Daily Archives: June 14, 2015

A Vision for the Future Orthodox Church in Western Europe

Sadly, vision has all too often been in short supply when it comes to a future Orthodox Church for Western Europe, On the one hand, there have been those, whom I have known personally, who failed to rise to the challenge and simply rejected the concept, preferring the ethnic ghetto and nationalist club and hiding behind Slavonic or Greek. On the other hand, there have been those who wanted to create ‘une structure d’attente’, a temporary structure waiting to be absorbed into Roman Catholicism, in the notorious and legendary words of one Jesuit-educated senior priest of the Paris Jurisdiction over 35 years ago.

At present one view is that the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople should make autonomous its Western European group or ‘brotherhood’, as it has already done in Finland and Estonia. This would be based on extreme liberalism and a copying of modernist Roman Catholicism (Roman Catholic calendar, no confession, intercommunion, no iconostasis, clean-shaven clergy, masonry, an upper middle-class pseudo-intellectual ethos with as many members as possible holding degrees in philosophy etc). Such an exclusive club is in fact just as ethnic as the ethnic ghetto; worse, it is class-ridden as well.

Only recently, I have come across two cases of Russian Orthodox being refused confession by such groups because they did ‘not have any sins’. One 25-year-old Romanian priest- ‘theologian’ actually told one that confession was ‘no longer necessary’. The other was told that ‘since you have not murdered anyone, you do not need confession’. Others have been told that they must abandon the Orthodox calendar. Another who attended the chapel of a tiny convert group defined it as ‘an upper class club for Anglicans’. All that happens is that the faithful are scandalized and quit such groups in search of ‘real Orthodox’.

I quote these sad examples because it is clear that the Church of the future can never be built on such practices because they are exclusive. Just as nothing can be built on a mononational and monolingual (be it Greek, Slavonic, Romanian, English, French or German) ethnic narrowness. The future will be built on inclusivity. And that inclusivity will not be built on a modernist, anti-Orthodox ideology, whose tone is set by the CIA, but on respect for the feelings of the faithful (and not lapsed) Orthodox people. The Church is the people; we are not clericalists in the Orthodox Church.

The Church of the future will be built on uniting different nationalities of Orthodox, not on dividing them by minimalism, built on being inclusive, not exclusive. The most anti-pastoral aspect of this is the attempt to impose on faithful Orthodox a degutted, pseudo-Orthodox, modernist ideology. If convert and semi-Uniat Orthodox want faithful Orthodox to come to their churches and chapels, then they must first become Orthodox themselves. ‘Halfodoxy’ has no attraction to us whatsoever. We do not ask for an acceptance of another language, simply an acceptance of the Orthodox Faith and Tradition.

How the World Was Turned Upside Down

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls. (Bill Bryson)

Many may have heard of the slogan that the Nazis erected over their slave camps: Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Makes your Free. So Slavery was proclaimed to be Freedom and Life became Death. However, it is not only the Goebbels-run Public Relations of the Nazis which, Orwellian-like, made truth into lies and lies into truth. As they say: ‘A commentary on the times is that the word ‘honesty’ is now preceded by the word ‘old-fashioned’. Thus:

Feminism is anti-Feminine, since it has led only to the masculinization of women and their subjugation to the tyranny of GDP: ‘Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen’ (Compton Mackenzie).

The end of the Cold War, which was supposed to lead to freedom, was achieved by colossal debt-enslavement to bankers.

The European Union is anti-European, since it has led to the destruction of the identities of the peoples of Europe.

The Educational System, become a tick-box exam-factory, has made pupils stupid, into zombies unable to think for themselves.

In the words of R.A. Knox: ‘It is stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil, when he is the only explanation for it’.

Why I Am Russian Orthodox

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats

Most people belong to one religion or another simply because they were born to a particular family in a particular country. Thus, most Indians are Hindu, most Arabs, Afghans, Indonesians and Iranians are Muslim, most Tibetans are Buddhist. Similarly, most, though not all, Catholics have connections to Latin countries and their colonies (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Angola, Niger, Brazil, the Philippines etc). And most Protestants belong to Germanic countries (Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, Britain and the countries of the former British Empire, the USA, Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa etc).

Similarly, most of the 216 million Orthodox Christians, belonging to the family of the at present 14 Local Orthodox Churches, are Orthodox because they belong to certain nationalities – mainly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe (Syrians, Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, Georgians, Romanians, Bulgarians etc). These are mononational Churches. But even most of the non-mononational flock of 164 million Russian Orthodox of 65 different nationalities, are Orthodox because they have been born to a particular family.

However, with prayer, experience of life and thought there are those Russian Orthodox who become conscious Russian Orthodox and come to have a consistent and logical Russian Orthodox world-view. In my own case this is what began to happen to me when I was twelve years old and, living in England, saw the film ‘Dr Zhivago’. This, curiously, was the beginning of my own pilgrimage. By the time I was in my twenties, after experience, prayer and thought, I had worked out a consistent and logical Russian Orthodox world view and I have tried to live by it ever since, despite my human weaknesses.

Such a world-view takes into account our universal Orthodox Christian beliefs, found in the Scriptures, that the universe and mankind were created by God; that mankind fell from bliss into sin and so paganism (institutionalized sin); then was cleansed by the Flood in the time of Noah; restored by the Coming and Resurrection of Christ the Son of God Who trampled down death by death, which truth we live by following the Church, the Body of Christ, through the Holy Spirit Who was sent down to us; but that nevertheless near the end of time the world will be destroyed by sin and the apocalyptic coming of Antichrist, who will be enthroned in Jerusalem, only to be dethroned by the Second Coming of Christ at the very end.

The knowledge through faith that the world will end through the rejection of Christ (for Antichrist is by definition the rejection of Christ) means that we have always known that mankind will fall back into paganism. In other words, sin will be institutionalized, it will become systematic and accepted as the norm. This is exactly what was prophesied already in the New Testament. For example: ‘But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without natural affection, truce-breakers, slanderers, profligates, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of religion, but denying the power of it: from such turn away’ (2 Tim 3, 1-5).

Today’s question then is how can it be that the Western world – once Christian – has fallen into such a state of depravity, which its elite is now spreading by force and bribery throughout the world? How has the Western world become the ‘missionary centre for institutionalized sin’, the centre which, like an anti-St John the Baptist, is preparing the way for the coming of Antichrist, the building of whose Temple in Jerusalem US Protestants, for instance, are actively funding? It is very difficult for one who belongs to the Western Catholic/Protestant world to understand this paradox.

The understanding of this paradox is and always has been abundantly clear to Christians who do not belong to the Catholic/Protestant world, but belong to the Orthodox Church. We look at the world from ‘outside the box’. Thus, the Orthodox Church has for centuries believed and prophesied that Antichrist and the end of the world will come as a result of the activities of Non-Orthodox outside Her. To take but a very recent example, we have St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1948). At the height of the dark night of Stalinist persecution of the Church in Russia he prophesied that the port of Saint Petersburg would one day fill with ships of Western people who would not be allowed baptism in their own countries and so would come to Russia for baptism. Eighty years on that time is now coming.

The question may be asked why Orthodox, though respecting the sincerity, beliefs and values of individual Catholics and Protestants and eagerly co-operating with them in the areas where we fully agree, cannot be Catholic or Protestant, but insist on belonging to the Orthodox Church. The answer is simple: for Orthodox Christians, Catholicism and Protestantism are part of the problem: of course it is the isms that are the danger, not the individual people, whom we regard not as enemies, but as naïve victims brainwashed by their isms. Thus, where did the modern secular, anti-Christian and repaganized world come from, how did it all come about, where were its seeds sown?

The secular, anti-Christian world came into being because it is a degeneration from Protestantism, it is post-Protestantism. And Protestantism is a Western cultural phenomenon of the 16th century, in England for instance created by the bloodthirsty monster Henry VIII. Protestantism created modern Capitalism (Mammonism) and commercial empires like the British and the American with their massacres of Hindus, Native Americans, Confederates, Africans, Boers, Vietnamese, Iraqis etc. For Orthodox who have belonged to the Orthodox Church since the day of Pentecost in 33 AD, Protestantism has in any case no attraction whatsoever, as it is a recent invention and, moreover, is conditioned by simply being anti-Catholic. Since Orthodox have never been Catholics, that cultural conditioning which created Protestantism by reaction to Catholicism is completely irrelevant.

If Protestantism is at the root of the modern world and is fundamentally a sort of anti-Catholicism, what then is the Orthodox view of Catholicism? Surely it is closer to Orthodoxy? Catholicism is clearly older, more historic, it existed before the 16th century, it has a veneration for the Mother of God, the saints, it has a liturgical sense, sacraments and a priesthood – it has so much spiritual wealth, like Orthodoxy, that Protestantism simply does not have. However, for Orthodox, Catholicism has existed only since the 11th century – it too is recent, albeit less recent. It too is ultimately a manmade adaptation of Christianity and the Church, a compromise which has put local culture above the Eternal Truth of the Church of God. Relative to Protestantism, it is a step nearer Orthodoxy, but it is still a step away.

For Orthodox, Catholicism is a religion adapted from Orthodoxy (hence the closer connections than with Protestantism, which is an adaptation of Catholicism, a step further away) for the justification of aggressive Western political aims. This we saw with the Papal-encouraged Norman Invasion of England in 1066, the next Crusades soon after, the invasion of Ireland, the sacking of the Christian capital of New Rome (Constantinople) in 1204, the invasions of the Teutonic Knights, the Inquisition, the cruel conquest of what we now call Latin America etc. The centre of (Roman) Catholicism, Rome, was not where Christianity began; that was Jerusalem, which is the spiritual and historic centre of the Orthodox Church. In Orthodox eyes Rome is reminiscent of pagan Rome, Babylon, which is why the first Christian administrative capital was in newly-established New Rome, a city without a pagan past, a new city for a new, Christian era.

Thus, for Orthodox, Catholicism, is also part of the problem. Catholicism is simply the first stage of the degeneration of the Western world after it had left the Orthodox Church. The second stage, even further from Orthodoxy, as we can see with ‘women-priests’ or the practice of homosexuality, which large branches of Protestantism, unlike Catholicism, accepts, is Protestantism. The third stage is the aggressive secularist ideology of the anti-Christianity of the modern, post-Protestant Western world with its imperialism and colonial exploitation; militarization; genocidal World Wars; the removal of Tsar Nicholas, ‘he who restrains’ (2 Thess 2,7), through the anti-Orthodox Revolution in Russia and creation there of a Zionist-run militant atheist State, which had been so carefully planned and financed from London and New York; concentration camps; atomic bombs; puppet regimes; banana republics; invasions of peaceful countries; revolutions (‘regime changes’); massacres; search for absolute global domination through debt-enslavement to bankers etc.

In a word, the leaders of the Western world, the global elite, are attempting to spread worldwide their ideology of anti-Christianity, which has carefully and progressively been built up on the foundation of a thousand years of Western history. Through deformation after deformation after deformation we have turned full circle, from a Western Europe which was Orthodox Christian at the end of the first millennium after Christ to one whose elite is today not only anti-Christian but increasingly openly Satanic in its promotion of and reversion to paganism. What are we to do? We, in the Orthodox Church, and particularly in by far the largest and strongest Orthodox Church, the Russian, are those who lead resistance to the project of the global elite, who wish to see the enthronement of Antichrist in their rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem so that they can rule the world by deception.

That is why the global elite, in the literal words of its representatives like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Tony Blair or Carl Bildt, speak quite openly of their desire to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church. They want to do with us what they long ago did to the Protestant world and, since the protestantizing Second Vatican Council over fifty years ago, to the Catholic world, in other words, to castrate us spiritually, to degut us and neutralize us as the centre of spiritual resistance to their One World Project. They want to do with the Russian Orthodox Church what they have already tried to do with two or three of the much smaller and weaker Local Orthodox Churches, replacing the Patriarchs with their own candidates, telling us what to say and do, destroying our Faith, ‘modernizing’ us. They will not succeed – because our Master is Christ; theirs is Satan.

The Fight for Freedom in Europe Continues

The article below was written within days of the G7 meeting in Germany. Thus, those who support the neo-Nazi puppet regime in Kiev, issued a proclamation from Hitler’s villa outside Munich (!)proclaiming a fight against ‘corruption’! Of course, in the real world the ghetto-like G7 is now irrelevant, surpassed by the economies of the five BRICS countries. Indeed, there are those who fight for freedom from US/EU/NATO tyranny and corruption and work for the liberation of the peoples of the Ukraine from the CIA-run Kievan dictatorship. Reader, read on:

Slovak volunteer in the Donbass: “It’s our way of fighting the EU and NATO.”

Posted: 12 Jun 2015 12:05 PM PDT

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten
June 11, 2016

Translated from the German by Tom Winter

A surprising melange is coming into view at the Ukraine front: Mercenaries from the Czech Republic and Slovakia have shifted over to the Donbass to fight against NATO. Their home countries are powerless: the rebels apparently pay better.

The Slovaks and Czechs who are currently fighting in eastern Ukraine with the volunteer militias against the Kievan Army intend to put together their own unit that would be part of the so-called International Brigade of the 15th Army.

“The Brigade has a lot of Czechs and Slovaks. They get around 350 Euros a month; they live in barracks and are equipped with tanks and armoured personnel carriers,” reports the Slovakian news portal aktuality.sk.

The news portal conducted an interview Monday with a Slovak mercenary soldier, who says that the most prominent Slovak fighter in Ukraine was Martin “Sojka” Keprta, but that he is now hospitalized with injuries from the fighting.

So far as equipment is concerned, the Slovak source says there are old Mosin-Nagant repeating rifles from Soviet times, plus Kalashnikovs of two different calibres, 5.45, and 7.62 mm, and anti-tank weapons, including PTURs,** grenade launcher RPGs, and all the other weapons that they have captured.

When asked about the involvement of Russian officers or commanders in the Eastern Ukraine conflict, the man says: “In our unit there is no Russian commander. Russia helps us politically and morally. They also provide us with humanitarian aid, which is more than necessary. The Russian military doesn’t have to be here on the spot: Every day the admissions committee in Donbass registers five to twenty people, who are signed in and are going to serve. We have, in contrast to the opposite side, of course, a shortage of motorized transport. ”

Then the Slovak mercenary shares the political motivation behind his service in eastern Ukraine. The mercenary, literally: “We see the EU as a dictatorship and NATO as an aggressive pact. This is our way of fighting the EU and NATO.”

On the same day, the Slovak government released an opinion on the investigative report of aktuality.sk. The Slovak newspaper TERAZ Slovensko quoted the Foreign Ministry in Bratislava: “Such adventurers act alone and actively contribute to the destabilization of Ukraine and the undermining of diplomatic efforts. They hurt the foreign policy interests of the Slovak Republic.

“The government keeps an open and clear distance from these adventurers. The priority of the foreign policy of Slovakia remains the stabilization of the situation in Ukraine in order to achieve a peaceful solution to the crisis through diplomatic negotiations. We support the independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and condemn all attempts to escalate the conflict. ”

The spokesman for the Slovak Interior Ministry, Petar Lazarov, on the other hand wanted weigh in “for security and tactical reasons:” “Slovaks who are fighting for a foreign military or their units without authorization from the president face a prison sentence of two to eight years.”

In eastern Ukraine there are numerous mercenaries from Europe. They are fighting against one side or the other. There are also mercenaries of the US company Academi, formerly Blackwater, among them.

**Mosin-Nagant is a five-shot, bolt action rifle first developed in 1891, corresponding to an American Winchester; the PTUR (“bassoon”) is a wire-guided rocket launched from a tripod-mounted tube. Big enough to require a three-man team.]

Translator’s note: There are European politicians pushing for independence from NATO, Wagenknecht in Germany, and Fillon in France, for instance. They won’t go to jail. Mercenaries from Academi won’t go to jail either.

A Reply to Fr George Mitrofanov

http://www.rocorstudies.org/interviews/2015/06/04/the-outcasts-unite-with-the-outcasts-on-the-eight-anniversary-of-the-reestablishment-of-canonical-communion-within-the-russian-orthodox-church/

In his strangely-titled interview “The Outcasts Unite with the Outcasts” (see above), Archpriest George Mitrofanov, himself perhaps something of an outcast, has declared that the two parts of the Russian Church united far ‘too late and far too fast’. With all respect, I am surprised by both these views.

Firstly, ‘too late’ is only from the viewpoint of those who want the past back. The past was of course dead 90 years after the Revolution. It is totally unrealistic to imagine that the past could be alive after 90 years, after a human lifetime. And why would you wish the past to be alive? It was the decadence of the past that caused the Russian Revolution. Recreate the past and all you will do is create another Revolution. All parts of the Church have moved on, we live in the here and now, united by the New Martyrs and Confessors created by the Revolution, not united by some unrealistic nostalgia for a past that had many faults.

Our unity is not that of ‘outcasts with the outcasts’, and even less of ‘the marginal with the marginal’ (as in the original Russian), but of the mainstream with the mainstream. It was precisely the marginal (whether marginal extremists of the old calendarist sort in ROCOR or marginal extremists of the renovationist sort in the Sourozh Diocese and elsewhere belonging to the Patriarchal part of the Church) who rejected unity.

Too late? Our unity became inevitable after the long-awaited Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the implementation of that Council which took the Church inside Russia several years. I would say that unity came just at the right time; had we waited longer, many in ROCOR would have joined the Church inside Russia; had we not waited, many in ROCOR would have objected to the haste and there could have been a schism splitting ROCOR down the middle.

Secondly,‘too fast’? Here again we see the idealism of Fr George concerning the principles of the All-Russian Church Council of 1917-1918, and that they (!) had formed the foundation of the life of the diaspora of the Russian Church. In reality, some decisions of that Council were based on the democratism and liberalism of Protestant-style Kerenskyism; thank God they were not all implemented, we do not want the negative aspects of the 1917-18 Council.

Here Fr George also writes that ‘and we most certainly overestimated your ability to influence our situation here’. It would have been an amazing piece of pretentiousness on the part of ROCOR if we had ever imagined that, small as we are and engaged in the mission to bring Orthodoxy to the Non-Orthodox world as we are, which is the real mission of the emigration, we could ever have influenced the situation in Russia.

Internal Russian problems can only be solved by Russians inside Russia; we have no such pretensions. We did not produce the New Martyrs – they were produced in Russia and they will provide healing inside Russia, not us. We have our own problems to solve and we look to our own saints, like St John of Shanghai, to help solve them.

Finally, Fr George writes that, ‘our belated unification’ resulted ‘in members of both parties becoming either at best idealists, or in the worst case just a product of the circumstances’. No doubt there are individuals on both sides who belong to these categories, but only on the fringes. The mainstream knew perfectly well what was happening. The scandals on both sides, for instance, the names of those who had worked for and were compromised by the KGB and the CIA (and MI5 and the DGSE in France), were well known to us; but the mainstream on both sides we had very pragmatic, Incarnational, views.

Inside Russia they knew that they could not go on without those who represented the unSoviet past and outside Russia we knew that we could not go on in isolation, that our mission to the world outside Russia had to be supported from inside Russia. It was precisely the dreamers who refused unity, whether the disincarnate, old calendarist (and sometimes CIA-financed) sectarians on the fringes of ROCOR or the Parisian-inspired disincarnate Russophobes on the fringes of the then Patriarchate (also very clearly supported, at least morally, by CIA-type organizations).

To paraphrase the Irish poet Yeats: Things did not fall apart; the Centre could hold. In other words, since 2007 on the mainstream has won the day.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

Speaker at the Fourth All-Diaspora Council, San Francisco 2006
Concelebrant at the Signing of the Act of Canonical Communion, Moscow 2007