Monthly Archives: April 2016

Our Hope for a Russian Orthodox Church in Norwich (Update 11)

The Update

Finally, on 15 April 2016 we managed to buy the premises for our future church in Norwich. After a three and a half month wait to receive planning permission from Norwich City Council, we had to wait an additional six months for exactly the same organization to send our solicitor the lease. Now we can at last start building work to transform the premises into an Orthodox church. At last a permanent home for Russian Orthodoxy in Norwich after over thirty years of struggles. Thank you!

History

In the East of England there is at present only one multinational and multilingual church faithful to Russian Orthodoxy with its own urban premises. This is St John’s Church in Colchester. God willing and with your support, we have now been able to buy a second one, in Norwich, exactly 60 miles, 100 kilometres, to the north of Colchester.

Why Norwich? For the last four years I have been visiting Norwich and some of the 200 Russian Orthodox there, mainly recent immigrants from the Baltic States, especially from Estonia. I have baptized several in their homes, married couples in Colchester, buried, blessed houses, listened to confessions, visiting every few weeks, sometimes twice a month and am Orthodox chaplain at Norwich Prison.

We thought of dedicating our community to St Alexander Nevsky. We attempted to begin liturgies using the Greek Orthodox church building in Norwich, but were impeded. How are our people and English people and others interested in the witness of the Russian Orthodox Church, to be cared for pastorally? Only from a church building. And such life is required not only by Russian speakers, but also by Romanian, Bulgarian and English Orthodox. Most of our regular parishioners, only one of whom has a car, live within easy walking distance of this building.

On Friday 8 May 2015, Fr Andrew saw a leasehold property for sale on the rightmove website for £50,000 at 134, Oak Street, Norwich. It measures 88 square metres externally and is at present used as offices and rooms for a cultural centre. It has electricity, heating and water and is in very good condition. It is so cheap because it is leasehold, in other words, you have to pay £100 rent per month for the ground it is built on. This amount is fixed until 2032. The lease itself is even longer – it lasts until 2047.

On Wednesday 13 May 2015 we organized a visit to these premises, attended by 9 local Russian Orthodox.

By Friday 15 May, Orthodox in Norwich had generously promised to donate £5,250.

On Monday 18 May Fr Andrew received Archbishop Mark’s blessing to buy the building if possible, meaning we could start obtaining pledges to donate.

On Thursday 21 May we heard from the surveyor that it would cost £3,000-£5,000 to knock down the internal walls and make good the floor and ceiling, so we could use this building as a church. This was lower than Fr Andrew had estimated.

On Wednesday 27 May we heard that our offer of £42,500 had been accepted. However, since conversion and furnishing costs will come to £12,500, this meant that we would need £55,000 in all.

On Friday 29 May we submitted the planning application for change of use from offices to a place of worship. This, we were told then, would take at least 6-8 weeks but should result in a positive answer.

On Wednesday 3 June we launched an internet appeal for £55,000 in order to set up our own church in Norwich.

By Wednesday 29 July, eight weeks after the appeal launch, total gifts and pledges had reached £55,000.

On Tuesday 29 September, after over three and a half months!, we finally received planning permission to convert the building into an Orthodox church.

On Friday 15 April 2016 we were at last able to complete the purchase of our premises and prepare to engage a builder to start work on the premises.

Why the Non-Commemorators are Mistaken

In the Gospels Christ tells us that although we are in the world, we are not of it, that although we are incarnate on earth here and now, our destiny is in heaven. Human errors have all been due to the failure to live according to these words. Either to the failure not to be incarnate here and now and to drift away into intellectual speculations and disincarnate daydreams and philosophies: such have been the tendencies either of Western intellectuals or of Non-Christian religions – indeed many such intellectuals have been attracted to Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufism, for example, for that very reason. Or else to the human failure to forget that our destiny is in heaven, to concentrate only on the incarnate here and now: such have been the tendencies of the Roman Catholic and Protestant deviations of Christianity, with their concentration on the thisworldly organization of the affairs of men, instead of the balanced God-Man, Christ, the Son of God become incarnate as man and calling us to heaven.

Put in terms of Church history and human deformations of the Church, the first said that Christ the Son of God never became man, the second said that Christ was not the Son of God. The first deformation, denying the Incarnation, went down in early history as Monophysitism, the second, denying possible human salvation, as Arianism. Later, in the fourteenth century, they appeared again, combined in the one heresy of Barlaam of Italy, who said that since God was unknowable (Monophysitism), man would have to rely on his autonomous reason to live (Arianism). Here was the justification for Western humanism and Renaissance paganism and all that has followed to this day – man the measure of all things. St Gregory Palamas opposed this heresy and expressed the universal Christian teaching, distinguishing between the essence and the energies of God. In modern, secular times the same two heresies have appeared as disincarnate, Western liberalism and petty, worldly nationalism.

Thus, today the Orthodox Christian world still suffers from these same constant enemies of the Faith, from petty, inward-looking nationalism of the ghetto and disincarnate, pro-Western liberalism of the intellectuals. In 1453 the latter betrayed Constantinople and provoked its fall and in 1917 it collaborated in the trap sprung by the West in Russia, provoking the February Revolution, later taken over by the Bolsheviks, and then dividing the Russian emigration between true White and false White. Thus, it can be asserted that the New Martyrs of Russia are ultimately the victims of the treachery of Western liberalism, for without Western support and finance the Bolsheviks would never have seized power. Without apostate wealthy aristocrats (including members of the Romanov Family), treasonous generals and Anglophile Duma freemasons, there would never have been any New Martyrs. Their anti-Orthodox and therefore anti-Russian treachery drips with the blood of the betrayed millions.

Then there is the second enemy, nationalism, which, unlike patriotism, which is love of God’s Creation, is simply worldliness, love of man’s creation. It betrayed the universalism of Old Rome, taken over by barbarian-minded Franks, and of New Rome, taken over by Hellenist nationalism. Unlike the petty nationalism of others in the past and today, petty Russian nationalism is worse because Russia has a vocation to defend all Orthodox of all nationalities and to witness to all the fragments of Christianity, a vocation to be Imperial, to be above ghetto nationalism. Examples of nationalism are the treasonous Old Ritualists, who openly supported the 1917 Revolution, a few divisive Russophobic émigrés who sympathized with Hitler, trying to undermine the Church Outside Russia and then siding with Western spies, and in our own times the pro-Old Ritualist Solzhenitsyn. His anti-patriotic nationalism, like that of all Russian nationalists, ironically ended up supporting Western liberals.

On this subject of inward-looking nationalism, there are now in Moldova, the Ukraine and on Mt Athos nearly seventy individuals, mainly monks, including one vicar-bishop and over a dozen priests, who refuse to commemorate Patriarch Kyrill at services. There are two reasons for the decisions of these non-commemorators. Firstly, there was the February meeting between Patriarch Kyrill and the Bishop of Rome in Cuba, for which the Russian Orthodox world had not been prepared although secret preparations for it had been under way for six months, and the vague joint declaration that they issued afterwards. This came after the disturbing document regarding relations between the Church and the heterodox world, released some two weeks earlier in Geneva, in preparation for the meeting of some Orthodox bishops in Crete in June. For some completely incomprehensible reason, this has provocatively already been called ‘a Holy, Pan-Orthodox Council’, when so far it is none of these things.

Seventy people make up 0.00004% of the Russian Orthodox world. We think their first concern is exaggerated. The document issued was after all a diplomatic one, not a dogmatic one and in their sincere simplicity they failed to distinguish between the two aspects. As for the second document, it is only a draft and has already been rejected by several Local Churches and many prominent and well-respected bishops in several countries. Even if it were passed as such, the vast majority, myself included, would either ignore it or tear it up. Such top-down decisions, taken without the slightest consultation with the masses, cannot be enforced. However, I do have a much more serious concern, which I wish the non-commemorators would share. They seem not to realize that since 2014 the Russian Orthodox world has been in a state of war, after an attack on the Ukraine, which toppled the legitimate government and installed an anti-Orthodox, Fascist junta in Kiev, ‘the Mother of Russian Cities’.

This is part of the Neocon-initiated World War, which has reduced a large part of Western Asia and Northern Africa, from the coasts of the Atlantic to the foothills of the Hiamalyas, to terrorist anarchy. This has resulted in the deaths of up to two million and well over ten million refugees, leading to the mass deChristianization of Iraq and Syria. It has also ravaged Eastern Europe, economically and in ex-Yugoslavia, militarily, where part of the population is affected by cancer from uranium-tipped NATO shells and menaced by the US-installed terrorist regime in Kosovo. It has also seen Russian Orthodox forces in combat in Syria, supporting Orthodox and friends of Orthodox next to the Holy Land, by Armageddon. In the post-Soviet world it is one thing for ‘Orthodox’ liberals and nationalists from anywhere in the Orthodox world to criticize or disagree with the Patriarch of Rus’. He may not be ideal (who is?), but to stop commemorating him during what is a World War, is almost treasonous.

President Putin and the Empire

The Empire’s debt casino is unsustainable and the ruling oligarchy sees war as the only way to salvage their hegemony

by Sergey Glazyev

Originally appeared on Lenta.ru.

The author is a prominent economist, advisor to the Russian President on regional economic integration, and the mind behind the Eurasian Economic Union

Is there any reason to expect the lifting of American sanctions?
The sanctions are an element of the hybrid war that the US is waging against us. They are doing this not because they do not like Russia’s ‘annexation’ of the Crimea, but because of the objective and subjective interests of the American establishment.

The US is losing its hegemony: it is already producing fewer products and exporting fewer technologies than China. China is also catching up with America in the number of scientists and engineers, and many innovative Chinese technologies are capturing world markets. China’s development rate is five times that of the US. The international system of economic entities recently set up in China exemplify the new world economic order.

The economic entities that dominate in the US, serving a financial oligarchy, have destabilized the American monetary and financial system, which defaults about twice a year. The causes of the global financial crisis of 2008 have not disappeared and the American debt bubble — financial pyramids composed of derivatives and the national debt —are still growing.

According to systems theory, this process cannot continue indefinitely. The American oligarchy is desperate to get rid of its debt burden, which is why it is conducting a hybrid war, not only against Russia, but against Europe and the Middle East.

As always happens in a changing world economic order, the country that is losing its leadership tries to unleash a world war for control over the periphery. Since Americans consider the former Soviet space to be their financial and economic periphery, they are trying to gain control over it.

The American political establishment has been brought up on the chimeras of nineteenth century geopoliticians. American students study basic English and German geopolitical ideas of that time in political science classes. The main question back then was how to ruin the Russian Empire, and they still look at the world through the eyes of the XIX century ‘hawks’, when Great Britain tried to save its hegemony in the First World War, then lost its colonial empire after the Second World War.

This is what American geopoliticians study in the State Department and the White House, continuing to look at the world through the prism of both the Cold War and British confrontations with Russia and Germany in the nineteenth century, and now the US is unleashing another world war.

The combination of the objective problems of the American financial oligarchy, and the strange mindset of American geopoliticians threatens a world conflict. This has nothing to do with the Crimea. Any reason will do.

We need to act in terms of the contradictions leading the US to an aggressive stance fraught with the risk of a hybrid war with the whole world. They have chosen Russia as their main objective, and the Ukraine, occupied by them, as their main means of destruction.
To survive under these conditions, maintain our sovereignty and develop our economy, we need to build a broad anti-military coalition, pursue our priority development strategy, recover our financial and economic sovereignty and pursue Eurasian integration.

To prevent war, we need to realize the president’s goal of a common development area from Lisbon to Vladivostok. It is very important to convince our European partners as well as our partners in the Far East and in the South that we need to cooperate, not by blackmailing or threatening them, but through mutually beneficial projects, joining our economic potential while respecting the sovereignty of each state.

Can we mend relations with the EU and how?

To mend cooperation with the European Union, we need to restore its sovereignty. The sight of European politicians among the crowd of Nazis at Euromaidan showed how much European political culture has degraded. The EU leaders are not independent; they are US puppets.

The American media dominate Europe’s political space, embedding anti-Russian chimeras into people’ consciousness, intimidating them with a so-called Russian threat. Their politicians are forced to go with the media line provided by Washington in order to win votes. This has lead to the catastrophe we are watching today in Brussels and other European cities, which are gripped with fear as governments fail to provide security.

Unfortunately, the sovereignty of Europe cannot be restored just by booting up social consciousness. The problems did not appear out of the blue; they are the result of the European political class abandoning its national interest. Europe is facing a very difficult period of transition, during which it is not yet a partner, but Washington’s shadow.

Europeans have lost their sense of direction. They live in a mosaic, a fragmentary world that has no shared relationships. But life will force them back to reality, and I believe that eventually European democratic traditions and humanism will prevail.

In the Church of the Holy Wisdom

A Greek journalist writes: “I met Ishmael who is Turkish in 1975, in England, where I was attending university. We became good friends and after graduating we kept in touch. Ishmael lives in Istanbul (Constantinople), a stone’s throw from Hagia Sophia. Recently he wrote a letter to me. “In the past year, at night, when we are outside, the smell of incense that you Christians burn in church overpowers us.”