the American Synod to get rid of all those of the Tradition, who knew the old Russian clergy and laity born before the Revolution or in the two first generations of the emigration between 1917 and 1967.

They are being replaced with new and idealistic converts, who do not know the Tradition, do not speak Russian, and have little to do with the realities, both positive and negative, of the Church inside Russia today. They can therefore be easily manipulated with fairy-tales and myths of ‘Holy Rus’. As for Nazification in ROCOR, that began in Germany in the 1930s and continued with its support of the Russian Nazis under Vlasov. The survivors of Stalin’s barbarism emigrated to the USA and South America, especially to Argentina, after 1945.

In the New ROCOR

However, they were opposed by the old pre-Revolutionary Western European ROCOR and the Chinese-Australian ROCOR, as well as the minority who had kept the authentic Orthodox Tradition in North America. After the Second World War Nazification was tempered to some extent, but from time to time its authoritarianism came to the fore again. Since the takeover of the old ROCOR by the American Synod in 2017, it has deliberately sent out its new convert-bishops to Australia and Western Europe to entirely dismantle the old ROCOR.

Thus, they tried to retire or force out faithful clergy and people. This substitution is now all but complete. Implementing schism from the Russian Orthodox Church, it has now begun rebaptising other Orthodox, denigrating other Local Churches and telling public and private lies about them, for ‘ROCOR is the only True Church’. This OneTrueChurch Protestantisation has made the American Synod into a sect, which refuses to concelebrate with other Orthodox, except in rare cases where it has self-interest to do so, to try and show that it is not a sect.

Conclusion: Waiting for Repentance

We will continue to pray for them and wait for their repentance, in the hope that they will return to the legacy of the old ROCOR of St John of Shanghai. Their ancestors suspended him and put him on trial, but like the Righteous Job he was in the end justified and glorified by God. Perhaps once this nightmare of the Ukraine is over, there will be great changes and reforms in the Russian Church, based on decentralisation, that is, deSovietisation. A Church which is opposed to LGBT, but which is filled with homosexual bishops is only hypocritical.

Moreover, the Russian Church operates inside a society undermined by abortion and divorce and, as a result, suffers from a demographic crisis. This cannot go on. Perhaps when it has at last dealt with its own deep problems, the Russian Church can draw back the oppressed half of ROCOR which still wants to be part of the wider Orthodox Church and world, and not be part of a hate-filled sect, which condemns all others. Then they will say with other Orthodox ‘Our Father’ and mean it, participating positively in the construction of new Local Churches.

 

High Noon and the Judgement of ROCOR

In 1976 in Oxford I met Lord Michael Ramsey, the by then retired Archbishop of Canterbury (+ 1988). I was impressed by him and his sense of tradition. He had both presence and knowledge. Therefore, in conversation I asked him what he thought of the then situation of the Orthodox Church. He answered that he found the Orthodox world torn by politically-motivated tensions.

These tensions were between the extremes of liberalism and conservatism, provoking either old calendarist or else political schisms. This happened to be exactly my own view, which I had developed over the five years I had been in direct contact with the Orthodox Church at that time. What impressed me was that he, a Non-Orthodox outsider, had also understood this.

In fact, he was voicing my destiny, my ‘High Noon’, which has been to fight against those extremes. In the last century, this meant the struggle against secularism, modernism, liberalism and ecumenist syncretism and in this century the struggle against the opposite extremism of so-called ‘traditionalism’, phariseeism, judgementalism and sectarian fanaticism.

The latter is nothing but primitive pride: ‘Only I am right, everyone else is wrong, therefore I am not in communion with you’. The reason for opposing these extremes is that we are called on to love God and love our neighbour. For the first extreme does not love God but idolises man in all his sin (humanism), but the second extreme does not love man and has no sense of justice.

The voices of the prophets tell us that we must avoid idolatry, but seek righteousness in life. This twofold struggle against the left and the right had to be led by mercy and truth. This was the sense of my speech at the All-Diaspora Russian Church Council in San Francisco in 2006. Here, as one of the ten speakers, I said (http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/atcouncil.htm):

Orthodoxy without Warm-Heartedness becomes a mere rite, rite-belief, an outward show; Tradition without Humility becomes hypocrisy and phariseeism, for only living the God-inspired Tradition brings humility; Independence without Compassion becomes haughty pride, sectarian Donatism, the condemnation of our unfree brothers.

Sadly, such words were heeded for only a few years. Within ten years, with the beloved Metropolitan Hilarion of the Church Outside Russia starting to suffer from dementia, a clique formed from those from the past as well as newcomers who had not been at the Council, intent on ‘saving the Church’, pushed him aside and took over. It was the end – unless the swamp can be drained.

The latest scandal of their ‘disgraceful Synod’ is that of Sister Vassa, the daughter of my old friend, the late Fr George Larin, who was a typical old school ROCOR priest (altar boy of St John of Shanghai) who would have had nothing to do with the present Stalinist nonsense. I disagree with Sister Vassa, that is not the point. You do not use the canons to punish for having different opinions to yourself!

For only repentance can overcome the scandals that have taken hold of that invalid ghetto since and it is unrecognised by the Orthodox world. As for us and all our parishes, we remain unbowed, for we followed our conscience, keeping the spiritual purity and canonicity of Holy Orthodoxy in the fullness of the Church, as Metropolitan Lavr ordained for us, and so keeping our integrity.

It will not be long before Moscow dissolves the American Synod, known as ‘ROCOR’. It is an international embarrassment, not just that they are ill-educated, but they actually profess the heresy of rebaptising Orthodox. Moscow has had enough. Rumours from episcopal sources in Moscow indicate that it is going to absorb those in ROCOR who support it and suspend the others.

The others can start their own Russian Old Calendarist Outside Russia (ROCOR) sect. We warned Moscow that it had to drain the ROCOR swamp. For years they did not listen and now they have a scandal that is far worse than it was before. Too bad for them. Meanwhile we go on in the mainstream, with our 14 bishops of four nationalities with our Autonomous Romanian Church of Western Europe.

 

 

On the Narcissism of the Western Elite

Motivated by hatred and jealousy, narcissists detest it when empaths tell them that empaths do not need them, as we know from experience. This is what has happened between the narcissistic US elite and the rest of the world, which includes tens of millions of ordinary US citizens. Although the US elite began its war against Russia in Kiev in 2014 and has continued it until 2025, Trump has hypocritically pretended to be an intermediary in order to arrange a ‘ceasefire’. In reality, as he does not know what he thinks, he is still just as much controlled by the warlike neocons as was Biden and the Trump of 2017-2020. Nothing has changed. In reality, he has utterly failed to reach any agreement. No amount of bullying, bluster and delusional thinking is going to change reality.

He failed even in exploratory talks about a mere ceasefire with Russia and the Ukraine (originally, he had, amazingly, promised ‘peace’ within 24 hours and then within 100 days). And he also utterly failed to reach a peace agreement with Iran, in which Russia would have been a genuine intermediary, Now the US still supplies Israel which continues its unending wars against Gaza, the Lebanon, the West Bank and Syria. His warships are even hiding from the Yemenis. Trump has also failed with China and the whole world on tariffs. Here he thinks that he holds a gun to their heads – but they hold a cannon in his back. His tariffs are only taxes on poor Americans who pay the US government for cheap imported goods because the USA is so deindustrialised that it can no longer make them.

Nobody in the tightly controlled Western media has mentioned why Trump wants peace in the Ukraine – it is simply because the US elite has lost its war there and is now trying to save face. Trump is simply hiding his defeat. True, the war should have been over within a few weeks, but the West through Johnson forbade peace. This meant that Russia had to fight all NATO, which is why this war is in its fourth year. For in order to fight the whole of NATO, the Russian military first had to be reorganised, renationalised, corruption eliminated and then a huge programme of voluntary recruitment had to be implemented. Thus, the partial privatisation of the Army to the treacherous Wagner organisation, led by the corrupt oligarch Prigozhin, had to be reversed and all reorganised.

Thus, several corrupt generals and officers had to be sacked and put on trial. After such a purge of the corrupt, the whole of NATO, its poor quality arms and its thousands of troops fighting in Kiev uniforms, has been defeated. The Russian Army is today stronger and larger than all the puny NATO armies put together. It has come back from far. In 2014 it was weak, underequipped and led by naïve leaders, who thought that the West was trustworthy and honest. Thus, by its interference in Eastern Europe, the West has thrown Russia into the arms of China. And that Alliance includes Iran, North Korea, India and other countries. It is unshakeable and the more the West threatens and bullies, sanctions and tariffs all those countries, the more unshakeable the Alliance has become.

Now the West is isolated against the rest of the world, the billion against the seven billion. The Western elite is now engaged in wars against the world, not a single one of which it will or can win. Trump has failed every time because, as a narcissist filled with hubris, he hugely overestimated both his own abilities to make deals and also hugely overestimated the prestige and power of the greatly weakened US. His man-child narcissism only reflects that of the US elite. This has now reduced itself to being a Regional Power, isolated against the rest of the world. We see that the world no longer needs the US. Nowadays we can all trade and live without it and without the conflicts it has created with the rest of the world. Disaster looms for Trump the narcissist, as for all narcissists.

The Gospels are full of narcissists. Only there those self-lovers are called pharisees. Full of their own pride and imagined superiority to others and attributing great importance to their external appearance, they loved to sit in the important places and be flattered by others. However, they were whitened sepulchres decomposing and rotting on the inside. Here is the warning to all elites everywhere, not least that in Western Europe, whose worst export to the Far West, the USA, was its delusional belief in its own superiority. In reality, elites are tolerated by history only as long as they serve. Here today, gone tomorrow. For the indispensable and exceptional Nation, just like indispensable and exceptional Western Europe, is now also dispensable and unexceptional.

 

 

10 May 2025: A Historic Celebration in London

After 75 years of presence, the Romanian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and Northern Ireland has been formed into an Archdiocese with its own Archbishop Athanasius/Atanasie (Rusnak). Aged 43, he is a Russian-speaking Moldovan, as we had hoped we would have, by background an engineer. He is highly educated, having studied in France and the USA and speaks five languages fluently (not through Google translate!). Archbishop Atanasie was previously bishop in Italy and has now been transferred here, to our great delight.

Vladica lives at the monastery in Stanbridge near Luton, where we have been many times and spoken to Vladica, in front of the photographs of his, and our, beloved spiritual fathers, Metr Kallistos (Ware) (Eternal Memory!) and dear Fr Raphael (Noica). Vladica calls Fr Raphael his ‘spiritual grandfather’, which is most interesting, as he was my spiritual father. This is logical, because Vladica is exactly a generation younger than myself, but we have the same spiritual and theological heritage.

The Archdiocese is part of the expanding Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe, with its bishops in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Iceland and now Great Britain. In the last twenty years of intense immigration and missionary conversion of native people, it is now four million strong, and has many monasteries and convents. The Metropolia is led by the dynamic Metropolitan Joseph (Pop), who is respected internationally for his love of the monastic life, his knowledge, experience and pastoral wisdom. Its Synod of Bishops and network of parishes and monasteries is now the centre of hope for a future multinational Local Church of Western Europe.

On Saturday 10 May we celebrated the Divine Liturgy and Vladica’s Enthronement at our new St George’s Cathedral in Enfield in North London. Present were 14 bishops, Romanian, Moldovan and French, some 120 priests from the for now 90 Romanian parishes in this country and abroad. The Cathedral was packed, even though the Enthronement had to be by invitation only, as so many thousands wanted to come. The service was mainly in Romanian, but parts of it were celebrated and sung in English, as all realise that the use of English is essential in order to keep the children in the Church.

Present was Romanian Orthodox Trinitas TV, the Lord Chamberlain, representing King Charles, who so loves Romania and Romanian culture, as well as the Romanian ambassador, Dame Laura, whom we know very well. Old friends from the Serbian, Georgian, Antiochian and Greek Churches and from the canonical Russian Church under Bishop Matthew of Sourozh were present.  They all concelebrated, except for the latter because of the political dispute between the Russian Church with the Greek Church, one of whose bishops concelebrated, but he did take communion with us.

Fortunately, despite its dispute with the Greek Church, the canonical Russian Church is in full communion with the Romanian Church. The Sourozh group recognises the sacraments of other Orthodox, unlike the schismatic Russians, who tried to steal and close our church (when it remained open in faithfulness), actively slandered us and made death threats. Why other Russian Orthodox bishops tolerate such behaviour remains a mystery, though the schismatic and violent ‘Russian’ has had to be restrained by the canonical Russians.

The Romanian and Moldovan Diaspora in this country now numbers over one million and the Church is growing rapidly, with many ordinations of properly qualified and educated, seminary-trained young men to the clergy. More are now training at the largely Romanian-run Theological Institute in Cambridge, including three more candidates from our ever-expanding Colchester parish, as well as in the Romanian Institutes in Paris and Rome. Within a few years, there is no reason to think that the total number of parishes, each of which is already attended by hundreds every Sunday, will not grow to several hundred.

Just in the last few weeks, large churches have been bought in Southampton in southern England and in Dundee, in Scotland and consecrations are going ahead. The Church is young and energetic, as witnessed to by the vibrant Cathedral choir, there are many children, and the average age of clergy and people is about 35. Many, especially women, dressed in national costume for the celebration. Although in Colchester we do about 150 baptisms a year, another parish does 1,000 a year. After the celebration all the priests were awarded a pectoral cross and certificate/gramota in honour of the event.

Afterwards, 300 of us, including ‘the Colchester Diocese’, as we are known(!), attended the reception at a Romanian-owned hotel complex with large grounds, situated in Elstree. We had a very nice dinner at 4,00 pm and were able to talk to several bishops, including the new young Moldovan Bishop Benjamin, and learned many interesting and positive things, especially from Metropolitan Joseph, who is so kind to us.

Vladica related to us events at the consecration of the new Serbian bishop in Paris last year. (I studied at seminary in Paris with the former Bishop, the now departed Bishop Luka in the 1970s. Eternal Memory!). We were very touched by the words of Archbishop Atanasie who said to us: ‘Thank you for everything you do for us’. These words rang in our ears. It is clear that we will be able to continue to help the Romanian Church with liturgical texts in English, as we have already done over the last ten years, as well as with the many Ukrainians and Russians who come to us, refugees in search of a non-political Church.

Having set out at 5.00 on Saturday morning, we returned home at 10.00 in the evening, very tired, but very happy on this historic day. We now look forward to Vladica’s visit to us on All Saints Day, 15 June. The Church moves forward by leaps and bounds, in the mainstream of the Orthodox Life, as we look forward to the future, away from the petty nationalistic and ideological political disputes of others in the past.

 

Striving for Russian Church Unity: A Historical Note

For 47 years, from 1975 to 2022, I strived to help create unity inside the severely divided Russian Church, which then consisted of three aggressively warring ‘jurisdictions’. From 1975 to 2000 I fought against the Saducees with their ‘anything goes’, swim with the tide secularists, ‘all religions are the same’, ‘we all have the same god’ syncretism. From 2000 to 2022, I fought against the Pharisees, the scribes and the hypocrites, the old words for narcissists, who love only themselves are therefore Anti-Christians.

The division was purely political and went back to 1917. Only once we had achieved unity inside the Russian Church through the non-political, those of goodwill, in each group, could we hope to achieve unity with representatives of the other Local Churches in the Diaspora and so work towards a Local Western European Orthodox Church. To our great joy, we saw intra-Russian Church fully achieved in 2019.

However, the devil also has ears. Three years later, just like Constantinople with its control freak and isolating mentality decades earlier, the Russian Church then suicidally destroyed that unity through more nationalist politics. As a result, in 2022, all of us multinational clergy, parishes and people, some 5,000 in all, crossed, with the approval of Moscow (rather like Fr/St Sophrony (Sakharov) in 1965) to what will be the largest part of the future Local Church, the Romanian. The Russian Church in the Diaspora is now isolated and very small, as it has lost Ukrainians and now many Moldovans, not to mention local people.

In the last three years, the Moscow Church in Moldova has lost nearly half its parishes. According to updated information, Moscow now has 1,200 parishes and the Romanian Bessarabian Metropolia no longer has 200, but 1,100 parishes, with many monasteries. The movement from Moscow to Bucharest is in one direction only, at the rate of 4, 6 and even 10 parishes and mainly young people per week. As Metr Vladimir famously wrote in October 2023, Moscow treats Moldovans like second-class citizens, just as it treats other Non-Russians, including English people. See:

https://gordonua.com/news/worldnews/rossija-otnositsja-k-nam-kak-k-beskhrebetnomu-narodu-mitropolit-moldavskoj-pravoslavnoj-tserkvi-napisal-pismo-hlave-rpts-1685283.html

Although Metr Vladimir wonders about contacting Constantinople and asking it for autocephaly, that will not happen. Patriarch Bartholomew does not want to interfere in Moldova (he already made his huge mistake in the Ukraine) and get on the wrong side of Bucharest. He will be going here next October to take part in the consecration of the new Patriarchal Cathedral, the largest Orthodox church in the world. It is too late for Constantinople, just as it is too late for Moscow. Far more likely, given Moscow’s stubborn refusal 30 years ago to grant Moldova autonomy or autocephaly, is that the elderly Moscow jurisdiction in Moldova will disappear, except for the ultra-Russian nationalist Bishop Markel, and Bucharest will grant Moldova autonomy.

This will also mean the end of most of the Russian Diaspora in Western Europe, as it largely consists of Ukrainians and Moldovans, especially in Italy, Spain and Portugal. The nationalist attitude of Moscow is suicidal. God gave Moscow so much, the largest country in the world, and yet it destroyed it twice, in 1917 and then again very recently. The  Soviet-style ideology of nationalism has destroyed a once multinational Church.

 

 

Fascism – the Default Ideology of the Western European Ruling Class

What was Charlemagne’s massacre (the EU Fascist elite call Charlemagne ‘the Father of Europe’ and award prizes in his name) of 4,500 Saxons at Verden in the Year 782, if not Fascism? (1)

What was the Feudal system and its castles (1000-1500) imposed by the Collective Western elite on the Western peoples, as it revived two centuries after the death of Charlemagne in 814, their first victims, if not Fascism?

What were the eleventh-century Norman Crusades in Sicily, the Reconquista in Iberia, and the Papally-sponsored invasion of and massacres in England by the Collective North-West of Europe in 1066 and then nine centuries of land theft from the people, called the ‘Enclosures’, if not Fascism?

What were the six centuries of massacres of Jews, Orthodox Christians and Muslims by the Collective West, known as the Crusades (1095-1717), if not Fascism? (2)

What were the massacres by the Collective West’s Northern Crusades (1147-1410), if not Fascism?

What were the Papal con trick of Purgatory, its Inquisitions and tortures, if not Fascism?

What were the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistador massacres of the native civilisations and peoples in what are now called South and Central America and the Caribbean, if not Fascism?

What was the African slave trade, if not Fascism?

What were the massacres of the European Wars of ‘Religion’ from the 16th to the 18th centuries, if not Fascism?

What were the Polish-Lithuanian invasions of Russia and the massacres of its people (1609-1618), if not Fascism? (3)

What was the Swedish invasion of Russia (1708-09), if not Fascism? (4)

What were the ruthless exploitation and exhaustion to death of hundreds of millions of industrial workers throughout the Capitalist world from about 1700 on, if not Fascism?

What were the ‘Highland Clearances’ of 1750 to 1860 in Scotland, when native people had their lives and property stolen, if not Fascism?

What was the French-led invasion by twelve Western peoples of Russia in 1812, if not Fascism?

What were the British genocides and artificial famines in the Indian subcontinent between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, if not Fascism?

What was the British genocide of the Chinese through opium in the nineteenth century, if not Fascism?

What was the British refusal to help the Irish by giving them food to eat in the Potato Famine and allowing a million of them to die, if not Fascism?

What was the unprovoked Franco-British-Turkish invasion of Russia between 1853 and 1856, called by Archbishop Sibour of Paris a ‘Crusade’, if not Fascism? (5)

What were the massacres of Native Americans and their confinement to concentration camp ‘reserves’, if not Fascism?

What was the genocide which wiped out the native people of Tasmania, if not Fascism?

What were the British massacres of Afghans in three wars against Afghanistan, of Africans in the Sudan and of Zulus in massacres and Boers in concentration camps from 1860 on, if not Fascism?

What were the Dutch massacres of natives in Indonesia, if not Fascism?

What were the Austro-Hungarian persecutions of Slavs, if not Fascism?

What were the massacres (‘pogroms’) of Jews, carried out by Catholic Germans, Austrians, Lithuanians and Galician Ukrainians, some 125 years ago, if not Fascism?

What was the massacre of millions of native Africans in the Congo some 125 years ago by Belgium, if not Fascism?

What was the German massacre of the native peoples of Namibia some 125 years ago, if not Fascism?

What were the British invasion of and massacres in Tibet in 1903-4, if not Fascism?

What were the racist German invasions of Russia in 1914 and in 1941, with the massacre of some 19 million mainly Russian civilians, if not Fascism?

What were the Italian colonial massacres in Ethiopia in the 1930s, if not Fascism?

What were the French colonial massacres in Indo-China and of two million Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, if not Fascism?

What were the British colonial massacres of native peoples in Malaysia, Cyprus and Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s, if not Fascism?

What were the American massacres of Koreans and two million Vietnamese in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, if not Fascism?

What was the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, called a ‘Crusade’ by the US President, if not Fascism?

The European elites were responsible for the two World Wars, which were in fact European Wars that were made into World Wars. Europeans did this by spreading them and tricking the USA into taking part, flattering it into abandoning its Republic and becoming an Empire. It was the elites of the same three countries, Germany, Britain and France, which were responsible for these European World Wars.

Now they want to create a Third European/World War by expanding the war of the Collective West against Russia in the Ukraine, killing the Ukrainians ‘to the last Ukrainian’, as they openly and shamelessly boast. After all, the Ukrainians are only subhuman Slavs, as the spiritual grandfathers of these Europeans, Charlemagne and Adolf Hitler, declared.

The war of hereditary oligarchic Eurofascist Globalists, clustered around banking elites, against the Nationalists of Washington, Moscow and Beijing is in full swing. The unelected Eurofascist Commissars of the Brussels Politburo are opposed to any restoration of sovereignty to the countries they rule – as we can see with the case of unrealised and reversing Brexit – for that would be to end their power, which exists through enforced dependence on them.

Now the Eurofascists even want to bomb the international Parade celebrating our Victory over Fascism in Moscow on 9 May. What further proof is needed to show that they are Fascists?

References:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Verden
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Russian_War_(1609%E2%80%931618)

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_invasion_of_Russia
  2. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Dominique_Auguste_Sibour

 

 

 

Translation of an Interview with the Russian Chrisma Church Website

Bright Tuesday 22 April 2025

https://t.me/s/chrisma_center

 Part One: The Orthodox World and Inter-Orthodox Relations

How would you characterise the situation of the Orthodox world and of inter-Orthodox relations today? What are the main forces and factors influencing this situation?

In the fifty years that I have been a conscious Orthodox, I have never known such a situation. The Schism, indeed multiple schisms, between Local Orthodox Churches today are unprecedented. This is a crisis.

As you know this crisis began with the action of the Patriarch of Constantinople, whose Patriarchate  received $20 million from the CIA to set up a fake nationalist Church in Kiev, composed of gangsters and murderers. (In reality he only got $15 million, as $5 million ‘disappeared’ in Kiev. Someone has to pay for the villas and the Bentleys….).

The West has used either naïve or else mercenary Ukrainians, exploiting their sense of entitlement, for its purpose, which is to destroy Russia, so it can then plunder its resources, which it has valued at nearly $100 trillion. (The Ukraine itself is irrelevant to these Western war criminals). Setting up a fake Church and using Nazis in the Ukraine were merely parts of the Western operation to weaken, destroy and then dismember Russia. It convinced nobody and failed utterly.

We see then a new ‘Cold War’, though that expression was always absurd. Both the first Cold War and this Second Cold War have been hot wars, which have left millions dead. After its rout in Vietnam, the US decided that Americans should no longer die to expand their Empire, that others should die for it, Afghans in Afghanistan, Iraqis in Iraq, Ukrainians in the Ukraine, ‘until the last Ukrainian’, as the West proclaims.

However, I remind you that the word ‘crisis’ means in Greek ‘judgement’. And this war is the Judgement of God on all concerned, on Orthodox and Non-Orthodox alike, not least the Judgement of God on Ukrainians and Russians. This is the Judgement of those who bear the Orthodox Christian Spirit, dukhonostsy, and those who fight against the Orthodox Christian Spirit, dukhobortsy. Which side are we on? That is what we must ask ourselves.

What are the fundamental positive and negative tendencies in the Orthodox world and in inter-Orthodox relations?

A Schism means that there is no communion between two parts. Negative tendencies are among those who create schisms. Thus, the only positive tendencies are among those who are trying to restore communion, despite the nationalist politicians, money-lovers and ‘Orthodox’ chauvinists, who caused these schisms. And I remind you that there are multiple schisms, although that may not be clear to all in Moscow.

Once Constantinople started in the Ukraine and Moscow broke off communion with it, other Greek chauvinists in Alexandria, Greece and Cyprus, who put their Hellenism above Christ, followed. Then Moscow moved into Alexandria’s canonical territory in Africa, apparently in revenge. There followed another schism and the Non-Greek and Non-Russian Local Churches began to lose sympathy for Moscow, which they began to see as no better than the Greeks, for it too had begun to operate on someone else’s canonical territory.

Then Moscow, through its Soviet centralisation, lost the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which now has over 100 of its own churches in Western Europe, outside the jurisdiction of Moscow. In Moldova there are now also over 200 parishes which have transferred from the Moscow Church there to the Romanian Church. Not a single one is going the other way and others are leaving Moscow every month. Will Moldova declare that it is autocephalous and set up its own jurisdiction in Western Europe, taking its many clergy and parishes there from Moscow? What exactly is this self-destructive streak in the Russian Church, which centralises and then attacks those who object to centralisation in search of freedom and the right to use their own language?

Then Orthodox in Latvia broke away from Moscow with a self-declared autocephaly, Estonia may follow, some in Lithuania have already left. And many liberal clergy and parishes in Western Europe and several liberal pastors inside Russia, like Fr Alexei Uminsky, have left Moscow because of what they see as Patriarchal support for the conflict in the Ukraine. His case sparked a huge scandal and reached the mainstream Western media. How, they asked, did the Persecuted Church of Russia become the Persecuting Church?

Fr Alexei has been well-known for years as a liberal, a charming but very naïve man, in the style of the former Bishop Basil (Osborne). We may not agree with liberals and their anti-patriotic streak, but he was an excellent pastor, sincere and kind, and he received the support of well over 14,000 Orthodox, who were opposed to his defrocking. And yet he was defrocked. Which is the canon that states that a good and loving priest can be defrocked because his political opinions differ from those of his bishop? Then Fr Alexis’ place was taken by an aggressive and militant maximalist, of whom it is asked: Where is the love in his words? Why do Church authorities persecute good pastors? We have received no answer to this question.

However, it is not only the pro-Western liberals who have opposed Moscow, the very conservative bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) have also publicly called on Russia to withdraw its troops from the Ukraine. And yet they have not been defrocked, even though on top of this they fell into schism from Moscow’s Western European Archdiocese and into the heresy of rebaptism, persecuting those who uphold Moscow’s viewpoint.

We are reminded that the CIA has great influence and also recruits in ROCOR and that eighty-three years ago ROCOR bishops supported Hitler and his Russian Fascist Vlasovtsy troops. Moscow appears to have no objection to this anti-Russian position of the highly Americanised ROCOR, which seems to have completely forgotten its Russian and Orthodox origins, despite its name. But inside Russia, it is different….

The falling away of the same New York-run ROCOR into the heresy of rebaptism, rebaptising Orthodox who want to go to its churches, despite the Creed which proclaims that ‘I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins’, and this, apparently, with the full support of Moscow, is serious. Yet ROCOR has since 2017 increasingly become just another American convert sect with cult followers, like other old calendarist sects. It has no knowledge of the real European Orthodoxy and it has become a type of Uniatism, a closely imitated Orthodox rite, but without the inward Orthodox and Christian spirit.

In all this I am reminded of a story from the life of President Putin. At the end of 1989 he was stationed in Dresden in East Germany and that country was breaking up around him. So they phoned Moscow: ‘What shall we do? What must we say?’. And there was no answer. ‘Moscow is silent’. Those words really marked him. But today Moscow is still silent, though this time Moscow means the Moscow Patriarchate, the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow is in denial.

Since the refusal of Moscow to deal with the unresolved ROCOR schism and then heresy (unresolved schisms always turn into heresies, look at the Roman Catholics), over thirty churches, 10% of the whole, have already left ROCOR for the Patriarchates of Constantinople or Bucharest. The former has set up a whole vicariate for them in the USA and a whole group with several churches and 15 clergy left for Bucharest in England. The fact is that the Russian Church is beginning to collapse outside the borders of the Russian Federation and Belarus. Why? Because it appears to have no adherence to the catholicity and canonicity of the Church. Moscow is silent.

Here is the fruit of Moscow’s breaking of communion. The Moscow jurisdiction is itself breaking apart. Unity is the most important thing in Church life, but it can only exist where there is love. Now chauvinism is hatred. Little wonder that in view of all this, heterodox, and not only Roman Catholics, say that the Orthodox Church no longer exists, it is broken into warring pieces, it has no catholicity. Moscow is silent.

Do you think that practical unity between the Local Orthodox Churches can be restored? What must happen for this unity to reappear? Could there be some kind of Amman format meeting?

Of course, the restoration of unity is possible, everything is possible. But it will need repentance. You may say that Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is too proud to repent, as he started it all. But there are two groups in Constantinople, that around the present Patriarch and the other, who quite openly declare that their Patriarch is mistaken. I think one of these will be the next Patriarch. The present one is very old and it is clear to all that he blundered in the Ukraine under financial pressure from the Americans, then governed by Trump who gave the Ukrainians military training and weapons, but who has now changed his tune in view of the Russian victory over the US-run NATO in its proxy war in the Ukraine.

However, there is also the schism between Moscow and Alexandria. There must be a solution here too. Moscow lost so much sympathy in the Orthodox world by entering into Africa, Alexandria’s canonical territory.

I think that after the Special Military Operation (SMO) is over in the Ukraine, there must be a Council of all 16 Autocephalous Local Churches. It is the Catholicity of the Church that has been under threat, ever since both Constantinople and Moscow insisted on centralisation. Both want unity, but Orthodox, unlike Roman Catholics, want unity in diversity, on the model of the Holy Trinity. And the word for Council is basically the same as the word for Catholicity in Slav languages. Constantinople and Moscow should not impose some Roman Catholic type of unity, that is, centralisation and rejection of Non-Greeks and Non-Russians.

Which hierarchs, theologians and others are working for the destruction of or, conversely, for the building up of Orthodox unity?

All who work in the Name of Power, Money and Outward Splendour, instead of in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, work for the destruction of Orthodox unity. The latter are the prophetic voices, those of Patriarch Porphyry of Serbia, of the Patriarchs Daniel of Bucharest and Sofia, of the late Archbishop Anastasy of Albania, and of all the others, in Poland, Georgia and Jerusalem. But all are waiting for peace in the Ukraine first. Nothing can be done until then, when a host of decisions will be taken, after the present paralysis is over.

  1. The Russian Orthodox Church. The Ukrainian Question.

What successes do you think that the Russian Orthodox Church has in external affairs, Church diplomacy, its foreign missions etc?

Here there are no successes, only catastrophic failures. Even its embraces with the Pope of Rome discredit the Russian Church. Why do you want to embrace the leader of a Church of so many homosexual and pedophile clergy, whom ordinary Catholics cannot stand? Orthodox and Catholics begin to think that the Orthodox who embrace Catholic clergy must themselves be homosexuals and pedophiles. Birds of a feather flock together, as they say.

One very young, very inexperienced, very racist and very arrogant Moscow Metropolitan said a few years ago, when he learned that masses of Non-Russians were leaving Moscow: ‘Too bad for them’. He did not see that in fact it is too bad for the Moscow Patriarchate, which is the loser, and so much the better for those who leave it. In such a situation, the Russian Orthodox Church should be renamed ‘The Russian Nationalist Church’. Perhaps he would agree to that? Catastrophic failures, indeed.

Only 20 years ago, the Orthodox world was praising the Russian Church, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, the bastion and hope of Orthodoxy. In 2003, His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II, whom I knew, wanted to found a Local Western European Orthodox Church. And now all is lost! Moscow is losing its Diaspora, of which at least half, if not three-quarters, is made up of Ukrainians and Moldovans, whom Moscow has continually treated as second-class citizens. Last year Metr Vladimir of Moldova himself wrote publicly about this ill treatment to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill. We, who are at the grassroots, have seen concrete examples of this racism and hatred towards Non-Russians every week over the last fifty years. Non-Russians have gradually been chased out of the Russian Nationalist Church.

As a result, the numbers attending Russian chapels and communities in this country, outside the Cathedral in London., are of the order of 10, 20 or 30 people. The numbers are tiny. Conversely, Greek and Romanian churches get hundreds, up to a thousand every Sunday. The Russian Church is dying out. For example, in our Romanian parish we have to give communion from three or four chalices every Sunday to those who have had confession.

I was brought up in the old Russian emigration. Metr Antony of Sourozh, who tonsured me reader in 1981, the St Seraphim-like Archbishop George (Tarasov) in Paris, who had been a pilot on the Western Front in the First World War, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor of St John of Shanghai, and who ordained me priest nearly 35 years ago, and above all the greatest Russian emigre of them all, Vladyka John of Shanghai, the saint, born in what is now the Ukraine, would be horrified by what is happening now. I spent my life working for the unity of the Russian Church; now the young and inexperienced, younger than our children, have been allowed to destroy that unity. Why? Who are these Young Turks who create schisms, sects and heresies?

What would you say are the strengths and the weaknesses of the Russian Church as regards its external activities and in inter-Orthodox relations?

I can see no strengths at all, as it has quite isolated itself from the Orthodox mainstream and at present shows no humility or desire to return to the mainstream.

The weaknesses of the Russian Church are eight in number, as follows:

Centralisation, militarisation, nationalisation, bureaucratisation, oligarchisation of the episcopate (corruption). From here you have a great many cases of careerism, ecumenism, episcopal homosexualisation.

It is all politics instead of pastors, protocols instead of the Gospel of Christ, chauvinist hatred instead of Love. Ask any Ukrainian from Kiev. Ask any Moldovan. Ask any Orthodox in Western Europe.

What could reinforce the positions and authority of the Russian Church?

The restoration, not reinforcement (it is too late for that), of the authority and positions of the Russian Church can only come through repentance and missionary work. The latter can only be successful if it accepts Non-Russians as they are. Otherwise, the Russian Church will die out here, just as the first and second waves of the Russian emigration died out here. You cannot Russify what is not Russian, though you can make it Orthodox. To do missionary work means to decentralise and grant autocephaly to the missions, once they are large enough to stand on their own two feet.

To my mind, the Church of the Ukraine (that is, the Church inside the new borders of the new Ukrainian State, whatever they will be and whatever it will be called) should receive autocephaly, as should Orthodox in Moldova and in the four Baltic States of Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Lithuania. These three should at once receive autocephaly. Otherwise, the Orthodox in those countries will go on splitting into different groups in disunity. It is still not too late to recover Church unity in the Ukraine, Moldova and Estonia in particular. Moscow centralisation only kills unity, as we can see everywhere in the Diaspora.

I have to mention here that the quality of the Russian bishops sent from Russia to Western Europe has been disastrous, apart from the one exception of Metr Nestor, who is excellent. There has been one scandal after another, though I will not go into details here. You cannot hide or censor scandals in the open, internet societies of Western Europe. For example, in London there lives Maxim, the ex-bishop who was defrocked for running a drugs factory with his boyfriend in Saint Petersburg. He was already notorious for his depravity when he was a priest in London, so they sent him back to Russia, where they made him a bishop, along with the two Ignatys! It is all so sad.

And in ROCOR it is no better, we have seen them all pass by here, one an anthroposophist, another a fanatic, one an alcoholic, another a homosexual parading with his boyfriend and his narcissistic and vindictive rages and alcohol, another CIA…God save us all!

How is the Russian Church perceived in the Western world today?

After all the above and then after the Budapest scandal, how do you think the Russian Church is perceived? It has totally discredited itself and is seen as hypocritical. How can the Russian Church be against the LGBT brigade, when it has so many homosexuals? If a priest were homosexual, he would be defrocked, but not a bishop. Strange. It is so sad, when 15-20 years ago the Russian Church was riding high on zeal for the New Martyrs and Confessors, and everything was still possible.

What for you would be the best outcome of the Ukrainian Church problem?

Let us be frank. The Soviet Ukraine, exactly like ‘Europe’ or the UK, is an artificial construct, created for purely ideological reasons. The Ukraine must be broken down into its component parts. It was constructed by three atheist dictators, Lenin who in 1922 gave Novorossija to the Ukraine from Russia, Stalin who between 1939 and 1945 grabbed land from Poland, Hungary and Romania, and then Khrushchov, who in 1954 gave Russian Crimea away to Kiev. It is strange to see how the West, supposedly the advocate of self-determination, freedom and democracy (!), so ardently supports the oppression and injustices of these three Communist dictators! Kiev oppresses all its minorities, some 40% or more of the population, and the West supports that oppression. But then the West is just as atheistic as the Communist dictators, so I suppose it is normal. Atheists everywhere have the same values, whether Communists or Capitalists. They are all oligarchs.

It seems to me that North Bukovina (Chernivtsy) should be returned to Romania, so-called ‘Zakarpat’e’ (Subcarpathian Rus) to Hungary and the two and a half Greek Catholic provinces next to the Polish border (‘U-krajina’) of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and the western half of Ternopol should be returned to Poland (or else they should become an independent Galician State and be closed off by barbed wire from the Orthodox world). Novorossija should be returned to Russia, leaving the ten and a half provinces of Kiyivska Rus, Kievan Rus, to be independent and sovereign. All that would have to be confirmed by self-determination, by referenda, after the full liberation of the Ukraine from the Neo-Nazi Banderists in Kiev and Galicia. Then the canonical Church in the new Kievan Rus State should be given autocephaly by Moscow. Will any of this actually happen? God will decide.

What could change in the Orthodox world after the end of the SMO in the Ukraine?

I think Patriarch Bartholomew will retire or ‘be retired’. There are plenty of anti-Ukrainian Greek bishop-candidates ready to take his place and Trump and Vance would support one of them. Just as Biden supported Patriarch Bartholomew.

More generally, there would have to be an Inter-Orthodox Council, a free one, held in humility, unlike the absurd meeting in Crete nine years ago.

It is a strange thing that the greatest economic and political event in the world in the last sixteen years was the Russian foundation of BRICS in Ekaterinburg in 2009. BRICS is an Alliance of Sovereign Nations, based on the profoundly Orthodox principle of Unity in Diversity, the principle of the Holy Trinity. It is strange that secular countries can follow that principle and hold summits every year, but not the Church, which seems to want Roman Catholic style or Soviet-style centralisation, instead of Councils and Conciliarity/Catholicity.

President Putin has on numerous occasions remarked that: ‘He who is not nostalgic for the USSR has no heart, but he who wants it back has no brain’. It seems to me that there are some in the Russian Church who have not yet heard his words.

Do you have refugees from the Ukraine among your parishioners?  What churches do they attend? How do they see the conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Churches? Are there any difficulties with them?

Of course, we have many refugees, who come from the canonical Church of Vladyka Onufry. They attend any churches except for Russian churches. In London they have their own Ukrainian parishes. Russians must understand that the vast majority of Ukrainians will now never attend churches where His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill is commemorated. The Russian Church has lost the Ukraine for ever. We have no conflicts with any Ukrainians, because we accept them as we accept all Orthodox nationalities, including canonical Ukrainians who have been here for many years.

Does the British government support these refugees?

Of course, as do all Western governments. However, that support is political, not humanitarian. One day Western governments will drop them. All that Western governments are interested in is people who are anti-Russian. It is all very hypocritical, they do not care for Ukrainians as such.

  1. Orthodoxy in Great Britain

What is the situation of the Orthodox community in Great Britain? Is it growing? Or is the Orthodox presence the same as before?

There has been massive growth here over the last 15 years. This growth has been by immigration, specifically that of Romanians and Moldovans. Until then, there had been about 300,000 Orthodox here, with 200,000 Cypriots, and some 100,000 Serbs, Russians (mainly from the Baltics), Bulgarians, non-canonical Ukrainians and others. Then, over the last fifteen years, there arrived 1.1 million Romanians and Moldovans, meaning that today 1.4 million, 2% of the UK population, are Orthodox, I in 50, the vast majority Romanian-speaking.

Which Orthodox Churches are the most active and authoritative in Great Britain today?

Without doubt the Greeks and the Romanians. The Greeks now have several bishops, I think, six, and only on Lazarus Saturday they baptised 200 adults, nearly all Non-Greeks, in a mass baptism. They own many churches, though they suffer from the problem of elderly clergy, the result of 30 years of paralysis before their new Archbishop arrived here in 2019.

The Romanians are continually opening or buying new churches and dozens of seminary-qualified men are being ordained priests. I cannot remember when a Russian man was last ordained priest. It must be at least 10 years ago. As a result, the Russian Church is dying out. Other Orthodox, like the Serbs, Bulgarians and Georgians, also live in very small national ghettoes and do not produce their own clergy. As for the very small Antiochian group, virtually without Arab immigrants, they are intent on recruiting minute numbers of Anglicans Evangelicals, which is all rather strange and, just like the very small ROCOR, including their bishop, their clergy are not trained in Orthodox seminaries, but are untrained and the priests are part-time. That level of ignorance creates many problems. Thus, the Antiochians here are proud to give Copts and Ethiopians communion.

What is the attitude of the British government to Orthodox? Does it favour one jurisdiction over another? Is any support given? Are there political pressures on Orthodox clergy?

The British government remains, as always, completely indifferent to all. The government is atheist. There is no support at all for Orthodox, but no political pressure or persecution either. It is a free market.

Do native English, Scottish etc people join the Orthodox Church? If so, what attracts them?

Over the last 75 years some thousands of native people have joined the Church. I am one of them, 50 years ago. The late Metr Antony of Sourozh was one of those who played a role in this movement, though he seems to have converted almost only from the upper class. But a few thousand is a very small number over 75 years and many have passed away in that time. What attracts them? Spirituality, definitely not politics or nationalism. Nationalist parishes never have any converts. The heterodox world is unspiritual and woke. Who is attracted to that? Spiritual emptiness does not attract, just as a desert does not attract. The Faith of authentic Orthodoxy attracts, but not flag-waving nationalism, meaningless ritualism or corruption. Some Orthodox will die out, others will survive and expand. It all depends on spiritual content, or lack of it.

How do Orthodox perceive the immigration of Africans and Asians. Are there conflicts with them, with Muslims for example? Are they frightened for their future?

Forgive me, but this is a very strange question! You live in Russia, where there are two to three times more Muslims than here! Here most Orthodox are immigrants themselves, why should they have problems with other immigrants? The second language in England is Romanian, the third is Polish. I find Muslims especially respectful. One of them told me that only Orthodox are real Christians. They have little time for the others. We have baptised three former Muslims into our congregation, two Turks and one Iranian. One of our Ukrainian parishioners, who has been here for over 15 years, is a builder and helps build mosques for them. What a pity that Orthodox do not build churches! There are certainly no conflicts with such immigrants. We are not racists! Why should we be frightened of them? I do not understand your question.