Daily Archives: December 16, 2016

Now We Do Need a Council

After the embarrassing failure of the 2016 Crete forum, attended only by heterodox and representatives from ten of the fourteen Local Churches, who disagreed among themselves, many refusing to sign, the Patriarch of Constantinople is angry. He is angry because his personal ‘pope-dream’ has failed and so he is now threatening all those who disagreed with his pet project with not concelebrating with them. This he can do within his own Patriarchate, but he cannot do with other Local Churches, except by excommunicating himself from them. As regards the four Local Churches, representing over 80% of Orthodox, who did not agree with the agenda of the forum and so did not even attend, they find the elderly Patriarch’s behaviour not just irrelevant but increasingly erratic. Some have raised the possibility that he and perhaps some of his geriatric aides have Alzheimer’s. Given all this, what is the future?

The fact is that the Crete forum has opened a wound in the Church, the wound of ecumenism, that is, the status for members of the Church of Non-Orthodox and the religious organizations to which they belong. The top-down attempt by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to impose a heretical understanding of this on the Church has brought only division. This issue must now be answered. Closely linked to this dogmatic erring which needs clearing up, but even worse than it, is the Crete forum’s deliberate failure to deal with the one real problem facing the Church in the real world. This is the refusal to send out missions to convert the world outside the Church. Many hierarchs seem to prefer inward-looking ethnic flag-waving to dealing with the largely ignored huge missionary territories where live seven billion Non-Orthodox. They need enlightenment by the Church. Here is why we now need a real Council.

Aleppo and Mosul

Aleppo is freed from Western-backed and Western-armed barbaric terrorists, called by the State-controlled, fantasy, Western media ‘resistance-fighters’. In the real world, millions of terrorized people are at last relieved. However in Iraq, Mosul, once called Nineveh, is also under occupation by the same barbaric Sunni terrorists and is suffering. These terrorists were founded by the USA as successors to the CIA-founded Al-Qaida, when it illegally invaded Iraq in 2003 and disbanded the largely Sunni Iraqi Army and State. In Mosul thousands of civilians are starving and perishing, as US-trained and armed Iraqi forces advance and slaughter, painfully slowly, house by house, towards the city centre. Of course, the Western media generally do not report this, just as they have generally not reported the Saudi massacre of 10,000 Yemenis under a rain of British bombs and aircraft, which have brought £2 billion to the British government over the last year.

Why such silent hypocrisy? Because Iraq is a US vassal State and Saudi Arabia is a British vassal State. So they are ‘allies’, regardless of the fact that the Saudis have beheaded more people than IS. Therefore, Western journalists are hardly likely to be allowed by their governments through ‘editorial policy’ to report otherwise. Indeed, they are paid to accuse Syrian and Russian governments of the crimes that they themselves committed when they first created the civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. So too bureaucrats of the US-funded United Nations and US-appointed political hacks throughout the Western world. Now that the democratically-elected Syrian government (called a ‘regime’ by undemocratic, non-elected and unelectable Western politicians and their mouthpiece journalists) has taken Aleppo, it may begin to think of a long-term settlement for the country, founded by British and French colonialism after the First World War.

However, with the disastrous failure, bankruptcy and collapse of the New World Order neocon ideology of globalism that has run the Western world for the last 25 years, what goes on in the Middle East is only part of the picture. Western State terrorism, fed by the 40% share of the world’s ‘defence’ industry that belongs to the bankrupt USA (compare to the 4% of the Russian Federation), may be coming to an end. A new generation is coming to the power, much to the slandering resentment of the bad losers of the anti-Christian, gerontocrat ideology of the ‘West is best’ past. As the Western media peddles their lies about the long-awaited liberation of Aleppo from Western-funded terrorism, a wind is blowing. It is the wind of freedom as the peoples of the Western world rise up against three generations of anti-Christian and anti-Church secularist tyranny, of which the last has been but the worst. This wind of freedom will bring challenges, but also opportunities.

What the Church Is Not

Piotr Multatuli, the respected contemporary Russian Orthodox historian and great-grandson of a New Martyr, has written: ‘The West will never tolerate the rebirth of Holy Rus. It will always try to annihilate us…Unfortunately, many in both State and Church still do not understand this’. We cannot comment on those in the Russian State who do not understand this, but of those in the Russian Church we can say a few words. We believe that those who do not understand this in the Church fall into two groups, each engaged in spiritual impurity.

1. Those Who See the Church as a Private Club

Firstly, there are those who do not look on the Church on earth as the Body of Christ, where God is incarnate among people. They see Her as a mere human institution for private spiritual consumerism, looking at Her essentially in a secular manner as a club for play, for self-serving, egoistic purposes. Thus, there is the tendency of small, inward-looking groups, often of converts. They form, in England for example, ex-Anglican clubs, in France for example, ex-Catholic clubs, elsewhere ex-Lutheran or ex-Calvinist clubs, or else, in general, disincarnate intellectual clubs, which debate disincarnate philosophy in clerically-led cliques, quite uprooted from ordinary Orthodox in the grassroots parishes. Such clubs are based on and preach Halfodoxy, heterodoxy with icons, denying the Orthodox Tradition, which is condescendingly relativized and dismissed as a set of mere ‘customs’. Those in such clubs have to stop talking and start doing, for the Church is not a club, but the presence of God on earth.

2. Those Who Commit Spiritual Treason Against the Church

Secondly, there are those who see the Church as a business, a secular operation for their own glory and well-being. For the King has unfaithful ministers: sadly, He has always had them and always will have them. Such are the ways of the world that infiltrate Church life. Sometimes, it can seem that only the neglected little people are faithful, while the princes of the Church follow the ways of the world. We should not despair, for unfaithful ministers will be swept away when the King returns. Those who love themselves and not the people of God, those who seek property and financial empires, those who seek the wallets, but not the souls of the people, those who prefer the rich and famous to the people, will be removed, for they will die. Moreover, their dioceses will die for lack of spiritually living priests, as the spiritually living people leave them. The result of the spiritual treason of the princes of the Church is solitude and death. The words of Christ are: Let the dead bury the dead.