Monthly Archives: February 2016

The Road from Cuba to Crete

Now that the Patriarch’s meeting in Cuba is over, we can begin to look at the deeper significance of the encounter and look ahead beyond the minor details to the big picture.

Firstly, it took place at an airport, on neutral territory.

Secondly, the Havana Declaration was signed in front of an icon of the Kazan Mother of God, which is associated with the expulsion from Moscow of the Catholic Poles 400 years ago.

Thirdly, it was signed by ‘Francis, Bishop of Rome, Pope of the Catholic Church’, not by someone pretentiously claiming universal authority.

Fourthly, the agreement is unanimous in its condemnation of liberal Western values, with their consumerism and exploitation, which are ruining the world environmentally, politically, economically and socially.

Fifthly, with this Declaration the much weakened and humiliated traditional West, in the form of the Vatican, is today in fact asking Russia for help. The Church has gained an ally in Roman Catholicism in defending traditional values.

Sixthly, there is the significance that this meeting took place in Cuba, the location of the largest Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Latin America. This symbolizes the universality of the Orthodox world, in particular of the Russian Orthodox world, on today’s planet.

Finally, given that about one fifth (not one half, as Roman Catholic journalists absurdly claim!) of Russian Orthodox live in what is called ‘the Ukraine’, as we predicted, the Uniats in the Ukraine (living mainly in a small area which formerly belonged to Poland) are very disappointed. According to the Havana Declaration they are more or less destined to die out as a grievous mistake in the dustbin of history.

There is more than this, however. Cuba is where in 1962 US aggression almost started the Third World War and avoided doing so only by removing its missiles that it had deliberately and threateningly sited by the Russian border in Turkey, at which point the Soviet Union removed its response from Cuba. And today we see another and similar risk of a Third World War, beginning only a hundred miles or so from the Holy Land and Armageddon, in Syria. Here US-controlled and NATO Turkey, having already illegally shot down a Russian plane and committing genocide against the Kurds, is now invading. The other US ally, that well-known beacon of freedom, democracy and multiple beheadings, Saudi Arabia, is threatening the same, having been routed in the Yemen and miserably failed to bankrupt Russia by drastically lowering the oil price.

The Western-founded and -trained and Saudi-and Qatari-financed Islamic State organization is facing rout at the hands of Syria and Russia. The latter are successfully defending Aleppo and are freeing areas of Syria from terrorist control. Of course, the Western State media have, on orders from their masters, gone berserk, relaying anti-Russian propaganda on behalf of the terrorists. Apparently the Russians are bombing hospitals and killing children – exactly what the USA did in Afghanistan last year. Once again the Western propaganda machine is talking about itself and imputing to others its own crimes. This reflects the equally nonsensical propaganda spouting forth from the bankrupt Galician Uniats and sectarians whom the US put in control of Kiev two years ago and the hysteria that NATO hawks are self-justifyingly whipping up in the Baltics about some mythical Russian invasion.

Beyond all this, there is even deeper significance. This year two events are due to occur in the Church: the first event is this February’s meeting between the de facto leader of the Church and the head of Roman Catholicism that has already taken place on the island of Cuba. The second event is the meeting due to occur in June on another island – Crete. That meeting was supposed to have taken place in Turkey in premises no doubt bugged by the CIA and taking place according to the agenda of its puppets. If the meeting does take place, it will now take place in different, bug-free premises and according to an agenda very different from the humanist one, redolent of the 1960s, that had been set by powers alien to the Church.

It is now clear that the meeting in Cuba, decided last September and with its pre-arranged Havana Statement, has in fact been preparatory to the Crete meeting. There is now no longer any ambiguity as to who leads the Church on earth and who will in fact lead the meeting in Crete. And so it is equally clear that the US-appointed clericalists on the fringes of the Church will not be even setting the agenda at the meeting in Crete, let alone taking decisions. The Church is awake and we the people are now having our say.

On the Joint Statement

As we know, on the afternoon of the Feast of the Three Great Hierarchs, the Pope of Rome met the Russian Orthodox Patriarch in Cuba, situated between north and south, east and west. And they met as equals, unlike in the usual meetings between Orthodox and Roman Catholics where the former are humiliated by the latter. This new respect by the Roman Catholics for uncompromised Orthodoxy is to be welcomed, however much some Orthodox may doubt its sincerity. Indeed, a writer in the ‘Catholic Herald’ is complaining about it http://catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2016/02/13/ the-vatican-did-everything-to-accommodate-patriarch-kirill-but-received-little-in-return/). Apparently that author believes that the Orthodox should be humiliated by the Imperialism of Rome!

I have been asked by several correspondents to say a few words about the document that both signed and which has been widely circulated on the internet. First of all, it must be understood that the statement issued by both sides is of course not a dogmatic one, but a diplomatic one. Some have not understood this, especially given the references to ‘Christian Churches’, which seems very strange when all Orthodox know that there is only One Church, the Orthodox Church. Many decades ago the much-respected writer of Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Fr Michael Pomazansky, was asked the question why we Orthodox on occasions do talk about heterodox ‘churches’. He explained very simply that this is because the heterodox, although outside the Church, have still conserved part of the heritage of the Church.

For example, most Roman Catholics and quite a few Protestants believe that God is a Trinity and that Jesus Christ is True God and True Man. Why? Because this is the heritage which they have kept from the Orthodox Church in the first millennium, which in the statement is called ‘The Undivided Church’. Yes, outside the Church there are no sacraments, just rituals, sacramental forms, but we still call a Roman Catholic ‘church’ a church and a Roman Catholic priest ‘Father;’ and a Roman Catholic bishop ‘Bishop’, if they so wish to be addressed.

Equally, we allow Roman Catholics to visit our churches and show them kindness. In other words, we show respect and courtesy, that is Christian charity. As the saying goes, ‘You will catch more flies with honey than vinegar’. Just as we are strict on dogmatic issues, we can also show generosity and not meanness of spirit in everyday life. And we repeat, this document is not a dogmatic one, but a diplomatic one. It is therefore binding on no Orthodox in the world, except on the signatory of course.

Let us now look at the positive aspects of this joint statement. There are three of these:

Firstly, the Pope of Rome agrees with the Orthodox Church that the liberal secularism of the Western world (which Roman Catholicism engendered through its deformation of the Trinitarian Dogma) and its cultural imperialism is completely unacceptable. Is Roman Catholicism regretting opening Pandora’s Box a thousand years ago?

Secondly, the Pope agrees with the Church that we must do as much as we can to protect Christians (all of them Orthodox or former Orthodox) in the Middle East from Western-caused and Western-allowed ethnic cleansing in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Millions have fled for their lives, over a million Christians in Iraq alone, and only military action by the Russian Federation has kept Syria intact and the Patriarch of Antioch in Damascus.

Thirdly, the Pope of Rome agrees, at least on paper, that Uniatism has no future and that it must gradually die out, so that it becomes a case for textbooks on historical errors. No more proselytization and stealing of churches in the Ukraine. In any case if there is to be any hope that Roman Catholicism might draw closer to the Church of God, Uniatism must be restrained. The Uniats are now very worried: the Pope is abandoning them as the lost cause which they always have been.

Finally, one correspondent has posed a question about my article from before the meeting, entitled: ‘Our Man in Havana: From the Catacombs to the World Stage’. He says that Patriarch Kyrill is issued from the 1943 agreement with Stalin, which at last allowed the Church inside the then Soviet Union to operate freely, and not issued from the catacombs. There is here a fundamental misconception, which is to contrast the Catacomb Church with the ‘official Church’. They were of course one and the same; to say otherwise is to fall into sectarianism, to put oneself outside the Church, just like Roman Catholics and Uniats.

To fall into sectarianism also means to cut oneself off from the saints. Thus, the saints listed in Fr Seraphim Rose’s excellent and well-known 1970’s book ‘Russia’s Catacomb Saints’ from before 1943 are naturally saints venerated in the ‘official’ Russian Orthodox Church. To fall into sectarianism is also to cut oneself off from St Matrona of Moscow, St Luke of the Crimea, St Sebastian of Karaganda, St Laurence of Chernigov, St Kuksha of Odessa, the newly-revealed St Seraphim of Sofia, the saints of Glinsk and many, many others.

This self-isolation and drying-up of love is what happens to those who believe in a fictional ‘Soviet Church’. No such thing ever existed, however much the CIA pays or hoodwinks people to believe in it. There was just the Russian Orthodox Church under the long dead Soviet regime. True, a few long since dead individuals compromised themselves at that time under political pressure, but that is between them and God Who will judge them and all of us. For Orthodoxy the Church is the whole people of God, not a few compromised clerics. We are not clericalist puritans. As the ever-memorable Metr Philaret of Moscow, himself a priest of the Patriarchate of Moscow for fifteen years and his father a bishop of the Patriarchate, said, the fact that individuals compromised themselves is no reason to fall into the heresy of Donatism. St John of Shanghai agreed with this.

Most of the clergy who appeared after 1943 were already clergy beforehand, many of them ordained and consecrated even before the Revolution. In other words, they were not ‘invented’ by Stalin in 1943, but had already existed, underground, in the catacombs, before 1943. As Solzhenitsyn remarked in the 1970s, and as I myself witnessed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, ‘official priests’ were the catacomb priests. Thus, bishops of the ‘official Church’ issued priests with extra antimensia for secret services and those priests baptized and preached secretly, since they were not allowed to openly, all the while celebrating the Liturgy and other allowed services openly in ‘official’ churches.

As for Patriarch Kyrill, his father, an archpriest, spent several years in prison under the Soviets; it is in this sense that the whole Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia has come out of the catacombs – and is now on the world stage, symbolized by Patriarch Kyrill.

More Criticism of ‘Pan-Orthodox’ Draft Documents

METROPOLITAN OF LIMASSOL: “WHAT UNITY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? THOSE WHO DEPARTED FROM THE CHURCH ARE HERETICS AND SCHISMATICS”

There are serious gaps in the theological and canonical discussions at the upcoming meeting of the Pan-Orthodox Synod, notes Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol.

In a letter, of which the Agency of Religious News Romfea.gr has published extracts, the eminent hierarch does not consider there to be any problem of restoring the unity of Christians, since this, in his opinion, was never disrupted. Rather, certain Christians chose a path different to the one we follow, that of the original Orthodox truth.

There are no churches or confessions. Rather, these have cut themselves off from the Church and must be considered heretics and schismatics, notes His Eminence, expressing confusion as to why such an important issue has been ignored.

The stance of His Eminence, who invokes the right of each hierarch to express his opinion regarding such an important event, is sure to cause discussion and debate within Orthodoxy.

“Since, in agreement with regulations sent to us regarding the organisation and operation of the Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church, and in particular article 12, paragraphs 2 and 3, indicate that we are entitled first to express our views at our local Synod, I, having examined my conscience, humbly submit to the Holy and Sacred Synod of our holy Church my views and opinions regarding the following matters,” the Reverend Metroplitan Athanasios underlines in his letter.

In his letter, to which Romfea.gr gained exclusive access, His Eminence Athanasios speaks about the text of the 5th Preconciliar Pan-Orthodox Conference held in Chambesy in October entitled “Decision – Relations of the Orthodox Church to the rest of the Christian world,” stating the following:

“I am in total agreement with the first three articles of the text. However, at article 4 onwards, I have made the following observations: “The Orthodox Church has always prayed ‘for the union of all’ – I believe this to mean the return to and union with Her of all those who broke away and distanced themselves from Her, of heretics and schismatics, once they have renounced their heresy and schism and flee from those things with repentance and are integrated and joined – united – with the Orthodox Church in accordance with the teachings of the sacred canons,” remarks His Eminence Athanasios.

His Eminence continues: “The Orthodox Church of Christ never lost the ‘unity of faith and the communion of the Holy Spirit” and does not accept the theory of the restoration of the unity of those ‘who believe in Christ,’ because it believes that the unity of those who believe in Christ already exists in the unity of all of Her baptised children, between themselves and with Christ, in Her correct faith, where no heretics or schismatics are present, for which reason She prays for their return to Orthodoxy in repentance.”

His Eminence completes his letter, of which Romfea.gr has released excerpts, thusly: “I believe that what is stated in article 5 regarding ‘the lost unity of Christians’ is incorrect, because the Church as God’s people, united among themselves and with the Head of the Church which is Christ, never lost this unity and therefore is not in need of rediscovering or seeking it, because it always was, is, and will be just as the Church of Christ has never ceased nor will cease to exist.”

His Eminence Athanasios adds that, “what happened is that groups, peoples or individuals left the body of the Church and the Church prays, and is required to try through mission, that they all return in repentance to the Orthodox Church via the canonical route. In other words, there do not exist other Churches, only heresies and schisms, should we wish to be more precise in our definitions.”

“The expression ‘towards the restoration of Christian unity’ is incorrect because the unity of Christians – the members of the Church of Christ – has never been broken, as long as they remain united to the Church. Separation from the Church and flight from the Church have unfortunately happened numerous times due to heresies and schisms, but there was never a loss of the internal unity of the Church,” His Eminence continues in his letter.

Elsewhere, His Eminence Athanasios states: “I question why the text contains multiple references to ‘Churches’ and ‘Confessions’? What difference and which element allows us to call some Churches and others Confessions? Which is a Church and which a heresy and which a schismatic group or confession? We confess one Church and that all the others are schisms and heresies. I maintain that giving the title ‘Church’ to heretical or schismatic communities is entirely incorrect from a theological, dogmatic and canonical perspective because the Church of Christ is one, as also stated in Article 1, and we cannot refer to a heretical or schismatic community or group outside the Orthodox Church as ‘Church’.”

“At no point does this text state that the only way that leads to union with the Church is solely the repentant return of heretics and schismatics to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ, which according to Article 1 is our Orthodox Church. The reference to the ‘understanding of the tradition of the ancient Church’ gives the impression that there is an ontological difference between the ancient Church of the Seven Ecumenical Councils and the genuine continuation of the same until the present day, namely our Orthodox Church. We believe that there is absolutely no difference between the Church of the 21st century and the Church of the 1st century, because one of the attributes of the Church is the fact we also confess in the Symbol of Faith, namely that it is Apostolic,” stressed the Metropolitan of Limmasol.

The Bishop subsequently underlines that in Article 12, the impression is given that the Orthodox are looking to restore the right faith and unity, giving cause for an unacceptable view.

“Article 12 states that the common purpose of the theological dialogues is ‘the final restoration of unity in correct faith and love’. This gives the impression that we Orthodox are seeking our restoration to correct faith and the unity of love, as if we had lost the right faith and are seeking to discover it through the theological dialogues with the heterodox. I maintain that this theory is theologically unacceptable for us all,” underlines Metropolitan Athanasios.

Elsewhere, His Eminence expresses objections to the text, stressing that “the reference of the text to ‘the World Council of Churches’ gives me the opportunity to make a complaint against occasional syncretistic events which took place therein, but also against its title, since it regards the Orthodox Church as ‘one of the Churches’ or a branch of the one Church which seeks and strives for Her realisation at the World Council of Churches. For us, however, the Church of Christ is one and unique, as we confess in the Symbol of Faith, and not many.”

His Eminence further states: “The view that the preservation of the genuine Orthodox faith is guaranteed only through the synodical system as the only ‘competent and final authority on matters of faith’ is exaggerated and ignores the truth that many synods throughout Church history taught and espoused incorrect and heretical doctrines, and it was the faithful people which rejected them and preserved the Orthodox faith and championed the Orthodox Confession. Neither a synod without the faithful people, the fullness of the Church, nor the people without the synod of Bishops, is able to regard themselves as the Body of Christ and Church of Christ and to correctly express the experience and doctrine of the Church.”

Addressing the Archbishop of Cyprus and the members of the Holy Synod, the Metropolitan of Limassol stresses: “Use of hard or insulting language cannot be made in ecclesiastical encyclicals of this kind, nor do I think anyone desires the use of that form of expression. However, the truth must be expressed with precision and clarity, though naturally with pastoral discernment and genuine love towards all. We owe it also to our brothers who find themselves in heresy or schism to be entirely honest with them, and with love and pain to pray and do everything possible to bring about their return to the Church of Christ.”

“I humbly maintain that texts of such importance and prestige as those of the Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church must be very carefully formulated with theological and canonical precision in order that these ambiguities or untested theological terms do not also give rise to incorrect expressions which could lead to misconceptions and distortions of the correct attitude of the Orthodox Church. Moreover, in order for a Synod to be valid and canonical, it must not depart in any way from the spirit and teaching of the Holy Synods which preceded it, the teaching of the Holy Fathers and Holy Scriptures, and it must be free from any ambiguity in the precise expression of the correct faith,” adds His Eminence Athanasios.

Elsewhere, invoking the Holy Fathers, His Eminence Athanasios stated: “Never did the holy Fathers nor ever in the holy canons or rulings of the sacred Ecumenical or Local Synods, are heretical or schismatic groups referred to as churches. If the heretics are indeed churches, where is the single One Church of Christ and the Apostles?”

The Metropolitan of Limassol also expressed his strong opposition, stressing that those who do not have the right to vote and participate in the Synod are merely ornamental.

“I humbly express my disagreement with the fact that the practice of all Sacred Synods until the present of allowing each bishop a vote is abolished. There was never before a system of ‘one Church, one vote,’ which renders the members of the Holy and Great Synod, with the exception of the primates, mere decorative items by refusing them the right to vote,” His Eminence Athanasios says in his letter.

In closing, the Hierarch of the Church of Cyprus states that: “I do not want to upset anyone with what I wrote, nor do I want to be seen to be teaching judgement of my brothers and fathers in Christ. I simply feel the need to express what my conscience requires me to.”

To read the Metropolitan’s entire letter, see the site of the Holy Metropolis of Limassol.

Translated by Fr. Kristian Akselberg

Romfea

123: Rome, Istanbul, Moscow

According to Canon III of the Second Universal Council and Canon XXVIII of the Fourth Council, the Metropolitan primacy of honour goes not to Jerusalem, but to the City where the Emperor lives. Thus, in the first centuries the Imperial Capital of Rome took the primacy and second place was taken by the Second Rome, New Rome, which the first Christian Emperor had founded and where he soon went to live. However, in the eleventh century Rome fell away from the Church and Holy Orthodoxy and lapsed into a paganised, barbarianized, so-called ‘Christianity’. This new pseudo-Christianity is what lay behind Papal corruption, violence and heresy in the first half of the eleventh century.

Thus, in the second half of that century it fell into the Invasion of England in 1066 and ensuing genocide throughout the Isles, pagan Aristotelian Scholasticism, the Crusades in the Holy Land and Eastern Europe, the human sacrifices made to Satan by the Inquisition, indulgences and mass genocides in ‘religious wars’ in Western Europe and the world’s greatest genocide (75 million dead?) in what became Latin America. Thus, New Rome, the City of the Emperor, took the place of Old Rome. Then in its turn, four hundred years later, this Second or New Rome fell away by betraying the faith to Old Rome and was duly occupied by the Ottomans. Thus, primacy passed to the Third Rome in Moscow, become in its turn the City of the Emperor.

The Emperor is the Defender of the Faith and the real, and not fictitious, Capital of the Church, of Holy Orthodoxy, is the City which extends its protection to all Christians and whose ruler is not ashamed to confess the Orthodox Faith. Since the fifteenth century this has meant Moscow, despite, or in a sense because of, all the Western attacks on it. These attacks were especially ferocious during the twentieth century and paralyzed it for three generations after the Western-organized ‘regime-change’ coup in 1917 and the ensuing genocide by the materialist Bolshevik regime. Today, with revival and restoration at last beginning in an increasingly sovereign Russia, the protection of Christians is exactly what the ruler in Moscow is doing in Syria.

This action has been very successful, with the result that the disastrous Obama regime is now pleading with Russia to allow a truce there; the end-game is approaching. The neocons have failed to effect regime change in Syria, just as the regime-change in the Ukraine, which they effected by toppling its democratic government, has proved to be the catastrophe that we all knew it would be. The defence of Christians in the Ukraine and Syria: this is why Russia is today the object of vicious propaganda attacks from the Western Powers and their demonic masters. The miracle of restoration of the Church inside Russia, however partial, hesitant, fragile and merely beginning, is abhorrent to the demons, for all their hopes of destroying the Church on earth and enthroning Antichrist are having to be postponed.

As regards the meeting of the Patriarch of the Third Rome and of the Pope of the First Rome, all is becoming clear. Both old Romes are now reluctantly ceding their places to the Third Rome, if only by force of circumstance. For it is not the Patriarchs of the First or Second Romes who lead the Church, it is the Patriarch of the Third Rome. He is free of submission to the Pope of Old Rome and to the USA. Thus several Western news agencies have presented the meeting at Havana Airport as the ‘first between the leaders of the two confessions since 1054’ (ABC News). Fox News says much the same. In France ‘Le Journal du Dimanche rightly asserts that the leaders of ‘the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches have not met since the age of the Schism’.

Thus, in reality even for the secular media the regular meetings between the Popes of Rome and the Patriarchs of the Second Rome, today Istanbul, do not count. The Patriarch in Istanbul, a Turkish citizen whose policies are dictated by Joe Biden and the US State Department, is not taken seriously even by the secular media. A compromised faith does not count: the Pope of Rome wants to talk to the real thing. In Italy the newspaper Corriere della Sera quotes the Pope: ‘Russia has imperial blood and so it can give the world a great deal’. The Pope is in fact calling on help from Russia, just as over 200 years ago his predecessor called on help from the Russian Emperor Paul to fight against the atheist Napoleon.

Not least Pope Francis now has to find a way of controlling the devilish hatred for the Church of the Uniats, whom the Vatican has so foolishly again unleashed in the Ukraine. Indeed, the first price for any help that Old Rome needs from the Third Rome in its battle to survive against Secularism, the illegitimate child of its illegitimate Protestant child, will be justice in the Ukraine. There Uniats have stolen churches, maimed and killed – all in the name of the Vatican: a story familiar elsewhere, for example in Serbia. This is why all the Uniat journalists are running scared today: could the South American Pope sabotage their xenophobia, which is justified by their Uniat ideology and their absurd pretence of being Orthodox, and tell them to convert to proper Catholicism or else abandon them?

Catholicism is all but finished in the West: if it is to survive, it has now to look to a restored Russia, the protector of the Church. It has to repent for its millennial and contemporary crimes, not least its co-operation with the Bolsheviks in the 1920s, for which in 1945 it had to pay very dearly after its collaboration with Hitler, pleading for and receiving Orthodox protection. Catholicism is at the crossroads, it can continue on the path of modern secularization, on which it has been for over fifty years, or it can return to the Church of God, incarnate in the first millennium of Western history. Having seen that in Istanbul there is only a minor ethnic cult, multinational Old Rome is now looking to multinational Third Rome for survival.

The Spiritual Empire versus the Neocon Empire

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Gandhi

Introduction: Towards an Orthodox Christian World View

I have over the last forty-three years tried to express an Orthodox world-view for English-speakers. No doubt, I have at times, perhaps often, been wrong in my assessments. However, that is not the point: as a human-being I have no hope at all of always being right and have no desire at all to get people to agree with me – all the more so as I can so often be wrong. On the contrary, I have always listened with attention and respect to the reasoned views of those who disagree but sign their names (I never answer or even read in full the illogical and often laughable views of anonymous brainwashed Establishment trolls who are ashamed to give their real names; delete is good for them).

The fact is that disagreements are essential for reformulating views. That is how we can draw closer to the truth, which is the only thing that is important. That can only come from praying about events, not from the secular media in themselves and assuming that they may actually occasionally be telling the truth. Above all, what I have hoped to do in all five decades of writing is to provoke people to think and pray for themselves. If I have contributed in any way to forming living souls and not zombies, then that alone has been positive. At this point in history, one so very different from the situation of the 1970s when I consciously began this task, how can I sum up in a few words an Orthodox view of the present world? Below are some thoughts on the present state of the world.

1. Today’s Russian Federation

Russia has been through several phases in her development. It has passed from seventeenth-century Orthodox Muscovy, isolationist and nationalist because forced into a virtual ghetto by Western and then Eastern aggression, to the Imperial Orthodox period which ended in the pro-Western coup d’etat of 1917. Organized from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg, that coup handed power to the murderous thugs, bank robbers and bandits of the equally Imperial but atheist period that ended officially in 1991. However, in reality, its banditry continued in even fuller flow until 2000 with the utterly corrupt, ‘ex-Communist’, Western-backed oligarchs who pillaged the public assets of the Soviet Union, no longer restrained by Stalinist leaders. (That is the only reason why they hate Stalin). With the miracle of 2000, this phase ended and we have moved to the far more promising period of Sovereign revival that has been unfolding over the last sixteen years.

As a result of the 300 year-old Imperial past, today’s Russia suffers from empire-fatigue, whether Imperial Orthodox or Imperial atheist. It has learned from its previous mistakes and also from the tragic hubris of today’s Neocon Empire, run from Washington, which seeks totalitarian global control. The last thing that the most perceptive and patriotic thinkers and doers of Russia want is the revival of a physical Empire. The only Empire they want is a spiritual Empire, the chance to spread the Light of Orthodox values, beyond the artifices of left and right, throughout itself and around the world, protecting Orthodoxy (as today in the Holy Land) and founding new independent Local Churches. However, for this to take place, the Russian Federation first still needs to restore in full its own sovereignty, that is, to wean itself off its post-1917 dependency on the Western world. This is only possible through referring to its pre-Imperial past in the spiritual Empire of ‘Rus’, before the Imperial Peter I and the Westernizers.

Russia knows that it is only part of this spiritual or Orthodox Rus, which was once even called Holy. Indeed, today’s Rus still consists of five parts: Great Rus (the Russian Federation); Little Rus (most of the north-west and central region of today’s ‘Ukraine’); White Rus (Belarus); Carpatho-Rus (the main part of which is still under occupation and is called by its Kievan occupiers ‘Transcarpathia’; and ‘Rus Outside Russia’. This is the rest of the Russian Orthodox world, in places as far apart as Japan and Latvia, China and Iran, Thailand and Lithuania, Latin America and Tunisia, Kazakhstan and the Philippines, Estonia and Central Asia, North America and Indonesia, Western Europe and Australia. Indeed, there is even a special part of the Russian Church, called the ‘Church Outside Russia’ to look after Russian Orthodox in these last four Western-controlled regions.

Russia’s Fifth Column

Sovereign Russia’s existence has always been challenged by its traitors, humiliated by their Western-imposed inferiority complex; princes from Western Rus bought out by Papal bribery and flattery in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; rationalizing judaizers in Novgorod; Kurbsky and greedy boyars and their Polish advisors who wanted power for themselves and whose first victim was Patriarch Nikon; Chaadayev and aristocrats (many of them ethnic Germans and masons with the title of baron), who became Decembrists in 1825 and their descendants who in 1905 wanted the victory of Japan and in 1917 showed ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’ (the martyred Tsar’s description of their traits) and implemented the Russian ‘Revolution’; oligarch-bandits (mainly Non-Russians) of the 1990s; and today’s fifth column of egoistic ‘liberals’ and ‘pro-Westerners’, orchestrated from the US Embassy in Moscow. These are the Euroatlanticists, the playthings of the Western Powers and they are entirely unprincipled. And they are still powerful in today’s Russia, largely controlling banking, the media and education.

All these traitors have always desperately wanted to be accepted by the West, but they never have been, except as what they are – traitors. The West has only ever used the greed and vanity of traitors as that of ‘useful idiots’ like Litvinenko, Berezovsky or Nemtsov. Believing in nothing except themselves, they are worthy of the maxim of Martin Luther King: ‘If you do not believe in something worth dying for, then you are not fit to live’. Together with these traitors there are other involuntary traitors, the narrow Nationalists and ‘National Bolsheviks’, who on account of their divisive chauvinism also tend to act as ‘useful idiots’ for the West. Although a few of them may be paid by the CIA, MI6 and Mossad, most are simply so enamoured by the vanity of their divisive and sectarian ideologies that they do not need to be paid at all. They cannot see the wood for the trees. Ironically, ‘ultra-Orthodox’ ‘Catacomb’ Orthodox like Nazarov and even thinkers like Dushenov and Dugin sometimes fall into this error of involuntary treachery, which would shock them if they realized it.

Having sold out the sovereignty, that is, spiritual independence, of Russia to Western materialism in 1917, that sovereignty has begun to be regained only since the miracle of 2000 – since the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors, that is, the canonization of all who have resisted Western materialism in death and in life. For they witnessed and witness to eternal and spiritual values, the values that are independent of this world. The restoration of Russia as a sovereign power promises sovereignty for all Eurasia, east and west, and calls to sovereignists in China and Western Europe alike: Join us and refind your sovereignty, independence and freedom from the common enemy – the Neocon Empire (see below). The salvation of real European patriots, as also real of real American patriots, whom we entirely respect, is in the hands of the present Russian attempt to restore its sovereignty and the values of civilizations based on religion and tradition, that is, based on spiritual independence.

Russia’s Allies: Real Islam, China and the Non-Western World

Since Peter I the Russian elite class, whatever its name, aristocracy, intelligentsia or oligarchy, has looked to the West. In other words, it looked in the opposite direction to its homeland and people. Given the multiple barbaric Western invasions and aggressions of the Russian Lands, from the Teutonic Knights to the Swedes, from the Poles to the hordes of Napoleon, from the Anglo-French-Islamist Crimean War to the Kaiser and NATO, passing through the 27 million dead left by the Fascist Germans and their allies, the foolishness of that elite class is apparent to all – except to itself. It is clear that the single and selfsame battle-standard of the West, Catholicism-Protestantism-Secularism, is not at all close to the Church and her Orthodox Tradition. Indeed, it appears that in many respects genuine Islam is much closer than it.

This may seem surprising, but it should not. The facts of history speak for themselves. Russia has always lived with a substantial Muslim minority, centred to its east. That minority did not launch blood-soaked ‘crusades’ against Russia, it did not burn down and pillage monasteries and churches and martyr those inside them like crusaders, it actually fought together with St Alexander Nevsky against the barbaric feudal knights. Amazingly, some of the best allies of Orthodoxy today are Iranian Shia Muslims, Sufis and traditional Sunnis (all totally different from the Islamists of Syria, Kosovo and Bosnia). The proof of this is not only in the common support for the traditional family or the way that Churched Russian women and nuns and traditional Muslim women dress and behave, but also, practically, in the Caucasus and in Syria, where Orthodox and traditional Muslims are allied together against the Western-financed, -trained and -armed terrorists of the pseudo-Muslim IS.

However, Russia also has friends throughout what was once called the ‘Third World’, whether it is in the Eurasian Economic Union, Latin America, Africa, Iran, in Buddhist lands (also closer to Orthodoxy in some respects than the Non-Orthodox West) and, above all, in China – in other words, in well over half the world. The new alliance between Russia and China, forced on Russia by the recent extreme Western aggression on its NATO-threatened borders in Eastern Europe and in the collapsing Ukraine and the US-installed Nazi regime in Kiev, is especially significant. It means that Russian natural resources and technological know-how are being exchanged in local currencies (not in petrodollars) for Chinese manufactured goods. Russia, China, India and the majority of the world stand united together against Neocon imperialism and colonialism.

2. The Neocon Empire

A photograph showing President Obama and the other leaders of the Western G-7 huddled together in Hitler’s former villa outside Munich last June symbolizes their total isolation from the Russian Orthodox world and its allies. They represent what can today be called ‘the Neocon Empire’, the contemporary financial, political and military secularist empire of the Western world, now centred in Washington, but before in London. The photo shows how the Neocon dictators had to shut themselves away from a large Western city, as usual, out of fear of popular protest. The politically correct Neocons are in reality intellectual terrorists (they call themselves ‘liberals!’), they are the modern-day Trostkyists who spread international terror and anarchy through their Nazi, Zionist and Islamist activities. Their plutocratic Empire, based on the dictatorship of banking capital, secularism and military violence, and urged on by their demonic masters, is utterly hostile to the Russian civilizational model that is based on voluntary collaboration, religion and tradition. The Neocon Empire is therefore opposed to all traditional civilizations worldwide.

These ‘progressive’, self-appointed ‘leaders of humanity’ kill millions of babies every year in their abortion holocaust. They illegally seize power in other countries in order to strip them of their natural and human resources. And this they do with virtual impunity, beneath the cover of the corporate media of their propaganda machine. There toil the regime-paid media stooges, such as those locally who write their laughable, tabloid articles for The Times and The Daily Telegraph or who ‘report’ for the BBC, whose voices only the brainwashed heed. Since the early 1980s, when they first started to come to power in the USA, the Neocons have run a Gulag, in which nearly one per cent of US adults are now locked up, and nearly another two per cent are on parole or probation – nearly 7,000,000 people in all. At exactly the same time, from about 1982, the Neocons began to indebt the USA (and other Neocon-ruled countries) through ludicrous militaristic projects and filling their own pockets, a debt now standing at 19 trillion dollars in the USA. This will never be paid off. Outside North American countries, which were stolen by the slaughter of the tens of millions of their native inhabitants who had lived there for thousands of years before they were so cruelly ‘discovered’, the next colonial bastion of the Neocon Empire is the EU of Western Europe.

The takeover of Western Europe began in 1916 when a bankrupt Great Britain was bailed out by the transnational bankers in the new capital of the elite, New York. Then, anti-English figures in Britain like Milner and Balfour seized power behind the scenes in London. This virtual coup d’etat led to Britain becoming the European base for the then New-York-based elite and later led to the US invasion of mainland Europe in 1944. This in turn led to the takeover of Germany in 1945, forcing all German leaders to take an oath of allegiance to the USA (similar to the situation in US-occupied, nuclear-devastated Japan) and the takeover of France by the CIA coup which ousted the anti-NATO French leader de Gaulle in 1968. This was an act of regime change, as the US regularly also practised in its mafia-ridden Italy after 1945; De Gaulle had to go, for he had refused to celebrate the US D-Day invasion of France, seeing that invasion as a US occupation, and he had also defied NATO.

The Patriotic Resistance

The EU is today a project that is dying from its own hubris. That hubris has led it to create and impose the euro and expand imperialistically to Eastern Europe, trying to absorb countries with a spiritually living culture that can never be absorbed by the EU’s secularist straitjacket of death. It was difficult enough for its original lapsed Catholic core acting under US orders to take over rebellious, post-Protestant Britain and Scandinavia; Norway, Iceland and Switzerland it never tried. But even in Western Europe national resistance or sovereignist movements, of both left and right, are now fighting for freedom, and with Russian support. And large minorities in EU-ravaged Greece and Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania, Hungary and Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, all countries that in some way or other defied Hitler’s Third Reich, now also defy the EU Fourth Reich. On the other hand, Croatia and the Baltic States, with their puppet American governments of today, were countries that generally neither defied Hitler’s Third Reich, nor today’s EU Fourth Reich.

As the EU’s power-crazed elite tries to take over Christian Montenegro and Macedonia, Serbia and Moldova, they are finding spiritual resistance all the greater. However, the bridge too far is the EU attempt to seize power in the Ukraine, a fictional country invented by Popes and Jesuits. Its far western, Galician inhabitants also welcomed Hitler’s Third Reich, which recruited two SS divisions there, and so who now also welcome the EU Fourth Reich. Urged on by its pro-Galician US masters, the EU created catastrophe in the Ukraine, awakening the Galician nationalist demons of the 1940s. With blood on its hands, the EU promised what it can never deliver, raising false hopes among a people sorely tried for over twenty years by corrupt, Western-backed oligarchs. Now the junta that the Neocon Empire set up in Kiev is responsible for the genocide of its own people on a massive scale. It is clear that once this EU adventure is over – and that may be very soon – the people of the Ukraine will have to ensure the denazification of Kiev and of the Galician Uniats who were given power by the immoral Neocons.

However, resistance to Neocon colonization and exploitation is also coming from elsewhere. In Latin America, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and above all in war-torn Syria, there are many who also want decolonization. The case in Syria is at present the most significant. War began there as a result of attacks from pseudo-Muslim Islamists, trained by the CIA in NATO-controlled Turkey (which despite its civil war the fanatics are now urging to invade Syria) and financed by fanatical Neocon allies – Saudi Arabia, Qatar and quite probably Israel. The Syrian people strongly resisted, which was totally unexpected by the Neocon elite. Now they are being aided by the Russian Air Force, which is fighting to keep the Christian presence in the Middle East, despite Neocon opposition, their lies about it doing harm and despite Turkish violence and invasion threats. Nevertheless, as a result of Neocon meddling, millions and millions of wretched Syrians have had to seek refuge in neighbouring countries, now as far as Western Europe, whose peoples are also having to pay the price for Neocon policies.

The Neocon Allies: Nazism, Zionism, Islamism and LGBT

We come now to the allies of the Neocon Empire. First of all, there are the Nazis, who, however ironic it may sound, are just like the Zionists. (For we use the latter word in the sense of racist supremacists who want global domination, which is what the Neocons want. This has nothing to do with the Jews, for most Neocons are of course not Jews, just as very many Jews are anti-Zionists). As for the Nazis, they have always claimed that they are racially superior to all others: that is why they can in their eyes be eradicated by Neocon weapons of mass destruction. (The only WMD in Iraq were those taken and used there by the invading Neocon forces). The Western Empire always supported the Nazi sadists, giving them shelter after World War II, whether they were German (like the war criminal Werner von Braun), Croat (like Stepinac, whom they have beatified!!!) or Galician (‘Ukrainian’) sadists. (It is precisely the descendants of the latter who today are active in promoting and supporting the Nazi regime in Kiev).

Secondly, there are the pseudo-Muslims, known as ‘Islamists’. An invention of the CIA in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Islamists included the US-trained Saudi terrorist Bin Laden. It was he and the Saudis who attacked the USA on 9/11 and yet the US elite refused to invade Saudi Arabia and change its barbaric regime. Perhaps because the Neocons already control Saudi oil and gas? Traditional, religious Muslims are not addicted to violence and do not commit suicide. These evil fanatics, who have existed at many points in Muslim history, for example as Ottoman janissaries, are not Muslims, they are Islamists. In other words, they have no more interest in religion than the ‘Protestant’ and ‘Catholic’ terrorists of Northern Ireland – they are pseudo-religious thugs, motivated only by banditry, egoism, sadism and power politics. And these terrorists, from Afghanistan to Kosovo, from Iraq to Tunisia, from Nigeris to the Sudan, from Bosnia to Syria, from Kenya to Mali, are being used as the shock-troops of the Neocon Empire.

However, the Neocons are not only allied with such sadists, but also with another dysfunctional group; those who designate themselves as LGBT. In history, sexual deformation, like plutocratic luxury, has always been associated with degeneracy, from Sodom to Ancient Greece, from Egypt to Rome, from the Renaissance Vatican to Paris, from pre-Revolutionary Russia (Yusupov and his ilk) to contemporary San Francisco. Such dysfunctional deformations are always the sign of the end of empire, they are always what happens just before empires collapse. We only have to look at the prevalence of another sexual deformation and also crime – pedophilia – in the present British Establishment. It is LGBT-ism which is now being aggressively used by the Neocon Empire as cultural imperialism and homosexual colonialism in order to corrupt and degenerate healthy societies worldwide.

Conclusion: The Coming Collapse of the Neocon Empire

More and more people all over the world and of all political views, not least in Western countries themselves, are now consciously calling for regime change in the US and the EU. They want to say good-bye to dictatorship, to the Neocon oligarchic plutocracy and its myth of democracy. The Western world today very strangely, but very closely, resembles the USSR in the 1970s, just before its dissolution. Inside the Soviet Union we saw then that although the ruling ideology was Communism, nobody believed in it, so, as Solzhenitsyn said, all lived a lie through fear. The collapse of the USSR came about not because of history’s puppets like Reagan or the CIA’s Polish Pope, but precisely because nobody believed in its lie any more.

Naked egoistic self-interest, the degenerate grab for money and power, is no policy for long-term survival, and yet that is the policy of the Neocons. The Soviet Union that was dissolved was replaced by the European Union. And that is why it too will be dissolved and for the same reason – nobody believes in it. Thus, the collapse of the Neocon Empire is coming, just as the collapse of the USSR came, for nobody believes in it any more either. For no empire lasts – all empires are always killed by their own hand, the hand of hubris. The present suicide of the EU makes this clear; the Empire does not have long to live and its collapse is inevitable. We should now be looking ahead, preparing for the aftermath of the Neocon Empire and its replacement.

Our Man in Havana: From the Catacombs to the World Stage

Some Orthodox are, understandably, worried by next week’s meeting between the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Pope of Rome. However, perhaps they listen too much to the CIA-paid hacks of the Western media who are already presenting the meeting as a kind of Russian Orthodox prostration before the Pope of Rome, on the orders of President Putin who is, apparently, desperate for any kind of contact with the West! Having recalled that at the Victory Day parade in Moscow on the 9 May the Russian President stood side by side with the leaders of China, India and many other lands, representing virtually the whole Non-Western world, the vast majority of humanity, we shall laugh our fill at the Western media. It is the G7 Western world that is isolated, bunkered up in Hitler’s Villa outside Munich as in June 2015. The meeting at Havana Airport between the Russian Orthodox Patriarch and the Pope of Rome, between the past and the future, between Old Rome and the Third Rome, will be successful, but only if the Pope of Rome comes with repentance. Why?

First of all this is the first meeting in history between a Russian Orthodox Patriarch and a Pope of Rome (though not with a Pope of Alexandria). Ignorant Western media point to the fifteenth-century meeting between the then Pope of Rome and Metropolitan Isidore at the so-called ‘Council’ of Florence. However that Metropolitan was not a Patriarch, he was not Russian and, above all, he was not Orthodox. The truth is that this meeting could be a turning-point for discredited Catholicism. It now has a chance to repent before the Russian Orthodox Church for the crime of Uniatism. Just as the Polish Pope, himself a quarter Uniat by descent, did apologize for the Crusaders’ barbaric sacking of New Rome in 1204 (800 years late!), so now this Latin American Pope of Rome has the opportunity to ask forgiveness (420 years late) of the Russian Orthodox world. It knows that as long as there exists a single Uniat, it is stabbing the Church in the back. The Vatican now has to start behaving as though it were Christian.

The Russian Orthodox world has never been against a meeting with the Pope of Old Rome, but it has always had to be on our terms, not from a position of humiliation, but from a position of authority. It could never have happened with the aggressive Polish Pope; with the penitent Pope Benedict it could have happened, only he was removed for being too close to Orthodoxy; now with this Pope there has come a chance. Both leaders are making pastoral visits to Latin America and Catholicism is facing the ‘battle of the millennia’ and needs the Church. Catholicism, heir to 2,000 years of history, now has a vital choice to make, to choose between the first millennium, which was Orthodox, and the second millennium which was Catholic-Protestant. In this third millennium, either it will choose to protestantize itself completely, or else at least a small part of it can choose the path of repentance and return to the Orthodox Church, supporting the Russian Orthodox defence of the Christian Middle East or siding with the anti-Christian post-Protestant West.

A generation ago, until 1991, the Russian Orthodox Church was for the main part viciously hounded by politicians and mockingly despised by Non-Orthodox. We well remember the 70s and 80s when we were forced to live in an almost ghetto-like situation; we were indeed the last of the Mohicans. Whether inside or outside Russia, we lived in the catacombs. At that time there were only 40 bishops in Russia and 5,000 clergy; today there are 361 bishops and some 40,000 clergy. There is no reason to think that those figures will not double over the next generation. The miracle happened with us. Through the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands, at that time the atheist regime of the countries of the Soviet Union collapsed by self-chosen dissolution, but also the Western world chose to descend into the pit of hell by self-chosen dissolution. Exactly a generation after these events, in 2016 we are now entering a new age, the generation where we come out of the catacombs and the ghetto and move onto the world stage.

Some may find it difficult to adapt to this; others who were never comfortable in the ghetto find it easier. But the fact is that for the first time in history a Pope of Rome is meeting a Russian Orthodox Patriarch. The Church moves centre stage. It may be that the Russian Orthodox Church can save at least parts of Roman Catholicism from Protestantization. Certainly, with last week’s canonization of the ROCOR hierarch and wonderworker, St Seraphim of Sofia, who first exposed the heresy of Bulgakov and then the heresy of Ecumenism, there is no doubt that the Russian Church has moved far on from the provincial Orthodoxy of the fringes who are still stuck in old-fashioned modernism. The Russian Orthodox Church now takes the lead in the Orthodox world and has turned the leadership of Orthodoxy from a US-run masonic affair into the voice of the Church. Not only that, but it also reclaims the Ukraine from the Nazi Uniat junta in Kiev, which may have only a few months to live.

Sunday of the New Martyrs and Confessors

Patriarch and Pope to Meet in Cuba on 12 February

It has been announced today in the Third Rome and also in Old Rome that Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Pope are to meet briefly at Havana Airport in Cuba on 12 February. This meeting will take place during the Patriarch’s long-awaited eleven-day pastoral visit to the Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Latin America, notably to Cuba, Brazil and Paraguay.

This high-level trip, involving visits to the political leaders of all three countries follows repeated invitations. The 15,000 strong Russian Orthodox flock in Cuba will especially greet our Patriarch, but the Patriarch will also recognize the important role played by Russian Orthodox in Paraguay before the Second World War and in Brazil over the last 100 years. However, beyond pastoral matters, this is also clearly a brilliant diplomatic move – for five reasons:

Firstly, it upstages and sidelines the absurd claims of the tiny Patriarchate of Constantinople to make out that it is somehow the ‘leader’ of the Orthodox world, whereas in reality it is fifty times smaller than the Russian Orthodox Church! It also ends the Phanariot myth that only it can represent the Orthodox Church at the Vatican, the real, de facto, leader of the Orthodox Church is Patriarch Kyrill. There will be anger at the Phanar, as it realizes that after nearly 100 years of trying to monopolize attention its diplomatic end has come.

Secondly, this is clearly a move aimed at further undermining the ridiculous pretensions of the sectarian Ukrainian Uniats, who have done so much and are still doing so much to encourage aggression and hatred towards Ukrainian Christians in the civil war that they have fostered in the Ukraine. They will be extremely worried that their official leader, the Pope of Old Rome, is in fact renouncing them and their psychotic Russophobia.

Thirdly, this meeting marks the enormous concern of the Russian Orthodox Church for Orthodox and other Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, who have been abandoned by the West, which has also abandoned the Papacy. Only the Russian Federation has substantially intervened in the war in Syria to bolster the majority there against the Western-trained, armed and financed terrorist movements intent on genocide, as has been made clear by Catholic leaders in the Middle East. Notably, during his visit, Patriarch Kyrill will lead the service at the Syrian Cathedral in San Paulo.

Fourthly, this meeting is taking place outside Europe in the course of a pastoral visit by the Russian Orthodox Patriarch to Latin America. This marks the internationalization of the Russian Orthodox world before the rest of the world. Having settled many of the outstanding problems of the Church inside the Russian Federation and brought numbers of bishops up to 361 and of clergy to 40,000 from the pitiful few 25 years ago, the Patriarch is now looking further afield outside Eastern Europe and the Federation. The second generation of renewal can begin. We can now expect that the Patriarch will make other high-profile visits to the more distant territories of the Russian Orthodox Church, including, God willing, to ourselves.

And finally, this meeting on the US doorstep, specifically in independent and sovereign Cuba, also marks the fact that the uncompromised Orthodox world does not recognize the globalist power grab of the Neocon Empire based in Washington. This move against the New world Order is an outstretched hand to the independent peoples of the world – the vast majority – in an unprecedented missionary endeavour. We cannot but welcome it.

Some Autobiographical Notes

I have been asked a number of questions about how, coming from a simple, earthy English background in rural England, I came to be a Russian Orthodox priest of the Church Outside Russia. Making use of some unexpected time this week, I have looked back through some old papers which I had forgotten and can now answer those questions with some dates.

Q: How did you come to the Russian Church?

A: After a countryside childhood strangely filled with interest in faraway Russia, I started teaching myself Russian in October 1968. I was told to do so in a particular spot in Colchester, which I could take you to now, by a voice heard coming, brought as it were by a wind from the east. So I began to read a lot of Russian literature in translation and Russian history. Two years later, in 1970, I had decided that I wanted to be part of the Russian Church and had begun reading as much as I could to find out about it (very little was available at that time). However, it was only after my sixteenth birthday that I managed to visit Russian churches.

Q: Where? In London?

A: No, my family never went to London, which we always looked on as a different planet, ‘the smoke’ as we still called it. The countryside was our home. I won a bursary and at the end of February 1973 I managed to visit a Russian church in England. This was the tiny Russian Patriarchal house chapel in Oxford, where I prayed at vespers on two successive Saturdays. Then in the same year I won another bursary to visit the then Soviet Union; in fact the first church I visited there was St Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kiev. As I entered those churches, I knew that I wanted to be part of their inner life and that this was my destiny, the whole meaning of my life, regardless of all the barriers that would be put in front of me. I felt that I had always been here, that this was in my blood. (Only in 2004 did I discover any possible though very distant explanation in a Carpatho-Russian great-grandmother – my mother’s mother’s mother). At the end of 1973 I also managed to visit the Patriarchal Cathedral in London, of which I had heard. ROCOR then had no existence outside itself, being largely unknown to the outside world, at least in England.

Q: Which part of the Russian Church did you join?

A: As soon as I was free to do so at the age of 18, in 1974, I asked to join the Russian Church. Of course, there were two parts then. Firstly, I met two representatives of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), who solemnly informed me that I would not be allowed to join their Church since it was in any case ‘for Russians only’. I also met other, rather fanatical and sectarian individuals from ROCOR, who completely turned me away. I therefore took the only option left to me and joined the Patriarchal Church, presuming that this was identical to the Church that I had seen in Russia and the Ukraine.

However, I very soon found out that the small Oxford Patriarchal parish was dominated by two opposing clans – on the one hand, by haughty Parisian-type modernists, and, on the other hand, by Soviet chauvinist nationalists, for whom the Communist Party could do no ill! I gave myself spiritual life by reading Russian theological books I ordered from Jordanville and elsewhere. Visiting Soviet Russia for a second time in 1976 and spending time there, I saw again how the real Russian Church was different from the Oxford cliques. In 1977 a priest I had met in Russia the year before suggested that I study at the Moscow Theological Academy. I would very much like to have done that, but at the height of the Cold War this was absolutely impossible. That was tragic.

Q: What did you do?

A: I did the next best thing and in 1978 went to live and work in Thessaloniki in Greece for one year. Here, I saw how traditional the ethos could be, quite different from the Church of Constantinople, which I had seen in England, but also, unfortunately, I saw narrow Balkan nationalism and came across the semi-Protestant Zoe and Sotir organizations – closer to Methodism than Orthodoxy! However, I also visited Mt Athos and was especially influenced by Fr Ephraim at Philotheou and the very poor and heroic monks at the Russian St Panteleimon’s Monastery. I remember especially Fr Seraphim, Fr Misail (who wanted me to join the monastery and be the librarian) and the choir director from Odessa. These were real, exemplary Orthodox. It was at this point that I decided that I should go and study at a Russian seminary.

Since I had been told (in fact lied to) that Jordanville only accepted Russians, I took the only option left and went to St Serge in Paris. (The two ‘seminary’ establishments of the OCA held no interest for me since they were both on the Catholic/Protestant calendar and deviated in other ways from the ethos and practice of the Russian Church inside Russia. I knew enough from talking to people who had been to them and from my visits to Russia to understand that they were not right for me. I wanted the real thing).

Q: What happened next?

A: I went to study at St Serge in Paris. There I experienced the battle royal between the two factions in Paris at that time. The first, led by Protopresbyter Alexis Knyazev, a wonderful teacher, was the pro-Russian one that was clear-sighted enough to see that the only future was to rejoin the Russian Church, but on some autonomous basis.

The second group, the Fraternite Orthodoxe, led basically by the Jesuit-educated Count, Fr Boris Bobrinskoy, notorious for having celebrated the liturgy in a Catholic convent with the filioque (!) – so as ‘not to offend our Catholic brethren’, was virtually composed of Uniats. Other members included the fantasist and Athos-hater Olivier Clement and a Georgian priest who spent his time extolling the Second Vatican Council. I soon gave up going to their courses. The modernist and manipulative Fraternite was populated by patronizing aristocrats and fantasist ideologues who preyed on naïve Catholics and converts. Descendants of those who had carried out the Revolution, they absolutely hated Russia and had no intention of ever returning to the sobriety and discipline of the Russian Church. Naturally, I supported the first group which alone was authentic and also realistic.

These two groups depended on the Rue Daru bishop, the weak, elderly but saintly Archbishop George (Tarasov). The Fraternite was clearly waiting for him to die and then seize power, which they only managed to do in full twenty years later. Members of the Fraternite, some soon to become priests, used to hiss, mock and boo Archbishop George publicly. It was awful. I believe that Archbishop George, a former WWI Russian pilot from the Western Front, was a saint. Had he been in good health and lived another fifteen years, he would have returned the group to the Russian Church with the status of an autonomous Metropolia.

Q: Where did you go after St Serge?

A: Having met my wife, who is basically of Anglo-Italian-Romanian origin, and married in Paris, we returned to England. We stayed here for three years, trying to find some sort of balanced spiritual life between the extremes of the pseudo-Patriarchal Church and the Church Outside Russia, with their cliques which were not Churchly at all, quite different from the Church inside Russia, which I had seen in 1972 and 1976, and again at St Panteleimon’s on Mt Athos.

Having discovered the scandalous truths about the extremists dominating both groups in England, we returned disillusioned to France and my wife’s jurisdiction (Rue Daru). Here the new German Archbishop had personally promised us that he was going to steer the Church away from the modernist and ecumenist Fraternite Orthodoxe and back to Russian Orthodox Tradition, but using Western languages whenever necessary. Enthused by this sensible direction and the support of Fr Alexis Knyazev, who was still alive then, I was ordained in Paris in January 1985.

Q: What happened?

A: I had fallen from the frying pan into the fire. Within four months I was asked to become a freemason, which I refused to do, thus signing a kind of spiritual death warrant for myself. Through weakness of character, the new Archbishop had by then taken a suicidal path. He was ordaining freemasons and other members of the Fraternite, while also forbidding the use of local languages, doing exactly the opposite of everything he had promised. He was guaranteeing the death of Rue Daru, whose only hope for survival was in fact to return to one or other of the parts of the Russian Church.

So I surrendered to God’s Will. And in 1987 I was granted the grace of meeting the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, a representative of the real ROCOR, just waiting to return to a politically free Russian Church. Coming from Kiev, where I had first been to an Orthodox service, Archbishop Antony showed me the real, multinational ROCOR, which I had read about, but totally failed to meet in London with its nationalism and sectarianism. In July 1988, Rue Daru held a service in honour of the millennium of Orthodoxy in Rus, attended by the modernist Catholic Cardinal of Paris, but from which all Russian bishops had been banned!

It was the last straw and, thanks to God, Archbishop Antony gladly received a group of 17 of us spiritual refugees into ROCOR at the end of that year. This was actually a turning-point for the Rue Daru group, as ever since then the flow of serious Orthodox leaving it has not ceased, giving up the fight to save it. We now realize of course that that fight was impossible and we had undertaken it out of misplaced idealism. The well had been poisoned from the outset. It was also a turning-point for us, from which we have never looked back.

Q: Looking back, what would you do if you had your time again?

A: A purely hypothetical question. Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing. At the time I had no advice at all, except for very bad advice, and there was no internet. Today, there is no doubt in my mind at all that I should have studied in London and then, in 1977, gone and studied at Jordanville. However, if I had not done what I had done then, how could I know all this now? Only experience teaches.

If I had not done what I did do, I would never have understood the Church of Greece, I would never have met the saintly Archbishop George Tarasov, the heroic Archbishop Antony of Geneva and so many other saintly figures, like the last representatives of the real White Russian movement, Fr Silouan of Athos of the Patriarchate (the disciple of St Silouan), the wonderful Baroness Maria Rehbinder, that exquisite Parisian poetess Lyudmila Sergeevna Brizhatova, the last White officer Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky, and so many others, the representatives of the real Holy Rus in all jurisdictions of the Russian emigration.

Neither would I ever have understood the tragic renovationist decadence and absurd Soviet nationalism within parts of the Patriarchate outside Russia at that time, the two sides of the suicidal Rue Daru jurisdiction (sadly, today there is largely only one side left) and how ROCOR was nearly enveloped by the marginal extremes of narrow Russian nationalist chauvinism and fanatical old calendarist converts, but saved by the holiness of Metropolitan Laurus and the many with him, who so exactly expressed our values in Holy Rus, Eternal Russia.

There is in even this short, forty-year experience a lifetime of joys and sorrows. I have been privileged to know it all. In that sense I do not regret anything, even though I have met many tragic individuals, seen much waste and many lost opportunities, and seen parts of the Russian Diaspora committing suicide through spiritual impurity. However, I have been even more privileged in that I have also seen the old and artificial disunity fall away and become heartfelt unity and so life in the dynamic present and future. The worst, and it was really bad, is over and the best is now and in the future. Over nearly the last twenty years Providence has allowed me to work freely for the Russian Orthodox Church in missionary work in my own homeland of the three counties of the East of England.