History

In the course of the fourth century the Church which had been bitterly persecuted at the start of that century by Pagan Rome was adopted by the Roman Empire. And as the Roman Empire began persecuting dissidents, so individuals representing the Church, specifically bishops, allied themselves to the persecuting Roman State, which demanded obedience from all. Thus, a State Church was born and the once Persecuted Church became a Persecuting Church. To counter this enslavement and proclaim spiritual freedom, the monastic movement boomed, ’the desert became a city’, Egypt and Palestine filled with monks. The pious in the parishes followed them, not the persecuting bishops.

Such ‘State Church’ compromises have patterned the whole history of the Church, most notably in Western Europe, a former part of the empire of Pagan Rome. Here a new ideology, with its self-justifying filioque and Papist ideology, which came to be called ‘Roman Catholicism’, was based not on certain bishops of the Church allying themselves with the State, but on the Church actually becoming the State. In fact, it became a ‘Superstate’, like the modern EU, which imitates the medieval Papacy in every way. This saw the Roman Pope, the head of the new Roman Catholicism, leave the Church and in 1054 become independent from the Church and even condemn the Church as ‘schismatic’!

From that moment on, the Popes of Rome, heirs to and imitators of the pagan emperors, could lead armies, persecute and murder dissidents, bless invasions, order so-called ‘crusades’ and implement inquisitions against all who disagreed with their imperialist cult of absolute claims to power and wealth.  Inevitably, from the eleventh century on that spawned many Protest movements, which further discredited them and divided the totalitarian religion that they led. And so the Church that canonised the Martyrs and Confessors, despite the worldly-minded, became the Persecuting Church, instead of love, showing hatred, and then refusing to repent in self-justification. This went down in history.

An Example in the Present

In case some think that this is simply a polemic against Roman Catholicism, let us make the truth clear. Plenty of Orthodox have followed suit, becoming ‘Philopapists’. For example, in recent times, the New York Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) did the same. And so a Church that had canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands in 1981, despite all the worldly-minded who criticised and mocked it, became in 2021 the Persecuting Church, instead of love, showing hatred and then refusing to repent in self-justification. This too went down in history. Like the Papacy, it preferred money and power to the Holy Spirit, to the Martyrs and Confessors.

But when did this decadence begin? This spirit was certainly absent in 1981 from the unworldly Metr Philaret, who at last canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors. The turning-point was perhaps in 2001, when his successor as leader of ROCOR, Metr Vitaly (Ustinov), by then very elderly and quite ill, was usurped. The Metropolitan who had opposed the CIA Grabbe faction was replaced by those sympathetic to that faction. Those who seized power replaced him with a series of pious, but very weak, metropolitans, and so continued to exercise power from behind their thrones. Their first act was to begin to fill the episcopate with their candidates in order to consolidate their power.

Therefore, in 2003, despite a threefold opposition from one Archbishop, they proposed one of that group’s episcopal candidates, a well-known homosexual (I had been shown his compromising photo as long ago as 1995). During the ceremony, one in the crowd, an acquaintance of mine, shouted out ‘anaxios’, ‘unworthy’, meaning that he opposed the consecration of that candidate. My acquaintance was taken aside by the wealthy brothers of the bishop and duly beaten up. And they call themselves Christians, and even call themselves ‘Orthodox’ Christians! The inevitable alcohol-fuelled scandals duly followed, ending up with the notorious property grab in Missouri. As had been foretold.

One of the techniques that has always been used by such groups is slander, that which was done in the Old Testament against St Job. It was in use already before the Revolution with regard to Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their Family and all those who supported them. Murder started then. As the media have developed, we have seen it in the Greek Church with ‘the slandered saint’, St Nectarios of Aegina (+ 1920), in ROCOR with St John of Shanghai (+ 1966), who was suspended and faced ‘defrocking’ by the CIA faction in the American Synod, which he defeated, and in the Romanian Church with the great saint, St Arsenie of Prislop (1989), who was so hated by the atheists. Such is our destiny also.

Those ‘Philopapists’ are then always opposed to the saints and slander them. In the case of St John of Shanghai, they will claim that he did not give his shoes away to the poor because he had compassion on them, but because he did not like wearing shoes! They also claim that St John was very much a bureaucrat because he had studied law! They, of course, like wearing expensive leather shoes and love issuing decrees and ‘protocols’. In other words, they slander St John in order to justify their own Anti-Gospel behaviour. They always divert attention from whatever in the saints contradicts their perversions and accuse the saints of exactly their own weaknesses by psychological transfer.

The ROCOR ’gang’ behind the 2003 consecration then continued their activities in order to consolidate their power further. The main aim for themselves and their candidates was to amass as much wealth, property and power as possible, usurping any who opposed them and replace them with their candidates. This was exactly what they had done with the bishop who had vigorously opposed their 2003 candidate. In the decades following 2003, more homosexuals and further CIA/NATO candidates took over in various places, with the Mother-Church in Moscow naively looking on, but never opposing the pro-CIA American Synod, as if paralysed, stunned by the cowboy behaviour of the Americans.

Indeed, even when ROCOR shockingly opposed the Russian campaign against the CIA/NATO takeover of the Ukraine from February 2022 on, Moscow remained paralysed, as if hypnotised. Had it too been infiltrated by the CIA and the Hitlerite spirit of Vlasov? A still unanswered question. Here we must not confuse the dogmatic with the pastoral. For example, although one of their bishops was very greedy for money, we paid him what he wanted, even though he constantly insulted us, jealously demanding ever more, tried to steal our church buildings like a common criminal, and slandered us, saying that we had stolen money from him! We stayed, as this was a pastoral, not a dogmatic, issue.

The Pastoral and the Dogmatic

Indeed, we only left him after he had publicly gone into schism with the Church by breaking communion with Her and had then begun rebaptising Orthodox. These were dogmatic issues, as he had gone against the Creed: I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. This is an attack on the Church, for which we are prepared to die and we will win because our slanderers are not prepared to die for their greed and schism. Those who confuse the pastoral and the dogmatic would have left him before. For example, there are those who create a schism around the calendar. However, the true calendar is the one which your bishop blesses you to celebrate on. Disobedience is the only error here.

The old ROCOR never had any problem with the calendar. We had many Romanian and Bulgarian new calendar refugee parishes with us, when the atheists were in power in Romania and Bulgaria and were persecuting those Local Churches. When freedom came, those parishes quite naturally returned to their Mother-Churches. Similarly, hundreds of Russian parishes in Africa use the new calendar, as do their parishes in Vienna, Sofia and elsewhere. And today the Romanian Church has received several hundred refugee parishes which use the old calendar. Our situation is similar to that of St Paisy (Velichkovsky), who before us also had to take refuge in the Romanian Church from the Russian.

However, those who deny the dogmas of the Church and change the Creed, whether in words with the filioque, or else, all the while hypocritically retaining the words of the Creed, in deeds, put themselves outside communion with the Church. They become schismatic sects of pharisees, failing to understand that communion is the visible, external sacramental sign of the internal catholicity of the Church. To be in communion means to be part of the Church, inherently and organically connected with the whole Body of Christ, members of Him. This is not about administrative bureaucracy and protocols, but about the life in Christ through the Holy Spirit. This is real Orthodoxy, the Church of the Holy Spirit.