Monthly Archives: October 2014

Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition Available Again

This anthology of 100 essays, first published in 1995 and now with a new foreword, is at last available again from:

frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk. 3rd Edition A5 495 pp.

Price: £15.00 + £2.80 p & p in the UK. Unfortunately, Air Mail to the USA is now £12.85 (surface post, which can take up to two months, is £8.00). Please make payments by Paypal button from the website: www.orthodoxengland.org.uk

From the Back Cover

Today many search for an Undivided Christendom and the traditional teachings of the Early Church, which go beyond the latter-day divisions and disputes of Roman-Catholic, Anglican and Protestant. And amid the chaos of recent years many have discovered the Orthodox Church and Her Faith, drawn from the first millennium of Christianity. In this book the author, an English Orthodox priest, looks at the authentic Orthodox Faith, beyond the historical and cultural vicissitudes surrounding it, and pinpoints its relevance to us. He writes: Orthodox Christianity is the Faith revealed to the repentant in their quest for the Holy Spirit. Should we accept it, we would thus accept the struggle for the Holy Spirit; and in so doing we would accept the struggle to build Jerusalem here, ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’.

Foreword to the Third Edition

For we hope that the Lord will deliver Russia and the Russian people from the dread years of evil which have now lasted for 70 years. Russia can be reborn only through the repentance of the Russian people, through faith in God, through living the Divine commandments. Therefore the rebirth of the Russian people – the rebirth of personal, social and national life – must be founded on the Holy Orthodox Faith and their life must be built on this. And then once more, as of old, Russia will be Holy Rus, the House of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Prophecy of the Ever-Memorable Archbishop (later Metropolitan) Laurus (1987)

All my life I have been haunted by the European world that was lost by the consequences of the tragic events and sacrifices of August 1914, now exactly 100 years ago. Growing up with nineteenth-century grandparents and great-uncles who had fought in the First European War and with tragic maiden great-aunts, I knew that all of us had to live with those consequences. There has been no peace in the world since then, since the profound injustice of the victory so cruelly and ironically snatched from the Russian Empire in 1917 by Allied treachery and then the German treachery that made the slaying of the Russian Royal Family inevitable. And that, in turn, made the destruction of Germany in the Second European War inevitable, with Russian troops taking Vienna and Berlin. And that, in its turn, made the Cold War inevitable.

That War dragged on until 1991. Then the Slav, Romanian, Georgian and Albanian Churches all lived beneath the yoke of atheism and had virtually no free voices. As for the smaller and weaker Greek Churches, they were compromised by US control. Thus, the impoverished Patriarchate of Constantinople, at one time financed by Anglicanism, had come under US control in 1948, when Patriarch Maximos was deposed by the CIA with threats to his life and despatched into a generation of exile in Switzerland, uttering as he went the words, ‘The City is lost’.

Those were dark days of the betrayal of the Church and, virtually alone, the Church Outside Russia spoke on behalf of us all. For during the Cold War proud anti-Incarnational modernism and ecumenism (heresies, like sects and cults which are created by heresies, are always based on pride), in either their crass, pseudo-intellectual, humanist Protestant/Catholic form, as often in the US, or in their subtle, pseudo-spiritual, personalist Buddhist/Hindu form, as often in Europe, were everywhere. ‘Orthodox’ academic theology was then dominated by that spiritual decadence which may be called ‘captivity theology’. In its intellectualism that ‘theology’, ignorant of the Lives of the Saints, utterly failed to see that Orthodoxy is a striving for holiness, which is simply a life lived with prayer in conformity with the Tradition

This was the academic theology of ‘Orthodox’ intellectuals, who had studied either in Protestant centres (Oxford, Cambridge, Strasbourg, centres in Germany etc) or else in Roman Catholic centres (especially the Gregorian University in Rome, but also Paris, Louvain, Jesuit Fordham etc). The academics infected naturally reflected the proud cultural prejudices of those establishments where they had studied, resulting not in an Orthodox, but a ‘Halfodox’ vision of the world. An associated mixture of ecumenists, liberals and modernists, those intellectuals wished to reduce the Church to a mere religion, a theory and an institution, just like the Western denominations. This was, consciously or unconsciously, spiritual treachery.

Their ‘theology’, in fact philosophy, reflected the humanistic personalism and spiritually empty symbolism of that age. Most of those intellectuals have now died, if not, they are very elderly. The generation of disciple-imitators that succeeded them has even less conviction or talent. It is hardly surprising – modernism is incredibly old-fashioned in a post-modern world. With the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, that age of decadence seems increasingly distant. I remember at that time, and I mean nearly 40 years ago, being told by an ‘Orthodox’ academic at one of those above-mentioned universities that if I was not satisfied with their food that did not satisfy my soul, I should ‘go and live in Russia’. During the Cold War that was not possible; therefore I took the next best option, to frequent the last emigres of the first generation of the White emigration in Paris and the Church Outside Russia.

This anthology of essays was written between 1974 and 1995, precisely at that time when the Church Outside Russia was isolated, indeed virtually besieged, under attack from all sides and from inside, by the extremes of modernism and ‘traditionalism’ alike. Indeed, as I came to realize, the Church Outside Russia was then one of the few points of freedom anywhere in the Orthodox Church. Figures in it expressed words of truth similar only to those of the lone Serbian theologian St Justin of Chelije, canonized in 2010, and other figures on the Holy Mountain and in the monasteries of the Carpathians.

Rejoicing in the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors in New York in 1981, when the Orthodoxy hierarchy was still paralysed in the homelands, at that time we also tried to reclaim for the Church the ancient holiness of Western Europe. We knew that all holiness can only come from the Church, as we daily confess in the Creed. Our task was to help gather together the remaining living spiritual and cultural forces of the dying West and to call it back to its roots in its ancient holiness that it had for the most part renounced. This desire is very much reflected in this book. Sadly, since that time we have seen the final death-throes of once Christian-based Western civilization, witnessing the disappearance of the old culture.

For after 1991, and with great speed, the demons that had operated in the atheist Soviet Union migrated to the atheist European Union, whose spiritual deadweight has been reinforced by the atheism of North America. Only a few years ago President Putin of the Russian Federation, made wise by the failure and defeat of atheism, warned the then Prime Minister Blair that demon-inspired atheism was literally a dead end; naturally, he was ignored, for deluded arrogance never listens to wisdom. Indeed, ever since 1988 the Church that President Putin belongs to, the multicultural and multilingual Russian Orthodox Church, 75% of the whole Church of God, has been reviving, re-opening or building three churches every day somewhere on the planet.

Together with it there is reviving the social, political and economic life of the Russian Federation, the Russian Lands (Rus) and even other parts of the Orthosphere. In 2007 in Moscow we witnessed the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and the re-establishment of canonical communion, a long-awaited miracle of our times. Our great hope of 20-40 years ago for the messianic restoration of Holy Rus, so great that it was a belief, has been coming true through repentance. We have no illusions that we may not see our hopes for the full restoration of the Sovereignty of the Tsar realized, or, much less likely, Europe liberated from its self-imposed ideological yoke, but at least we know that we are on the way. There is much to do, very far to go, but the direction is the right one.

Nearly twenty years on now since the first edition, this book is here reprinted, a few typographical errors corrected, spelling updated, long paragraphs divided and a few minor precisions and corrections made. May this third edition of these essays be a help to all those who seek. May it guide them to the spiritual awareness of the Church and Civilization of Holy Rus and that Orthodoxy is Christianity and that all else, whatever its legacy from ancient Orthodox times, is ultimately but an ism, a distortion and a compromise. ‘For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith’ (1 Jn. 5, 4).

Glory to Thee, O God, Glory to Thee!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

August 2014
St John’s Orthodox Church
Colchester, Essex, England

An Interview with Popular Russian Author and Politician Nikolai Starikov

The new elections in the western Ukraine (they did not take place elsewhere) have, with a small turnout and reports of widespread rigging, re-elected the corrupt oligarch leader, who calls himself ‘Poroshenko’ (his mother’s surname), as head of the Kiev junta. Having lost the support of the Church and the masses, with support only from nationalistic sects, his Ukraine faces bankruptcy. The USA and the EU which installed the present regime have no money to subsidize it. With two lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their defeated troops scurrying to leave both countries, the Middle East in a bloodbath because of Western-armed and financed Islamic terrorists, terrorism throughout northern Africa, ebola in western Africa and a China which has overtaken the USA, the Western world, itself bankrupt, has cares other than the backward and provincial Ukraine.

With winter coming, the anti-Church Poroshenko has ordered temperatures inside Ukrainian homes not to exceed 15 degrees Celsius (60 Fahrenheit). The only warm homes in the Ukraine are in the Crimea, which voluntarily returned en masse to Russia after a 60-year occupation by the Ukraine, and in the newly-liberated areas of the eastern Ukraine which have regained their freedom from the neo-Nazi tyranny in Kiev, which suppresses free speech and internet and censors the media. Meanwhile, the US-ordered civil war against the Free Ukraine continues in the east and the north and the south, further draining the Kiev’s finances. In a word, the Ukrainian tragedy continues. Below we reprint an interview with a popular Russian Orthodox historian on the current situation in the Ukraine:

(http://russia-insider.com/en/tv_politics_ukraine_christianity_society/2014/10/27/08-26-19am/heres_what_russians_really_think).

Nikolay Starikov, a historian, is an extremely popular author and blogger from St. Petersburg. Several of his books are current best-sellers. He is on TV all the time, one of the most visible of a new type of up-and-coming politician. He recently founded The Great Fatherland Party, a conservative, patriotic party which espouses Christian values. The thing to understand is that he is very mainstream. He echoes what a majority of Russians believe.

Part of his success is that he is very articulate and intellectual. On TV, he often plays a professorial role, explaining complex subjects in terms people can understand – history, economics, current events. He has a very reasonable, matter-of-fact, cut-to-the-chase demeanour and it is a hit with the public. If you want to understand what Russia is thinking, and where it is heading, pay attention to this man. Here is the interview with him:

You say you are a “nationalist” Russian. Whom do you consider Russian? Are Russian values different from Ukrainian values?

Russians and Ukrainians are one people. 100 years ago there were Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belarussians). These definitions are more appropriate than current designations. It is not offensive to say “Little Russia” because it just means “original,” with Kiev the Russian city from which all of Russia originated.

Therefore, Ukrainians and Russians are the same people with slight cultural, culinary, and linguistic differences.

Being Russian is not just ethnicity but a specific world view.

Overall, there are no separate values between Russians and Ukrainians, who, along with other nationalities comprise a big “Russian world”.

Are there any values that are specific to the Russian world and are different from, say, European or American values?

Yes. The main difference is their goal in life. In the Russian world, the goal of life is to follow certain morals and commonly held values, such as duty. Western traditions are more egotistical, living for oneself. Today’s Western consumer society is a direct result of that.

If I could sum it up, being Russian means serving God. In the West, it is more of an agreement with God.

Is there room for cooperation between these different civilizations?

It is not only possible, but we must find a compromise. The problem, however, is that there needs to be an effort from both sides. There was a search for compromise between 1945 and 1991.

Now the West does not want to listen to Russia, it does not want to see Russia on the world map. A good example is current American attempts to pit two parts of the same people [Ukrainians and Russians] against each other.

Russians are ready for a compromise. But we are not the ones instigating civil war in Canada or Mexico.

So what do you think accounts for what you see as anti-Russian American policy?

First, I have no doubt that America is behind the Ukrainian coup, much like the coups in Libya, Syria and other countries, and even in friendly countries like Egypt.

The reasons are the same as the reasons behind World War I and World War II: to weaken competitors and make the dollar—and now keep the dollar— as the only reserve currency.

In our interview with Denis Pushilin (former leader of one of the regions in East Ukraine), he said he would like to see Donetsk as part of a Russian Empire. What are your views on this statement?

I think Mr. Pushilin has a rather narrow view. We must talk not just about Donetsk and Lugansk, but about the entire territory of present-day Ukraine.

This territory is the cradle of the Russian world and I would like to see Ukraine as a part of it. If certain parts of Ukraine don’t want to be a part of the Eurasian Union or Customs Union, then they can choose to go in another direction. That is what we are talking about when we talk about the federalization of Ukraine. But right now there are attempts to suppress the will of the eastern Ukrainian people with military force. It should be up to the locals to decide which path they take.

How can the conflict in Ukraine be resolved?

There are usually two ways. One is a military victory of one side over the other. The other way is for the two sides to lay down their arms and start negotiating. Right now, the Ukrainian government, which came to power as a result of a coup, is being backed by the West and that is why it has adopted such an inflexible line towards eastern Ukraine.

If Europe and America would tell Ukraine to start negotiating, they would do so immediately because they are essentially puppets of the Washington regime.

If they are Washington’s puppets, why is President Putin calling for dialogue with them?

In order for the bloodshed to stop, you must negotiate with someone. Mr. Putin, along with millions of Russians, considers the current Ukrainian government as simply being amoral politicians. But in order to stop the fighting, we must talk with someone.

What is your opinion on the recent presidential elections in the Ukraine?

I am ready to consider them legitimate as soon as the United States approves of the recent Syrian elections that took place amid a military conflict.

Many experts have suggested that what Russia really wants is a frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine, which it could then use to its own advantage. What is your assessment of this claim?

Russia does not want any conflicts on its borders, as they may spill over into Russia. For the United States this is a distant conflict and most State Department officials cannot find Ukraine on a map.

You have repeatedly referred to the government in Kiev as “fascist.” Besides claims that they are using military force against civilians, what other similarities do you see between Kiev and Nazi Germany?

If people see Hitler and those who fought alongside Nazis as their idols, can we not call these people Nazis?

You are talking about Stepan Bandera [the Ukraine nationalist who collaborated with the Nazis during their invasion of the Soviet Union]?

Yes.

Can you name some specific organizations or people that you consider “Nazis”?

Right Sector, Svoboda, and anyone who marches through the streets with posters of Bandera.

You have mentioned earlier that only a small minority of people in eastern Ukraine have taken up arms. What accounts for such a small number of those willing to fight?

There is nothing new about this. Even during the Russian civil war, tens of millions of people did not take up arms. Most normal people are usually hesitant to fight, thinking any crisis will just blow over.

And yet the Maidan protests attracted thousands of people.
Yes, but I don’t think they all signed up to join Right Sector and went to fight in the East.

We are not talking about military matters, but simply people showing up to express support for their point of view.
There were also two million people who voted for secession in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. There are only about four thousand people who are ready to fight, and those are people who signed up for the Ukrainian National Guard. The Eastern separatists have more people than that.

What is the future of Russia-NATO relations?

I see a future of relations that are courteous and without constant provocations, such as the ones by NATO against Russia. Our American colleagues would understand our position better if we wanted to put a couple hundred missiles in Mexico and Canada. They should remember the rather strong reaction by President John Kennedy to Soviet attempts to put missiles in Cuba.

Those defending NATO expansion say that those countries wanted to be part of NATO.

Okay. But Cuba also wanted to house Soviet missiles voluntarily.
If America did not object to Russian missiles in Cuba, would you support Ukraine joining NATO?

That would be a great trust-building measure on their part, and Russia would feel that America is a friend.

Towards a Russian Orthodox Brotherhood in Europe (R.O.B.E.)

Introduction

It is one thing to be a theoretical member of the Church, but it is another to practise the Faith in life. As we can see from schismatic Uniatism, which keeps many outward observances of the Church, it is possible to observe a ritual but to be spiritually separated from the Church and so degenerate. Of those who remain in the Church but want to reduce the Church to outward observances like Uniatism, it may be said that they are in a ‘pre-Uniat’ state. Indeed, in our own times, we can see from certain ideas and even practices which have entered the Church from the outside world that it is possible to be nominally or intellectually (the same thing) Orthodox, but practically to deny both Christ and the Holy Spirit in one’s heart and so in one’s life. Such temptations are schismatic because ultimately they separate from the Church, as we can see in Estonia, for instance, where a small group of Estonian Orthodox spiritually separated from their canonical Church and Her traditions. Such temptations are present everywhere, although here we are concerned with Western Europe.

The Denial of Christ

Recently a young Moldovan parishioner showed me on his iPhone pictures of an ‘Orthodox’ church (in a large city in the USA). It had no iconostasis and had frescoes which looked as though they had been painted by a child. The child had thoroughly mastered the outward technique of icon-painting but did not understand that icons are intended to make us pray, thinking that their function is purely decorative. In other words, the technique was perfect, but there was no feeling and no content, just as in Uniatism, a ritualistic or intellectual Orthodoxy. Quite naturally the parishioner asked me if the picture was of a Catholic church which was copying the Orthodox Church. I had to tell him, since I recognized the photo, that in fact it belonged to a group whose Greek Catholic (Uniat) ancestors had returned to the Church over 100 years ago, but had not yet left their Uniat mentality behind them and acquired the Orthodox spirit. He told me that although this might be ‘good for Americans’, he personally would not attend such a church if he lived in the USA. I sympathized with him.

The problem with groups which have not acquired Orthodox culture and copy heterodox culture is that pastorally they reject rooted Orthodox in favour of ethnic (in this case, American) cliques and clubs of converts. They may attract a few Non-Orthodox or Orthodox who have lost all their roots, but they do not attract Churched Orthodox. We can think of divisive convert groups in Western Europe which have made the same mistakes. Thus, in one convert chapel in England, Greek is forbidden, since the whole service ‘must be in English’. In another convert chapel of the same group, the Sunday service, the only one, has been described as ‘the Book of Common Prayer with extracts from St John Chrysostom’. In a third convert chapel of a jurisdiction in France, local Romanians are made to feel unwelcome because ‘they don’t behave like us’. And in a fourth case in the same jurisdiction there is in a large town a convert chapel, whose congregation numbers six, but over 100 ‘ethnic’ Orthodox living nearby who do not attend the chapel because ‘it doesn’t feel right’.

Such cliquish and self-serving attitudes, no ‘foreigners’ allowed, ‘go back to your own country’ (to quote the actual words of one convert) is typical of small, inward-looking groups with an ethnic Establishment superiority complex. Their pride is responsible for their jurisdictional separation from the rest of the Church. Such Anglican ethnicism is of course matched by the ethnicism of certain immigrant clergy, who categorically refuse to receive English or other people into the Church, because, I quote literally, ‘you are not dark enough’, or who tell them to ‘go away and become Anglican or Catholic’. In all these cases, the lack of desire to serve others, the lack of any missionary witness to other nationalities or ecumenist compromise, shows that such individuals fundamentally do not believe that the Orthodox Church is the Church of Christ and consider that their mission is only to those who have a certain secular passport. They have put their nationality (their worldly identity) above Christ. In other words, they deny Christ, the heavenly passport, in favour of this world.

The Denial of the Holy Spirit

In the last century there also appeared a subtle form of the denial of the Holy Spirit in a theory of ecclesiology called ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’. In origin this is a sociological reflection of the highly abnormal, uprooted conditions in which Paris Russian émigrés lived in the mid-20th century. It involves deliberate and political disincarnation and separation from their Church and State of origin through the domination of highly politicized and sectarian personalities (who, ironically, claimed to be ‘apolitical’!), without a normal episcopal presence and so without episcopal ecclesiology, without normal monastic life and so without monastic and ascetic ecclesiology. This quite cultish, personalist theory, or rather philosophy, of disincarnate spirituality was elaborated among others by the late Fr Nikolai Afanasiev. At best, such a philosophy was one-sided, but at worst, in the hands of the Protestantizing, like the late Fr Alexander Schmemann, or the politicized in Constantinople, it very rapidly became a form of Protestant congregationalism.

For the latter, extraordinarily, the centre of Church life was not repentance, which is what St John the Baptist and the whole Church Tradition calls us to, but the eucharist. However, the eucharist is not a cause, but a result, in fact a result of repentance; to invert the two in such a way is to put the cart before the horse, for there is no eucharist without first repentance (without preparation, including confession). In other words, this eucharistic ecclesiology had no ascetic sense, it was triumphalist and ‘charismatic’ – in the negative sense of self-exaltation. This Protestant/congregationalist cast of mind of the ‘we are already saved’ variety is why this philosophy was influential at the protestantizing Second Vatican Council. It is also reflected in the protestantizing, French-language liturgical books put out by a politicized lay fraternity in Paris. It is notable that the ever-memorable Fr John Romanidis rejected such a 20th century philosophy, after being influenced by it in his youth, and that most of those who still talk about it are now very elderly.

This also explains why spirituality-less modernism (like its ancestor Protestantism) rapidly descends either into boring and futile secularism and/or boring and futile moralism. The fact that moralism, which has so poisoned generations of Western people and often reduced them to amoralism and immoralism by reaction, is due to a lack of spirituality, explains why many modernists, deeply secular, are also moralists. However, although moralism can be modernistic, this does not mean that it is always left-wing; moralism can very easily descend into deep conservativism (the right-wing). And conservatism of the right is no more traditional than modernism of the left. Standing above both isms, the Tradition of the Church is instead radical, for its stands above all worldliness, whether it is left-wing and liberal or right-wing and conservative. And this we can see very clearly in the lives of such saints as St John of Shanghai, who, as a saint was obviously not a modernist, but was not at all a conservative either. This was because he was radical, that is, he belonged to the Tradition.

Conclusion

It has long been my hope, for I believe that it is long overdue, that one day we shall see a multinational Russian Orthodox Brotherhood in Europe (R.O.B.E.). If it has not been for the enslavement of Orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, it would surely have come about two generations ago. Such a Brotherhood would be under Russian Orthodox episcopal supervision, uniting all Russian Orthodox of both parts of the Russian Church, of all nationalities, in other words, uniting all of us who follow the One Tradition, together with Serbs, Georgians and lovers of the Tradition from other Local Churches. Being united, we would be witnesses to the integral Faith, able to counter ethnicism (convert or other), the anti-episcopal, anti-monastic and anti-ascetic prejudices of the older generation and the schismatic Uniatizing and protestantizing modernism prevalent in certain jurisdictions. This would mean the assertion of the Incarnation and the Ascetic, the assertion of Christ and the Holy Spirit, without which a Local Church in Western Europe can never be founded.

Not the First and not the Last

Since the 1960s, and even before that, spiritually sensitive Western people have been drawn to embrace Russian Orthodoxy, realizing the historic and far-reaching errors of the Western world and that their only salvation is in Holy Rus. This movement of repentance for millennial apostasy continues today. As we reported on 10 October, a French resistance-fighter, in combat for the liberation of the Ukraine from the Nazi/Uniat globalist junta in Kiev, has joined the Church in the free Ukraine. He was soon followed by another Frenchman and now, most recently, by two Catalans. Here follows a translation of excerpts, under the original title, from an interview between themselves and the priest who received them. (See: http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2014/10/20/my_ne_pervye_i_ne_poslednie/

What drove you to come here and fight in this war?

How could we stand aside? We saw on TV how they are bombing towns, peaceful civilians, shooting people and burning completely innocent people to death, raping little girls, cutting people up and selling off their organs, the mass burials and the destruction of churches. These are monstrous, unheard of crimes against mankind! We cannot understand it, in Spain the army protects the people, but here the Ukrainian army is killing its own people. How can this be happening in the 21st century? Clearly demonic powers have been unleashed in Novorossiya (eastern and southern Ukraine)….Your pain is our pain, our tears, and your victory over the Fascists is our victory. That is why we are here, God has called us here. We are not the first and not the last.

Spain is not next door, how did you get here?

We are Catalan nationalists. Just for coming here to fight we would get long prison sentences in Spain…We had to overcome many difficulties to get here….

What is life like in Spain?

After the crisis life has not been easy in Spain. There is high unemployment, especially among the young. Joining the EU did not improve our lives, prices rose, life did not get any better with debt, we suffer economic slavery. Spain is rotting from corruption, democracy is just a word, the country is controlled by clans of oligarchs. We have been fighting for the freedom of Catalonia for a long time. Evil values are being foisted on us, even though the overwhelming majority of the population is against…

When did you last go to a Catholic church? What is your attitude to faith? Did you know anything about the Orthodox Church at home?

There is no Orthodox church in our town and we knew nothing about it until we met you. We cannot remember when we last went to a Catholic church…

Do you like our church? What did you feel at the service?

The church felt like a home for our souls, everything is unusual, beyond our understanding, but close to our souls. To be honest, when we were at a Catholic service, we sat down but after half an hour we felt weighed down, but here, standing up, after two and a half hours, understanding nothing, we felt as though it had all lasted only 20 minutes.

2014: The Turning Point

Every 500 years or so the Western world appears to go through a period of revolutionary transformation, sometimes positive, sometimes negative. Thus, with the birth of Christ, Western Europe faced a choice between the old and the cruel and the new and the compassionate; after 300 years and the sacrifices of countless martyrs and confessors, it finally chose the new, preferring to be with Christ. Then, approximately from the year 500 on, spiritual heroes began to spread the chosen path throughout Western Europe, west and north, to distant and cold Atlantic shores, and the sixth and seventh centuries are known to history as the Age of Saints. Succeeding centuries brought the peripheral lands of Western Europe to Orthodoxy, which by the year 1000 had spread into Scandinavia and even as far as the Isles of the North Atlantic.

However, after the first millennium, from around the year 1000, the power-grabbing elite of Western Europe fell to the temptation of pagan Rome under the guise of a compromised, feudalist form of Christianity, a novel and aggressive ideology that came to be called Roman Catholicism. Around 1500 this degenerated into a compromised, capitalist form of Christianity, which justified worldwide aggression and genocide. Today, at the year 2000, that elite is throwing off the last vestiges of Christianity and re-entering the demonized world of the pagan past, in which man has only an economic value. The demons are coming back from hell, which is spreading worldwide, at present to the Ukraine, part of the Russian world, which after many temptations is choosing to remain faithful to the original pre-Roman Catholic and pre-Protestant Christianity.

In the Ukraine the present Western puppet junta ironically makes much of ‘European values’ and ‘Western’ or ‘Euroatlantic’ Civilization, which it opposes to Russian Christian Civilization. Rightly so in fact, because such purely modern ‘European values’ are opposed to European history, which, like Russian history, has Christian roots. This propaganda term ‘European values’, in reality means the anti-values of the parasitical transnational financial elite, at present based in the USA, and its global geopolitical doctrine of domination and exploitation. This doctrine is utterly opposed to traditional European culture, which is being revived in today’s resurgent Christian Russia. This is why this Russia is so hated by that elite, for it stands in the way of the elite’s power-mongering search for global hegemony, denounces it and even seeks to reverse it.

In reality, ‘Euroatlantic’ values are leading to the death of Western Europe itself, its countries become mere colonies of Fourth Reich Berlin, itself a mere colony of the transnational elite. Europe’s once sovereign peoples are dying out through abortion, suicide and euthanasia, as patriotic minorities inside them are aware. A country, which like Serbia resists, is bombed into submission, its territory is polluted with uranium, divided, taken away and made into a NATO base for drug-runners. This is what is now being attempted in the Ukraine and what the global elite intends to do with Russia. But the mission of Russia is to be what restrains (2 Thess 2, 7). It is not to bring hell to the world, so ruthlessly exploited by the elite which is in love with Mammon, it is to bring to the world the light of Christ, the ideals of good and Divine and human justice.

The present war in the Ukraine is an anti-Ukrainian war because it is opposed to the spiritual rebirth of the Russian world and of the rest of faithful Orthodox Christendom. The war is being fought between Christianity and Mammon, whose high-priests want to destroy and divide reviving multinational Russia, reducing it to the Western colony it was under Communism after 1917 and under post-Communism after 1991. The Russian world counters this war with its sovereign independence, non-nationalist universal religion and popular culture. Russia resists the myth of ‘European values’ because it has already suffered under those ‘values’, having knowledge of them from the Revolution of 1917, which Europe so enthusiastically imposed on Russia through the treacherous fifth column of Westernized Russian aristocrats.

For every anti-Christian revolution in Russia has been directed by the elite (boyars/ aristocrats/oligarchs, call them what you will) against the three founding values of Orthodox Christian society: Sovereignty (Independence), the Orthodox Christian Faith (Divine and Human Justice) and the People (Unity). Today the Russian world faces a choice, to become a vassal of the global West (as the Western-installed Fascist elite in Kiev is trying to do with the Ukraine) and so disappear as a Civilization, or else to return to the fullness of Christian values in Russian Orthodoxy. These include the re-establishment of the multinational Christian State with its ideals of social justice, uniting and overcoming artificial divisions of left and right. These values are opposed by three anti-values, so well described by the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II as ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’.

If the indebted Western world wishes to repent for its thousand-year apostasy from Christianity, for its millennial anti-values of ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’, and stop following the transnational oligarchs, all it has to do, as some have already done, is to accept the integral Orthodox Christian Faith. If, instead, it continues to chase out Christian values with its totalitarian liberalism, dependency on a caliphate of Muslim immigrants and debt-enslavement to the oligarchs, it will fall further into bestial, moral decomposition, the zombification of bread and circuses and so spiritual and physical death. In its death agony the elite is sowing division around the world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. But despite everything, victory is still possible. Our task is to lead the faithful remnants of the West to reviving Russia and salvation.

The Thousandth Anniversary of the Baptism of St Olaf

One thousand years ago Western Europe was faced with a choice: to remain faithful to the Church of the Christian Roman Empire, whose capital was in New Rome (later known as Constantinople), or to follow that part of its power-loving elite which wanted to revive the pagan Empire of Old Rome, renouncing the Church, the Christian teaching on the Holy Trinity, and the authority of the Christian Roman Empire.

One of the last figures among the ruling elite to follow the former course came from the Western European periphery where faithfulness was stronger. This was St Olaf (Haraldson) of Norway. On 19 October we commemorate the thousandth anniversary of his baptism in Rouen in Normandy in France, where his holy relics are present for veneration and French and Norwegian choirs are performing in concert.

Born in 995, after his baptism he was accompanied to Norway by the Anglo-Viking bishop and later saint, Sigfrid, and proclaimed King. He ruled from 1015 to 1028. During his reign he did much to baptize and enlighten his people, quelling civil strife and was killed in 1030 in a battle with divisive aristocrats. He was canonized in 1031 ‘with the agreement of the whole Norwegian people’.

In his homeland the sainted king, who united Norwegians, is celebrated as ‘the eternal king’. He was one of the last Western Europeans to become an Orthodox saint and churches in Russia were dedicated to St Olaf, notably in Novgorod and in Staraya Ladoga, where he lived for several years. It comes as comfort to know that on the site of his last battle, at Stiklestad, a Russian Orthodox chapel has just been built, where Norwegian and other Orthodox can ask the prayers of St Olaf.

Holy, Right-Believing King Olaf, Pray to God for us!

French Resistance Fighter Joins the Church in the Ukraine

As we know, the war of liberation in Novorossiya (southern and eastern Ukraine) from the American-imposed junta in Kiev has forced the junta to resort to the use of mercenaries, mainly from the US, UK and Poland. Paid for by Fascist oligarchs, the mercenaries have suffered huge casualties. What is less known is that the Ukrainian freedom fighters have also been aided not by mercenaries, but by volunteers, and not only from Russia. They have come from Kazakhstan, Belarus, Serbia, Germany and France, desiring to take part in a war between good and evil, between Holy Rus and the apostatic West.

A few days ago a young Catholic Frenchman from Paris was received by chrismation into the Church under the name of George. Since he had joined the resistance fighters in the eastern Ukraine, the priest told him: ‘Stand up for the truth until death, live in a holy way’. To which he answered: ‘Now we are brothers in faith and in spirit’. Later, George explained his motivation in coming to fight for Holy Rus and join the Church: ‘In France the news is completely censored. People have been left ignorant. People refuse to believe in the monstrous crimes of the Fascists…Democracy and freedom of speech are only words…Democracy merely means that you have the right to enjoy material goods…There is a moral crisis in the country, an extremely negative attitude towards religion is formed from childhood…Your services are like living water’.

‘In the churches in Paris you can have rock concerts, dog shows, even an exhibition of pornography. None of this has troubled anyone for a long time, and I won’t even mention Islamisation…When I saw the bestial acts of the Ukrainian Fascists here in Novorossiya, then something stirred in my soul – my place is here, with my brothers and their pain is my pain, so I came here. Here I met the ‘Russian’ God’. Archpriest Oleg Trofimov, a priest with a doctorate in theology who received George, recently received a family of seven Koreans into the Church. He added: ‘Our Mother-Russia has through the Providence of God become the Divine melting pot where the destinies of different peoples, cultures and religions meet. They all have the opportunity to come into contact with the Orthodox Faith…with Russian Orthodox civilisation’.

The International Responsibility of the Russian Orthodox Church

I belong to the generation of those outside Russia who grew up when the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia was captive to the militant atheist regime there. Her voice inside the then Soviet Union was silenced and we soon discovered that her few dependent representatives outside Russia were severely compromised in many respects. We then discovered that other fragments of the Russian emigration had abandoned the Church, unpatriotically and even treacherously never intending to return to her, going the way of the world. Only the majority part of the Church remained outside Russia, in her essence faithful, despite some fringes. This was the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), providentially founded by His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon in 1920. Then we thought it possible that the Church inside Russia might never recover and that only the Church Outside Russia would ever be free to speak on behalf of the whole Church – which is what we did.

However, in 1991 the old atheism in the Soviet Union finally collapsed. Unfortunately, it brought chaos in its train, as in the 1990s ex-Communist Westernisers, many of them Non-Russians, overnight switched to being Capitalist Westernisers, becoming oligarchs. Thus for a time they defeated patriotic forces, betraying the heritage of the former Russian Empire to the new Western atheism. As that tragic period came to an end, in the year 2000 a miracle happened. Building on the mass baptisms of the decade before, the Church inside Russia spoke freely, canonising its martyrs and confessors. From 2000 on it became obvious that the two patriotic parts of the Church, inside Russia and outside Russia, would draw together and become one once more, their voices merging in a choir. Today, the faithful remnants of Western peoples, who have been entirely abandoned by their governments to atheism, are beginning to look to the reunited Russian Orthodox Church for answers to their questions.

First of all, the reunited Russian Orthodox Church has the view of humanity as spiritual beings, beings with a spiritual destiny, free children of eternity with immortal souls, not slaves of death and determinism and of contemporary fashions and passions. Secondly, therefore, our society is based on spiritual and moral values and its purpose is to transfigure humanity positively. It encourages in humanity spiritual freedom, freedom from fashions and passions, and does not bring it down to the bestial level of animals, as does the apostatic West. Thirdly, and finally, the Orthodox Christian State therefore exists in order to raise humanity up through providing the means to both physical and spiritual life. This means encouraging traditional values, specifically those of Orthodox Christian culture. Such culture is universal in its spirit and meaning, for it is the fruit of a Church whose emblem is the double-headed eagle, uniting and not dividing East and West, Asia and Europe.

Today, specifically, we should not forget that this same Orthodox Christian culture was at the birth of Europe nearly two thousand years ago, but not at the birth of modern European culture. That culture in fact is not European at all, but anti-European, because it is anti-Christian, having rejected Christian civilisation. Indeed, Orthodox Christian culture is infinitely more European than present-day post-modern European culture. As a true European, St Nicholas of Zhicha, wrote generations ago, the real Europe was created by Christ, Who pulled it up out of the darkness of paganism and barbarism, giving it the ability to create new Christian civilisation and culture. But this is precisely what contemporary Western Europe has for exactly one hundred years rejected, spat on, murdered in its trenches, burned in its crematoria and buried. Today, through Russia, Europe has the unique and also last chance to return to its Christian roots, to the Age of the Saints, to the culture of Christ.

In other words, Western Europe now has the opportunity to follow the Russian Orthodox Church or else, as its elite is now doing in the Ukraine and in Russia, to spit on it in contempt. Only when brainwashed Western people understand the big picture, what they have been deprived of for 1,000 years, will they regain Orthodox Christian culture and so meaning to their lives and a consistent and logical world view. Inside Russia, and outside Russia in our regional, multinational Russian Orthodox churches, we offer the understanding of Incarnate Christianity as an Empire of the Spirit, genuine Orthodox Christianity, the Sovereignty of the Spirit. The time has come for the West, and the Westernised, to choose between the pseudo-culture of globalism, which is no culture at all, as it perverts and destroys the meaning of human life. Recivilisation through uncorrupted Orthodox Christianity or spiritual and physical suicide. This is the choice for the Western world.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
East of England Orthodox Church

Patriarch of All the Northern Lands

At a press conference in Moscow on 24 September, His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill answered questions from journalists about the Church. Particular attention was paid to the historical development of the Patriarchate itself. It was noted that when the Patriarchate was created in 1589 by all the Eastern Patriarchs, the title granted to the Russian Patriarch was ‘Archbishop of Moscow and Patriarch of all the Northern Lands’. Indeed, this was the title used until the uncanonical abolition of the Patriarchate by Peter I. His Holiness explained that the word ‘Patriarchate’ does not signify some mononational entity, jurisdiction over one ethnic group (as in the modern corruption of the term), but canonical jurisdiction over a part of the world. This was, for example, the meaning of the usage in the old Roman Patriarchate in multinational Western Europe, which lasted until 1054.

It is also the meaning of the usage for the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which had jurisdiction over the now non-existent Byzantine Empire, the Pope (Patriarch) of Alexandria, whose Patriarchate has jurisdiction over lands to the south of the Byzantine Empire (Africa) and the Patriarch of Antioch whose Patriarchate has jurisdiction over lands to the east of the Byzantine Empire. Patriarch Kyrill explained that after the Patriarch (Pope) of Rome fell away from the Orthodox Christian Faith, so the ‘Patriarch of Moscow, All the Russias and All the Northern Lands’ was chosen to replace him as Patriarch of all Christendom to the north of the Byzantine Empire. Since this title has never been cancelled, it remains in force today. As the Patriarch commented, this means that the Patriarch has to take into account the interests of all the peoples who are in his jurisdiction. To imagine that he is Patriarch of only the peoples of the contemporary Russian Federation is quite unfounded.

A Warning from Future History

From ‘The World since the Fall of the Berlin Wall’ (1989-2039)

Chapter 12

The Proposed Third World War and the Ukraine

Although it is only twenty-five years ago, 2014 still seems like a century away to those of the present generation. Incredible though it now appears, by 2014 extremist elements in the political and military-industrial complex in the US and the rest of the Anglosphere (UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and their puppets in the European Union were minded to start a Third World War and were even prepared to use nuclear arms. If these extremists could have had their way, this would have entailed all the inevitable human blood sacrifices of any War, which are so delightful to Satan. If moderates had been unable to control the aggression of those who wanted to start such a War, they would open it with an anti-Christian war, a new Teutonic Crusade, in the Ukraine, which the elite had already designated as a battleground between good and evil, Christendom and Satanism, Orthodoxy and the West. Why would this War be started precisely in the Ukraine, and not on alternative battlefields in the Middle East and China?

In order to understand this, we have to remember that a small part of eastern Poland (then called the western Ukraine) was Uniat and schismatic, that is, outside Holy Rus on account of its spiritual degeneration or nationalism. Therefore the rest of the then Ukraine had to be tested. Was it really Russian Orthodox, or was it merely like the Uniat and schismatic part, observing outward rituals disguising inward decay? In any case, from the Western viewpoint, the international Russian Orthodox Church had at all costs to be destroyed as a spiritual entity, divided into dissident sects and reduced to irrelevant folklore and nationalism, like the CIA-approved new calendarist Local Orthodox Churches and their old calendarist sects, or, even better, like the inherently culturally enslaved Protestant and Catholic churches. The Russian Church was the centre of resistance to Western exploitation of resources, the last barrier to global hegemony and the object of revenge for many, since her defeat of the earlier Western forerunners of Antichrist, Napoleon and Hitler.

Satanism and the Ukraine

Now Satanism is always accompanied by human sacrifice. This had already been seen in the bloodbaths of the First and Second World Wars in the first half of the last century and in the abortion holocaust which followed them. And the sure sign that Satanism was present in the Ukraine could be seen in the seizure and destruction of churches and human sacrifices and atrocities, including torture, mass murder and even crucifixion, organized by the Fascist regime in Kiev. Thus, already by the autumn of 2014 thousands of Ukrainians and an airliner full of Western civilians, had been sacrificed on the altar of Western secularism, not only in the eastern Ukraine, but also in the north and the south of the country, in Kharkov and Odessa. US tanks and troops were by then pouring into Poland, Romania and the Baltics.

The scene was being set by the hawks standing behind the US frontman Obama, the winner of the CIA-financed Nobel peace prize. By 2014 the Euroatlantic coalition, run by Washington ever since its occupation of Western Europe in 1944 and Eastern Europe after 1988, represented only a declining 10% of the world population and was facing bankruptcy. For the Euroatlantic elite a war, if possible a World War, seemed the obvious solution to its internal problems. By its actions in the Ukraine, the coalition, which pretentiously styled itself ‘the international community’, had isolated itself from the rest of the world. Thus, in the face of Western aggression, Russia had already turned east, tightening its bonds with China. With the whole of Eurasia set against Western aggression, the coalition therefore began provoking China.

Satanism and the USA

Satanism had been apparent in the very foundation of the USA at the hands of dissident republican and atheist Europeans. It could be seen in the slavery present there from the start and in the blood sacrifice of millions of its slaughtered native peoples, carried out at the hands of those ruled by masons. Immediately after the further ruinous bloodletting of the American Civil War and the North’s barbaric conquest of the South, there began the USA’s international campaign of imperialism. This entailed dividing other lands and peoples all over the world by destabilization, creating internal chaos in order then to rule over them through terroristic wars of intervention in the name of ‘freedom and democracy’ – as in Yugoslavia.

Whether through political cunning or huge bribes made in order to corrupt members of local political and media elites (English-speaking puppets), whether through massive artillery bombardments or carpet bombing, whether through co-ordinating revolutions (as the British government had done in Russia in 1917) or systematically organizing political chaos through social media (as the US had done in many Arab countries and then in the Ukraine in early 2014), whether through the use of atomic weapons or simply favouring, arming and training one faction in a country against another, the US elite’s obsession with control had by then become global. No power on earth could restrain it – unless it was the empire of the Spirit – Holy Rus.

Satanism and the EU

Now the Christian State has as its ideal the provision for the potential attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, the Satanic State always has as its aim the provision for the potential attainment of hell through worldly comfort under illusory slogans such as ‘liberty, fraternity and equality’. Therefore, all who rejected the Satanic State’s aim, wherever they lived in the world, had to be tyrannized, their phones tapped and their electronic messages controlled. Those who tyrannized in this way believed like Lucifer that: ‘We shall be like God’. And such was the path to Antichrist adopted by the EU.

Therefore every country in Europe had to be subjugated to the EU, the structure for the new world order in Europe. The EU’s Satanic nature was revealed in its self-justifying demand not only that the sterile sin of Sodom be recognized as natural and sinless, but also in a whole series of anti-Christian laws, closing churches, encouraging massive Muslim immigration, banning the cross in public places and making human sacrifices through euthanasia and abortions, the sign of which was the Satanically-inspired smoke from aborted babies’ bodies, belching forth from hospital and clinic chimneys throughout the EU.

The Proposed Path to Antichrist

Those national elites who joined the EU at that time were undertaking to destroy the souls of their peoples, their national traditions, cultures, identities, morality and the family, every vestige and ideal of Christianity, so that all would be ready to accept Antichrist. If any countries resisted, they would be bombed into submission or, failing that, economic sanctions would be applied to them in order to annihilate them physically. Even countries that until recently, two generations before, had been nominally Christian, began foisting Satanism on the still relatively innocent peoples of Eastern Europe.

Those countries were attempting to corrupt Eastern Europe spiritually, morally and physically in the name of the future World Government. All of this was done under the disguise of consumer comfort and freedom. They said: ‘Renounce Christ and the commandments and then you will have the right to our bread and circuses’. Thus, the Western elites, elected by minorities through media manipulation and public relations, became the enemies of their nations’ traditions, the enemies of their own peoples. But by the time zombified populations realized this, it would be too late.

Contamination

By then the population, zombified by the State-controlled media, would also have been poisoned by genetically modified foods, which even insects refused to eat, by hormones and additives, by chemical and nuclear pollutants causing cancer, autism and debilitating allergies, by heavy metals, by foods ‘for the third world’, so that there would be nothing healthy to buy. This had already become visible in the USA, where 60% of the population had been poisoned by contaminated foods and genocide through obesity, cancer, heart attacks and diabetes was taking place.

Having plagued its peoples by sterility and the inability to conceive, creating the need to conceive in test tubes, through surrogates or else to adopt children from elsewhere in the world, the Western elite also removed children from their natural parents and created families of two fathers or two mothers, brainwashing the people through propaganda to think that this was normal. The elite thus ensured the ignorance of the people, making sure that their only beliefs were death and materialism, that it did not matter what one was, only what one had. Orthodox Christianity or the West, life or death, here was the choice.

How it All Turned Out

Such were the thoughts of the elite in October 2014; but the elite had forgotten the old saying: Man proposes, but God disposes. And so it was that…… (text interrupted at this point).