Monthly Archives: June 2014

A Miracle in Austria

28 June 2014 marked the centenary of the tragic assassination, planned by freemasons, of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his spouse Sophia, Duchess of Hohenberg. This was the spark that lit the powderkeg of Europe and so led to the First World War. Carefully planned by international freemasonry and carried out by a manipulated young Bosnian student, the assassination successfully destroyed the old Europe for ever and led to the fall of Christian monarchies. Although warned not to visit Sarajevo by the Russian Imperial government, with whom the Archduke had been on excellent terms since his most cordial visits to St Petersburg in 1891 and 1907, he still went ahead with the visit.

The Archduke had become the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne on 19 May 1896, the feast of St Job and the birthday of the future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II. In 1900 the pious Archduke married his future spouse Sophia for love and was totally devoted to her. In 1906 he put forward a plan to take power from over-powerful Hungarian aristocrats who so oppressed the Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and set about granting autonomy to over 12 different nationalities. Only such decentralization could ensure the survival of the Empire. He resisted pressures from the Hungarian elite and wanted to ensure peace with Russia and so Serbia, knowing that powerful French and Hungarian freemasons did not want that, but instead sought an Austro-Russian war. Hence their well-planned assassination in Sarajevo.

After the War the Hohenberg family was able to keep only the castle of Artstetten (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artstetten_Castle). During the Second World War, as convinced monarchists and therefore anti-Nazis, descendants of the family were imprisoned in Dachau, where they helped Jews and gypsies. This year, from 9 to 11 May 2014 the great-grandchildren of the Archduke invited to Austria an advisor of Metropolitan Hilarion of the Church Outside Russia, together with the Myrrh-Giving icon of Tsar Nicholas II from Moscow. It was here that a miracle took place. On 10 May at the castle of Artstetten in Lower Austria, towering with its onion domes over the Danube, before members of the family and the tomb of the Archduke, the akathist was read before the icon.

It was at this moment that ‘the background of the icon changed and the halo around the Tsar-Martyr’s head gave out rays of golden light; in turn his clothing shone and his face seemed as if it were alive, his mouth seemed to open and his lips moved as if he were speaking. His hand made the sign of the cross in blessing and a strong fragrance was given off; it seemed as though his figure was about to move forward from the background’. (Written by Princess Rosalia von Hohenberg). A deep impression was left on all present.

An Orthodox Future for Finland?

Foreword

Nearly 100 years since the aggressive Western attempt to take over the last bastion of Christendom in Russia in 1917, there are reasons for pessimism and for optimism. On the one hand, in the south, the West has taken over the Patriarchate of Constantinople and made it into a hub of Diaspora aggression against the fullness of Orthodoxy. It has tried to subvert the other ancient Patriarchates, the Churches of Greece, Cyprus, Albania and now the US and the EU are trying to subvert the Churches of Georgia, Romania, Serbia and even Russia.

On the other hand, we have witnessed the miraculous Resurrection of the multinational Russian Church, 75% of the whole Orthodox world and the champion of all who follow the Orthodox Tradition. Savaged by base attacks from nationalism, liberalism and foreign-controlled Constantinople in France, the USA, Estonia, the Ukraine and England, she has not only survived but is responding to her calling to preach the Gospel and consequent unique Church Christianity worldwide, speaking the ‘Russian Word’ to the world at large.

The fault-line between two spiritual tectonic plates, those of atheist/secularist Europe and Christian Eurasia, has never been absolutely clear. This we have seen in recent years in what is now called Bosnia-Herzegovina and the western Ukraine, where aggressive Westernization is still trying to conquer the Orthodox borderlands. However, in the north, along the Russo-Finnish frontier, it is clear. On the eastern side are the remains of Orthodox Christianity; on the western side is standard Western atheist secularism and the few oases of Orthodoxy.

Introduction

The fact is that the first millennium of the history of Europe is by and large the history of its depaganization or Christianization. However, the second millennium of the history of Europe is by and large the history of its repaganization or deChristianization. This de-Christianization or loss of integral faith has been expressed by humanism, that is, the worship of fallen and sinful humanity, a history which is now being definitively completed by the through-going paganism and worship of sin in this opening third millennium.

Another fact about Europe is that the international names of several of its countries are not the names given to them by their native peoples. For example, as regards France and Bulgaria, they are known by names of very small groups of invaders, for the French are really Gauls, not Franks, and the Bulgarians are really Slavs, not Bulgarians (a Turkish tribe). Also, Germany is in fact Deutschland, Hungary is Magyarország, Greece is Ellatha and Romania is a recent, German-invented name for Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania.

Yet other European countries are known by the Germanic word ‘land’ and yet they are not inhabited by Germanic peoples. Thus, the Gaelic peoples of Ireland and Scotland do not use the word ‘land’ for the native names of their countries. Similarly, Lettland (Latvia), Estland (Estonia) and, especially, Finland are not Germanic ‘lands’. In the case of Finland, the name for the country is ‘Suomi’, probably related to the word for land, similar to the Slavic ‘zemlya’, which is completely different from its foreign, but international name. Why?

The West

The reason for this strange name of ‘Finland’ is due to the country’s position between East and West. Finland was in fact only a small area in the extreme south-west of present-day Finland, conquered by the Swedes who gave the name to the whole country and then conveyed this Swedish name to the Western world. By that time Sweden had renounced its early 11th century heritage of St Olaf and St Anne of Novgorod, in the late 11th century abandoning that Orthodoxy of its youth to join the new Roman Catholicism.

This meant that Finland never encountered the still at heart Orthodox first millennium Christianity of the West, but only that of the second millennium. For by then there had developed a deviant form of Christianity in the West which had broken away from the Church and Church Christianity remained dominant only in the then majority East. And here it was developing apace, above all in the Balkans and in the Russian world, a world that included Slavic and Finnish tribes alike. A coming clash was inevitable.

In the 12th and 13th centuries the now Roman Catholic Sweden began to launch its own imperialistic crusades and the Swedish Establishment imposed a ‘patron saint of Finland’, the English papist Henry of Uppsala (+ 1156). Thus, as elsewhere in Western Europe, the local aristocrats introduced feudalism and the Finnish peasants were exploited. In the 16th century, following the latest Germanic fashion, Sweden adopted Lutheranism and began lutheranizing the Finns and set to massacring the Orthodox in eastern Finland or Karelia.

Notably, on Christmas Day 1590 they martyred St Jonah and 115 other monks and laymen at Pechenga. The 17th century was a period of more Protestant fanaticism and Sweden, then a great force, expanded both south and east. In Karelia the Swedish forces destroyed and burned to the ground the monasteries of Valaam and Konevsky. The monks that did not flee were martyred and many peasants met the same fate. The Swedes took over Karelia, Ingermanland, Estonia and Latvia, refusing to allow the people to practise Orthodoxy.

After this came the neo-pagan ‘Enlightenment’ and atheistic French influence which the Swedish aristocrats now in turn forced onto the Finns. Although after 1809 the Swedes lost their influence to Russia for over a century, such was the hold of Lutheranism that Finland still left the Russian Orthodox world after 1917. Over the last century it has gradually adopted typical, post-Protestant, Scandinavian modernism and secularism, the world of plastic, steel and glass, for the most part losing its wood-solid traditions and old pieties.

The East

Unlike in the West where the authentic and unsecularized Orthodox Christian Tradition had been disrupted and interrupted, in the East it continued. Orthodox Christianity had started to spread to Finland at latest at the beginning of the 12th century. Some of the earliest excavated crosses in Finland, dating from the 12th century onwards, are similar to a type found in Novgorod and Kiev. It seems certain that Orthodox parishes were established as far west as Tavastia in central southern Finland.

The main missionary work fell to the monasteries in the wilderness of Karelia. Two monasteries were founded on islands in Lake Ladoga which centuries later became famous: these are Valaam and Konevsky. The Karelian and Finnish forests were also inhabited by spiritually advanced hermits. Often around the hermit’s hut or skete there settled other ascetics and so a new monastery was founded. Notably, in the far north, St Tryphon of Pechenga (+ 1583) became the Enlightener of the Lapps (the Sami).

Another important example of this process was the Karelian St Alexander of Svir (1449–1533), who struggled in the ascetic life for 13 years at Valaam and then founded another monastery on the River Svir. However, after such spiritual figures there came Lutheran persecution of the Church. It was only in 1809 that a newly powerful Russia took over the whole of Finland from Sweden. However, although some beautiful Orthodox churches were built, these were mainly for Russian soldiers and merchants; missionary work was weak.

Thus, the Church became identified in the minds of many Finns with the imperialism of Westernized Russian aristocrats and bureaucrats. When Finland became independent of Russia after 1917, the 24 Orthodox parishes in Finland were taken under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the Lutheran calendar was adopted and decadence began, associated with freemasonry, modernism and unmentionable practices. In the 1940s Russia was further discredited as a result of the wars between Finland and the atheist Soviet Union.

And so for political reasons the parishes in Finland, and later a small monastery and a convent, came to have a life independent of their roots in the Russian Mother-Church. Finnish became the norm – clearly a good thing for missionary work in Finland. However, from the very start under the foreign-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople, modernism set in, which increasingly took over the liturgical life of the churches. Many wondered if the salt had lost its savour under pressure from renovationism and ‘finlandization’.

Conclusion

The last two centuries of Finnish-Russian relations have produced the predictable Russophobic reactions. The ugly nationalism of unChurched Russians who yet claimed to be Orthodox has created by reaction a local nationalism. The same process as in Finland has also been visible in diasporas in France, the US and elsewhere, where most still do not understand that in the Church the word ‘Russian’ means multinational and multilingual. Today in Finland there are 140 priests and some 58,000 Orthodox outside the Russian Church.

Although services are now in Finnish, we see a limited future in a Lutheranized and secularized Orthodoxy, a ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’ or ‘Halfodoxy’, a ‘Diet Orthodoxy’, rationalized, homogenized, sanitized, degutted, neutered, castrated, serving even the Easter cycle on the Catholic/Lutheran calendar. We see the future with the great defender of Orthodoxy in the North, St Alexander Nevsky (23 November/6 December), who warned that ‘God is not in power, but in truth’, and with the Karelian/North Russian monastic tradition.

Will the Russian-built churches of Finland one day return to integral Orthodoxy? Modernist Lutheran and Uniat-style Finnish churches, for example, in Oulu, Lintula, Espoo and Pori can stay with Constantinople. The Cathedral of the Dormition (the largest Orthodox church in Western Europe) and Holy Trinity church in Helsinki, the magnificent wooden church in Joensuu, St Alexander Nevsky (as it originally was) church in Tampere and the churches in Tornio, Vaasa and Hamina, all stand as witnesses to and reminders of authentic Orthodoxy.

Afterword

The question of our Church is not primarily a geopolitical question, but a spiritual question. The question is not whether the Orthodox world is with Europe (the EU) or against Europe, but whether the Orthodox world is with Christ or against Christ. As for us, we will remain with Holy Rus, because there is nothing higher than holiness, not even ‘Europe’. Our task is to preach the ‘Russian Word’, as Dostoyevsky put it, that is, to preach the Orthodox word to the whole world before the end, as the Gospel bids us.

Orthodox Christian values are not those of the Western world, which forsook Orthodoxy nigh on 1,000 years ago. We do not print ‘In God we trust’ on our banknotes, for we trust in the God of the Holy Trinity, not in the god of Mammon. In the West, they believe in what you have; we believe in what you are. In the West, they believe in Number 1; we believe in the family. In the West they believe in ambition, career and money; we believe in life, for Christ said: ‘I am the Life, the Way and the Truth’.

We Orthodox in the West, whether in Finland or elsewhere, will remain here for as long as our missionary witness is not persecuted out of existence. When that happens, then we shall flee back to Holy Rus, of which we have always been the truest patriots. Moreover, we shall remain faithful to Orthodoxy, just as the Church Outside Russia has remained faithful to Orthodoxy for 94 years already. We shall not change, whatever the world and all its Establishments think, for we do not fear the institutions of apostasy, but rather we fear God.

Why we do not speak of ‘British’ Orthodoxy, but of the Orthodoxy of the Isles

In contemporary England the word ‘British’ signifies the ‘Establishment’ as in ‘the BBC’, the propaganda-driven British Broadcasting Corporation. It thus refers to all the pitiful, imperial aspects of the history of this little country, whether in the period of the Romans, the Normans, the Georgians with their ‘Rule Britannia’ chant, or the Victorians who physically identified the figure of Queen Victoria with the mythical figure of Britannia and their cruel, worldwide empire.

Outside England, in particular in Scotland and even more in Ireland, the word ‘Britain’ means imperialist exploitation and the barbaric colonialism of the past. Thus, the Irish Embassy in London actively discourages the use of the term ‘The British Isles’ to refer to Ireland; for the Irish it is an insult. In the Orthodox context we note that the term ‘British Orthodoxy’ is used only by Establishment, ex-Anglican convert types among the tiny British Coptic group and a few others elsewhere.

Those elsewhere are usually under the once Anglican-dominated Patriarchate of Constantinople or else are connected with the former British Middle East and British-imposed freemasonry and new calendar. Often such people are connected with the Duke of Edinburgh, a Greek Orthodox freemason, and the current Prince of Wales, who appears to follow in his father’s footsteps; certainly he hates President Putin, absurdly identifying him with the Nazis.

The hatred of the Russian Church by the British Establishment became abundantly clear at the time of the extraordinarily biased British press coverage of the 2006 Sourozh schism, when former Anglican Establishment converts abandoned the Russian Church for Greek Orthodox freemasonry. What term then do we use to describe the Orthodoxy of those who live in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales and their dependent islands and of the saints who dwelled in these islands?

Quite simply we use the term the Orthodoxy ‘of the Isles’ (of Britain and Ireland), and the Saints ‘of the Isles’ of Britain and Ireland. This term is not only inclusive of the whole archipelago of the British Isles and Ireland, but also avoids the sad connotations of the past, which saw scenes of the burning of British flags for arrogant, ‘British’ colonialist meddling. Ex-Anglican ‘British Orthodoxy’ is one thing, but Insular Orthodoxy, the Orthodoxy of the Isles, is quite another.

Nineveh is Fallen

Wasted is Nineveh; who will bemoan her? Whence shall I seek comforters for her?

Nahum 3, 7

And he will make Nineveh a desolation, a dry waste like the desert.

Zeph. 2, 13

When US forces together with others from servile poodle-governments in London and the new Eastern Europe were sent to Iraq, they appeared to have four aims.

The first aim was to overthrow the CIA-installed Saddam Hussein, who had become too popular for the West’s liking. He had after all, with Washington’s tacit approval, originally tried to reunite to Iraq the province of Kuwait, which had been cut off from the rest of the country by oil-greedy British colonial authorities. That made him no longer useful to the West.

The second aim was to control Iraq by ‘bombing it back to the Stone Age’, depriving its citizens of normal education, not to mention water, electricity, petrol and other staples of modern life.

The third aim was to oversee the election of a ‘democratic’ government.

Washington duly achieved all three aims, spending $3 trillion in the process and almost bankrupting the USA.

Firstly, Saddam Hussein, hardly a pleasant man – the CIA should know – they created him – was farcically murdered (just as the all too popular Kaddhafi was later murdered in Libya).

Secondly, the Iraqi people was effectively deprived of all the essentials of modern life, completely dividing the country, so that the West could then rule it, pumping out its oil and gas.

Thirdly, ‘democracy’ was created with the election of the present leader al-Maliki.

But now, just as all the experts predicted, Washington is very unhappy.

Firstly, the overthrow of the strongman, Saddam Hussein, has created an Iraq full of terrorists, many of whom were supported, financed, trained and armed by the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government, just as it supported, financed trained and armed Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to overthrow its government.

Secondly, having divided Iraq and utterly embittered the Sunnis, the West now sees it splitting into its three natural parts in a horrendous civil war.

Thirdly, having created ‘democracy’ in Iraq, the West now wants to overthrow its democratically-elected government (just as it did in the Ukraine, where it also overthrew the democratically-elected government in order to install a pro-American, neo-Nazi clique).

Nineveh, today called Mosul, is now fallen and its surviving Christian population has fled. Founded by Nimrod, a descendant of Ham (Genesis 10), Nineveh heeded the holy prophet Jonah who went there at the words, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me’ (Jon. 1, 2) and its 120,000 people repented. Our only hope now is that both those who laid waste to Iraq in 2003 and those who are now laying waste to Nineveh will cease their futile and hypocritical self-justification and also turn to repentance.

Thousands Die in the Ukraine as ‘Europe Sets a Concrete Example of Life Without Christ’

The Western media report only what its leaders want them to report, for example, the strife which the West has caused in Iraq, where, also unreported by the Western media, Christians are being obliterated, as in Syria. However, in Europe, censored by European media, the genocide continues in the Ukraine. A few days ago a junta aeroplane with 49 foreign (EU and US nationals) mercenaries, paid for by corrupt oligarchs, was shot down by Ukrainian freedom-fighters, most of them Christian patriots. In the war, directed from training camps in Poland which is run as a colony by NATO, whose armed masses and fleet now threaten Russia, three days ago 250 died, two days ago 49 and today more than 100.

Orthodox priests are fleeing the Ukraine for Russia as heterodox and schismatics, their clerical leaders included, openly threaten to kill them and destroy their churches. This reminds us that the present borders of the Ukraine have existed for less than a generation and it basically consists of south-eastern Poland joined to south-western Russia. It is then an artificial construct (like EU Europe), created by the monstrous atheist dictators Lenin and Stalin, who were imposed on Christian Russia by the West in 1917 by overthrowing the Tsar. Today, 19 June, Metropolitan Onufry, the Locum Tenens of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, has called for peace and spoken against the atheist EU, which caused all the problems in the Ukraine.

In an interview with the Interfax news agency the Metropolitan spoke of the Ukraine as a ‘buffer zone’ between the Christian world and the Western world. He spoke of current morality in Europe which ‘would bring no good to the Ukraine’. ‘Europe sets us a concrete example of life without Christ. It pays no attention to the Lord’s commandments and what He forbade. On the contrary, it promotes permissiveness, according to which life is guided by human desires and not the Law of God. This is the wrong path… not all human desires are holy…Today the world is basically divided into two camps: one camp consists of people who strive to keep in force and reality moral laws, given to humanity by God for its benefit’.

He continued: ‘However, the second camp tramples down those laws. For example God blessed man and woman, Adam and Eve, in marriage. Not two Adams, not two Eves’. The Metropolitan, who only a few years ago visited us in London, also pointed to the legalization in Europe of single-sex marriage, euthanasia, which he called ‘the legalization of the sin of suicide’, and abortion. ‘If nobody is left on earth to keep the Divine order of life, then human life is doomed and humanity is headed for self-destruction. The laws, which the new European world offers us today, are not acceptable. We cannot collaborate with and join this world. We should keep our unity with those who adhere to Divine law.’

19 June 2014. My grandfather’s 120th birthday. He, born on 19 June, possessed both morality and common sense. As a soldier he took part in the liberation of Baghdad and Jerusalem. Reader, please pray for the repose of Henry.

His Holiness Kyrill, Patriarch of all the Russias, now calls on the fullness of our Church, to all the peoples of historic Rus, to pray

O Lord Jesus Christ our God, look down with Thy merciful eye on the sorrow and great pain of lamentation of Thy children in the Ukrainian land. Deliver Thy people from civil strife, make to cease the bloodshed, turn away impending misfortunes. Bring the homeless home, feed those that thirst, console those that weep, join together those that are divided. Let not Thy flock that are embittered towards their kin be diminished, but grant them swift reconciliation, for Thou art compassionate. Soften the hearts of those that have grown violent and bring them to know Thee. Give peace to Thy Church and her faithful children, that with one heart and one mouth we may glorify Thee, our Lord and Saviour, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Дорогие братья и сестры, обращаюсь ныне ко всей Полноте нашей Церкви, ко всем народам исторической Руси

Господи Иисусе Христе Боже наш, призри милостивным Твоим оком на скорбь и многоболезненный вопль чад Твоих, в земле украинстей сущих. Избави люди Твоя от междоусобныя брани, утоли кровопролития, отврати належащия беды. Лишенныя крова введи в домы, алчущия напитай, плачущия утеши, разделенныя совокупи. Не остави стадо Свое, от сродник своих во озлоблении сущих, умалитися, но скорое примирение яко щедр даруй. Ожесточенных сердца умягчи и к Твоему познанию обрати. Мир Церкви Твоей и верным чадам ея подаждь, да единем сердцем и едиными усты прославим Тя, Господа и Спасителя нашего во веки веков. Аминь.

Déjà Vu

After the flight (‘the exit strategy’) of defeated Western forces from Iraq, they left behind them a weak and bickering sectarian puppet regime. This had only limited control of the centre of the country around Baghdad and everywhere else the invasion left chaos, bitterness and the desire for revenge. Now that that regime looks like falling to Sunni forces, some in the West must be repenting. Just as the CIA founded Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, so the West, through its puppet allies in utterly corrupt Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has trained and armed Sunni forces in Libya, Egypt and Syria. And now look what is happening.

Western-trained Sunni forces have spread to Iraq and look like seizing power. The Western elite has swiftly dropped all its propaganda rhetoric about an ‘Arab spring’. Its ‘freedom and democracy’ mantra has unleashed a Pandora’s box from Afghanistan to Tunisia, via Libya, Yemen, Bahrein, Syria and Iraq – just as many Middle East experts precisely predicted before the genocidal Bush-Blair 2003 invasion of Iraq. It looks as though the West may now have to ally itself with Iran and the Assad Syrian government in order to defeat the Sunni terrorists, which it itself trained and armed on American bases in Qatar, Turkey and Afghanistan.

In Iraq we now also see exactly what will happen next year in Afghanistan once the humiliated Western forces have fled from there too and when its puppet regime, which even now controls less than one tenth of the country, falls to the people. They will in turn take their revenge on the local, English-speaking, CIA-installed traitors. Just as with a host of CIA puppet-regimes over the last 65 years, in Latin America, South-East Asia, Greece and Italy, it too will fall quite quickly. The same is already happening to the CIA-installed junta in the Ukraine, which it is also trying to turn into yet another banana republic.

Having in the Ukraine found an unprincipled and power-mad English-speaking bandit, who made his money from drug-dealing, prostitution rackets and arms sales (rather like the corrupt rulers the CIA backed in Saigon half a century ago), it backed him. Telling the ignorant and hoodwinked Western public that he had made his billions from ‘chocolate’ (!), the US administration had him elected President with fewer than 25% of the votes, despite a massive US-style PR campaign and strict media censorship. However, he has already slaughtered hundreds in the civil war that he has undertaken and now he faces bankruptcy.

This is because his corrupt regime cannot even pay the foreign, US-trained mercenaries whom it has had to engage to massacre the Ukrainian people – mercenaries are necessary because most of the Ukrainian forces themselves will not kill their own people, as he will. What the West has overlooked in the wars that it created first in Georgia, then in Syria and now in the Ukraine, is that all these countries, unlike Afghanistan and even Iraq, have a large population which has great veneration for the Mother of God. It is She Who has apanages in both Georgia and the Ukraine and a great shrine in Orthodox Syria.

Just as the US failed in its promotion of the tinpot Georgian dictator and torturer, the English-speaking, US-trained Mikhail Sakaashvili, so too it is failing in Syria and the Ukraine. The Russian Crimea, given to the Ukraine by an atheist dictator sixty years ago against the will of the people, did not want to become a US naval base. Now the south and east of the Ukraine, called by history Novorossiya (New Russia), given to the Ukraine by an atheist dictator ninety years ago against the will of its people, does not want to become a US missile base. The US policy of destabilization and genocide is not working in the Ukraine and will not work – as long as its people pray to the Mother of God.

The Mystery of Archbishop Averky

The future Archbishop Averky (Taushev) was born in 1906 in Kazan. Due to the nature of his father’s work, in his youth he travelled all over Russia and grew to love its monasteries, reading deeply. In 1920 the Taushev family fled Russia for the Bulgarian city of Varna. Here, while still at high school, the young man met the exiled Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, who further inspired his love of monastic life. After leaving school the future Archbishop enrolled at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Sofia.

On graduating he accepted a position as assistant secretary in the Carpatho-Russian Diocese in what was then Czechoslovakia. There, in 1931, he was tonsured monk with the name Averky, ordained deacon and in 1932 ordained priest, serving in local parishes. After carrying out various tasks for the diocese, in 1940 Fr Averky was forced to leave Carpatho-Russia. He moved to Belgrade where he taught Pastoral Theology and Homiletics, but in 1945, moving out in front of the advancing Red Army, he arrived in Munich together with the Synod of Bishops of the Church Outside Russia. Here he continued teaching.

In 1951 Fr. Averky was assigned to teaching at Holy Trinity Seminary at Jordanville in New York State. Fr Averky was soon consecrated bishop and in 1960 he was chosen by the monastery to be their Abbot. As Abbot, Archbishop Averky, as he had become, led the curriculum, teaching New Testament and Homilectics, writing and preaching. He also actively participated in publishing the Russian periodical ‘Orthodox Rus’. He reposed in 1976, known for his Orthodox writings and sermons calling to repentance, his saintly life, adherence to the Tradition against ecumenism and extremism, and his conviction that the end of the world was rapidly approaching amid contemporary apostasy.

The mystery that concerns us is why the Archbishop was so convinced that the end was near. After all, forty years on, we are still here. The answer, however, is not complex. Already, over 1950 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote similarly of the end of the world. Is it possible then that saints can be wrong? In reality, the saints are not wrong. The end of the world has been near on several occasions. Saints and the saintly have intuitions of this and this is precisely why they are sent by God to warn us and to call to repentance. This is what the Apostle Paul did and it is also what Archbishop Averky did. And people did listen to him and others.

In 1981, five years after Archbishop Averky’s repose, the Synod of Bishops canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Thanks to their prayers, persecution ceased in the Russian Lands and there began the process of the Rebaptism of Rus. With this act of repentance for the overthrow of Old Russia and its Orthodox foundations three generations before in 1917, the world changed. God gave an extension to the world and the end that had indeed been near in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the holy Archbishop had said, drew back.

Today, with the world situation on a knife edge, with the Western world gripped by the Satanic urge for global military and economic control and seeking to destroy the last vestiges of spiritual life everywhere, with many Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria compromised by Western propaganda, with many of the last strongholds of Orthodox piety, including Serbia, Georgia, Moldova and now the Ukraine, under threat, and with Russia only half-way to repentance, it is clear that the end is approaching once more. Now only the Mother of God can extend history and grant us another period for repentance. Now we should turn again to the prophecies and warnings of Archbishop Averky.

Mr Cameron and British Values

Having realized fifty years too late that the idea of Britain is spiritually dead, having refused to do anything to save it from death and having betrayed it time and time again, it seems extraordinary that the present UK Prime Minister is now trying to do something. Defeated in elections by the anti-EU Independence Party and with 100 days to go to the Scottish referendum, when Britain (and therefore the British flag) may well be abolished, he has now suddenly taken to a love of ‘British values’.

Thus, when asked today which values he would like to see taught in UK schools, he today replied: ‘I would say freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions. Those are the sorts of things I would hope would be inculcated into the curriculum in any school in Britain’.

The problem with Mr Cameron’s ‘British values’ is that though they may still be shared by privileged Eton and Oxford Establishment types like himself, they do not mean much to ordinary people who live in the real world of today. First of all, ‘Britain’ itself is a mythical invention of the self-interested Establishment elite of the 18th to 20th centuries. In the 21st century that has little meaning. If he were to speak about English values (or Scottish or Welsh or Irish values), that might have some meaning.

Thus, what does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a Britain whose Establishment founded an Empire on slavery, massacre and exploitation?

What does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a country where 200,000 abortions – some 6 million since abortion was legalized – are carried out by the State every year?

What does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a country whose elite signed away its sovereignty to what is now the EU forty years ago, never allowing the people to vote on it since then?

What does the ‘British’ value of tolerance mean in a country where people are afraid to speak the truth because of the tyranny of political correctness, promoted by every ‘British’ institution, not least its tightly-controlled media?

What does the ‘British’ value of the rule of law mean in a country where we are obliged without consultation to continually meddle in, invade and destroy other countries for no reason at all, where those who oppose such invasions mysteriously die as a result of SIS actions and where our e-mails and phone calls are spied on every day by the ‘security’ services?

What does the ‘British’ value of personal and social responsibility mean in a country where the judiciary, police force, businessmen, the heads of the utility companies and politicians are vetted by the so-called ‘security’ services and are usually freemasons, a closed brotherhood which bars promotion to non-members?

What does the ‘British’ value of respect for British institutions mean in a country where all those institutions are utterly compromised by their history, whether by the ‘Enclosures’ (a legalized collectivist land grab by the rich from the poor), ‘Highland clearances’ (ethnic cleansing), colonial exploitation of Indians and Africans, compulsory deportation of the poor to the ‘colonies’, the British concentration camps of the Boer War, the slaughter of innocent youth in the First World War, the current meddling in and invasions of foreign countries and the massacres of their native populations by bomb and bullet (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), and subsidized terrorists (Syria) and puppet regimes (the Ukraine), and the continuous lies of corrupt politicians to a people who are not allowed to vote in a system in which their vote would be represented?

Mr Cameron not only needs to define his values before he speaks, but above all he needs to start living them without hypocrisy.

The West is Alienated from Christ and Therefore Intolerant

Many people worldwide have been amazed at the Western indifference and even hostility to the plight of massacred and fleeing Christians in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and now in the Ukraine. There, 55,000 refugees have fled to Russia in the last 24 hours from the devilish massacres by foreign mercenaries of the Christian people of the Ukraine. The neo-Nazi junta in Kiev, under strict Western control, sends in tanks, murders and maims Christians, refusing to talk to its own people.

Where do this intolerance and hatred for Christianity come from? Surely the West supports Christianity? It used to. And why does President Obama meddle in the UK’s possible decision to leave the atheist EU and Scotland’s possible decision to leave the atheist UK? Why does he threaten and intimidate even Western peoples? Where does this bullying arrogance come from? These riddles have today been answered by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov.

As reported by the Interfax Religion agency and the sedmitza.ru website, the Russian Orthodox Foreign Minister considers that the West has become antagonistic to Russia because of its return to the Church of Christ. He noted the Russian amazement that the West still equates the Russian Federation with the atheist Soviet Union, whereas ‘the new Russia is returning to traditional spiritual values, rooted in Orthodoxy’.

At the same time, he noted that the ever clearer contradiction ‘between the multipolarity of the world which can be objectively affirmed, and the desire of the USA and the historic West to hang on to their habitual positions of domination, the ever clearer contradiction between the cultural and civilizational diversity of the contemporary world and attempts to foist Western values on everyone’. He added that the West ‘is increasingly breaking away from its own Christian roots and is less and less receptive to the religious feelings of people of other confessions’.