Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all people, let us pray to the Lord.

Foreword: Church Unity and the Anti-Autocephaly Argument.

Although they are not Roman Catholics, there are those who love and admire Papism. They are mainly Patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople. They love anti-missionary centralisation, keeping all power and money in their own hands, and are opposed to granting any autocephaly. They argue that unity is strength, division is weakness. Arguing for Papism, they forget that the Popes were the toys of medieval kings, more recently of Napoleon, Hitler and of the CIA, which appointed its political Polish Pope. Moreover, they forget that masses of Christians are not Roman Catholics and never will be, for they see in it just another centralist bureaucratic organisation, as tyrannical as any State.

New Local Churches and the Sin of Centralism

Since 2022 a series of clerics in the Russian Church, under threat of being defrocked by their hierarchy for not agreeing with the war in the Ukraine, refusing to pray for Russian victory, and so compromising themselves spiritually, have left it for another Local Church, the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The problem here is that they have, perhaps not realising it, passed from one extreme to the other. They remain spiritually compromised, for the hierarchy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople has for nearly eighty years been run as a sub-department of the hideously anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox US government, with its Protestant-style LGBT and all the rest.

There is only one reason why people leave the Church – because they have lost their Faith and no longer agree with the teachings of the Church. On the other hand, people can leave a part of the Church which is infected by nationalist politics because people belong to another nationality, have another language and live in a different State, which the nationalistic part does not accept. In this case, people are obliged to move to another part of the Church, which accepts them as they are, with their nationality, customs, language and government. They have not left the Church at all and, if anything, their movement is missionary, as they are in fact spreading Orthodox Christianity.

If a large number of people find themselves in this situation and are not accepted by their Mother Church because of their nationality, language or situation in another State, and have no other part of the Church to go to, then it is the duty of the Mother Church to establish a new Local Church for them. If it does not do so, then those in the Mother Church behave as a stepmother and commit the sin of centralism, which is simply the sin of love of power and money, which they cling on to. Administrative separation is not lack of unity, division of Faith or change of dogmas. The Faith remains the same. Let us explain this through some examples from ancient and modern history.

Three Examples of Centralism

Rome was the first to fall into the sin of centralism through its Germanic Popes in the eleventh century. They refused to establish or even recognise independent, ‘autocephalous’ Local Churches in different nations. They even imposed their Latin language, which few understood outside their clerical caste of scholars and bishops, ‘the princes of the Church’. This was anti-missionary. The Popes also launched bloody wars of persecution, Crusades and Inquisitions against dissidents and declared that those who massacred them would go straight to heaven. These acts of aggression created dissidents, logically called Protestants, who rejected the Popes and their Latin language.

Just like Rome, the Imperial Capital of Constantinople also fell into the sin of centralism. At first, Non-Greeks in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria and Armenia left it. Then came the departure of Rome, which was also accompanied by Greek ethnic xenophobia. Understanding that it would lose all Non-Greeks, the Greeks later allowed other peoples to have their own Local Churches. Thus, the Serbian, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian Churches appeared. However, recently, it has threatened to take back their Church independence, called ‘autocephaly’, granted centuries ago, and to become ‘first without equals’. This is pure Papism, racist centralisation.

Just like Rome, Moscow also fell into the sin of centralism, a consequence of its centralising State. As a result, there appeared protesting Russian sects: Judaisers, Old Ritualists and then Dukhobors, Stundists, Baptists. Over thirty-five years after the dissolution of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Moscow Patriarchate was finally forced to grant Church independence to Orthodox in Poland, Czechoslovakia and then to those North America, and grant partial independence to Orthodox in Japan and China. Today, over thirty-five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1991, Orthodox in the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltics also want their independence in the same way.

Autocephaly, Not Nationalism

However, those in the Ukraine who want Church independence, ‘autocephaly’, are termed by those contaminated by nationalist hatred as ‘uncanonical’ or even ‘schismatic’. Ironically, those who call pious Orthodox such names are generally Soviet nationalists who wave the Soviet flag and appear to worship Stalin. However, support for autocephaly, granted as a result of the decentralisation of former centralised empires, whether those of Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, does not mean that we approve of the other extreme, of hateful nationalism and racist xenophobia. Patriotism unites and creates sympathy with other peoples, but nationalism always divides in hatred.

Local Churches need autocephaly in order to speak in the local language of their peoples, to respect their customs and for them to adapt to local political conditions. Thus, even Greeks and Greek Cypriots have their own separate  Churches – this is because they need to deal with their local ‘ceasars’ on different territories, having political independence, always strictly following the words of Christ: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’. This is not nationalism, because nationalism puts the nation above Christ. That is as in the German anthem: ‘Deutschland ueber alles’ – Germany above everything – including above Christ and man.

All nationalists follow the same German example and as xenophobic racists put their nation above Christ. And yet He made us all, whatever our language and nationality. Our wish to see the autocephaly of Churches in countries which are politically independent from the country of the Mother Church is based on the example of the Local Churches, to Whom the Apostle Paul addressed his individual letters almost 2,000 years ago. There is nothing new then in such an ‘ecclesiology’, the incarnational theology of the Church. The persecution of those who work for future Local Churches and abuse them is proof that we are expressing a Gospel truth, which this world detests and rejects.

The Struggle for Autocephaly and the Catholicity of the Church

We have recently seen the example of the newly-founded Macedonian Orthodox Church, whose autocephaly was finally granted to it by its Serbian Mother-Church after decades of waiting, accusations and strife. The granting of Church independence, ‘autocephaly’, the founding of new Churches by Mother-Churches, is not a question of dogma. This is why the centralists’ accusations like ‘uncanonical’ and ‘schismatic’ applied to those who work as missionaries towards founding new Local Churches are absurd and vain. They go against the Catholicity of the Church, the third sign of the Church, which states that the Church is One, no matter where it is or what language it uses.

Similarly absurd and vain is the persecution of us who have always worked specifically for a new Local Church of Western Europe, which we have been proposing in concrete terms since 1988, though we have been opposed by centralising and racist Greeks and Russians. Both extremists on the fringes of the Church, these centralisers who refuse to establish new Local Churches because they are greedy to cling onto power and money, and also the sectarian schismatics, who want to maintain their power over their tiny ghetto-churches and condemn all other nationalities, have opposed us. We may not live to see it, but our children and grandchildren may live to see a Local Church.

Obtaining autocephaly has always been a struggle. Recently the Macedonian Church received autocephaly, but only after nearly sixty years, actually less than the length of struggle of the Bulgarian Church for autocephaly, which was especially bitter. As for the ancient Georgian Church, it had its autocephaly uncanonically suppressed for nearly 200 years by the Russian Church, itself then suppressed by Imperial and then Soviet control. Conversely, we do not hold with racist and politically-motivated Ukrainians who do not know the words of ‘Our Father’ and throw out icons of Russian saints from churches because they are Russian. That is just Nazi racism, the other extreme.

Afterword

Many think that today’s Russian Church leadership is just as subservient to the Russian State as the State-appointed hierarchies of the Protestant Churches, the Churches of England, Finland, Sweden, Norway etc, are towards their States. That was indeed the case of the Russian Church before the Revolution under the Protestant ‘Spiritual Regulation’ of Peter I. Under the Soviet regime, it was far worse, for bishops faced death for disobedience to the State. It seems that today’s Russian bishops are so psychologically traumatised by that period that they voluntarily do what they imagine the State wants. The State does not want such subservience, it is, amazingly, self-imposed.