Contemporary Life
Q: What do you think of the assassination of Charlie Kirk?
A: To tell you the truth, I had never heard of Mr Kirk until he had been assassinated, apparently by Ukrainian terrorists, since he was on their death-list.
Of course, it is appalling that anyone can be assassinated, though it happens every day. Mr Trump has assassinated Iranians with pleasure, and supports the assassinations of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and tens of thousands of Russians every year.
I think this assassination typifies this intolerance which the whole Western world is now subject to, both in the US and Western Europe. In the US it is cowboy gun violence, here it is ‘cancelling’ people, creating in ex-Catholic Europe a kind of New Inquisition of censorship, just as frightening as that of the Middle Ages, or else, in ex-Protestant Europe, creating witch-hunts of those who tell the truth.
The Western world has become the new Soviet Union, as had been predicted for over 30 years. It hates the Truth. This hatred of the Truth can only be, as Christ says, because ‘the Truth will set you free’. That is why any tyranny hates the Truth. People say: ‘I don’t agree with you, therefore I can murder you or ‘cancel’ you’.
Some people want to make Mr Kirk into a martyr. You can only be a martyr if you die for Christ. That is not Mr Kirk’s case. As far as I know, he was an Evangelical, with all the deviations that that entails. Read the lives of the saints rather than spend hours youtubing Mr Kirk. There is a big difference. The martyrs showed humility, patience and the joyful readiness to die for their Faith. People should not be bringing politics, either left-wing or right-wing, into the Church. Our belief is the Gospel, the words of Christ.
Q: What is your view of Jordan Peterson? And Paul Kingsnorth?
A: I don’t know much about Jordan Peterson, but as far as I can see he is an excellent psychologist, a thorough observer of human nature and makes many good suggestions and gives good advice to young people. It is a pity that he has not formally become a Christian and so remains an outsider.
Paul Kingsnorth belongs to the Romanian Orthodox Church, like us. Clearly, he is new to the Faith and says many of the things that recent converts say (I can remember thinking and saying the same things fifty years ago). However, because he is a writer and a speaker, he has a gift and can explain his approach to the Faith to those outside the Church. So he is a very good missionary and avoids excesses, like some misguided converts.
Q: What happens to those who get rebaptised?
A: I know one young man, who had never been baptised and then was baptised into the Orthodox Church. Unsatisfied, despite the warning words of the Creed, he then got rebaptised by an ‘Orthodox’ sect. Six months later he got rebaptised by yet another ‘Orthodox’ sect (total worldwide membership – six). Two years on, he now never goes to church. It is clear that his approach to baptism was ‘magical’, and the need to get baptised came from his pathological state, not from any spiritual reason. In fact, the priest who baptised him the first time, warned him that if he got rebaptised, he would lapse from the Church. So it always is.
Q: What do you think of the fact that the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman?
A: It is nothing to do with us. We have never been members of that religious group and, like 95% of English people, know little about it. All we can see is that it was founded by the murderous Henry VIII, so he could give himself a divorce, and that today it is an overpaid woke laughing-stock. What I do know and care about is that that there are Orthodox bishops who are not women, but who are either financially corrupt, or else sexual perverts, who form ‘lavender mafias’, or else they are both.
Q: Would you take part in anti-abortion marches?
A: I am of course opposed to abortion, as are all Orthodox Christians. Ten years ago, we had a Russian ROCOR parishioner who wanted to abort a child – she already had two children. Although it took some effort, I persuaded her to keep the child and the Church gave her £2,000 to help her with costs. Today she has a lovely little girl, now ten years old, and her parents are very happy with their decision. This is being anti-abortion practically, and not demonstrating politically in the street.
That only has negative effects, which is why I am opposed to political activism. First of all, it is a waste of time and has no effect. Secondly, it is part of a political ideology (right-wing in this case), encouraged by some clerics who are sexual perverts. Thirdly, it seems to be prevalent among converts from Catholicism and Protestantism. When not naïve, they can at times be immature, self-admiring, self-satisfied, self-important, self-righteous, middle-class, priggish, who want to advertise themselves. Others are sometimes closet homosexuals, misogynists because they are unhappy alone, and can be extremist and hateful. I would not encourage them.
Q: I have heard the statement that ‘the similarity between the bodies of apes and human-beings shows that they have a common ancestor’. What would you reply?
A: The similarity between the human body and the bodies of most animals, two eyes, two ears, one nose, one mouth, four limbs and similar internal organs, proves only that we were all made by the same God.
Church Life
Q: Are there different types of priest?
A: Most definitely. There are three types of priest. The first is the careerist, an ‘apparatchik’, as the Russians call him, they are the yesmen who climb the rungs of the clerical ladder and are desperate for awards. The second type are kindly and moderate, good and popular priests.
Finally, there is the third type, those who are touched by the Holy Spirit and the spirit of prophecy. It is best not to touch them and try and make them fit into some religious system or careerism. You cannot control them. The Holy Spirit does not fit into manmade religious systems. Bishops rise and fall according to how they treat such priests.
Such was the case with St John of Kronstadt, who did not receive any priestly awards for decades and only became rector of his huge church after forty years because of the jealousy of his bureaucrat-metropolitan! Such was the case also with the future St John of Shanghai, who was also persecuted by similar bishops. There are ignorant bishops who persecute and despise the saints. We know who they are.
Q: Which Local Church is going to be at the root of founding the new Autocephalous Church of Western Europe?
A: Between 1985 and 1988, I had briefly thought that Constantinople could perhaps do it, as the Russian Church was still divided and enslaved to the Communist regime. Then, in summer 1988, I clearly saw official Greek nationalism and corruption.
After 2003 and the words of Patriarch Alexei II promising such a new Local Church – and he grew up in Estonia – I thought it would be the Russian Church that could do it. After many doubts and setbacks after 2016 especially, by 2021 I saw that this was definitively not going to happen, as the Russian Church had fallen into Non-Christian centralism with its virulent nationalism and ghetto mentality, clearly refusing to give any other nationality autocephaly.
The Russian Church clearly and openly turned its back on Orthodox England and Orthodox Europe, precisely on 4 February 2022. That was a historic moment. Now it is isolated and is losing the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltics, as well as the Diaspora, all because of its centralist refusal to grant anyone autocephaly, which is its refusal for nationalist reasons to do missionary work. It is the path it has chosen, to its loss.
Today we have a situation where, with rare exceptions, the Greek Church is only for Greeks, the Russian only for Russians, the Serbian only for Serbs, the tiny numbers of Bulgarians and Georgians are also nationally exclusive, Antioch is only for the tiny numbers of disappointed Anglicans, Protestants and Evangelicals, and the new ROCOR is only for the few pathological convert fanatics. Only the Romanians are left.
I look back with gratitude to the moment when all our parishes were forced to join the Romanian Church by the ROCOR schism (and real schisms are always preceded by heresy, which in their case was the Donatism of the past. You should never return to your first errors, but learn from them). That was a time above all of liberation and relief, not of abandonment and treachery. Our local Archbishop, who is Moldovan, has as his main interest precisely Autocephaly, the theme of his doctorate. This is Providence. In the future, Russians will look back on this moment with horrified regret at their historic error.
Britain
Q: Iranians call the USA ‘the Great Satan’ and England ‘the Little Satan’. What would you say about that?
A: I would make a correction: ‘The Little Satan’ is not England, but Norman England, which is usually called ‘Britain’.
Q: Should Britain have taken part in World War One?
A: Definitely not! Though too late, that huge error was made. I blame Sir Edward Grey for his warmongering and secret promises. If it had not been done, we may not have seen either Hitler or Stalin, let alone all the rest.
Q: Should we pay other countries compensation for the crimes of the British Empire?
A: Who is we? We, the people, never had any idea what was being done abroad by the elites. It is only today when the old, load-bearing, national propaganda myths are collapsing that the people are discovering to their horror what had been done for centuries behind their backs. The asset-stripping both inside the country and abroad were acts of London merchants/businessmen soon after the Reformation. That asset-stripping was reinforced after the merchants took full power through Cromwell and the Dutch and German rulers whom they brought in after Cromwell. The only case for compensation that can be made is for the descendants of those elites to be forced to pay some sort of compensation, provided that they are still benefiting from the criminal acts of their ancestors.
Chisinau, 7 October 2025