Monthly Archives: September 2025

From Feast to Feast: Nine Days in the Life of

Saturday 20 September

Today, the third Saturday of the month, we have our monthly English liturgy. As usual, the Liturgy is held in the little church and takes only one hour, ending at 10.20, though I do give a long instructional talk of 20 minutes afterwards. Then those who came, a mixture of English parishioners and Russian parishioners with their children – the parents want their children to understand the Liturgy – have tea together in the meeting room. We mix with those who attend the Saturday Russian School which takes place later in another room.

Sunday 21

I arrive at church, as usual, at about 7.15 am. Preparation and the Proskomidia take one and a half hours. We have many tens of thousands of names to commemorate, so we can only pray for all the names once a year. The second priest arrives at 7.30, but has to go to the hospital to give communion to a very sick elderly woman. He is back at 8.30. Then confessions begin at 8.45 with all three priests available and the two deacons helping. The Liturgy begins more or less on time at 9.20. After the Liturgy, I have a Russian memorial service, a Moldovan baptism, and then there are people to see individually. I get home at 3.30.

Monday 22

Today I am visiting Count and Countess Benckendorff at their rose-gardened thatched home in Suffolk. We have not seen one another for a good discussion for several months. First, we discuss what we need to do for next Sunday (see below). Countess Benckendorff will prepare some white roses (white because they are White Russians) for the graves, where the parish has erected new wooden crosses after nearly 100 years. Above all we speak of our favourite topic, the future of Russia and the Russian Church, against the background of the latest news from Russia.

Although both Benckendorffs were born, brought up and worked in the Soviet Union, they have worked through and understood the problems of the last century of Russian history. They are both appalled by the present civil war in the Ukraine and how the West has sponsored it against the interests of both peoples. But the peoples themselves are also responsible. We agree that all this horror is the result of the aftermath of both waves of Westernisation, the Marxist-Soviet one before the 1990s and, from the 1990s on, the Capitalist one of the oligarchs. Both were the result of the Western-organised regime change operation in 1917, known falsely as ‘The Russian Revolution’, that we should rather call ‘The Russian Degeneration’.

As regards the Military Operation in the east and south of the old Soviet Ukraine, it has always been clear to us from the outset that giant Russia would win militarily against small Ukraine, even with full NATO backing, rather as if in a conflict between Germany and Belgium, it would be clear that Germany would win, however much Belgium was backed by outside meddlers. However, from the outset it has equally always been clear that the Russian Church would lose. A Church, one third of whose members are Non-Russians, has lost one third of its members and been turned into an ever more centralised, clericalised and militarised ghetto, hostile to the people and to the spiritual. The violent and conscious rejection of Non-Russians and the Orthodox mission to Western Europe by the now nationalist Russian Church hierarchy for purely political reasons has been its huge loss.

Both the Count and Countess have a great fondness for their distant cousin, Count Paul Benckendorff, brother of Count Alexander, the last Imperial ambassador at the Court of St James (London). Count Paul was very close to the martyred Tsar, ready to die for him, and wrote the book ‘Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo.’ Their view is that in 1917 Russia committed suicide, betrayed by its corrupt aristocracy, the oligarchs of that age, and it still has not recovered from that suicide, even though we are now advancing on the road to recovery, especially compared to fifty years ago.

This can be seen very clearly in the Russian Church hierarchy, as it goes from one scandal to another, to the despairing patience of the faithful clergy and people, more and more of whom are boycotting it, as they have been let down. There is far to go to restore the original Russian Church, as it was before Peter I, the ensuing bureaucratisation and increased ritualisation. The problem is not that the State persecutes the Church or forces it into obedience, it is people inside the Church who think that the Church must imitate the State, just as in the Church of England.

Another thing we agree on is that the decadence in Russia in 1917 was shown by the fact that people no longer took communion, at best, only once a year, often indeed never after baptism. In effect, by 1917 Russia had fallen out of communion with Christ and into the ritualism of the pharisees who can express only hatred. Here is how the leaders of the once persecuted Church became persecutors.

Tuesday 23

Today I bless the home of an English Orthodox family in Bury St Edmunds. Afterwards N. comments that the alien British Establishment want us to rejoin the Globalist EU project (did we ever leave it?), continue the greedy Globalists’ war in the Ukraine in order to exploit all its natural resources, and increasingly control and censor us as they are authoritarians. N. adds that ‘the present Prime Minister claims that we have free speech and if anyone disagrees with him, they will be arrested’. I suggest that all may change, once the leaders of Germany, the UK and France fall, since they are all extremely unpopular, indeed are hated.

I listen to him with a smile, but change the subject to history and say how the problem of Western Europe is that it was conquered by barbarians like the Franks, Vikings and Normans.  As a result, the twentieth century was patterned by the descendants of these barbarians with their barbarian World Wars, fighting against neo-pagans – Communists and Nazis.

In the afternoon I collect the up-to-date statistics for our Church in Western Europe. Our two bishops in the British Isles and Ireland now have dioceses of 119 priests and 19 deacons in 95 parishes and 5 monasteries. We are part of the two Autonomous Metropolias of Western Europe, of Western and Southern Europe, and Central and Northen Europe. They include even our parishes and missions in Finland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland. We now have 10 bishops, 859 parish churches and 30 monasteries, with the number of churches increasing regularly.

We have come a long way from the days of liturgies in front rooms and sheds, with 10-20 huddlers in the catacomb churches of the 1970s. When there were more than 25 people present, they would say: ‘There were a lot of people at church today!’ However, these conditions still endure in the present Russian Church in the Diaspora, which still suffers so grievously from its past errors. Thus, the Russian Church in the Diaspora (ROCOR) may have up to 300 parishes altogether, but only about 50 of them have more than 100 parishioners for Sunday liturgies. Most have between 10 and 40 mainly converts. But we are now in the normal mainstream, in churches that have hundreds of parishioners present every Sunday.

Fr Ioan Nazarcu, our old friend, whom we have known for 15 years, and for some years now has been a priest, has just given the Economist magazine an interview. Although this Rothschild magazine is atheist in ideology, Fr Ioan, whose English is excellent, has been able to give them a first-rate interview.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/09/22/the-orthodox-church-is-thriving-in-britain-thanks-to-immigration

Wednesday 24

Today I have my day off and am at home, dealing with domestic matters and building work. 

Thursday 25

Today I bless a Ukrainian-Moldovan home in Basildon near east London. The parents are worried about transgender propaganda at school and are thinking of returning to Moldova to protect their children from it. I stop at church to get everything ready for the feast on Saturday. It takes me two hours. Then I bless the home of a Russian family in Colchester and stay for tea and conversation. They have just returned from Moscow, which is now very vibrant and generally more prosperous than Western cities, which have so many social problems and suffer from litter, graffiti and potholed roads and pavements.

Friday 26

Today I am seeing Moldovan and Romanian parishioners in Stowmarket in Suffolk and in Diss across the border in Norfolk. I will not make it to the canon this evening in Colchester, where 30-40 Romanian parishioners gather more or less every Friday evening or sometimes at midnight for a Liturgy. Fr Ioan will, as always, cope very well.

Saturday 27

Today is the Feast of the Exaltation for our Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan parishioners. About 50 people are in church. Afterwards I baptise an adult Russian. 

Sunday 28

 I head to church at 6.45. After the Liturgy, we have the meeting of St Alban’s Circle, our youth group. About sixty people attend. The subject is the life of St John of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Fr Ioan is doing baptisms in the main church, while Fr Sergey has a memorial service in the little church. At 1.20, I leave for Claydon cemetery outside Ipswich and the graves of Countess and Count Benckendorff, wife and son of the last Imperial ambassador, Count Alexander. They are distant cousins of the present Benckendorffs. People place roses on the graves of Countess Sophia, Count Konstantine and his wife Maria Korchinska. I get home at 3.30

At home I have to start getting ready for my pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania from 6 to 17 October.

 

 

Orthodox Pray in Our Own Church in Dublin

The Church of St John of Shanghai in Colchester was built in 1855 and is the largest wooden church in the British Isles and Ireland. St John’s is attended annually by 5,000 Orthodox of 25 nationalities. It has two altars, three priests of different nationalities, two deacons and Sunday attendance is between 200 and 400.  It is administered by the East of England Orthodox Church Trust (Charity No. 1081707), centred in the City of Colchester, which cares for our Deanery of seven multinational Orthodox parishes in Colchester, the East of England and beyond.

St John’s is a parish of the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, part of the Autonomous Orthodox Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe with its Synod of 7 bishops and over 900 parish churches and many monasteries. Our rapidly expanding Archdiocese  already has 108 priests and 17 deacons in 95 parishes and 5 monasteries, as Vladica Atanasie ordains our many candidates throughout Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Next to us, however, with Bishop Nectarie of Ireland and Iceland there are another 10 parishes and 15 priests and his Diocese has had wonderful news:

https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2025/09/14/miracle-from-god-romanian-orthodox-community-gathers-in-newly-purchased-cathedral/

 

 

‘There is No Grace Outside the Orthodox Church’. True or False?

The very fact that the above statement is sometimes made displays either ignorance of the rudiments of our Faith, or else a pathological state. The latter by definition quenches the Holy Spirit, Who is the source of grace. And yet the statement is widespread among the tiny numbers of pseudo-Orthodox sectarians who are not and do not wish to be in communion with the Orthodox Church, known as ‘old calendarists’, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian and Russian. The Russians are from the Russian Old Calendarists Outside Russia, who are now struggling to overcome their latest pedophile scandal.

Such old calendarists, perhaps 75% of them in the USA, number some 10,000 individuals and are divided into some 20 different tiny sects, which are constantly warring with each other. In this they resemble the various warring Protestant sects, which comes as no surprise as most old calendarists are ex-Protestants. They enjoy telling each other and others, that they ‘will go to hell’, as they are possessed by the spirit of pharisaic condemnation. This is the darkness of every Spiritless and so Loveless human ideology, which stems from demonic pride. Such pride is founded on praise of self by condemning others.

In this way they feel superior to others, their hearts swollen with self-loving pride, as they have deprived themselves of the Holy Spirit and so of humility. They fail to understand the basic theological truth that we are saved only by Divine Mercy, never by any narrow human ideologies, which are always founded on the absence of love, that is, on hatred. The pharisees ignore the words of Christ, that ‘the wind (Spirit) blows where it wishes’ (Jn. 3, 8) and of the Creed: ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit…Who spoke by the Prophets’. These words clearly disprove the human ideology that there is no grace outside the Church.

Denying these words, the human ideologists of exclusive grace, that grace belongs to them only, declare that Christ was lying, that the Prophets were not saved, including the Forerunner John, the last Old Testament and first New Testament Prophet, was not saved, and nor was the Mother of God, at least for the first 33 years of her life. They deny that the Spirit can blow and call people into the Church, like the Jews before Christ spoke to them, like the Archangel-visited Inuits before St Innocent came to them. And such is their anti-historical sense and hatred that they condemn generations even of their own ancestors.

St Sophrony the Athonite explained Orthodox theology to us nearly fifty years ago, in 1978, before many of the saint-denying, ‘Orthodox’ sectarians were even born. This followed a scandal on Mt Athos. Orthodox sacramental theology is clear, he said. The sacramental forms outside the Orthodox Church are not sacraments, but rites. The sacramental potential of those rites is only activated by the grace that comes from contact with the Church. Thus, there is no need to repeat the rite. Anything that is ritually deficient (single immersion or splashing instead of triple immersion, for example) is covered by the grace of the Church.

The fact that people come to the Church is proof that the Church transmits (non-sacramental) grace outside of Herself, the free and direct grace of the Holy Spirit. However, that grace cannot be maintained in the world without the support of the grace from the sacraments, that is, sacramental grace. This explains the age-old and universal (except among the new, US, pseudo-Russian old calendarists) practice of the canonical Russian Church of receiving Catholics by confession and communion. Certainly, when I was in the old ROCOR, I received Catholics thus, in faithfulness to the practices of the old, Russian ROCOR.

As an Orthodox prison chaplain, I am in constant contact with Orthodox thieves, fraudsters, rapists and even murderers. They are all baptised Orthodox Christians. Do these then have grace, whereas my fellow-chaplains, Catholic or Protestant and other good, but Non-Orthodox, people, have no grace? This is absurd and reveals only that the old calendarists have no knowledge and experience of life in their gloomy and negative ghettoes, where apparently the Sun does not shine. They are victims of their own ideology of censorious, accusatory and sectarian judgementalism, so self-isolated from the Church.

Those who deny the presence of any grace outside the Church, deny that the Church is like the Sun – it shines on all, the righteous and the wicked alike. Those who deny this, limit God, taking over His role as the Only Giver of grace of the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds from the Father, and not from old calendarist schismatics. No ‘infallible’ Pope, of Rome or of any other Western Capital, can dispose of the Holy Spirit. All such bishops are literally ‘disGraceful’. In the homelands of Orthodoxy, ancient homelands as in Western Europe, or modern homelands as in Eastern Europe and West Asia, we know this from experience.

 

 

 

 

 

September 2025: A Tale of Two Cities and of Two Saints

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

Charles Dickens

Two Cities (1859)

Dickens’ The Tale of Two Cities was published 166 years ago and concerned the two cities of London and Paris. Today these cities have become rather irrelevant on the world stage and been replaced by others. These are Ekaterinburg, which in 1918 became the New Paris, the City of Martyrdom, as was old Paris for a time after 1789, and Shanghai, which has become the new centre of commerce, the New London, as was old London until 1918. Ekaterinburg is in North Asia (Eurasia), at the very frontier of Europe and Asia, and Shanghai is in East Asia. In the first days of September 2025, they came to the fore, as three out of the four most important world leaders met because of agreements made in them.

Firstly, there was the meeting of the SCO (Shanghai Co-operation Organisation) and secondly that of the Intercontinental BRICS, founded in Ekaterinburg. The main languages were Mandarin and Russian. And on 3 September over twenty of the most important world leaders gathered in Beijing to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Chinese victory over the Western puppet of Japan, turned rogue, and against Japanese Fascism. 20 million Chinese were killed in this struggle, 16.5 million of them civilians, for China had to fight for fourteen years from 1931-1945 against 70% of the Japanese Army. This is unlike the USA which fought only from 1941 to 1945 and lost 400,000 from its armed forces.

In its battle against German Fascism, the USSR lost 27 million, 19 million of them civilians. In other words, the USSR and China lost 47 million people against Fascism, whereas US lost fewer than 1% of this. The world leaders gathered in Beijing were national leaders, not tyrannical, oligarch-appointed sexual perverts and puppets of the global banking cartels, as in the West, like Trump, Merz, Starmer and Macron. BRICS is the Concert of Sovereign Nations, which preaches non-interference, co-operation, and refuses to engage in regime-change operations or assassinations of the democratically-elected leaders of other countries. They highlight today’s Tale of Two Cities and Tale of Two Saints.

St Nicholas of Ekaterinburg (1868-1918)

BRICS was founded in the Tsar’s Capital of Saint Petersburg in 2006 and its first summit took place in Ekaterinburg in 2009. Ekaterinburg is the City of the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, his Family and four of his faithful servants in 1918, though the first of them had been martyred in 1916. Tsar Nicholas had reigned over a summit of cultural achievement: Dostoyevsky (1881), Chekhov (1904), Tolstoy (1910); Tchaikovsky (1893), Rimsky-Korsakov (1904), Rakhmaninov (1943); Levitan (1900), Serov (1911), Repin (1930). In 1917 this apex of culture was overthrown in a right-wing plot of aristocrats, generals, politicians and lawyers, orchestrated by British perfidy and hatred of Russia in wartime.

The plotters were themselves soon overthrown by the crude and reactive Western ideology of Marxism, accepted and imposed mainly by Non-Russians. Mass genocide followed. Today, those of us who are faithful to the memory of the righteous Tsar continue his mission. Count and Countess Benckendorff, ambassadors of Holy Rus, travel throughout the East of England and beyond, recently visiting Royal Sandringham and greeting King Charles III, and renewing with St Edmund, the last East Anglian King, who was martyred like Tsar Nicholas by the same heathen. This is despite the apostasy of certain members of the Russian Church, whose liberation from the politicians we all await.

Tsar Nicholas II spoke five languages, Russian, English, French, German and Danish. He was multinational, wanting to build a church for Orthodox in every Western European capital, before the First European War prevented him from implementing this project. Today the Benckendorffs fly the multinational White Russian flag combined with St Edmund’s standard as their confession of the Faith. But a number of Church leaders are still stuck either in the masonic (1721-1917), or the Bolshevik (1917-1991), or the Capitalist (1992-2022) past. Thus, the plagues of nationalism, centralism and sectarianism infect the once great multinational Russian Orthodox Church and sadly enslave it and limit it.

St John of Shanghai (1896-1966)

Ekaterinburg has its saint, but so does Shanghai. Multinational, Imperial and Prophetic like our Tsar, St John (Maximovich) preached repentance for his martyrdom not only to the apostatic Russians in Shanghai, Western Europe and the USA, but also to the whole Western world. As a result of the weaponisation of Western finance, trade, the dollar and diplomacy, the United Nations (UN) may yet move from New York precisely to Shanghai, together perhaps with the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World Bank and the WTO (World Trade Organisation). Although St John was persecuted, suspended and put on trial by the apostatic Russians in the USA, his victory in Shanghai is coming.

After all, the three largest BRICS nations alone, Russia, China and India, that is, North Asia (Eurasia), East Asia and South Asia, represent over three billion people, some 36% of the world’s population. All Eurasia is now being interconnected, as symbolised by new pipelines which are only reinforcing these interconnections. Even West Asia, the greatest nation of which is Iran, is entering into those interconnections, despite the Western wars against it. Africa, Latin America and even Oceania are also now entering into those interconnections. Missing only is the self-isolated and barbarically aggressive north-western peninsula of Eurasia, that pretentiously calls itself ‘Europe’.

That ‘Europe’ and its US master is now a blend of failed (bankrupt) states and rogue (which murder the heads of other countries) states. As globalists, their leaders hate as ever their own peoples. The 750 + US bases worldwide are not threats to freedom, but monuments to its bankruptcy. The Western world, Northern America, Western Europe, the crusader settler colony of Israel, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the 47 million of Oceania, is isolated. And so it mounts attacks against BRICS in Pakistan and Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia, Syria and Iran, Thailand and Cambodia, Venezuela and Brazil, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Serbia, Romania and Moldova, Hungary and Slovakia.

The Way Ahead (2025)

First the Western world lost its diplomatic, technological and military war against Russia, China and India. Then it lost its economic war of illegal sanctions and tariffs, against Russia in 2023, China in 2024, and India in 2025. Western Europe is still living in the past of its old empires. The Frankish Empire of Western Europe, built against Eastern Europe (from 882 on), against Southern Europe (from 999 to 1194), against Northern Europe (from 1066 on) and then against the coastlands of West Asia and North Africa (from 1096 on), is over. This millennial empire is why it is four times more difficult for Western Europe to give up its hubris and fantasy than for the USA with its mere 250-years of empire.

At this very moment Western European governments are collapsing in violence. Its European Wars, ‘World War One’ (1914-18) saw the suicide, or rather murder by Zionists, of the German Second Empire (Reich), the Russian Imperial, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires. ‘World War Two’ (1939-45) saw the suicide, or rather murder, of the German Third Empire (Reich), the British, the French and the Japanese Empires. ‘World War Three’ (2022- ) saw the suicide, or rather murder, of the US Empire and that of its vassals in Western Europe, the Ukraine and Israel. At this very moment, Western European governments are collapsing. And the cause is the same – suicide or murder.

‘It would be a far, far better thing that you do, than you have ever done’ for the West to return to the Pre-West. This is the West of the Age of the Saints. For authentic Christianity is not a Western religion, but came out of Asia for the whole world. And so the West would become again part the rest of the world. This is the future, to rejoin the Concert of the Sovereign Nations, in respect and toleration. US intolerance, like its religion, does not export. US religion was cast out of Europe because of its intolerance, its intimidation and bullying are not Christian. Western intolerance, interference in the affairs of others, is dead, which is why the Western world is the museum and the cemetery of its past.

 

 

 

Questions and Answers August 2025

Church Unity 

Q: How can we arrive at Church Unity, when all sixteen Local Churches are at last in communion with one another?

A: I can answer this on the basis of the achievement of Russian Church unity (2007-2021), in which I helped a little. This was achieved by the compromises made by all sides, which got rid of the extremes of the three Russian jurisdictions. The MP had to renounce, at least for a time, Sergianist Sovietism, ROCOR had to renounce, at least for a time, Russian Fascism, and Rue Daru had to renounce Western Liberalism. It will be the same in the question of the unity of the whole Church. Greek, Russian and other nationalisms (Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian and others) are responsible for the present divisions. Who will have the courage to renounce such nationalism?

A word of warning, however. Since 2021 when Russian Church unity was achieved, some powerful elements have renounced their compromises and gone back to their extremes, so unity has been lost. Thus, the fanatical and schismatic US convert elements in ROCOR broke communion with Rue Daru and centralising MP nationalists are pushing the Church back towards Stalinist Sovietism. Through nationalist fanaticism and schism the Persecuted Church has become once more the Persecuting Church, the Church of the Pharisees, thus scandalously renouncing the legacy of the New Martyrs and Confessors. And so regained internal Church unity has been lost, even inside the Russian Church.

Conversion to Orthodoxy and the Non-Orthodox World

Q: Why have so few Western Europeans joined and remained faithful to the Orthodox Church? I mean at most it can only be a few tens of thousands out of over 470 million.

A: In order to become a real and not a superficial Orthodox Christian, it is no good admiring ‘mystical’ monks, ‘pretty’ icons, ‘lovely’ singing, or the ‘traditional’ liturgy. That is all emotional, superficial. You have to renounce, spiritually, the anti-Christian historical and contemporary acts committed by your national elites in acts of repentance. This means renouncing blind nationalism, for we are called to be not of this world – blind nationalism, the attachment to artificial States and elites, cannot be part of our Faith. This is true for all nationalities.

For example, if you are an Orthodox Russian, you venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors who were persecuted by Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet regime, which you therefore renounce, as well as renouncing the anti-Church acts of the pre-Revolutionary governments which go back to the seventeenth century and the resulting Old Ritualist schism of that time. Then you renounce the serfdom copied and introduced by the Western-style Russian aristocracy, which led to the anti-aristocrat Pugachov revolt, suppressed by the German Empress Catherine II, and later to the 1917 revolt. This is renouncing parts of your ‘national tradition’ also.

If you are from Western Europe, you have to go back much further, rejecting not just the atheistic secularist woke modernism of contemporary post-Protestantism or post-Catholicism, but also the imperialism and colonialism of the nineteenth century, the iconoclasm of the Protestants, the Popish heresy of the filioque, which claimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Bishop of Rome, introduced feudalism with its castle and knight protection rackets and the barbarian plundering and massacring of the Crusades with their ideology of racial superiority over others. The vast majority of Western Europeans are unable to do this, consciously or, far more often, unconsciously. Yet, such repentance for a culture gone wrong is at the heart of conversion to Orthodoxy.

Q: You appear to be opposed to converts. Is that so?

A: Not at all! I am opposed only to crazy converts, the pathological types, as they are called in French, especially when they are made priests, or, horror of horrors, bishops! The downfall of ROCOR was not because of convert clergy, but crazy convert clergy.

Q: Where do moralism and intellectualism come from?

A: They are both deviations which come from a lack of spirituality, from those who have ‘quenched the Spirit’. Moralism generally produces conservatism and then phariseeism. Intellectualism generally produces liberalism and then homosexuality.

Q: Why should the Church be opposed to tithing when there was a Church of the Tithes in Kiev?

A: ‘Desyatinnaja Tserkov’, ‘the Church of the Tithes’, is a well-known church in Kiev in the history of Ancient Rus, precisely because it was unique, built by tithes imposed on rich people. No other examples of an Orthodox church built by tithes are recorded. It is always quoted by US converts from Protestantism in order to justify the tithes they want to impose on Orthodoxy. Tithes are a practice of the Old Testament, beloved by Protestant sects, and are not part of the practice of the Orthodox Church, except in exceptional missionary circumstances, and only then when they can be enforced on the rich by the secular authorities, as they were in Kiev. In other words, the Church is not opposed to tithes as such, it is opposed to them being made compulsory.

Q: If the Pope were found to be a homosexual or a pedophile, there would be an existential crisis in the Roman Catholic world. When we know that some leaders of Orthodox Churches are such, why is there not some huge crisis inside them?

A: The short answer is because we are not clericalists. In other words, the Head of our Church is Christ, not some man, who by some sort of magic, has inherited his title from St Peter. The sins of others, including of Patriarchs, are their affair for their personal repentance. The Church goes on without them. The Church belongs to all, not to some mere clerical elite. They are here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: Are you shocked by the election of a new Protestant Archbishop of Wales who is a lesbian?

A: Stop the hypocrisy! That is none of our Orthodox business, it is theirs. Our business is that there are so many effeminate, homosexual Orthodox bishops, notorious for persecuting happily married parish priests, for their contempt for women and children, for their spiritually empty intellectualism and for their avarice. One small part of the Russian Church is increasingly looking like a Church of pedophiles and perverts, who ‘defrock’ all whistleblowers.

All these vices have the same origin – in their faithless lack of love. If Orthodox complain, then in the future, all Non-Orthodox engaged in ecumenical relations with Orthodox should demand to speak only to Orthodox clerics who are heterosexuals. The clericalist mafia always justifies itself. But the people know and they massively followed the ‘defrocked’ clergy, who before being ‘defrocked’ had transferred to a canonical, non-schismatic Local Church, where they concelebrate with all other Local Churches.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you compass sea and land to make one convert, and when he is made, you make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves (Matt: 23:15)

It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble (Lk: 17:2)

Q: What is the attitude of the Orthodox Church towards black people?

A: The same as its attitude to white people, or people of any other colour. All people were created in God’s image. In any case, Christ in His human nature was olive-skinned, not white. Look at any icon.

The only case of racism I have every come across was a white American convert bishop who said when George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman in the USA in 2020 that, ‘it does not matter because he was only a black’. Moreover, he said this in front of a mixed-race young woman, who never had anything to do with him again and when we left him, she was elated. And yet such a hateful bishop claimed to be canonical. It was one of the last straws, as he also publicly proclaimed that he disliked Greeks and Romanians and only half-liked Moldovans. That was in front of representatives of all those nationalities, to their faces. It really is time for those who consecrate new bishops to make sure that they are Christians first.

Q: How do you feel about no longer being in the Russian Church?

A: The only important thing for me is to belong to the Orthodox Church. The fact that a Russophobic agent, inspired by NATO, chased me and thousands of others out of the Russian Church and into another Local Church, in my own case after 47 years of faithfulness, is not on my conscience, but on the conscience of the authorities of the Russian Church who allowed this to happen for purely political reasons. This will go down in history. And I am quoting a Russian bishop who said precisely this to me.

Q: How can you belong to a Church that uses the new calendar when you use the old calendar?

A: Probably because I have always belonged to such a Church!

I distinguish between the dogmatic and the pastoral. I belong to a Local Church, just like the Russian Church also, that allows both calendars, according to pastoral need – as the old, pre-crazy convert, ROCOR also used to allow both. So many schisms and sects have been founded by confusions between issues that are dogmatic and issues that are merely pastoral, between primary issues and secondary issues. We reject that confusion.

Q: As you are an English nationalist, what do you think of illegal immigration? 

A: I am not an English nationalist. Nationalism is an ugly thing, as we can see from inhuman nationalist demonstrations, which create fear among poor refugees who have been chased out of their countries by Western-created wars. Nationalists are Little Englanders; Globalists are Great Britishers. I am a Great Englander. A patriot. I am English, more exactly East Anglian, and above all I am an Orthodox (not a heterodox) Christian.

In other words, I am a patriot of England, the real England of the saints and poets, of the spiritually sensitive. I am also a patriot of the real France before that horrible atheism began in 1789, and I am a patriot of the real Russia before corrupt aristocrats seized power and introduced serfdom and then when power was seized by atheists, Leninists and Stalinists. I have nothing in common with Masonic Russia, Fascist Russia or Stalinist Russia.

As for illegal immigration, I think it is illegal.

Q: Is it normal for Orthodox to write ‘the unworthy’ in front of your name?

A: Not at all. This is the false piety of pride of some converts. We are all unworthy and we know it. There is no need to display it. Stay modest, do not become proud, even of your unworthiness. Stop boasting!

The Russian Church 

Q: Since only 1-3% of the Orthodox population go to church in Russia, how can it be called ‘Orthodox Russia’?

A: This way of thinking, that going to a building on a Sunday makes you a Christian, is purely Protestant, moralising and abstract. Orthodox Christianity is our way of life, our culture, our values, our self-identification and nothing else.

Q: Where in your view did the Russian Church go wrong?

A: In 2003 His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II, whom I met in 2007, proposed to open a multinational Exarchate and Metropolia in Western Europe, centred in Paris, that would be the foundation of a future Autocephalous Western European Orthodox Church. Who here could not go along with that? We all did. However, in recent years that idea has been abolished in favour of a nationalist Russian Metropolia, on paper centred in Paris, but in reality in Moscow. It increasingly excludes all Non-Russians, including Ukrainians and Moldovans, let alone native Western Europeans, from itself.

This is exactly the same mistake, made decades ago, as that of the Greek nationalist Patriarchate of Constantinople. It seems that some people never learn! This is not only the complete renunciation of the apostolic call and promise of Christ in the last chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel, and also of Patriarch Alexiy II and of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. When the Russian Church renounces its saints on account of the same nationalism, bureaucracy, militaristic rigidity as the Greeks suffer from, then we know that we have to go elsewhere to live Church life.

Where did it all go wrong? Since the repose of Patriarch Alexiy II, especially from about 2016 on. Orthodox England rejoices in the Orthodoxy of Russia, but not in the rest.

Illustrations of this new political and anti-pastoral mentality include charging 100 roubles for holy water (as now in one Siberian Metropolia) or the recent Russian Church scandal in a former Soviet Republic. Here a youngish hieromonk, the secretary of the local bishop (who is a well-known active homosexual), asked to be defrocked in order to get married. He was granted his request. Some time later the defrocked man went to church with his wife, only to find a priest who, looking directly at him, said to all ‘some people here will not be saved’. This is sadly typical of the pure phariseeism that has become the norm in a few parts of the Russian Church in recent years. It has nothing to do with the Russian Church of the Emigration and of the New Martyrs and Confessors.

Q: Why do we not hear about Sergianism in the Russian Church any more?

A: I think we do hear about it, only much less. This is because it was always a purely political, anti-Communist, accusation from the Cold War, promoted by the CIA as a ‘heresy’. It was never a heresy, just a sin that come about from human weakness and cowardice, resisted by the vast majority of Russian Orthodox, and affecting only a few at the administrative head of the Russian Church.

The nature of this sin is to say in words, and sometimes in actions, that whatever the State, Communist or not Communist, proclaims, is true. This is known as erastianism and all the national Protestant Churches in Northern Europe have always suffered from it. However, we find it in the leadership of the Russian Church because since the age of Peter I, they have been protestantised in this respect. It could be said that the Russian Church reflects the error of the Church of England, whose bishops are all appointed by the Prime Minister of Great Britain and dare not contradict the Establishment, from which they profit and draw prestige.

Q: Why is the Russian Church sometimes very rigid, with many rules and regulations?

A: Firstly, the Russian State Church mentality, above all today with its militarisation, means that sometimes people give the impression that the Russian Church is an Army, not a Church. Secondly, neophytes/converts like to reduce everything to lists of rules on dress and outward conduct. This is not the Church, but a convert fantasy. Comparisons with other Local Churches immediately indicate how some are going astray from the mainstream. Moreover, the authentic émigré traditions of the Russian Church were of the mainstream.

Q: The life of St Antony the Roman states that he sailed from Italy to Novgorod on a stone. Do you really believe this?

A: I believe that he sailed from Italy to Novgorod on a merchant’s ship and at night he slept in a stone coffin, which he took with him. Many monks at that time slept in coffins, either wooden or, especially in the south of Europe, stone.

The Ukraine

Q: What do you think the war between Russia and the Ukraine is really about?

A: This conflict is not a war between Russia and the Ukraine. It is a proxy war between Russia and the Western world (the US and its Western European NATO vassals), which is taking place on a small part of the territory of the Soviet Ukraine and on all the other post-Soviet territories, where the US is trying to encircle Russia. In other words, it is a war between two different ideologies, between Globalism, the Western Oligarchic System of the 10%, and Nationalism, the National Systems of the Peoples of the 90%. The racist and Nazi West could not care less about the Ukrainians themselves, in fact, as they openly proclaim, they can ‘die to the last Ukrainian’ in defence of Western economic interests. As a result, the Russians are slowly going to demilitarise and denazify NATO, and not just the Ukraine.

This means conflict between the unipolar world of the West-centric woke ideology, led by the atheistic USA against the multipolar world of traditional cultures (cultures based on spiritual and moral values), led by Russia. The latter founded BRICS, an alliance for the co-operation of the multipolar world of sovereign countries, which all respect faith or morality (traditional forms of Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism). After military victory, the immediate task of Russia will be to refound and restore a Sovereign country with its own identity within its natural (= Non-Soviet, historical) borders, centred around Kiev, without its oligarchs. Only then will there be peace.

Q: Do you think the CIA is paying ROCOR for its anti-Russian stance on the conflict in the Ukraine?

A: I don’t know.

As you know, the ultra-right-wing Grabbe faction received large amounts of cash for ROCOR from the CIA from the 1960s right up until 1991, when it was abruptly cut off, as the Soviet Union had been dissolved. Today the ROCOR Synod in New York is dominated by Americans, one of whom has a father, who held a senior position in the CIA and NATO, and is a great lover of Tony Blair. The CIA loves to have dirt on such bishops.

Among the others, who all speak fluent American, are those who have received support from the American administration (even a Cathedral and other properties in former West Germany), which is why it is known as the American Synod. Since for many in the US administration the Russian Federation is Public Enemy No 1, maybe in a few years’ time your speculation about the virulently anti-Russian statements of most of its bishops will be shown to be correct. However, of this there is no proof at the present time, all is circumstantial, so you may be wrong.

Q: You have been criticised for being political. What would you answer?

A: I have often spoken about politics, but not about party politics, probably because I support no political party. We have to speak about politics, when one Greek nationalist Patriarch is installed by the CIA and another Patriarch refuses to say anything which counters Russian nationalist politics. Both are examples of those who put local nationalism above Christ. We are not of the world, but we do live in the world, and like the Church Fathers we have to show that we understand who is who in this world, who we can support and who not. We refuse, as ever, to work for the CIA (or for its branches in the Brussels Politburo and MI6) or for the FSB. Naivety and cowardice are not solutions! We have to be aware, wise but gentle, as Christ instructed His disciples. The fact is that all divisions from the Church are caused by politics, nationalist or left and right, CIA or KGB.