Daily Archives: June 30, 2017

Diveevo, 9 May 2045

The Third Imperial Council in Diveevo

After the Divine Liturgy and a Paschal service of intercession before the relics of St Seraphim of Sarov, whose veneration is now worldwide just as the saint prophesied, the 2045 Imperial Council of the Russian Orthodox Church opened today in the Sacred Monastery of Diveevo. Present were Tsar Nicholas III, Patriarch Tikhon II of Moscow, the 205 metropolitans representing the 1,040 other archbishops and bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church and representatives from the other sixteen smaller Local Churches.

Tsar Nicholas’ Opening Speech

After greeting everyone, Tsar Nicholas, who has now ruled the restored Russian Empire for 15 years, recalled how on 22 June 1941 the Russian peoples had been treacherously attacked by Fascists of many Western nationalities on the feast day of All the Saints Who have Shone Forth in the Russian Lands. This had seen the beginning of the repentance of the Russian peoples for their apostasy a generation earlier in the tragic twentieth century.

He noted how the dreadful events of the 1941 attack had led the Russian peoples to achieving two of the aims of the Russian Empire after it had been attacked in the First German War of 1914, that is, freeing Berlin and Vienna. His Majesty recalled how the genocidal anti-Slav invasion of 1941 had ended with victory on this day, 9 May, exactly 100 years ago in 1945. At these words all stood and sang ‘Eternal Memory’ to all Russian Orthodox of all nationalities who fell in the Second Patriotic War of 1941-45.

Since 2030, as Tsar Nicholas noted, the annual rate of church-building throughout the Empire had increased from 1,000 churches per year, which it had been at since 1992, to 6,000 per year. This did not include churches being built for other Local Churches, notably in Africa and Western Europe, and churches being rebuilt and restored in Turkey. There were now nearly 125,000 churches throughout the Empire, serving its 210,000,000 population.

Tsar Nicholas then reported that the Eurasian Confederation (EAC), at the head of which the Russian Empire stood as founder, now had exactly fifty members. It stretched from Portugal to the Pacific, as far north as the Arctic and as far south as Vietnam, included China and India, and numbered over a third of the world’s population. All fifty members of the Confederation had accepted the voluntary evangelization of their countries by the Russian Orthodox Church, providing that this would lead to the foundation of new Local or Regional Churches.

Unfortunately, it was still not certain what the eight countries of the bankrupt Brussels Union dictatorship (Germany apart from Saxony, since the latter had rejected what it called ‘Carolingian’ rule from Brussels, France, Italy, Benelux, Croatia and Galicia (capital L’viv)) intended to do after more recent Muslim terrorist attacks in their capitals. He added that these eight countries were not ready to join the Eurasian Confederation, as they would first have to mature spiritually.

Greetings from the Other Local Churches

Patriarch Vasilios IV of Istanbul and All Turkey, a former Athonite monk, sent his fraternal best wishes in Turkish and begged for alms for his Church, which was struggling to meet the needs of the millions of Turks who had joined it in recent years. He said that although there were still a few churches in his territory where Greek was used, 98% of his parishes were now all Turkish. He thanked the Russian Church for its help in translating liturgical e-books into Turkish and rebuilding many churches in his jurisdiction.

Patriarch Seraphim II of Antioch, who is a fluent Russian speaker, spoke by skype and thanked the Russian Orthodox Church for its help in building churches and monasteries in Syria, Mosul and Beirut. He expressed his devotion to St Seraphim, whose name he bears, and recalled his life-changing pilgrimage to Diveevo twenty-two years ago.

Pope Nektarios I of Alexandria and All Africa, a Kikiyu from Kenya who is also a fluent Russian speaker, sent his greetings and thanked the Russian Church for building over 900 churches throughout Africa over the last ten years and training so many of his clergy free of charge. He remarked on how the Faith had thrived ever since in 2031 his Patriarchate (like that of Istanbul and Antioch and other Local Churches that had made the same error) had returned to using the Orthodox calendar, ending old calendarist schisms. He estimated that there were now nearly 100 million African Orthodox, with tens of thousands being baptised every week all through Black Africa, making his Church the second largest Local Church.

Patriarch Theodore II of Jerusalem and his All-Arab Synod thanked Tsar Nicholas for his help in restoring and rebuilding churches for the Arab faithful throughout Palestine and Jewish Israel, for preparing liturgical e-books in Arabic and helping to set up schools and two universities for Arab Orthodox.

Other fraternal messages were sent from the Local Churches of Romania, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia and Albania, thanking Tsar Nicholas and Patriarch Tikhon for their protection and aid.

Then Metropolitan Mitrofan (Liu) of Beijing stood before all the assembled Metropolitans and announced that the Chinese Orthodox Church, the fifteenth Local Church, was now celebrating the tenth anniversary of its autocepaly from the Russian Church and new missions were opening every month. He mentioned in particular that the mission to Tibet was meeting with great success and that the seventh Tibetan Orthodox convent had opened in Lhasa last month. The assembled Metropolitans stood and sang Many Years to Metropolitan Mitrofan and the peoples of his Church.
Metropolitan Istvan (Stefan) (Bojko) of the Hungarian Orthodox Church sent his fraternal greetings by skype from Uzhgorod, where he is currently visiting members of his family, after consecrating the new Cathedral in Budapest. His flock now numbers 1.3 million.

Metropolitan Ioann (Maartens) of Paris, speaking on behalf of the Western European Orthodox Church, which had received its autocephaly from Moscow eight years ago, so becoming the seventeenth Local Orthodox Church after the Chinese and the Hungarian, reported that it now had 992 parishes, despite the political and economic difficulties in those parts of Western Europe that had not yet freed themselves from the Brussels Union dictatorship and joined the Eurasian Confederation.

Metropolitan Ioann, who is fluent in nine languages, spoke eloquently of the duty of the Russian Orthodox Church to meet the spiritual needs of those who had witnessed the spiritual and moral collapse of Catholicism and Protestantism in Western Europe and indeed worldwide. He noted the shock of those in France after the recent declaration that atheism was now the new official State religion. He feared that direct persecution was now imminent and that he might even be forced to take refuge in Dresden, the capital of Free Saxony, part of the EAC.

The Russian Orthodox Church

Patriarch Tikhon II of Moscow and All the Russias then spoke of his ecclesiastical territory, Europe and Asia, and how all were held together by the One Faith, for which he thanked God. He said that the main task of the Council would be to deliberate on granting autocephaly to create three new Local or Regional Churches in Japan, Korea (reunited since 2024) and South-East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand). There followed reports from various Metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church.

First, His Beatitude Metropolitan Job (Romanchuk) of Kiev and Malorossiya remarked on how Malorossiya had prospered since 2020, when the old American-imposed junta in Kiev had collapsed and the ‘Ukraine’ (as it was then still called) had divided into its constituent parts, with EU-sponsored Greek Catholic Galicia breaking away from the Orthodox world altogether, but refusing to join Poland. He said that enormous progress had been made against corruption and that Malorossiya was today one of the most trustworthy countries in the world. However, he noted that the birth-rate was only now beginning to increase again after the social, economic and political collapse of the old Soviet-style ‘Ukraine’.

His Beatitude Metropolitan Nicholas of Washington (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), which in fact is the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Continental Eurasia (the territory of Patriarch Tikhon) and Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), spoke next of Church life on the continents where his Church works.

He described how his part of the Russian Church was now composed of six Metropolias, of which the largest, that of the Confederated States (the former USA) and Canada, now had 702 parishes. The Alaskan Metropolia, represented by Metropolitan Innocent of Alaska, reported that it now had 211 parishes.

The former Latin American Metropolia had now been divided into two Metropolias, firstly for Mexico and Central America, with 624 parishes, and secondly for South America, with 511 parishes. He noted that missionary work was progressing well in South America, but there was still a shortage of Portuguese-speaking priests in Brazil.

The Oceanian Metropolia numbered 373 parishes, most of which were in Indonesia and the Philippines. As for the Ionan Metropolia, (Isles of the North Atlantic – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), it now numbered 167 parishes, all with their own buildings, and had eight monasteries.

Metropolitan Gregory of Tashkent and Central Asia spoke next, reporting considerable growth in his flock, especially from Muslim women who were asking for baptism.

The Council will continue tomorrow with brief reports from all the remaining 202 Metropolitans.

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (May-June 2017)

Q: What is your deepest childhood impression?

A: My first memories go back to when I was two and a half, but I always felt in childhood that I was in Paradise and that God was just beyond the horizon, not far away at all. That was my first and deepest impression. That is why I have always wanted to re-enter my childhood, or at least, its spirit.

Q: Who were the people you met who impressed you the most?

A: First of all, there were all those of my parents’ generation, who had been through World War II, and of my grandparents’ generation, who had been through World War I. I heard so many stories from them, stories which you never read in the books or see in propaganda films.

Q: What did you understand from their stories?

A: I understood that World War II in Europe had actually been a continuation of the still unfinished World War I. I understood even then that that War had actually been a series of different wars. Later, as an adult, I understood in detail that in the Pacific there had been a contest for dominance in Eastern Asia and the Pacific between Japan, ironically Western-armed and Western-trained, and Great Britain, which Japan has easily won. However, it had then lost the contest when the USA had taken over from defeated Great Britain and beaten it, finally by dropping A-bombs on its civilians. Then there had been the war for oil resources in North Africa and the Middle East, which Great Britain had won against Germany, but only because the USA had armed and helped it. Then there was the war on the Eastern Front in Europe, where the Western Powers had hoped that Germany would exhaust itself by destroying the USSR, so losing two enemies at the same time. In fact, the USSR had defeated and contained Germany, but only for two generations, until the Fourth Reich EU taken over Eastern Europe. Finally, there had been the war on the Western Front, which Germany had lost militarily, but won economically through its EU.

Q: Was there anyone else who shaped you?

A: Beyond them, there were representatives of an even older generation still alive then, those who had been born as far back as the 1870s. One elderly lady I met had been at Queen Victoria’s funeral, another remembered the Relief of Mafeking in 1900. (A third, in France, though I was an adult then, told me how her grandmother had told her how she had seen Napoleon riding through Versailles. I had no reason to disbelieve her). They all impressed me because they were living history, representing something that had disappeared, for good and for ill. History is real, it all happened.

Q: But what about the Orthodox you met after childhood? You knew very well Metr Antony Bloom, Fr Sophrony Sakharov, Fr Alexander Schmemann and other clergy.

A: True, but apart from Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev and spoke to me about him, the other clergy you mention did not impress me very much. It was more laypeople who impressed me. For instance, there was Princess Kutaisova the elegant Oxford teacher, Elena Grigorievna Evdokimova who had greeted the Tsar before the First World War, Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky who was the last White officer in Paris, the genial Prince Boris Galitsin, the noble Ekaterina Osipova, Maria Cattoir, or Lyudmila Brizhatova the poetess, and many others. They were all the best of the White emigration, because that emigration had been divided into two parts, those who were really White, that is the penitent, and on the other hand, those who had betrayed the Tsar. The penitent were not only penitent for themselves, even though they had often had little to repent for, but above all repented on behalf of others.

Q: When did you first begin writing?

A: Before I could write!

Q: What do you mean?

A: When I was four, I used to take scrap paper and draw wavy lines on it; it was my writing. All my childhood and long after I carried pen and paper with me. I was always noting things down. The first piece that was published was when I was eleven. I had an aunt who had written an unpublished novel and my father, who had left school before he was 14, had written poetry. So there was something in the family.

Q: Is there anything you would you like to write in the future?

A: For forty years I have wanted to write a novel about the Russian emigration in Europe. There is a huge untold story there. True, there is a French film specifically about those who returned to the USSR after 1945 and the American film ‘The White Countess’ about the emigration in Shanghai and an immense number of memoirs of individual emigres, but that is not the same. I would like to tell a saga, an epic, though I suppose I never will, as I do not have such talent. I would like to tell of the refugees who had nothing to eat, the Tsar’s generals who became housepainters, the princes who were taxi-drivers, the Cossacks who worked at Renault and went to the church in Boulogne-Billancourt, where I married. There is so much to say here.

Q: Would you say that you are political?

A: Not in any party political sense, but only through the eyes of the Church, in the sense that, as we live in the world, we must understand what is going on in the world, either to encourage and try to channel it, or else to oppose it. Some people say that they are apolitical. Well, that is already a political stance. That is to be disincarnate, futile, to waste yourself on dreams and lose yourself in illusions. That is wrong, spiritually dangerous, even demonic. Real Christians all believe in the Incarnation, therefore we must have an interest in politics, so that we can influence the world.

Q: Do you hope for the restoration of the monarchy in Russia?

A: Of course, but it must be the restoration of the Orthodox monarchy, Sacred Monarchy, not just some token monarchism, as in the UK. This restoration is essential, not just for the Russian Lands, not just for the Orthodox Church (in which so much decadence began after the overthrow of the Orthodox monarchy in 1917), but for the whole world, which became unbalanced afterwards. The Second World War would never have happened, nor would the so-called Cold War (in fact a Hot War with millions of victims in the Third World), if the Orthodox Monarchy had not been betrayed, for the monarchy is the last bastion of Orthodox power.

However, we must be realistic. To have Orthodox monarchy, you must deserve it, you must have the right spiritual level; contemporary Russia is very far from that. It will need mass repentance for the monarchy to be restored. That is not happening yet. Our role is that of St John the Baptist, to be forerunners who preach repentance, who prepare the way. What we feared in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the end of the world, will certainly still come, if there is not mass repentance. We have been given a stay of execution with events in Russia, especially since 2000, but no more than that. All is fragile, hanging by a thread.

Q: What can be done here in concrete terms for restoration?

A: We need to establish a Russian Orthodox Monarchist Association (ROMA) today, on the centenary of the epic tragedy of the so-called Russian Revolution. This needs to commemorate the last Tsar and his family, martyred ninety-nine years ago on the confines of Europe and Asia. Their martyrdom was a catastrophe for the whole world, particularly for the Christian world, which has fallen apart without a strong Christian Russian Empire, going from disaster to disaster.

Such an Association also needs to help prepare the Western world for the coming Russian Emperor, who will have an even greater international significance than the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, because he may well be the last Christian Emperor before the end. As such, he will be the only protector of the Church of God against all the pseudo-Christian and anti-Christian forces that have surfaced on the world, both before and since the fall of the Russian Empire one hundred years ago.

Q: What do you mean exactly by repentance for any of this to happen?

A: The Faith of many has been made impure. It is polluted and corrupted by superficiality. We can see this in the liberalism of intellectual or academic theology. I remember in Paris how a divorced subdeacon and teacher of such ‘theology’, an author of many books on ‘theology’, never fasted, even in Holy Week. What sort of theology could he write, when he did not fast, when he did not clean his soul first, when he wrote against asceticism and monasticism? This sort of attitude, very common among such people, is just decadence. This has to be repented for – not justified, as many do.

We can also see this superficiality in extreme conservatism. Just recently someone wrote to me that he believed that the earth was flat and that dinosaurs never existed because their fossils had only recently been discovered. Yet the Psalms say that: ‘He hath made the round world so sure, that it cannot be moved’. To be very old-fashioned is not the same as following the Tradition, which is much more radical than being old-fashioned. Such extreme conservatism also has to be repented for.
We can see this superficiality in nationalism, which tries to put the Truth for all time and all peoples into the narrow container of one nationality. In one Balkan church I visited years ago, I was told that I could not venerate the icons because I was not of the nationality of the church! Such ignorant nationalism or racism, called phyletism, which is simply attachment to this world, has to be repented for.

We can see this superficiality also in the attitude of certain ex-Soviet people who treat the Faith in a consumerist way, as a sort of magic. Magic happens automatically regardless of the efforts you make, whereas prayer, the sacraments and Church life depend on the efforts that we make to cleanse ourselves and receive grace. Such people are always upset when they pay their money and do not get the magic result that they expect. Faith does not work like that. Such an attitude to the Faith has to be repented for. We have to work for the Faith.

Q: What would you say of the future of the world?

A: Only God knows our future. But some things are clear. We now have to meet the obligations imposed on us by the collapse of the heterodox world, the spiritual and moral collapse of Catholicism and Protestantism.

Q: What do you hope to see in the future?

A: In the years that remain to me, I hope to see the establishment of the Metropolia in Western Europe, which is a single whole, and the restoration of our Diocese of the Anglo-Celtic British Isles and Ireland, after so many decades of spiritual decadence and alien ‘Britishism’. Let us here restore the ideal of the Anglo-Celtic St Cuthbert.