Monthly Archives: March 2024

Ideology Versus Faith and the Post-Ukrainian Russian Church

Introduction: Ideology versus Faith

Ideology and Faith are opposed to one another. As an example, I will describe the exact church situation in a small provincial town in eastern Russia today, where there are two churches and which I know well. This situation is very symbolic of my fifty-one years of experience of the Russian Church in Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and of the Russian Diaspora in Western Europe, the USA and Australia and how that situation has radically degenerated in recent years.

Those who knew and lived in the Russian Church before the last few years of decadence and who for generations had venerated the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia are shocked and disappointed by the unthinkable events that have happened since. The Church was purified by the blood and suffering of those new saints. Now there are those who are trying to sully the Church once more. This is the result of a Church administration which has, purely voluntarily, applied the dead hand of the State with its ever-corrupting ideology of power, money and careerism, to itself, under no obligation whatsoever from the State.

A Church of Ideology

The first church in this small provincial town in eastern Russia is a large, beautifully restored church with frescoes and golden domes. It looks like a picture postcard, a Russian church as it should be and as is portrayed in countless coffee-table books and tourist brochures. It attracts rather well-off people who want to be in such a church; it makes them feel that they are in a ’proper church’ and that they are doing everything ‘correctly’. Thirty years ago, the church was still a ruin, abandoned there by the atheists who had wrecked it and desecrated it before World War Two. Now the church is prosperous, there is an emphasis on donating money, it is frescoed and led by Fr Gennady, a priest who hands over a lot of money to his bishop, seems rather like a businessman, has many awards, is well-off, lives in a nice house and has a smart car.  At the end of every Sunday service he preaches about politics in a way which he believes to be patriotic, but which in fact is nationalistic. He repels the few Non-Russian Orthodox (mainly Ukrainians) who live in the town. It is also rather depressing, certainly for anyone who wants to get away from the oppressive spirit of this world and expects some uplifting words from the Church.

There is no parish life, in the sense that there is no unity among the ‘parishioners’, even the priest’s wife does not attend church because of her depression. The wife of the second priest, aged 33, left him for another man. These are just groups of people who attend the church, fewer in number than in the heady and idealistic days of Patriarch Alexij II and restoration twenty-five years ago. These people do not work together, for there is no sense of community. This church is the fruit of the ideology of ‘The Russian World’. Although the basic ‘Russian World’ ideology had evolved by the Year 2000 and then found favour with the State, it was only in 2009 that it was officially adopted by certain politically-minded Church hierarchs. Since then it has been promoted, has filtered down and some have adopted it, like the priest in this town. It is essentially an aggressive, even militaristic, self-righteous, Stalinistic Russian nationalism, as symbolised by the controversial Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, recently opened outside Moscow.

This ‘Russian World’ nationalism is an exact parallel to the equally self-righteous, political and aggressive Greek nationalism, or ‘Hellenism’, promoted by some in the US-backed Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople and other Greek Church institutions. Ultimately, the Russian World ideology goes back to the nationalistic ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ ideology, which gradually developed after the fall of Constantinople, ‘the Second Rome’, in 1453. Now, Hellenism was rejected by the Apostle Paul in the first century who described how the Cross is foolishness for the Hellenes (1 Cor 1, 23), that is, a form of paganism. As for ‘The Russian World’ ideology, it too has been rejected by the very eminent confessor of the Faith, Metr Onufry of Kiev and all the Ukraine. He has quite rightly said that we should not be aiming at creating a ‘Russian world’, but ‘God’s world’. https://spzh.media/en/news/79477-decr-uoc-comments-on-decree-of-the-25th-world-russian-peoples-assembly

A Church of Faith

The other church in this place is much older, on the edge of town, looks poorish and is really rather plain. There are no golden domes. Inside there is a great number of icons painted on wood and relics. Fr Leonty, the priest, is an older pastor and spiritual father and is ignored by his bishop. He does not have a car and never asks people to donate money. He is not interested in money. His sermons concern the Gospel and he never mentions politics in church, but speaks of repentance and a change of life for the better. He is very traditional in his faith, but is kind and open to everyone. Parish life is strong and people feel united. They love their pastor, as he loves them. The emphasis is on the spiritual, on confession and communion.

The second church is the fruit of the Faith of ‘The Orthodox Christian World’. This Faith goes back to the Resurrection of Christ in Jerusalem in the Year 33 and its Incarnation in the world as a way of life, and not some nationalist ideology or political philosophy, for it is not nationally exclusive. Indeed, on the Day of Pentecost in the Year 33, the apostles spoke in different languages, so that all could understand. No national or racial exclusivity here, for the Orthodox World is multinational and international, the expression of Catholicity.

This Faith has always been expressed by the Church and is lived by all who are devoted to the Church, as seen most obviously in the communion of the saints. In today’s world we could give this Faith the name of ‘The New Jerusalem’. This is simply another word for Orthodox Christianity, which is outside all petty nationalism and concerned with the spiritual and ascetic. It opposes ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ with what has in Russia since the seventeenth century been called ‘Moscow the Second Jerusalem’.

Faith Always Wins

The essential problem with the Third Rome ideology is that the ideal of Rome always degenerates into nationalism. For example, the ideal of the First Rome degenerated into what was at first a Germanic or Frankish-led Western ideology and superiority complex of infallibility in the eleventh century. Passing through Spanish, Dutch, French and then British nationalist leadership, a millennium on, this ideology is now US-led. The ideal of the Second Rome (Constantinople) also clearly degenerated – into a Greek nationalist ideology. The multinational ideal of Moscow the Third Rome has equally been degenerating into Russian nationalist ideology for a long time. This is why in the seventeenth century the then persecuted Russian Patriarch counterbalanced the ideal of the Third Rome with the ideal of the Second Jerusalem. This is the only way.

For the moment some in the Russian Church have rejected Non-Russians, thus rejecting centuries of missionaries and missionary activity outside itself and have degenerated the Christian Commonwealth ideal of the Third Rome into a mere nationalist ideology. Whether in the Ukraine, Latvia, England or elsewhere, all too many in the Russian Church have turned their backs on Non-Russians. Those who love the Church of God are at present often forced to look outside the Russian Church for spiritual life.

However, there is the same situation for those inside Russia who seek the spiritual. In the provincial town I know, they go to the second church, not to the first one. That is why we too have had to go elsewhere, still hopeful that certain Russian Church clergy can cast off the nationalistic and militaristic ‘Russian World’ ideology. Although it is clear that the Russian State is the great winner in the Ukraine, it is the Russian Church that is the great loser and although it is clear that the Ukrainian State is the great loser in the Ukraine, it is the Ukrainian Church that is the great winner. The need is to return to ‘God’s world’, as Metr Onufry of the Ukraine has said.

Conclusion: Towards the Future

This New Jerusalem Faith, the Faith of ‘God’s World’, is also that of the free Metr Hilarion of Budapest and Hungary. He stands out as an exception among the episcopate of the Russian Church. Principled, speaking Western languages and with connections all over the world, he occupies the high moral ground and has not compromised himself in ‘Russian World’ politics. He is surely to become the next, non-political and pastoral, Patriarch and Archpastor of the cleansed Russian Church. Indeed, his first act may have to be to reverse the appalling injustices and persecution committed inside the Russian Church against its faithful pastors in the last three years for their rejection of sectarian schism, greed and politicisation, which have so utterly discredited the Russian Church.

He will also have to stand up to the absurd and novel demands of sectarians and schismatics, who claim to be ‘Russian Orthodox’ and claim that Non-Orthodox Christians, including Catholics, must be rebaptised to be received into the Orthodox Church. Then he can include more Western Orthodox saints into the Russian Church calendar. He will have to decentralise the Russian Church, granting autocephaly or autonomy to the Churches in republics outside the Russian Federation. Above all he will have to re-establish good relations with all the other Local Churches in the spirit of Catholicity and so move towards settling the century-old canonical irregularities within the Orthodox Diasporas through a politically free Council of the whole Church.

 

 

Why the Kiev Dictatorship has not been able to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

https://spzh.media/en/zashhita-very/79475-why-hasnt-the-authorities-banned-the-uoc-yet

Why haven’t the authorities banned the UOC yet?

28 March 14:01
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The campaign to ban the UOC has entered a new stage. Journalists are jailed, MPs can be sanctioned, and the West made the first anti-church publication. What’s going on?

After the attack on March 12, 2024, on UOJ journalists and church rights activists by the SBU, it was expected that this would catalyze the adoption of the anti-church bill 8371 banning the UOC (along with the final seizure of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra). With the journalists being silenced and rights activists intimidated and detained, it should be painless to vote to ban the Church, according to the logic of the orchestrators of these events.

However, something went awry. The vote, slated for March 20, 2024, had to be postponed. MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak announced on his Telegram channel that bills were being removed from the agenda altogether. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, many deputies, including those from the presidential faction “Servant of the People”, simply sabotage meetings and do not come to work in the Verkhovna Rada. Secondly, the Rada has accumulated quite a lot of unpopular, controversial, and scandalous bills. As IT specialists say in such cases, applications begin to conflict with each other.

In other words, using administrative resources, you can push through a vote on one scandalous bill, but not on all at once. Therefore, administrative resources have to prioritize bills, while parliamentarians calculate which bill’s vote could cause them more tangible troubles.

As it turned out, Bill 8371 banning the UOC is the biggest trouble, not only to the country as a whole, but also to each individual deputy personally.

Amsterdam’s warning

On March 15, 2024, UOC lawyer Robert Amsterdam wrote a letter to the parliament speaker and members of parliament, not for the first time explaining that bill 8371 is unconstitutional and unlawful, and its adoption will not only tarnish Ukraine’s image as a non-democratic state but also expose the MPs who vote for it to certain packages of Western sanctions. Moreover, this applies not only to the vote in the Verkhovna Rada but also to other persecutions against the UOC: seizures of churches, beatings of believers, and so on.

One of the most well-known sanction packages of this kind is the so-called “Magnitsky List”. But in many countries, there are similar lists that include officials and public figures who violate fundamental human rights. According to R. Amsterdam, these lists include individuals for much less significant human rights violations than those committed against UOC believers in Ukraine.

Amsterdam’s warning caused a very nervous reaction in the Verkhovna Rada, which the lawyer himself described as apoplectic.

This means that the deputies took the warnings seriously and had second thoughts to the effect whether it was worth playing with fire, as sanctions may involve entry bans to EU countries, the USA, asset freezes, and other dismal consequences.

In view of Amsterdam’s warning, an emergency meeting of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy was convened in the Verkhovna Rada on March 18, 2024, and they were so outraged by the activities of the American lawyer that they called his warnings threats and decided to complain to the SBU. MP from the party of former President P. Poroshenko’s “European Solidarity” Iryna Herashchenko called the warnings fake, while pressure on deputies – interference in the work of state institutions. She even wondered if sanctions should be imposed on R. Amsterdam.

However, Mrs. Herashchenko did not consider that, firstly, imposing sanctions against human rights defenders for their legitimate human rights activities is akin to authoritarian, not democratic countries. Secondly, by her excessive reaction to the warnings, she (like other MPs) actually indicates that these warnings sound quite serious and authoritative. Well, and thirdly, if, for example, adults warn a child not to put nails in the socket because it will shock them, does it mean pressure on the child and an infringement of their freedom?

They will take a different path

Apparently, Amsterdam did make an impression on the Verkhovna Rada MPs, as the authorities decided to first prepare Western public opinion for the adoption of the anti-church bill 8371, and only then put it to a vote.

The head of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy, Mykyta Poturaev, suggested sending a delegation of MPs and representatives of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches to the US to try to explain to the American establishment that violating the right to freedom of conscience is not considered a violation as long as it is directed against the UOC.

One might assume that this attempt will be unsuccessful, since both the US and European countries are perfectly aware of what human rights are and what constitutes their violation. However, there is still a certain hope for success, as it was the Americans who lobbied for the creation of the OCU and subsequently provided it with active support and assistance. Moreover, this support was demonstrated by representatives of both the Republican and Democratic parties. However, in our opinion, American lobbyists for the OCU did not anticipate that it would come to the point of forcible seizures of churches, mass violations of legislation during the re-registration of communities, and now to the prohibition of the UOC at the legislative level.

On March 21, 2024, Ukrainian political analyst Kostiantyn Bondarenko announced on his Telegram channel that the Office of the President had ordered several Western editions to publish articles against the UOC, in defense of the anti-church bill 8371, justifying the persecution of the Church, as well as discrediting lawyer R. Amsterdam and his human rights activities. K. Bondarenko also mentioned the considerable budget for such an order – over $2.5 million in March and April 2024.

No sooner said than done – and on March 22, 2024, the first customized article appeared in The Wall Street Journal titled “Is Religious Liberty ‘Under Attack’ in Ukraine?” Its author, a certain Jillian Kay Melchior, believes that liberty is not under attack in Ukraine, but “the country faces a dilemma in how to deal with an Orthodox church controlled by Russia” and with R. Amsterdam, who spreads fakes about persecution of the Church.

The text of the article itself gives the impression that it was written by poorly talented authors in Ukraine, offering blunt narratives and unsubstantiated claims. If Jillian Melchior is indeed an American journalist, why didn’t she even bother to edit the following paragraph: “Five years ago, the Patriarch of Constantinople recognized the fully independent, self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine. But the ROC and the UOC-MP refuse to recognize the OCU”?

Firstly, there is no UOC-MP in nature (this is an invention of the Church’s internal Ukrainian enemies), there is only the UOC. Secondly, the right to recognize or not recognize the decisions of the Patriarch of Constantinople is part of religious freedom, the right to freedom of belief.

Any community, any believer can recognise or not recognise the decisions of the Patriarch of Constantinople, just like any other religious leader, which is their constitutional right.

The content of the article contains so many unsubstantiated statements and accusations that there will be a significant workload for lawyers and human rights defenders to hold the publication accountable for causing moral harm and baseless discredit. For instance, it claims that the UOC-MP provided material support for Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the East of Ukraine in 2014. Where is the evidence? For such a statement is definitely hazardous for one’s reputation.

In the United States, as in other developed countries, there is a clear distinction between the actions of individuals and the actions of organizations. In other words, we speak about individual responsibility vs. collective responsibility. The fact that individual believers and even priests of the UOC supported Russia’s aggression does not in any way prove the guilt of the entire Church.

In this regard, we cannot ignore the recent statement by the head of the SBU, V. Maliuk. On March 26, 2024, in an interview with “Facts ICTV”, he stated that to date, the court has sentenced 23 clergymen. And a total of 37 suspicions have been announced to representatives of the UOC clergy, with more than 80 criminal cases opened. Let’s reiterate it: 23 convictions! And now let’s compare this figure with the numbers of traitors in the SBU itself. Back in 2016, the SBU published on its website a list of its former employees who defected to Russia, which consisted of 1391 (!) people, including one major general and 47 colonels.

Simon Shuster in his book “Showman” about Volodymyr Zelensky quotes former Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov, who said that at the beginning of the full-scale war, the most desertions among the security forces were in the SBU. The exact number was not given, but it was said that “their departure depleted the ranks of the SBU.” So where are the bills to ban the SBU? Where are the accusations of undermining national security? Where are the calls to hold the entire SBU accountable for the actions of these employees?

It can be assumed that such an experienced lawyer as R. Amsterdam will certainly use these facts as arguments in support of his position.

Actions in defense of the UOC

Supporters of the UOC are also not sitting idly by, but taking vigorous actions to defend their Church. On March 26, 2024, the United Nations Ukraine website published a report from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “On the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine”. It asserts that over the past three months, “clergymen and parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continued to experience intimidation.”

The report describes several cases of violent seizure of temples. On the same day, an interview with the UOC lawyer, Archpriest Nikita Chekman, was published on the YouTube channel of the NGO Public Advocacy, a human rights organization. The interview discusses specific violations of the rights of UOC believers, forcible seizure of temples, searches at the Center for Legal Protection of UOC Believers, arrests of journalists from the UOJ, and so on.

These facts of violations of believers’ rights will be disseminated among international human rights organizations and will also be heard at the UN Human Rights Session.

In other words, defenders of the UOC are doing everything possible to draw the attention of the international community to violations of UOC believers’ rights. And in competition with adversaries of the UOC trying to prove the opposite, defenders of the UOC seem to have a more fair chance to win. After all, there are so many offenses committed over the past 10 years that hiding or misinterpreting them is no longer possible. Moreover, most of them are well documented and formulated as statements to law enforcement and judicial authorities of Ukraine.

In addition, the Ukrainian authorities have decided to take actions that are almost zero-tolerated in the West. We are talking about encroachments on journalistic activity and the work of lawyers. Unfounded arrests of Orthodox journalists and gross unlawful interference in legal practice are perceived extremely negatively in the West.

But relying on the assistance of the international community and the reaction of Western countries to the violation of the right to freedom of conscience in Ukraine is not enough. The most important thing is the steadfastness and fortitude of believers within the country.

The guarantee of the existence of the UOC is not the protection from American or other lawyers, but the fidelity of believers to their Church, the readiness to defend their religious beliefs despite threats and intimidation.

You can take away the temple, but you cannot take away faith. You can illegally re-register a community, but if the community confirms its loyalty to the UOC and its Primate Metropolitan Onuphry, then it remains in the fold of the Church, and people continue to be in communion with all Christians as members of the Body of Christ. This cannot be fought or overcome by any anti-church laws or prohibitions. Our strength is in the fidelity to our religious choice, fidelity to Christ, in fulfilling His commandments.

What might happen next

Most likely, the anti-church bill 8371 will be put on hold for some time. They will wait for the reaction of Western society to the commissioned articles against the UOC and its defenders. Perhaps they will send a delegation of officials and representatives of various denominations to the United States, who will try to convince their counterparts that there is no persecution for faith in Ukraine. Unfortunately, things like church raids and illegal re-registrations of UOC communities in favor of the OCU will continue. But the decisive steps of the authorities to ban the UOC (or the absence of such steps) will mainly depend on the situation on the fronts.

This is all nothing new. Any authority, in various failures, tries to redirect public anger to someone else. It has always been this way. Let’s remember the very first persecution of Christians under Emperor Nero. When in 64 AD almost the entire Rome burned down and the citizens guessed that the emperor had himself set fire to the city, then the authorities, without much thought, accused the Christians of arson.

A new religion, incomprehensible, suspicious – is a very convenient target to redirect the crowd’s anger. The same thing can happen today.

If military failures follow, the authorities may intensify persecution of the Church so that Ukrainian society sees the UOC as an enemy, shifts its focus to dealing with it, and does not ask inconvenient questions from the authorities. But this is only one of many factors that will influence the situation. The opinions of Western countries and the struggle for power within Ukraine will also have their impact, inter alia.

Anyway, the most important thing is God’s providence, which can steer the situation in ways that no one currently anticipates. “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails” (Proverbs 19:21).

Tragedy in the Collective West and Tragedy in the Russian Orthodox Church

A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.

Walter Lippman, US political thinker and journalist, Congressional Record, Vol III, Part 7, 1965

Introduction: The Rise of the Collective West

In 1066 the Papally-backed bandits of North-Western Europe, Normans, Bretons and Flemings, led by Duke William the Bastard, invaded England to oust the ‘schismatic’ English. They were greatly helped by English traitors placed there by the half-Norman King Edward the Confessor. It was one of the first acts of aggression of the Collective West, which was then being assembled and united by its ideological and infallible head, the Pope of Rome. This ‘Crusade’ was followed by other Papally-backed ‘Crusades’, which were also acts of gangsterism and thuggery by the same Collective West. Those Crusades massacred tens of thousands not only in the Holy Land, but also along the Baltic. Here knights and mercenaries of various Western nationalities took delight in murdering the ‘schismatic’ Russians and other Non-Catholics. In the following centuries Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes and Germans took part in further attacks on Russia and in Papally-backed efforts at regime-change, most notably in the Time of the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century.

However, the greatest examples of violent aggression against Russia by the Collective West were the campaigns of the Papally-crowned Napoleon in 1812 and of the nominally Catholic Hitler in 1941. Napoleon’s aggression was multinational and, indeed, the Russian rout of Napoleon is still celebrated there as a victory over the ‘Twelve Nations’. In 1854, the French, joined by the Ottomans, British and Sardinians, invaded Russia again, this time mainly through the Crimea, the Cardinal of Paris calling it a ‘Crusade against the schismatics’. It was another joint effort of the West. Then in 1914 Germany and Austro-Hungary also attacked Russia. In 1941, having learned nothing from Napoleon’s defeat, Hitler also invaded Russia with an Army of just as many nationalities, but whose losses were many times huger than those of Napoleon. Nearly all of them died and this time instead of troops from the Russian Empire liberating Paris as in 1814, in 1945 troops from the Soviet Empire liberated Berlin and this time stayed there for over forty years.

Today the USA, of which NATO is only a puppet, continues to try and dominate Eurasia. However, the USA island, like Britain before it, is only a maritime power and cannot fight on the Eurasian landmass, but can only attempt to divide and rule it. This is why US allies are on islands like Britain, Japan and Taiwan, on coastal strips like Israel and on peninsulas like South Korea and Western Europe. As soon as it tries to penetrate the Eurasian landmass, it is resisted by huge land-based forces, like those of Russia and China. And because the USA is trying to weaken and destroy Russia through the Ukraine and China through Taiwan, both those countries have now allied themselves to defend each other from the USA.

Some modify the statement that ‘history repeats itself’ and declare rather that ‘history echoes’. Whatever the case, geography does not change. Land-based Russia dominates Northern Eurasia and the maritime island empires, Britain and after it the USA, are still trying to destroy Russia from the sea, whether from the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Black Sea or the Pacific Ocean. The Western ideology of superiority and indispensable exceptionalism remains just as jealous as ever of those who have lived for up to a millennium and a half in the eastern half of Europe. These are the lands of the East Slav peoples, of ‘Rus’, represented above all by the Russians, with their rich agricultural land and abundant mineral resources. Today the Collective West continues, as before, to attack Russia along its northern and southern flanks, with the fantasy of making ‘NATO lakes’ in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, but also in headlong frontal warfare in proxy warfare with bloody consequences for the hoodwinked Ukrainians, who are simply being used and abused.

However, even the very unpopular elites of the Collective West (Macron and Scholz at about 17%, and Sunak at 9%) are increasingly divided on this issue. This division is very complex, as the forty nations of the western half of Europe are divided by different views and experiences. But all those elites have committed suicide because they have invested so heavily in the lost Ukraine project. Now the US is abandoning the Ukraine and ultimately Europe too. There only ambition now is to stretch out the Ukrainian tragedy until after the US elections. The situation is like that in Britain in the Year 410. Then the Roman Emperor Honorius replied to a request for assistance from Britain against pagan attacks, telling the Roman cities to see to their own defence. It was a tacit acceptance of British self-government. No forces could be spared to protect distant Britain. Roman control of Britannia was entirely lost. So too the declining and bankrupt USA is abandoning Western Europe. Like a pet dog abandoned by his master, the pet dog no longer knows what to do.

NATO – Today’s Collective West

Europe is divided. Apart from the fact that a few European countries are not even members of the US NATO organisation, that is, of today’s Collective West, or else are not members of its political and economic wing, the US-controlled EU, there are those in the western half of Europe who simply want good relations with Russia. Here there stands out Hungary and it has been joined by Slovakia. Remarkable is the aggressive, colonial attitude of the very unpopular Czech regime of Pavel (now more ferociously anti-Russian than even the Americans – perhaps overcompensating for his Communist past?) towards Slovakia. This is why the Slovaks divorced from the patronising Czech elite over thirty years ago. These two countries will not get on until the that elite is removed by the Czech people. More or less openly, Serbia and minorities in every country in the western half of Europe, from Moldova to Germany, from Cyprus to Montenegro, from Bulgaria to Italy, from Austria to Portugal, from Ireland to Sweden, also have pro-Putin attitudes and want to oust their highly unpopular elites.

NATO Romania will become pro-Putin, if he gives it back its land stolen by Stalin in the south of the Ukraine and if it gets back the Romanian parts of Moldova. Many other countries near Russia will also change their attitudes, if their small and unpopular US-elites are removed and, of course, if they can make favourable agreements with Russia about supplies of oil and gas. These include Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Spain, Portugal and above all Germany. I would also include Poland, Finland and the Baltics, whose aggressive Russophobia exists only because their elites believe that they have US backing for it, which for the moment they have. However, Poland is already changing its attitude and its workers are blockading the Ukrainian border. As for Switzerland and Ireland, they too could return to real neutrality. As for Finland and Sweden, they never asked their peoples in a referendum if they wanted to join NATO because they knew that the peoples would have rejected it. Indeed, even their corrupt elites have already declared that they will have no NATO bases in their countries. Their NATO membership is therefore meaningless and unnecessary.

In any case, what is NATO? NATO Turkey does what it wants and NATO Greece arms against Turkey. Denmark has virtually no military equipment left, Slovakia has no air force left, Hungary has no tanks, the Baltics have minute armed forces, France has no howitzers left, Britain has a navy with submarines and aircraft carriers that have become an international joke, is unable to recruit enough sailors to man its small fleet of boats, has had to scrap one third of its operational planes because it has no pilots for them, has no self-propelled artillery left, only 40 tanks that actually work and has to recruit soldiers for its underpaid army in Nepal. In France the mere mention of conscription is greeted by rioting. Could France supply even 15,000 troops to invade the Ukraine? In any case, they would be killed within two weeks. As for deindustrialised Germany, it has little left to give and what it gave, like Leopard tanks, has been shown to be useless. Its increase in military spending does nothing for its own forces, all the increase is given to prop up the Ukraine.

The End of NATO and of the EU

NATO is going to collapse into the grave it has dug for itself by ‘poking the bear’. Its elitist sister-organisation, the EU, will follow NATO, all the quicker if Trump is elected in eight months’ time, but, in any case, it is inevitable. Western Europe is utterly divided, as we saw with Brexit. True, the British elite which hates the English, Scottish, Welsh and most obviously Irish peoples, has refused to implement Brexit. This is because it wants to continue to line its pockets with EU money, which is why it has always loved the EU. Germany, under its much-disliked US puppet Scholz, and France, under its deluded and detested Emperor ‘Jupiter’ Macron, are also divided.

The ‘Big Three’ pygmies, Germany, France and the UK, are at each other’s throats. The cat (USA) is away, so now the (three) mice play. The three are still respectively obsessed with their need to dominate (Scholz), imperialist superiority (Johnson etc) and delusions of grandeur (Emperor of Europe Macron), they are today irrelevant and squabbling clowns. The German elite still dreams about Lebensraum in the east, its tanks are still burning on the steppes of the Ukraine. The proud and arrogant British Establishment still thinks it rules an Empire and is a race apart (which it is, but not in the way it thinks, for no-one has yet told them the sun has set on them). As for preening and pretentious members of the French elite, they are still as narcissistic, self-important and therefore as petulant as ever. However, the last statesman in Europe, De Gaulle, overthrown in the CIA operation of 1968, died soon after. Now, after the US has destroyed Europe, especially since 2022, there are left only European political midgets, all suffering from megalomania.

Unlike in 1914, in 2024 Russia has the biggest economy in Europe and has by far the most powerful military with invincible arms. Russia was forced by the West into liberating the Donbass. NATO then forced Russia into liberating all the Ukraine and the EU. Russia was forced by the West into demilitarising and denazifying the Ukraine. NATO then forced Russia into demilitarising and denazifying NATO. The irony of all this is that the split and unwieldy 32-nation NATO alliance, most members of which refuse to spend more money on their inadequate armed forces, is fighting against Non-Communist Russia. And yet, during the Cold War, NATO never fought a war against the ‘evil empire’ of the Communist Soviet Union. Today Soviet Imperialism is long since dead inside Russia, though not, ironically, in Kiev.

What is alive, however, is the nationalism of democratic Russia, which is a millennial Civilisation. So is the ultra-nationalism of anti-democratic and autocratic Ukraine. But Ukrainian nationalism is artificial, without historical roots, as the Ukraine has no deep historical past, and now exists in a half-Russian country. Moreover, pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, which the West despises as it also despises the failed state of the Ukraine and despises Ukrainians. It has been artificially revived only as a tool of Russophobia for purely political and military reasons, financed with hundreds of billions of dollars, trained and armed by Western Imperialism only in order to weaken and then destroy Russia through ‘regime change’ and to die ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

This opposition of nationalisms is why the conflict in the Russian east and south of the Soviet-created and NATO-defended Ukraine was inevitable. Like it or not, the reality is that Russia was always, and obviously, going to defeat the Ukraine in any military conflict, thanks to its far greater land mass, its world-respected diplomacy and backing from the multipolar BRICS, its population that is now seven times greater and far superior military technology. The self-deluded West, blinded by hubris and contempt and stuck in its bullying, arrogant, ignorant and triumphalist ‘end of history’ myths of the 1990s, lived in a virtual world, a world of wishful thinking. As a result of this fantasy, it totally underestimated the diplomatic and military might of Superpower Russia of the 2020s. As it could not even defeat Iraqi conscripts and Afghan goatherds, what chance does it have against the most advanced military equipment in the world?

Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not first sit down and consult whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him that comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else while the other is a great way off, he sends an embassy and desires conditions of peace?

Luke 14, 31-32

The Tragedy in the Russian Orthodox Church

Today, we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, or our culture can be erased from history. Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion.

President Vladimir Putin, 30 September 2022

‘Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion’. So proclaims the Russian State, whether you believe it or not. Ironically, against this background of the victorious Russian State and its reconstruction of ‘Rus’ (the Union State of the Russian Federation, Belarus and the New Ukraine), we see the defeat of the nationalistic administration of Russian Orthodox Church. What are the values of this administration? ‘Humanity, mercy and compassion’? The administration of this Church, known as the Moscow Patriarchate, has been to some extent discredited because of its militaristic and nationalistic attitude to the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the Moscow Patriarchate has lost the loyalty of many of the multinational faithful outside the Russian Federation and Belarus. And even inside these two countries, it has lost the loyalty of many who are not devoted to Russian nationalism, but put Christ above a nation.

The Church is not an army. However, some in the Russian Church administration is demanding that its clergy and people behave as if they were in an army. That is suicidal behaviour in what is by definition a volunteer organisation. Fewer attend Russian Orthodox churches inside Russia, especially those of the two younger generations, who did not experience the persecution and nobility of the Church in the Soviet past. They see many of today’s Russian clergy, especially the episcopate, as corrupt mini-oligarchs and anti-spiritual bureaucrats and politicians, who are incapable of spiritual values. It is not surprising. What is the origin of the tragedy, this self-imposed defeat, which is so paradoxical in view of the victory of the Russian State?

The tragedy is that after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian State desovietised itself, but the Russian Church did not. The Russian State had to face up to reality in order to survive in the real global world and so became the leader of the multinational, multicontinental and multicivilisational BRICS Alliance of black, brown, yellow and white. This reality was that Moscow, the Russian State, knew that it could no longer hold on to Non-East Slavs, as the USSR had split into 15 independent republics, let alone hold on to its Eastern European Empire, where the USSR had come to be hated. Tragically, however, the Moscow Patriarchate did not realise this and did not desovietise itself, as symbolised by its keeping of its Soviet name, ‘the Moscow Patriarchate’.

We have repeatedly suggested that it be renamed ‘the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’, which is a monastery just outside Moscow. Instead, many in it has continued to live in the bubble and ghetto of the Soviet past, thinking it had power over all Non-Russians, over whom it still held jurisdiction. In other words, it is to some extent a remnant of Soviet Imperialism in the post-Soviet world. Leaving to one side the glory of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the real Russian Orthodox Church, the senior administration, the Moscow Patriarchate seems to have retained a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy with a mentality of subservience, cancelling all independent thinking. Will it really need the interference of the Russian State to desovietise the Russian Church? It would be the irony of ironies.

Nationalism and money-making, which soon turned into oligarch-style corruption, became the order of the day for many. The only qualifications to be a bishop were to be single, have an idea of the Church services and history, and to be good at raising funds, to be ‘an effective manager’. Some were pedophiles or spies, psychopaths or drug-dealers. Spirituality and morality never entered into it. Episcopal money-making means exploiting priests, who in turn are supposed to exploit the people. As the proverb says: ‘A fish rots from the head’. Such exploitation means aggressively grabbing and then micro-managing territory, property and income. The larger the territory, the more the parishes, the greater the number of parishes, the greater the income. This means misusing the canons (which such mafiosi always call ‘holy’!) for purely territorial, ideological, financial and sectarian claims.

Any Russian Orthodox pastors or spiritual fathers who disagree with the canonical deviations or just political opinions of their superiors seem to be ‘defrocked’! This includes ‘defrocking’ those who have left the persecution of the Russian Church without letters of leave, because the Russian Church refused to grant them for no good reason, though the Russian Church itself has received hundreds of clergy from other Local Churches without letters of leave, especially in Europe and Africa. The word ‘hypocrisy’ comes to mind! Such a militaristic, nationalistic, centralised and unipolar command and control system has made some in the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, and those who imitate it, into something that scandalises. And this is in a country whose State has championed not centralisation, but the non-nationalistic and decentralised multipolar BRICS Alliance! Some claim that Moscow is ‘the Third Rome’. But Rome had the ability to unite different peoples and cultures. This is not what ‘the Third Rome’ is doing, because of its exclusivist nationalism.

The Russian Orthodox Fragments in the Emigration

Given recent events, even before the Russian State launched its Special Military Operation against NATO in the Ukraine, some have asked me if I regret helping to foster the unity of the two émigré fragments of the Russian Church, centred respectively in New York and Paris, with the Russian Orthodox Church, centred in Moscow. The answer is a resounding ‘No’, and for the reasons below:

The New York émigré group, known familiarly as ROCOR, numbering about 60,000, essentially in the English-speaking and German-speaking world, was by the 1990s turning into an old calendarist sect. Our victory was that on its reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in 2007, its then hierarchy rejected its past, self-imposed isolation and its emerging status as a pharisaical right-wing sect. Indeed, as a result of this reconciliation, some 5% of the most extreme part of the New York group left it and created four different tiny and exclusivist sects, which were not in communion with any part of the worldwide Orthodox Church. If it had not been for the reconciliation in 2007, the New York group would not have survived, it would have split into two, a sect and the rest – who, like myself, would have joined the Mother-Church.

The Paris émigré group, known familiarly as Rue Daru, numbering about 15,000, essentially in French-speaking Europe, was by the 1990s turning into a modernist cult. Our victory was that on reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in 2019, it rejected its past, self-imposed isolation and its emerging status as a Tradition-less, make-it-up-as-you-go-along cult. However, as a result of its reconciliation, some 43% of the most extreme part of the Paris group left it, mainly for the modernist section in the Church of Constantinople. If it had not been for the reconciliation in 2019, the Paris group would not have survived, it would have split into two, a cult and the rest – who, like my close friends there, would have joined the Mother-Church.

The Results

Some, reading the above statistics, may say that the reconciliation of the New York group, four times larger than the small Paris group, was by far the more successful. However, the story since 2007 proves otherwise. Having been cleansed of extremists, the Paris group has remained firm. And although only some 5% of the New York group abandoned it, they left behind a large number of others, perhaps about 38%, who still had a sectarian mentality. They just hid behind their paper reconciliation with the Mother-Church as a justification to continue to do exactly as before. Hypocrisy. They had never intended to repent. In other words, there had always been the same proportion of extremists in the New York group as in the Paris group (43%), but the New York group was not cleansed of them. It is this remaining extremist part of the New York group, over a third of the whole, which a decade after the reconciliation, since 2017, began to take revenge for the reconciliation, seized power and caused all the problems. Notably it has actually completely unjustifiably initiated a public schism with the Paris group, supposedly another part of the same Russian Orthodox Church! Moreover, this schism, inside itself, has passively been backed by the administration of the Moscow Patriarchate!

There are already examples of senior clergy and people exiting the New York group, either by ‘retiring’, or else by joining non-schismatic Local Churches. And there are those who have not left yet, but are still suffering the same moral torment as those who have left, seeing the disgraceful behaviour of its new hierarchy. Its pious bishops of the last century must be spinning in their graves. The new sectarian ROCOR hierarchy is reverting to the pro-Nazi or Vlasovite ROCOR mentality in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and to the sectarian CIA-funded, Vlasovite ROCOR of the 1960s to the 1980s. Its degeneration is its own fault. You cannot blame the corruption of individuals in the Moscow Patriarchate for your own corruption. You must take responsibility for yourselves. Individual corruption is a personal choice, not something forced on New York by Moscow, even if New York episcopal corruption follows exactly the same pattern, falling to exactly the same corruption of accumulating territory, property and income. The larger the territory, the more the parishes, the greater the number of people, the greater the income. Power has gone to all their heads.

This pathological micro-management, popularly known as control freakery, also means misusing the canons (which they always called ‘holy’ as part of their absurd self-justification!) as weapons for uncanonical political and territorial claims. Any clergy who disagree because they are Christians are ‘defrocked’ by the corrupt, not least in Non-Russian Moldova, where large numbers of parishes are leaving the Russian Church for their ancestral Romanian Church. Homosexuality and love of money and luxury, living as ‘princes of the Church’ and not as servants of the people, is their choice. Don’t blame Moscow for that. The proof of this is that the Paris group, however naïve some may say that it is, has not followed this path of episcopal and clerical corruption and has no desire to do so. The Paris group has not left to one side the glorious victory of the New Martyrs and Confessors over atheism. It has in no way a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy with its mentality of subservience, cancelling all independent thinking. On the contrary, Paris has retained the multinational Russian Orthodox missionary vision. Here is the tragedy of the New York ROCOR group. It has, purely voluntarily, abolished its heritage in suicidal acts of self-destruction.

Conclusion: Quenching the Spirit

Thus, the heritage of multinationality and catholicity of both the Moscow and New York parts of the Russian Orthodox Church have been rejected by their clerical administrations, with the ensuing isolation of the Russian Church. The senior hierarchy of both parts has shut itself off from concelebration with other Local Churches and promoted those of Russian nationality above all others, whom it treats as second-class citizens. Interestingly, the Russian State did not impose any of this. The senior Church hierarchy, acting like a Stalinist Soviet Politburo, did. And quite freely. This has been suicidal. Essentially, the Holy Spirit is being replaced by the human spirit.

The tiny Paris group alone has not chosen that path. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Divine calling of the émigré fragments of the Russian Orthodox Church was firstly to reunite with the freed Mother-Church in Moscow and secondly to call its administration, the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’, to repentance after the nightmare of Sovietisation, by witnessing to Russian Orthodoxy, and so desovietise it. The New York group did the opposite of this. It not only remained silent on desovietisation. It actually imitated and sovietised itself, making itself too into a ‘Soviet tank’. It opposed baptism with the heresy of rebaptism, Christian love with phariseeism, and catholicity with right-wing sectarianism. It could all have been so different, it was all so unnecessary. New York, like Moscow, chose suicidal self-destruction and the living forces of the Russian Orthodox Church are deserting it, as its hierarchy quenches the Spirit.

After reconciling with Moscow, the New York hierarchy copied the worst of it, also becoming corrupt – financially, ideologically and morally. The errors of both Moscow and New York can be measured in the destinies of those who have left them, seeing the unrighteous life lived by bishops and priests and therefore their inability and unwillingness to proclaim Christ. Whatever you think of the inevitable outcome of Russian military victory, the profoundly tragic inter-East Slav war in the Ukraine is Divine punishment for the sins of the hierarchies of both Moscow and New York. The Russian Orthodox Church, let alone Orthodox Rus, let alone Holy Rus, has been torn by civil war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. This is not pleasing to God. This is hardly the Triumph of Orthodoxy, let alone the Triumph of Orthodox. But it is what happens when there is no repentance for all that went before and when the Russian Orthodox Faith is dominated by corrupt and highly centralised clerical administrations, which compromise everything. However, after the resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church, we remain convinced that it will shed the bloody graveclothes with which it is still wrapped from the Crucifixion and be cleansed of the unworthy and corrupted.

I tell you, No: but unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish.

Luke 13, 5

 

Church of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe,

England

The Triumph of Orthodoxy, 24 March 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ukraine: The End-Game and the Great Cleansing of the Church

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2024/03/11/razvyazka_na_ukraine_i_velikoe_ochiwenie_cerkvi

The Western fiasco in the Ukraine is coming to an end. All agree that the third year of the SMO, 2024, is the turning-point. Some say it will all be over in May, others in September. Perhaps. Only God knows. Rumour has it that some senior Ukrainian officers have defected to Russia. They know the war is lost and they no longer want to fight for the Nazi regime in Kiev. They are beginning to understand that Russia is not at all against the Ukraine, but is liberating the peoples of the Ukraine from the US-installed Nazi yoke in Kiev.

Ten years have passed between the coup d’etat of Victoria Nuland, the US Deputy Secretary of State, which spent $5 billion on overthrowing the democratic government in Kiev. She has just been ‘retired’ (= sacked) and been replaced by John Bass – the former US ambassador in Afghanistan, who oversaw the ’withdrawal’ (= humiliating defeat) of the US in Afghanistan in 2021. The US, led by its senile President who nearly every day makes a new embarrassing public mistake, knows that it has been beaten in the Ukraine too.

This whole fiasco was begun by the USA. However, the German, British and French vassals, barking enthusiastically for war like little puppies around their US master, have now been abandoned by that same disillusioned master. The little dogs are now more aggressive than their master, their Russophobia unabated. The fact is that the master in Washington has understood that there is no point in throwing away more dollars to a lost cause. Hence the ‘retirement’ of Nuland. However, the Europeans have yet to understand that Kiev is a lost cause and they have wasted their tens of billions of euros and pounds.

What of the future of the Ukraine, as established by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, and of Moldova? Russia wants to re-establish the unity of Rus, the threefold Union State of the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Belarus. There will be a New Ukraine, inside its natural borders. The east and the south of the old Ukraine may revert to Russia, thus linking Russia to Odessa and Transdnistria, which may also become part of Russia. Most of the rest could form the New Ukraine, perhaps consisting of the ten provinces and Kiev in Central Ukraine plus Khmelnitsky and most of Rivne in West Ukraine. The New Ukraine would be a country only slightly larger than Belarus. Perhaps. Only God knows.

Romanian parts may return to Romania and the Romanian Church, and Hungarian parts to Hungary and to the Russian Orthodox Church in Hungary. Perhaps the four western provinces of Volyn, Lviv, Ternopil, Ivanovo-Frankivsk plus the western tip of Rivne province will return to Poland. However, Russia may set conditions for Romania, Hungary and Poland. For example: These territories must remain demilitarised and if you want them, you must leave NATO. The Romanians would be interested, if most of Moldova was added to the bargain: the Russian parts of Moldova like Gagauzia would, like Transdnistria, go to Russia, the rest would go back to Romania and the Romanian Church. Orthodox in parts going to Poland would go under the Polish Orthodox Church. Perhaps. Only God knows.

After the conflict is over, there must also be a settlement for the Russian Church. Outside Russia most in the Russian Church have supported Russia, but by no means all. Some have been persecuted by treacherous bishops and clergy, sometimes liberals or homosexuals or money-lovers, who have openly supported the Americans against Russia. Here a number of bishops and senior clergy, children of Vlasovites and senior NATO officers, have supported the Kiev regime, publicly condemning Russia. All around treason and cowardice and deceit….

They have even forced Russian patriots, Russia’s greatest friends in the West, to leave the Russian Church after a lifetime of faithful service, taking refuge (naturally, not with the US puppets, the Greeks), but with the Local Churches of the Romanians, the Poles, the Serbs and the Bulgarians. Meanwhile, Russian voices abroad have been raised in favour of the canonisation of the CIA spy Navalny as a martyr! After the SMO will come the great cleansing of the Russian Church, not just in Russia, but elsewhere. You ain’t seen nothin yet.

The Situation of the Orthodox Church in 2024

Introduction

The Orthodox Church is a Confederation of sixteen Local Orthodox Churches, totalling some 200 million faithful, with about 80,000 priests and 1,000 bishops. Most Orthodox Christians live in Eastern Europe, though there are minorities in most countries in the world.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Greek Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (now called Istanbul) stands out as the historically most prestigious Local Orthodox Church. For over a thousand years of history until 1453, it was powerful and in Constantinople there lived the only Orthodox Emperor. However, today this Patriarchate is very small in numbers, with a few million faithful at most, of whom fewer than one thousand actually live in Istanbul.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Russian Church of the Patriarchate of Moscow also stands out, partly because many see it as the successor to the Church of Constantinople, but above all because it has, or used to have, about 70% of the total number of the faithful, 140 million. This is because it is, or used to be, multinational, with a third of its members Non-Russians of many nationalities. This is unlike the other Local Churches which are in effect National Churches. However, today, this is increasingly less the case, as we shall see below.

The Negative

As a result of the pre-eminent positions of these two Local Churches, the powerbrokers of this world have always striven to take control of their senior clergy.

Thus, after the Ottoman capture of the City in 1453, the Constantinople Church gradually fell under foreign, later French or British, control, with their ambassadors appointing the leader or Patriarch of the Church for payments of money to the Ottomans. After the fall of the British Empire at the end of the Second World War, Constantinople came under the control of the successor Empire, the USA.

In 1948 its Patriarch, Maximos V, was removed by the Americans by force and flown in President Truman’s personal plane into exile in Switzerland, dying there in 1972. He was at once replaced with a Greek-American puppet-patriarch, who proceeded to do anything the Americans wanted. Some forty years ago I got to know a Greek bishop who had been Patriarch Maximos’ personal deacon at the time and was an eyewitness to those events. He told me how the CIA thugs took Patriarch Maximos with violent threats, intimidating him with possible death if he refused to obey them. ‘We have ways of making you come with us’, were their exact words.

As for the Russian Patriarchate, after 1700 it came under the control of Protestant-style laymen, called ‘oberprokurors’, who were appointed by the government. Russian bishops were appointed by politicians, some anti-Orthodox and often strongly anti-monastic, just as in the Protestant Churches, in Germany, Scandinavia or England. For example, in the latter country the Prime Minister, who may be an atheist or a Hindu for instance, is still responsible for appointing all Anglican bishops. As for the former Russian Empire, after 1917 the situation became even worse and Soviet atheist laymen openly persecuted and controlled the Russian episcopate, most of whom it murdered and martyred. After the fall of atheism in 1991, the Russian Church revived, but its senior clergy remained with the subservient mentality of the previous three centuries.

As a result of such politicisation, Orthodox who are part of the Russian Church but who live outside the borders of the Russian Federation and are not Russians, are leaving the various parts of the Russian Church. This is most obvious in the Ukraine, but also in Moldova, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as in Western countries. They do not wish to belong to any part of the Russian Church, which is being nationalised, that is, Russianised. They want to worship Christ, not a national, political system. In other words, the Russian Church is becoming alien to them. As one of its very young but senior metropolitans, filled with ethnic hatred and conceit, said when he expelled some Non-Russian clergy and faithful from the Church recently and handed them to another Local Church: ‘Too bad for them’.

In this way, clergy and people are leaving the Russian Church because of their desire for self-determination, they are ‘voting with their feet’. As a result, the missionary work of the Russian Church has all but ceased. Who wants to belong to a Church which persecutes its own? Only a few extremists. The numbers of the faithful in the Russian Church could eventually go down to 50% of the total number of Orthodox from 70%, as a result of the foundation of new Local, or National, Churches for Orthodox, who live in independent countries or regions outside the Russian Federation. These could be formed in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Western Europe, South-East Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America or elsewhere.

As a result of the acts of politicians there is at present a serious schism between the Constantinople and Russian Churches, which between them number some 72% of all Orthodox. In 2018 the Constantinople Church, egged on and very generously financed by the US State Department, was told to try and destroy the Russian Church. Therefore, Constantinople created a purely political schism with the Russian Church by opening its jurisdiction on what had for centuries been uniquely Russian territories, namely in Estonia, the Ukraine and now in Lithuania.

Consequently, since then the Russian Church has refused not only any communion with the Constantinople Church, but also with other Greek Churches or bishops who for ethnic, financial or political reasons support Constantinople. This includes the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Russian Church has in revenge opened many parishes on African territory, which Alexandria has claimed for nearly a century. Both sides are excommunicating each other and defrocking each other’s clergy tit for tat, quoting the canons in false justification for their own purely political and punitive purposes. There is no Love, only the spirit of revenge, and so the Church is under attack and there is chaos.

The Positive

Some might conclude from the above that the situation in the Orthodox Church is dark and desperate, given the views of senior hierarchs of both the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow and their schism. However, those outside the Church refuse to understand a vital fact: senior clergy are not the Church. This is important because senior clergy die and are replaced. There is no reason to think that the succeeding senior clergy will take the same line as before. All wars sooner or later end in negotiations.

For example, within the Patriarchate of Constantinople there are a great many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people, who remain faithful to Orthodoxy. Many there regret the anti-Russian aggressiveness of their Patriarchal authorities and their uncanonical actions under US pressure, just as they regret the equally aggressive Russian response. When asked by the faithful about those actions which have led directly to schism, such pious Greeks simply reply: ‘It is all politics. Pay no attention’.

In other words, the storm will pass, just as the storms of earlier centuries have also passed. And within the Russian Patriarchate, most also have the same viewpoint. Here there are also many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people who refuse to take part in the politicisation of any part of the Russian Church, either by the Russian secret service, the FSB, or the American, the CIA, which are both trying to undermine the Russian Church, bribing individual corrupt clerics.

As a local example we have for exactly fourteen years been greatly supported by a new White Russian family in East Anglia, Countess Benkendorf, strongly supported by Earl (to give him his English title, which neither of them uses publicly) Benkendorf. They support the Tsar and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, having a new martyr as a direct ancestor, and give no support to mere politicians in any part of the now unfree Russian Church. They are among the new White Russians who now live here in East Anglia, but are in fact relatives of the old White Russians. For the last ambassador of Imperial Russia to Great Britain was Count Alexander Benkendorf (+ 1917) who lived here with his wife Countess Sophia (+ 1928 in Ipswich), whose descendants were also friends of my late aunt in Colchester.

They are devoted to the local St Edmund the Martyr, the last King of East Anglia and have East Anglian rose-growers and sweet pea growers among their close friends. Earl and Countess Benkendorf reject all politics and extremes in the Russian Church, whether of the old politicised and money-minded White Russians, who worked for MI5 and MI6, or of the new nationalistic and secular-minded post-Soviet Russians. They remain in the centre, in the mainstream, following the golden mean, the middle way of the Fathers and the Saints. The Earl and Countess represent us all, they are our Connection, but they are just local examples of a far, far greater and worldwide movement.

Thus, apart from the majorities in both these Patriarchates who reject politicisation, most of the other fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, although slightly more or less close to one side or the other, still keep their independence. Nearly all stand somewhere in the middle, not taking sides, like the traditional Greeks and Russians described above. We note especially the position of the Romanian Church, the second largest Local Church, and of the Albanian Church, together with the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch and the Polish and Serbian Churches. They all show great independence. Here bishops and the faithful insist on the catholicity and conciliarity of the Church. We all call for a Church Council, where the Church can come to unity through depoliticisation, the rejection of bribes and political pressures from States and their secular minions, who wrongly think that they can buy the Church.

Conclusion

Non-believers, as well as those who believe only weakly, overlook Divine Providence in the history of the Church. The greatest proof that the Church is run not by human beings, but by Divine Providence, is that it has survived extraordinary human stupidity, pathological individuals and incompetence for nearly 2,000 years. Human institutions, like clerical elites, survive for a few centuries at best, and often only for a few decades or even a few years. God’s Providence protects us, for the Church belongs to Christ the Son of God, not to mere men, and Christ is always victorious.

 

A New World and Church Order

Kill them all

Words of one of the leaders of the Catholic Crusade which massacred some 10,000 people at Beziers, France, on 22 July 1209

Kill them all

Words of another new Herod, US Congressman A. Ogles, speaking of Palestinian children, 21 February 2024

Introduction: The Real World  

In order to understand the conflict in the Ukraine which the USA began in 2014 at a cost of $5 billion to its taxpayers, we have to understand the background to it. Only then can we appreciate its huge significance for the future, for the result of this American war against the Ukraine and so Russia and so China is a New World Order. This is a millennial turning-point, the first since the ‘revolution’ or ‘transformation’ of the mid-eleventh century, which marked the rise of the West. This is not like the historic changes that took place in, for example, 1096, 1135, 1215, 1378, 1492, 1517, 1688, 1789, 1815, 1919, 1945 or 1991. Although these were all highly important, despite the rhetoric around them, none of them led to a New World Order, but to just further extensions of exactly the same old Western World Order. However, it is this conflict in the Ukraine, the last straw that has broken the camel’s back, that is leading to a New World Order following on from the post-Imperial West. Let us explain this by describing the World Order as it is today, with its division into two, the isolated, minority West versus the Global Majority, North, South and East.

The International Chessboard

On the one hand, in today’s world there are the globalist, amoral-liberal oligarchies, known as ‘the West’. These represent only 12% of the world population of eight billion human-beings. Although just a small minority, this West includes vast territories (especially the largely empty and uninhabitable spaces of Canada and Australia) and many of the richest and most powerful individuals in the world – the capitalist oligarchs of transnational corporations and their bankster politician servants. These elites are renowned for promoting Godless, anti-national and anti-family ideologies: Atheism (as the oligarchs are atheists, they replace God and play at Him), Globalism (= the control of the Globe by oligarchs) and LGBTQ (the oligarchs’ favoured forms of depravity).

On the other hand, in today’s world there are also the sovereignist, national-authoritarian democracies, known as ‘the Rest’. They are democracies, albeit quite militarised but not autocracies, as their elected leaders’ priority is to represent the broad national interests and identities of their peoples, not of the rich and their banks, transnational corporations and decadent liberals. These sovereignist democracies represent 88% of the world population of eight billion human-beings. Although the overwhelming majority, they include most of the disinherited and powerless in the world. However, they are growing less poor and less powerless, as the teeming millions of Asia, Africa and Latin America are brought together by their common values of belief in God and universal moral values, patriotic respect for the Nation, and the importance of the Family, amid the common search for peace, justice and prosperity for all.

Thus, on the black side of the international chessboard, there is the King that is Israel, the Queen that is the USA, with rooks represented by Japan and Germany, bishops by the UK and France, knights by Canada and Italy. The pawns are represented by US-run countries or groups of countries like Kiev regime Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, most of the rest of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Spain, Taiwan and South Korea.

On the white side of the international chessboard, there is the King that is China, the Queen that is Russia, with rooks represented by India and Brazil, bishops by South Africa and Belarus, knights by Iran and Saudi Arabia. The pawns are represented by countries like the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, North Korea, Hungary, Serbia, Venezuela and Cuba.

The Deluded Narrative of the West in the Ukraine

The elite of the West lives in a state of delusion, so profound that it actually believes in its own virtual world delirium of propaganda myths or ‘narratives’, as it calls them. For example:

  1. The Western elite believed that it could enforce its own illegal sanctions against Russia. Its sanctions failed miserably, indeed backfired, and have helped isolate and bankrupt European economies, making them into failing States. They did not realise that Russia has autarchy, that it is independent, and is itself a huge source of oil, gas, fertilisers, chemicals and foodstuffs, especially wheat, on all of which the Western world depends. By its boycotts of vital Russian goods, the West has wrecked its own economies, forcing many staples to double in price, so undoing itself. Russia has not attacked it; it has done it all to itself. It believed in its own delusional propaganda, that Russia is just ‘a gas station with nukes’, ‘with the GDP of Spain’ (!), and not a sovereign country and a great diplomatic and military power, already the most powerful economy in Europe, and is supported by most of the world. Thus, the self-destructive sanctions of the West only strengthened Russian sovereignty. Indeed, economists forecast that the Russian economy will overtake the US economy during the present century, to become the world’s third largest, after those of its allies, China and India.
  2. The elite believed that it could enforce regime-change in Russia. In fact, its scheming only made the very popular President Putin, a national representative and sincere patriot, more loved, and made itself even more loathed. Despite the lies (narrative/PR/psyops/propaganda/spin) of the West, which is all it has, President Putin is not dying of cancer, dementia or anything else, unlike the openly senile President Biden.
  3. The elite believed that it could apply the offensive military technology which it had used against Iraq twenty and thirty years before, against Russia, this time using Kiev regime cannon-fodder as its proxies. The elite believed that its ‘game-changing’ weapons, tactics and training were superior to the far advanced Russian, when in fact they were either obsolete or else over-engineered because of its own profit-obsessed, oligarch-driven and suicidal deindustrialisation and decadence. The obsolete or unsuitable weapons and munitions from NATO cannot be replaced because of the deindustrialisation of the West. However, increasingly militarised Russia has a huge military base, with a million well-trained volunteer troops drawn from four times the Ukrainian population, and cannot run out of weapons, missiles, tanks, ammunition, men etc. This is unlike the US colony of the Ukraine, which is running out of all of them, even of ill-trained conscripts abducted by force off the streets. Up to 500,000 Kiev troops (Ukrainians and NATO ‘advisers’ and mercenaries) have died so far and at least another 700,000 have been wounded. On the Russian side the anti-Russian, BBC-sponsored Mediazona project reports the deaths of over 45,000 troops and an unknown number of wounded Ukrainians, Chechens, Russians and Ghurkas, all of whom are fighting for the liberation of the Ukraine from the Kiev dictatorship. The ratio is 1:10. The West has failed miserably, thus falling into the Russian trap, facing yet another humiliating defeat in 2024. It has learned nothing from its previous routs in Saigon and Kabul, still cultivating the seeds of its own destruction.

Restoring the Real Ukraine 

The Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Ukraine was never against the Ukraine, still less was it ‘a war’ against the Ukraine, it was intended to end the war begun by the US against the real Ukraine in 2014. It was never about occupying or destroying the Ukraine, it was only ever about overthrowing the US-installed dictatorship in Kiev and liberating the peoples of the Ukraine, undoing the artificial, centralised, Sovietised Kiev State, as it had been created by Communist tyrants like Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, and as supported by pro-Nazi Western elites. Russia had no interest in war, only in applying pressure to begin talks about security, which the Kiev regime and its Western patrons had rejected for eight years.

This is why only a small number of Russian-trained troops, about 10% of its armed forces, many of them Eastern Ukrainians, began fighting in the Ukraine in February 2022, facing huge odds. This was a small-scale operation that had been provoked by the anti-Ukrainian Kiev regime’s genocide of Eastern Ukrainians for eight long years. In this way, after 24 February 2022, the Russians pre-empted the proposed full-scale Kiev invasion of the Donbass by a few days, destroying anti-Slav US biolabs in the Ukraine and gradually grinding down the huge NATO fortifications which had been prepared over the previous eight years. The West forced larger-scale military action on Russia by its aggressiveness, forbidding Kiev to make peace, arming the South American-style terrorist junta and the dread secret police in Kiev, for whom Hollywood, literally, wrote the scripts. It supplied the junta with huge amounts of NATO equipment, munitions and tactics, which were all stuck in the time-warp of the deserts of Iraq of the 1990s.

This ensured the rout of the so-called ‘counteroffensive’ of the Kiev forces in 2023. However, the ‘permanent war’ dreamed up by the West also meant that Russia’s first aim of freeing the Donbass (and protecting the Crimeans, whom Kiev next also threatened) would have to be extended to liberating all the Russian east and south of the Ukraine. Apart from this liberation of the eastern and southern half of the Ukraine, there remained two other vital aims – the demilitarisation and denazification of the rest of the Ukraine. Demilitarisation is now three-quarters done. It has taken much longer than it would have because since 2022 there has been so much extra military equipment from NATO countries to destroy. Now we come to the third and most complex aim – denazification.

Denazification means the removal by the Ukrainian people themselves of the Nazi junta. It is not something that Russia will do directly, it does not go in for US-style regime change manipulations. It will wait until the consciousness of Ukrainian people awakens and they themselves overthrow the US-imposed junta that has been murdering their menfolk in their hundreds of thousands. Signs of this new consciousness are becoming apparent, with an open political split into factions in Kiev. Its removal is necessary because under Washington orders, the junta in Kiev outlawed negotiations with Russia in April 2022. For peace talk to begin, the Russian aim all along, that junta must first therefore be removed. Russia cannot begin peace talks with US-controlled European puppets or the American puppeteers, as they refuse to talk. Talks will be possible only with Free Ukrainians, those who have understood that the West wants to kill them ‘to the last Ukrainian’ for the sake of the West. The West has no love at all for Ukrainians; it prefers Israelis. Peace talks are impossible with the present US-imposed Kiev elite.

The Consequences of the Western Defeat

A Free Ukraine will be established within its new borders. This will be after those who choose by self-determination to belong to Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania (certain people are already gathering like vultures around the corpse of the Ukraine) have returned with their territories to their ancestral homelands. What will happen to the for now forty countries of the north-western peninsula of Asia, which calls itself Non-Russian Europe? Abandoned by their ex-globalist, turned nationalist, puppet-masters in the US, its former European satellites will have to sort out their own national affairs, just as Eastern Europe had to, once it was abandoned by the USSR. What of the twenty-one countries of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe? Russia will have a border with Hungary, which in turn has a border with Russia’s past and future ally, Serbia. The way will be open for all the at present sixteen countries of South-Eastern Europe to form an Alliance, helped by the multipolar BRICS Alliance, Chinese investment and Russian energy. This Austro-Hungarian-Ottoman Alliance could stretch from Hungary to Greece, Austria to Cyprus, from Czechia to Croatia, Albania to Moldova (perhaps minus Russian Transdnistria and Gagauzia), Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim, doing away with the old local petty nationalisms and primitive racism, working towards a Confederation for the peace and prosperity of all. However, these are not the only local consequences. There are the local consequences for the five countries of North-Eastern European, which border Russia and Belarus, that is, Finland, the three Baltic States and Poland (whose farmers are at present blockading the border with the Ukraine – for Poles resent Ukrainians and their sense of entitlement). The consequences there will be just as significant, once their US-imposed elites have been removed and popular governments elected.

As for the other for now nineteen European countries, those of Western Europe – and we know what Washington via Victoria Nuland thinks of Europe – they will at last be free to throw off their old Uniparty Russophobic elites, who have between only 10% and 20% of approval, and start all over again, in face of the new reality. The European puppets are now arguing with each other, finger-pointing, like children when the (American) parents have left the room, as they are incapable of doing anything except taking orders. The days of the pygmy von der Leyen, pretending, with others who also had Nazi grandfathers like Baerbok, to be Charlemagne, of the bankrupt pygmies Johnson and Sunak pretending to be Churchill, but with nuclear submarines held together by superglue and aircraft-carriers whose propellors do not work, of the megalomaniac pygmy Macron pretending to be Napoleon and in charge of NATO, but with French farmers pouring manure onto his buildings, and of the pygmy Scholz pretending to be Hitler, are over. And NATO, which does not exist to protect Europe, but to control it, will be over with them, as will the EU with its unelected Commissars. The new reality will be the Union State of the Russian Federation, Belarus and the New Ukraine and, beyond that, the BRICS Alliance. The Alliance has already replaced the old unipolar West as the new, multipolar, economic, political, diplomatic and military centre of the world. Western Europe has yet to catch up with this and reintegrate the Asian landmass, of which Russia is the hub.

Beyond this, there are the consequences for the USA. Since 1945 it has been the leader of the West, with all its decadence, exploitation of others and above all hubris. It inherited the privateering piracy of the failed oligarchy of the global British Empire, with its plundering of others’ raw materials, usury, financial speculation, slave-trading, drug-trafficking and permanent war. The American Empire, which cannot even defeat the Houthis, who do not even have a Navy and Air Force, has failed for all the same reasons. The future President Trump is not going to allow the conflict in the Ukraine to continue until his election in November 2024, though President Biden desperately wants it to continue after he imagines that he will be re-elected. Trump wants to ensure that the USA’s second humiliation in four years, from Kabul to Kiev, will also take place under the Democrats. The American Empire is now collapsing under its senile leader, who symbolises its disgraceful decline, and losing control of its feudal vassals in Europe, Oceania, Asia and Latin America.

And then the USA, shorn of its bankrupting overseas burdens like its NATO vassals and its coastal protectorates, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel, will be governed by an American Nationalist (ex-Republican) Party. This will have to sort out the huge mess of abortion, corruption, crime, debt, drugs, deprivation and injustice which its elite has allowed to develop within its own borders. In order to do this and so avoid yet another Civil War, it may have to split up into its constituent parts, returning the south to Mexico, the north-east and north-west to a reformed Canada, making California independent, and returning Alaska to the Russian Federation. The overseas US protectorates, including Australia and New Zealand, will be left to find their own way, making peace with their neighbours and integrating the real world.

The Orthodox Church after the Western Defeat

The leaders of Roman Catholic and Protestant religious institutions were at the root of the Western ideology of racial and religious superiority, that is of Western pride. Outside Western Europe, the clergy of the Orthodox Church have suffered many distortions and much corruption in the second Christian millennium (1033-2033). This is especially where they found themselves in political centres and so became victims of the then much more powerful Western Europe, geographically next door to it. The corrupt forgot the people of the Church, who are soon going to have self-determination. However, today’s reality is that the two most important Local Orthodox Churches, 75% of the whole Church, are in a state of schism and are even trying to drag the other fourteen Local Churches into their schism, and with some success.

For this reason, for instance, the Greek Orthodox episcopate in particular has been subject to the political manipulations of the Western Powers. For example, those who were at the centre of the then Ottoman Empire in Istanbul (Constantinople) found their episcopal posts being traded by the Ottomans and sold to French and British ambassadors who then appointed their puppets. Since 1948 they have in the same way been controlled by the Americans. They have not been politically free, as is evidenced by the lives of St Nectarius of Pentapolis in Egypt or Patriarch Maximos V of Constantinople in the last century. Currently, the political grip of the US secularists on its episcopate seems to be ever tighter.

In the Russian Church, there was no Patriarch between 1700 and 1917 and the Church was governed by laymen, several of whom were either atheists or else enemies of the Church, yet they made appointments to the episcopate and persecuted monasticism. Then, between 1917 and 1991, the episcopate of the Russian Church was under the intense scrutiny and control of the Soviet atheist regime, which appointed many corrupt individuals to it and persecuted those who were not corrupt. The Church was Sovietised and so centralised. After 1991 the episcopate did not de-Sovietise and decentralise and was also subject to all manner of financial and political pressures. This led to many immoral and corrupt actions, which discredited many parts of that episcopate and scandalised the faithful, with the result that fewer and fewer Russian Orthodox attend their churches. The onion-domes, regilded by corrupt oligarchs, may gleam, but the people do not want clergy who live corrupt lives, they want living examples of faith. As regards the Russian Orthodox Church outside the Russian Federation, it is now in a state of self-destruction, under attack not only from the CIA, but also from ‘One True Churchism’, or rather from ‘One True Jurisdictionalism’. Missionary work from the Russian Church is now virtually impossible outside Russia. They seem to have lost it, after wasting their huge opportunities over the last thirty years.

The Church itself, whether in Constantinople, Russia or in the many other parts of the world where it exists, has always survived thanks to bishops who live by the Holy Spirit, monastics who actually live the monastic life inside monasteries and convents, incorruptible and unbribable parish clergy, and the little people. We are those who refuse to sell our souls for money and worldly honours. From here have always come the fearless martyrs and confessors, by whom the Church has always lived despite corrupt bishops and clergy. The latter proclaim the lie that all owe obedience to them, even though they are financially and morally corrupt, undermined by their lusts for power, money or depravity, and create sectarian schisms and even heresies. To gangsters we owe no obedience, for we owe obedience to Christ, who precisely overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. Let the corrupt bishops be warned even now: We have always won and we always will win. The episcopate of the Church is going to be cleansed. The Great Cleansing is coming, not least in Russia, where the State is being cleansed and the Church is the next on the list.

 Conclusion: The New Church Order

 Once freed from the political pressures of the old Western powerbrokers of this world, from whom the episcopate of the Orthodox Church has suffered so many manipulations and temptations down the centuries, today’s unnecessary internal tensions and disagreements between Local Churches can be resolved. These have been thrust on the Church by those selfsame powerbrokers. On the one hand, there can be decentralisation, with the Church no longer being a plaything of the centralising, imperialist ideologies, which make some in two Patriarchates use the canons for politics, to the scandal of all. Such seem to consider that the Church belongs to them, and not to Christ. On the other hand, there can be a strengthening of the spirit of the Catholicity of the Church, creating a much deeper conciliarity. Then all the Local Churches, whose number could swiftly rise to perhaps twenty-four with new Diaspora Churches, could meet regularly in Councils to resolve disagreements because they will at last be politically free to do so. The opportunities for a New Church Order are here. But will they be taken?

Communiqué: New Decisions of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church

Published by Andrei Ursulean

On Thursday 29 February 2024 a working session of the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church took place in the Great Hall of Theoctist the Patriarch in the Palace of the Patriarchate, under the Presidency of His Beatitude Patriarch Daniel.

The main decisions of the Holy Synod are as follows:

  1. The declaration in the Patriarchate of Romania of 2025 as the commemorative year of the centenary of the Patriarchate of Romania and the commemorative year of the Romanian Orthodox priests and confessors of the 20th century.
  2. The establishment of a Romanian Orthodox Diocese of Great Britain, based in London, for the more than the 1 million Romanian Orthodox believers in this part of Western Europe.
  3. The establishment of a Romanian Orthodox Diocese of Ireland and Iceland, based in Dublin.
  4. We recall the position of the Romanian Orthodox Church with regard to political life and electoral campaigns that, in the context of the 2024 electoral year, the Church is not involved in party politics, because, according to Article 7 Para. 1 of Law No. 489/2006 on religious freedom and the general regime of cults, recognised cults are factors of social peace and any attitude of public enmity in society, of political partisanship, of attacking persons or straining relations with public authorities are contrary to the spiritual mission of the Church in society.
  5. Approval of the December and January volumes of the Synodal Lives of the Saints of the Romanian Orthodox Church.
  6. Approval of the Akathist of the Holy Unmercenaries Cosmas and Damian of Asia (November 1).
  7. Approval of the Akathist of Saint Gerasim of Cephalonia (October 20).
  8. Approval of the Service to the Holy Unmercenaries Cyrus and John (January 31, June 28).
  9. The organisation from 1-31 March 2024 of a collection in the Romanian Patriarchate to help build homes in Armenia for Armenian refugees from Nagorno Karabakh.
  10. A reminder of the fact that, through the Financial Control and Audit Body of Dioceses, Metropolias and the Patriarchate of Romania the Church authorities audit the financial and property statements of parishes, dioceses and metropolitans and, in the event that deficiencies are found, they adopt measures to remedy them, for the correct application of which the Metropolitan Synod, respectively the Permanent Synod, are responsible; the respective Financial Control and Audit Bodies must be staffed with experienced specialists (economists and financial auditors), who are characterised by fairness, professionalism and faithfulness to the Church.
  11. We bless, encourage and support the initiatives of Romanian Orthodox communities in Ukraine to restore communion with the Mother Church, the Patriarchate of Romania, through their legal organisation in the religious structure called the Romanian Orthodox Church of the Ukraine.
  12. We reaffirm the fact that all Romanian Orthodox clergy and pastors from the Republic of Moldova who return to the Metropolia of Bessarabia are canonical clergy and blessed believers and any disciplinary sanction directed against them on the grounds of their membership of the Romanian Orthodox Church is considered null and void, according to the Synodal Decision No. 8090 of 19 December 19 1992.
  13. We appreciate the rich social and charitable activity of the Romanian Orthodox Church during the year 2023, which have had visible positive effects in Romanian society.

Chancellery of the Holy Synod