Monthly Archives: December 2025

Cursed are the Warmakers: The End of the Year and the End of Western Supremacy

The old world is dying, and the new world is struggling to be born; now is the time of monsters.

Gramsci

Introduction: War and Peace

In early 2022 I was asked who I supported in the conflict in the Ukraine. I answered that what I supported is peace and I pray for peace at every service. I added that if Russians and Ukrainians had been Orthodox, there would never have been a war, (At most only 2% of each actually go to church; both countries are racked by very high abortion and divorce rates and so have a huge demographic problem). In fact, this is a proxy war between Great Powers, the pro-Nazi, NATO West and nationalist Russia. The Kiev regime has been armed for half a trillion dollars by NATO nations as a naïve proxy, exploiting its provincial nationalism, to destroy and break up Russia, which is far too big and strong for the jealous West. All are victims in this war of attrition, which will end, like all such wars, like World Wars I and II, very suddenly, in just a few months.

Four Years of Conflict in the Ukraine

For Kiev to fight against Moscow is industrial and strategic nonsense, because Russia’s economy is many times larger than the Ukraine’s, indeed it is the largest economy in Europe and the fourth largest in the world, even by the vast underestimate of Russian GDP by the absurd PPP measure. Then Russia’s population is five times larger than the pre-war Ukraine’s (and millions of Ukrainians have since fled for Russia – today Russia’ population is at least seven times larger than the Ukraine’s) and its territory is 30 times larger. How can Russia, a military superpower, with production so vastly superior to that of the whole West and weapons so advanced that the West can only dream of them, not win against the corrupt and bankrupt Kiev puppet regime? It is motivated, as it is fighting an existential war, for the West this is just a neo-colonial war.

The 30,000 or so illegal sanctions against Russia (legal sanctions are voted in by the United Nations) harm only the West. Notably, they are destroying Western European industry and have doubled the cost of energy for consumers. For example, German car companies are moving to China, where they can obtain cheap Russian energy, unlike in Germany. The Russian economy is autarchic, independent, and has almost everything it needs. If ever it wants something else, it can simply obtain it from the 90% of the world which ignores those absurd sanctions. The world will look back on 2022 as the year when the Western world began its final act of suicide. In trying to destroy and take over patriotic Russia, it repeated its same failures as under the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, the Swedes, Napoleon I, Napoleon II with the British, the Kaiser and Hitler.

The West never learns from history. This is because it is utterly blinded by the history of its arrogant hubris – ‘we are allowed to do everything’. The discredited Kiev regime is in place only because the West had in 2014 usurped the previous democratically-elected and peaceful Ukrainian government by violence. By its own admission, it had used five billion dollars in US bribes to install the genocidal, pro-Nazi regime. The conflict was inevitable. If Russia had violently overthrown the democratic government in Mexico, trained and armed the Mexican Army to the teeth, ordered ‘Trump, tear down this wall’, threatened to supply it with nuclear and bioweapons and, despite peace agreements, genocided 14,500 Americans, women and children included, who lived in Mexico, would the USA not have reacted? Such was the situation in the Ukraine.

After fourteen years of incredible hesitation, naivety, disorganisation, corruption and weakness, its military in part outsourced to the incompetent and corrupt, Wagner private mercenary group, Russia did finally react, in 2022, just as it said it would, but failed to, in 2008. This time, since 2023, the Russian military has been strong. And so, alas! much too late, some in the US administration in Washington have at last realised that the US cannot win its very costly, lost war in faraway Ukraine. The US, now engaged in Caribbean piracy, genocide in Gaza and taking over Greenland, is deindustrialised. In its greed it started making all its needs in China. The US can never match Russia’s technology, productivity and vast and advanced military potential. Most US needs are made in China. That is not the case for the booming Russian economy.

The War Party in Western Europe

Unlike the US elite, the grandfathers of the Western European ruling elite were mostly Nazis and political failures in their own countries (like Merz, Kallas, von der Layen, Metrevelli). Their grandfathers were defeated by Russia and they want to avenge them. The elite has swallowed its own virulently anti-Russian wishful thinking propaganda (‘narrative’), and so amazingly, it still believes that it can win in the Ukraine! This is because that elite and its globalist media are deluded by their colonial and imperialist past. After French and German leaders refused to back the illegal, US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, political power in Western Europe was seized by US-backed oligarch candidates. Reality began to dawn in bankrupt Washington only in 2025, after a string of trillion-dollar foreign policy disasters, that the USA must extricate itself from its quagmire in Kiev.

This meant the new US abandoning its Western European elite, which had been imposed by the pre-2025 US elite. However, the Western European elite, feeling betrayed by Trump’s new policies, is stuck in its threefold megalomaniac delusions, those of Napoleon, Hitler and Churchill. The US is abandoning it, together with its similar, regime-changed and losing elite, which it positioned in Kiev in 2014. The US has only existed for 250 years and can abandon any of its useful idiots in Eurasia, Western Europeans or Ukrainians, and blame them for everything. However, dictatorial Western European leaders cannot abandon Kiev, for they are prisoners of a proud, feudal ruling caste and its thousand-year Nazi ideology of ‘The West is Best’ and ‘We (the elite) are the garden, the rest (the 90%) are the jungle’, of which garden, they claim, the Ukraine is part.

Only belief in this ideology, perhaps credible on account of Western European colonial empires before 1914, but today completely delusional, can explain the irrational and suicidal behaviour of the present autocratic Western European warmaking elite. This group, largely composed of sexual perverts, pedophiles, transgenders and cocaine addicts (Epstein, ex-Prince Andrew, H. Biden, Zelensky and all the others – we know their names), is doing its utmost to foment an unjust and lasting war against Russia by 2030. It uses censorship and bogeyman tactics against its own population: ‘The Russians are coming’. According to it, Russia had been losing the war for three years and ‘is on the brink of collapse’, and yet they are begging for a ceasefire and ‘Russia intends to invade all of Western Europe’. Which set of their contradictory lies should we believe?

The elite needs to seize ever more money not only to finance the bankrupt Kiev regime, but also to buy time for itself. It has no interest in the Ukraine, Ukrainian history and the Ukrainian subhuman people (‘Untermenschen’), but it is interested in prolonging its careers. In its demented and narcissistic delusions, it is forlornly hoping that in 2029 Trump will be replaced by someone from the equally demented US past who still thinks like them. But in reality, it is too late. The Kiev regime is already collapsing militarily. No amount of money (or lies) to further the Kiev regime’s corruption will help it now, for with its much depleted stocks of its very mediocre weapons, lying burned out on the steppes, the West lacks arms for Kiev to buy and Kiev lacks soldiers to operate the non-existent arms, which are to be bought with their non-existent money.

Conclusion: Sons of Satan

The warmaking ruling elite of Western Europe has utterly isolated and alienated itself from the rest of the world, from international law, which it no longer observes even though it created it, and from most of its own population. The latter, the ‘serfs’, detests the undemocratic and repressive elite, which bans free speech and debanks and hounds its critics into exile, so that it is supported by the 10% of the population which is sufficiently brainwashed. For a change of policy on the Ukraine, the old dictatorial elite will have to be replaced by candidates from the peoples of Europe, the ‘populists’. The latter are not Western supremacists, not Globalists. They want to work with the Global Majority, not against it. The perverted warmakers of Western Europe should be warned: Cursed are the warmakers, for they shall be called the sons of satan.

 

 

The Continuing ROCOR Schism and the new Canonical Russian Orthodox Bishop for Britain

In December 2020 the New York-based ROCOR (those initials used to stand for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) of the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) consciously engineered a schism by forbidding communion with its sister Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, based in Paris. Thus, ROCOR cut itself off from communion with canonical Orthodoxy, from the catholicity of the Church.

ROCOR lost everything because of its crazy converts. This single act of folly resulted almost immediately in ROCOR in England losing well over half its Diocese, 5,000 people in six parishes, with twelve clergy. They included the senior priest of the Diocese, with 36 years of faithful service to the Russian Orthodox Tradition and the Russian Tsar, who had played a role in the crucial and long-awaited canonical reconciliation of ROCOR with Moscow in 2007.

Although the Moscow Patriarchate itself declared that ROCOR’s act was insanity, it did nothing to counter it and a senior Metropolitan in Moscow instructed all who had quit ROCOR to join another Local Orthodox Church. This was a suicidal act of support by the MP for the ROCOR schism and a stab in the back for its decades-long missionary work in Western Europe. Thus, in obedience, we all fled the new, uncanonical ROCOR and joined another Local Orthodox Church, of which many were only too happy to take us.

Since then, the new sectarian ROCOR (apparently now standing for the Russian Old Calendarist Church Outside Russia) has refused to repent. As a result, it has now lost another subdeacon (and future priest) in Northern Ireland, a priest in Canada and a priest in the USA. All were converts, who had recently come into the new American ROCOR. Without any sense of history, they had never known the old canonical ROCOR, which was an integral part of the Orthodox Church and Tradition.

All of this is a replay of ROCOR’s Boston schism of 1986, exactly as the late Fr Seraphim Rose had time and again warned would happen back in the 1970s. Then some sixty small parishes of rootless people left ROCOR for old calendarist sects, just as other smaller groups would later leave in 2000 and in 2007.  The Protestant-style 1986 schism was a clear consequence of sectarianism among ungrounded ROCOR clergy and converts. Those who took part in it had no knowledge of the Tradition and so fell away from the Church into old calendarism.

These schisms are what happens when you abandon communion and concelebration with the Canonical Local Orthodox Churches, that is, with the mainstream of the Church. Now the chickens are coming home to roost again, for when ROCOR bishops claim that no other Orthodox bishops apart from themselves are Orthodox, what can their uninformed converts conclude? Only that, if there is ‘One True Church’, it must be schismatic, not one which is in communion with others, even if only on paper, like ROCOR.

The viewpoint of the schismatics is the only logical one for their sectarian mentality, which makes even the calendar into a dogma of the Faith. When their ROCOR bishop – although on paper in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church – publicly declares that the Greek Patriarch is possessed by demons and that he personally hates Romanians and half-hates Moldovans, what can you expect from his followers? His converts demand logical behaviour of him, that he abandon communion with all others formally, not just in words. Otherwise, they see him as a hypocrite, as they publicly say.

These schisms are the clear result of the new ROCOR’s rejection of the Orthodox Tradition, the Tradition confessed by St John of Shanghai and his successor as the ROCOR Archbishop of Western Europe, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. They quite naturally concelebrated with everyone. Here today is the result of the crazy convert policy of the very ignorant bishops of the new American ROCOR. With no love for others, they fall out of communion with all, like judgemental pharisees.

Little wonder that in despair at the behaviour of the new ROCOR, Moscow has now gone ahead and at last consecrated its first local bishop in Britain. Bishop Augustine MacBeth is for its Archdiocese of Western Europe (the former Rue Daru jurisdiction) of the MP. Given the ROCOR schism from Moscow’s Archdiocese of Western Europe and its refusal to accept and respect local people and local languages, relying on convert Americanisms with their theological and historical ignorance and google translate to communicate, Moscow had no choice but to consecrate a canonical Russian Orthodox bishop from the local population for the local population.

Of course, it is all too little and much too late, as the Orthodox left for another Local Church four years ago, as advised by the MP Metropolitan Antony (Sevryuk)! Then the Moscow Patriarchate refused to receive those who had quit the schismatic ROCOR even in the face of the sectarian and hate-filled actions of the new ROCOR episcopate.

Since then, the former members of ROCOR, zealous for canonical communion and the catholicity of the Church, forced to join another Local Church by the new ROCOR fanaticism and ignorance of the Tradition, have gone from strength to strength. Now we live in canonicity, in the mainstream of the Orthodox Church and concelebrate with all (though not with the schismatics), far from the tiny ghettoes of crazy convert bishops, their clergy and their incessant scandals.

The Fall of the Empires and the Rise of the Anti-Empire

Foreword: Orthodox Church Life

Ever since 1917 the life of the Orthodox Churches has been pulled apart and polarised by manipulators who have wanted to weaken and so control the Church in order to further their own, anti-Christian political aims. Thus, Greek Patriarchs in Constantinople have been manipulated and their nationalism flattered by their secularist paymasters in the American Empire in Washington. As for Russian Patriarchs in Moscow, they too have been manipulated by the power- and money-seeking spirit of those who want to try and make and remake the Soviet Empire.

However, in reality, despite the negative concentrations at the extremes, both Local Churches have a broad left to right spread. The spread goes from Constantinople’s pro-Catholic gay ecumenists to the old calendar monks of Mt Athos (though they too are divided 1). And it goes from Moscow’s gay clerical intellectuals who visit the Pope of Rome as often as possible to the American Synod of the now spiritually irrelevant, New ‘ROCOR’, which resembles a Neo-Protestant American old calendarist sect that even dares to rebaptise other Orthodox! (2)

However, there are the many who keep the Tradition in both Patriarchates who agree with the majority who follow the Tradition in the fourteen other Local Churches. We follow the golden mean of the pastors, steering between the extremes created by politicians, and we maintain the piety of monastic and family Church life. But what if both the American Empire and those who want to restore the Soviet Empire fell and the Church were left alone? Surely then the Centre would be strengthened? Is this about to happen because of current geopolitics?

Introduction: The Fall of the Pagan Roman Empire

A long, long time ago, in 409-410 AD, Emperor Honorius of Old Rome sent the ruling elite in Britain an instruction known as the ‘Rescript of Honorius’. In this he told its members that they must in future defend themselves. With bankruptcy which was caused by usury ending the dominion of Old Rome over its Western provinces, the Roman Legions were leaving. True, New Rome and its Christian Roman Empire would continue until 1917, but that is another story. This story is about the fall of the Western provinces, which are now called Western Europe.

All the subsequent attempts by the only superficially Christianised to restore the pagan Empire of Old Rome failed. These attempts were made by the Carolingian, the Papal, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the German, the British and the Soviet empires, as well as today’s EU sub-empire. Similarly, today the American Imperial successor to all of them is falling and now has to retreat from the sub-American Empire of Western Europe, despite EU false flags (non-existent Russian drones, aircraft and submarines), desperately staged to keep the USA in Europe.

The Fall of the American Empire

In 2025 the bankrupt American Empire had to retreat from Eurasia because of its imperial overreach, as it had repeated the errors of its predecessor and model, the British Empire. The latter began its fall, due to overreach, in 1900, overtaken by the German economy, defeated by Dutch Boer farmers, losing the Titanic in 1912, suffering humiliation in 1914 and 1929, and later the humiliating routs of its Army at Dunkirk in 1940 and Singapore in 1942. The American Empire is following the same path of failure and has to admit that its sphere of influence is very limited.

Five generations behind the British, the dementia-led American Empire is following its own narcissistic decline, having refused to learn from British hubris and history. The US is having great difficulty even holding on to Latin America, already dominated by China, as shown by its pirate attacks on Venezuela. The US already has to abandon Afro-Eurasia, after the bloody and costly routs of US forces in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and today the Ukraine and Gaza, with millions of lives and trillions of dollars squandered, leaving all to China and Russia.

The Fall of the Ukrainian Empire

The nationalist junta in Kiev, busied with the theft of tens of billions of dollars of ‘NATO aid’ and of Russian assets, and its oligarchs busied with laundering money and buying seaside villas in warm countries, is made up of war criminals. It has sent a whole generation of ill-trained and ill-equipped Ukrainian soldiers, aged between 25 and 55, to the slaughter, all for vain dreams of nationalist power and ever more lucre. Two million Ukrainians are already dead or maimed. And yet for Western European political leaders, as for Zelensky, Kiev’s proxy war must continue. Why?

Firstly, because they do not want to admit that they were from the outset wrong. Secondly, more than this, , they do not want to stem the cashflow that they and their political industrial, military and media oligarch masters have pocketed. The desire to continue to line their bloodflowing pockets is why they repeat the absurd lie that after victory in the Ukraine, Russia will invade the financially and spiritually corrupt and deindustrialised EU. They think that Europeans are so stupid that they too will be willing to send their sons to die on their behalf.

The Fall of Soviet Western Europe

Having learned from the errors of the Soviet Empire, Russian politicians would hardly invade the bankrupt museum-countries of Western Europe. The latter are plagued by debt, social breakdown, failed infrastructure, illegal immigration and their costly defeat in the Ukraine. Of course, the Western leaders never had any interest in the Ukraine or the ‘subhuman’ Ukrainians – the latter were only ever useful idiots employed to weaken Russia and, if necessary, die for the Western elite ‘to the last Ukrainian’. Today’s Western elite is more Sovietised than today’s Russian.

Indeed, the unelected Eurocommissars of the European Union form today’s Soviet Union. Western political theatre and its fairy-tale media narratives, do not change the realities of the Russian victory in the Ukraine. Despite the blatant lies of the Western media about their corrupt Ukrainian puppets, it is clear that the West is destroying the Ukraine. The corrupt EU and NATO Empire will expand no further. Both are crumbling, as they fantasise about peace negotiations with themselves. They cling to their Ukrainian dream, as it alone holds them together.

The Fall of the EU Sub-Empire

Having cut themselves off from cheap Russian gas and oil and illegally stolen Russian assets, the EU Globalist elite has deindustrialised its peoples, showing their hatred of Sovereigntist patriots. They preach that their bloody sub-Roman empire stands above the interests of their own peoples, whom they so despise. Imperialist globalism is opposed to patriotism and persecutes and mocks it. Thus, the proud elite of ‘Great Britain’ mocked ‘Little England’, for it did not understand that only humility will ever make Little England, or any other country, Great.

For the same is true for every single country in Western Europe, naively deceived by the Great Delusion of the EU and the illusory allurements of now failed and defeated US hegemony. As a result of the retreat of the American Empire from Western Europe in the face of Russian might and of the Western rout in the Ukraine, the EU is crumbling, the countries of Western Europe, a mere 14% of the world economy, but once, in 1990, 30%, are now only minor powers on the world stage. Those countries, their sovereignty restored, will have to join the future – BRICS.

Conclusion: Towards the Anti-Empire

Having regained their freedom, the peoples of ex-Habsburg and ex-Ottoman South-Eastern Europe will join BRICS first, escaping the autocratic clutches of the unelected EU Commissars. The EU sub-Empire has lost because, thanks to its stupid and racist hatred of Russia, China and Russia are now completely united. Decommunised China already economically dominates East Asia, including Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and more. And desovietised Russia will economically dominate Western Europe, once its present elite has been dismissed.

Post-1945 Western organisations, weaponised against the Global Majority by their masters, have been pushed into the background. They have become irrelevant. Thus, the G7 has long since been a secondary organisation, like all the other post-War Western organisations, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the EU, NATO, which are all collapsing. BRICS is the new United Nations, replacing it as the one and only Anti-Empire, composed of the Sovereign Nations of the world, the real United Nations, led by China, Russia and all decolonised and free peoples.

Notes:

  1. Monks of the Tradition on Mt Athos told us only three weeks ago, when we were there, that if there are currently many earth tremors on Mt Athos, it is because certain abbots have weakly accepted instructions from Constantinople to allow the gangster ‘clergy’ of the so-called OCU (‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’) to celebrate there.
  2. The new ROCOR has rejected the vital spiritual heritage of the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John of Shanghai, and all us disciples, who have kept to the royal way between both new calendarists and old calendarists, as St Paisios the Athonite himself praised Archbishop Antony for doing. Thus, Vladyka Antony heroically rejected the extremist right-wing policies of the CIA agent Grabbe, who manipulated the Americans in the 1980s New York Synod with various absurd directives. Vladyka Antony and his disciples, like Bishop Ambrose (Cantacuzen), consistently refused to have anything to do with old calendarist schismatics, never concelebrating with them, unlike those in the CIA-funded American Synod. The CIA has always tried to split the Russian Church, whose unity we fought for so hard, and under its NATO-CIA bishops, besieged by homosexual and pedophile scandals, has now achieved that aim, sundering the new ROCOR from the Russian Church and from all canonical Orthodoxy. Quite simply, old calendarists are not Orthodox, as they are not in communion with the Orthodox Church.

 

 

On the Rise and Fall of Empires

Introduction

Forty years ago I used to work for a well-known French company in Paris. Founded in 1900 by a very dynamic man, who had seen a market opportunity, it had become quite large. However, the son, profiting from his father’s success, had simply managed the company, resting on his father’s laurels. All went fairly well, but there was no innovation. The company had then passed on to the grandson. He did nothing and took out money for his expensive lifestyle. By the 1980s all was in decline and it was something of a ‘museum’ or ‘heritage’ company. As there was little investment in new equipment and ideas because the grandson was taking out the money, it was declining. A three-stage process similar to this one happens with empires.

Imperial Rise and Fall: The Three Stages

There are apparently some 200 theories to explain the fall of the old pagan Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. This clearly suggests that there was not one simple cause for it, but a combination of causes. Nevertheless, perhaps we can put forward three general stages associated with the rise and fall of empires, as did the British military hero Sir John Glubb (1897-1986) in his interesting analysis, The Fate of Empires. Here he suggested, controversially, that many empires seem to last about ten generations, 250 years, before they fall. He admitted that although this was a generalisation, his remarks did come purely from practical observations, not from some intellectual theorisation or ideology. We too suggest three stages in the rise and fall of empires:

  1. The first stage, that of the grandfather, in the rise of empires is the Age of Conquest, in which great self-belief, energy and courage, as well as great cruelty, greed and racist superiority are shown. (‘All others are barbarians’. ‘The West is Best’). We can see this with the aggressive expansion of the West in the eleventh century, which led at the end of that century to the official ‘First Crusade’ and to the accelerating expansion of settlement, colonisation and exploitation, starting in 1492, with a further drastic and global acceleration about 250 years ago with the conquest of India. This period is the age of the spirit of enterprise and positivity, of ‘we can do it’. We can clearly see this in the recent Victorian Imperial Age of Great Britain and then in the post-1945 Imperial American Age.
  2. This is followed by the second stage of profit-taking, the stage of the son, of affluence, arrogance, self-congratulation, complacency and hubris. ‘We will rule for ever’, as was expressed in the Edwardian British anthem Land of Hope and Glory, glorifying the Empire ‘on which the sun never set’. That ended with the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic and the suicide of 1914. This was also the slogan of the ‘thousand-year’ Third Empire (= ‘Reich’) of Hitler, which lasted for exactly twelve years. Complacency means that there is a refusal to learn from history and from mistakes, a lack of openness to others, to anything new. ‘We are the greatest, we have nothing to learn from others’. At this stage, empires fall into denial and cannot see how low they are sinking.
  3. The third stage in the fall of empires, the stage of the grandson, interests us most, since we believe that this is what the Western world is now going through.

Falls are marked by mismanaged crises, dissension, lack of cohesion and common goals. This produces a disparate society because of the lack of shared beliefs and values. As society pulls in different directions, there follow disintegration, negativity and pessimism. Immigration takes place, for there are few to do, or who are interested in doing, vital tasks, since those who were born into that society are interested in the selfish infantilism of ‘fun’. ‘Why bother?’ The lack of energy comes from the lack of self-belief, courage and so passivity. One of today’s phenomena is ‘snowflakes and wimps’, those who constantly suffer from ‘anxiety’ and ‘stress’. People say: ‘There is nothing in it for me’, which shows the selfishness that comes from their lack of aims and values.

Decline is also marked by loss of faith in any religious aim or belief. This creates personal and collective decadence. As Glubb remarked: Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease, resulting from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving. This cynicism is the result of despair. In the case of Britain, no longer ‘Great’, this can be seen in the satire that has pervaded society since 1945. The spirit of mocking everything, especially the discredited Establishment, can be seen in many satires, such as Monty Python and Mr Bean. There is even a satirical show called Mock the Week.

Conclusion

This cynicism or, in English, world-weariness, can be seen everywhere in contemporary Britain, and in Western countries in general. The lack of self-belief can be seen in the young people, in fact beggars, who stand in the street and sing American songs or, at least, songs in an American accent. When you cannot even sing in your own language, that is the end. The result of the absence of any respect for God and for neighbour ends in a lack of self-respect. This nihilistic attitude to self is seen in poor dress and diet, tattoos, pieces of metal fixed in the face, and the use of drugs, whether vapes, tobacco, alcohol or harder drugs. The decline proceeds generation by generation until it results in nihilism. The cynicism is such that all alternatives are rejected. And so the fall comes.

On the Six Divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Diaspora

In the twentieth century the Russian Orthodox Church outside the borders of Russia split into six groups, three splits took place for ethnic reasons and three splits took place for political reasons.

The Three Non-Russian Ethnic Divisions

Firstly, there was quite a large Carpatho-Rusyn group in the USA, founded by immigrants who had been forced into Uniatism. They had arrived in the US from 1880 on, not from the Russian Empire, but from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Once in freedom in the USA, most of them returned to Russian Orthodoxy (the strongly Uniatised did not and were called by the absurd term ‘Ruthenians’). The return was for two reasons. Firstly, an infamous Roman Catholic Archbishop in the USA, called John Ireland (1838-1918), refused to let the Carpatho-Rusyns have married clergy and, secondly, he tried to steal their churches from them. As a Roman Catholic bishop (just like ROCOR bishops today), he did not understand that Carpathian Orthodoxy is founded on churches built or paid for by the people for the people. In real and not clericalist Orthodoxy, the hierarchical principle is always balanced by the congregational principle.  Led by the future saint, Fr Alexis (Toth), most people returned to the Church. The People’s Orthodoxy always triumphs over greedy clericalist bishops, who have the State mentality and dreams of power and riches. The Carpatho-Rusyns came to form a group known as the Metropolia and then from 1971 on the OCA (Orthodox Church in America).

After 1945 there formed second and third groups, a small Belarussian group and a very large and also very nationalistic Ukrainian group, mainly in Northern America, but also to some extent in Western Europe and elsewhere. After the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, most of the Ukrainian group, hating Russians, ended up under Constantinople. The small and weak Belarusian group more or less died out.

The Three Russian Political Divisions

As for the ethnic Russians in the Diaspora, after 1917 they too split into three. Initially, until the 1990s and renewed emigration, the smallest group was the Moscow Patriarchate group. This was at the centre of Soviet patriotism, which after 1991 transferred to Russian Federation patriotism. Many in this group never dared contradict whoever was in power in Moscow, whether they intervened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan or the Ukraine. A blind patriotic loyalty even to an atheist regime (!) prevailed among some in this Church. For them, the Russian Patriarch is an ethnarch, in the same way as the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople is an ethnarch. For example, when Orthodox in Latvia were recently obliged by the local government to stop commemorating the Russian Patriarch, many there stopped going to church. I was asked if people should continue to attend churches there. I answered: If churches there continue to commemorate Christ, then of course they should attend them. Clearly, for many, the commemoration of the Patriarch was much more important than the commemoration of Christ. This is a parallel to the Roman Catholic attitude to the Popes of Rome. For them too the Pope is the head of the Church. No Pope, no Church! And the same ‘phyletist’ disease is present among some in Constantinople, Moscow and elsewhere.

The second smallest group in the Diaspora after 1917 was the Paris-centred group. This was led by Westernised aristocrats and intellectuals, mainly from Saint Petersburg, who had betrayed the Tsar, organised the first ‘Revolution’ (palace coup) to overthrow him and showed loyalty to Western values such as liberalism, ecumenism etc. In general, they showed little interest in fasting, monasticism and piety. This is now an even smaller group, as it has largely died out.

The largest émigré group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, also Russian Orthodox Church Abroad or in Exile), was always anti-Communist. However, since being anti-Communist is not the same as Orthodox Christianity (to the amazement of some of them!), this led them into deviations and perversions, such as Nazism, then the CIA, NATO, the Republican Party and American Imperialism. The erroneous idea was that anyone who was anti-Communist was their friend. That hatred blinded many of them to the fact that all those movements embodied hatred for Russia. And yet these people were supposedly pro-Russian! After multiple scandals in ROCOR over the last decade, involving narcissists, homosexual and pedophile clergy, this group has also become very small. Many have left it in disgust at its anti-Christian ethos and so it has in recent years become a rather irrelevant fringe group and a very great embarrassment to its Mother-Church in Moscow.

As for us, we continue to confess our loyalty to Christ and His Saints, the New Martyrs and the New Confessors, in faithfulness to St John of Shanghai and his successor the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. In 1975, we were already venerating the still uncanonised (after some 50 years!) New Martyrs and Confessors. Moscow refused to canonise them, like the two other groups – refusals all from lack of spiritual freedom. Apart from some quite exceptional individuals such as St John of Shanghai, all three groups also refused to venerate the Saints of the first millennium West when it was still Orthodox.

After the long overdue reconciliations with Moscow and apparent unity of the three ethnic Russian groups between 2007 and 2018, in the 2020s, the situation worsened sharply, as nationalism, Russian, American or French, seized hold of the leadership of the three groups. Moreover, as a result of Soviet-style nationalist centralisation, the Russian Church began to suffer from further splits with Orthodox in Estonia, the Ukraine, Moldova and Latvia. These splits spread everywhere outside the borders of the Russian Federation, among all who felt they had been treated as second-class citizens by the Centre and its emissaries. This left the Russian Church drifting rudderless and heading for shipwreck, as we continually described at that time.

Although we ordinary clergy and people were left leaderless and abandoned by politicians instead of pastors, we shall never respond to lies with lies, to slanders with slanders, to hatred with hatred. But neither shall we remain silent in the face of lies, slander, hatred, schism and sect. We shall continue to defend our canonical communion with the mainstream, all the Local Churches of the Orthodox Faith, and defend the spiritual freedom of our clergy and parishioners to be in communion with the whole Conciliar Church, to guard our Catholicity, and to keep the memory of the Saints, who are the identity of our Church. And in our case they are the identity of our England, as also of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And no foreign sectarian and schismatic interloper from the USA has impeded us from so doing.