Nobody goes to heaven by sending others to hell.
Q: Looking back twenty years after the 2006 Church Council on the relics of St John of Shanghai, what do you think that the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) should have done after its reconciliation with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007?
A: ROCOR played a very important role in the last half of the last century. Do not forget that from 1950 until 1966, it had a saint in its midst, Archbishop John of Shanghai and Western Europe. Then it witnessed to the Western world of the persecution of the Church by the Soviet atheist State, the inherent worldliness of KGB-manipulated ecumenism and modernism, it spoke in spiritual freedom in the place of its brothers and sisters in the Patriarchal Church, who were enslaved as hostages inside Russia. Having sent representatives to the Second Vatican Council, ROCOR’S greatest moment came in 1981, when, although sixty-four years late, it began the work of canonising the New Martyrs and Confessors. This work is not complete, as archives open, as we see from the July 2026 Synod in Moscow, where new names of New Martyrs and Confessors have entered the Church calendar.
Indeed, from the Year 2000 on, ROCOR no longer served a purpose, since the Church inside Russia had been freed from the State, as proved by the fact that it too had at last begun to canonise even more New Martyrs and Confessors. Since the generation of those who had been adults before the Revolution of 1917 had all but died out by 2000, ROCOR’s destiny was to become four autonomous Metropolias, part of the Mother Church, taking over its Diaspora, as its title of ‘Russian’ was already becoming mythical. If it had joined in with Moscow, it could have spearheaded Russian Orthodox missionary work and witness in the Diaspora, co-operating with others, separating out into four regional Diaspora Metropolias. It would not have become the Moscow Patriarchate, but simply the Russian Orthodox Metropolias of Northern America, Latin America, Western Europe and Oceania.
This is exactly what I worked for after 2007, the event of unity for which we had patiently been waiting since the repentance of Moscow at its Jubilee Council in August 2000. But ROCOR did not work for this after 2007. In May 2006, standing at the Fourth ROCOR Council in San Francisco, where I was one of the ten speakers, I heard the former US ambassador to Kiev, John Herbst, whispering behind me to the then Bishop Agafangel from Odessa, saying: ‘This looks bad. We shall have to work against it from inside’. He was talking about ROCOR’s Conciliar decision (by over 95% to under 5%) to merge with Moscow. He meant that since the decision had been taken, ROCOR would have to be sabotaged from inside, its infiltrated key assets, jealous narcissistic psychopaths, would be activated. And that is exactly what they did, using their agents, who had long ago been planted inside ROCOR for future promotion.
The Moscow Patriarchate? How naïve they are, just like the Russian State, outwitted, as usual, by the infiltration of the CIA! The first indication came immediately in May 2007, when directly after the service in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, where I had concelebrated, one of the most senior CIA-asset priests in ROCOR (he is still alive) turned to me and said in English: ‘We’ve done it’. I knew what he meant by that, though he thought that I did not. I was not a recruit. In May 2007, after the Act had been signed, one ROCOR bishop returned to his country to be greeted by his colleague, the local Moscow bishop, with a smile and the words: ‘Now we are one, we can work together as one’. The ROCOR bishop, a CIA asset since the 1960s, answered him shockingly, that nothing of the sort was going to happen. And herein lies the sin of ROCOR – it did not merge and so lead the way in the Diaspora.
At best it became a museum Church, a relic of the past, turning in on itself, and claiming exclusivity before the outside world as an ideological ghetto, all financed by you know who. Incredibly enough, some extreme right-wingers, later schismatics, in ROCOR before 2007 had actually predicted that Moscow would take over and destroy ROCOR, once the Act of Canonical Communion had been signed in 2007. This was a lie born of the paranoia of elderly pharisees, who were afraid of losing power. In fact, as we have said, it was just the opposite, it was ROCOR which deceived naïve Moscow, using its newly-obtained paper unity with Moscow in order to claim canonicity and so destroy itself. In reality, the small but poisonous American faction gradually destroyed the ROCOR of St John of Shanghai, whom it had already persecuted, suspended and effectively killed in 1966, now hypocritically claiming him as their own!
It denied that he had ever given his shoes away to the barefoot poor, saying that he did not wear shoes because he found them uncomfortable! (I quote a ROCOR bishop). ROCOR sent its control freaks outside the USA to impose its unexportable, Protestant-based, US imperialism on other countries, so ‘draining the swamp’, in fact, however, creating the swamp. It set up the new ROCOR as a sect, that was de facto in communion with no-one, because it considered that all other Orthodox were hated heretics and needed rebaptising. This was to reject the Catholicity and communion of the Church, as is typical of all sects. All it could do from this moment on, as the Russians and Russophiles of the Tradition left ROCOR or were even openly expelled from it, as we were, was to recruit young, naïve, male Protestant converts of the Zionist Evangelical type to replace the people and refill their ranks.
The old ROCOR was killed and the new ROCOR of ignorance of history and Russia, pharisaic condemnation and right-wing fanaticism (the same playbook as had been tried by the Grabbe faction in the 1960s and 1970s) and podcasts for incels, was substituted for it. The new ROCOR flattered their pride, telling neophytes that they had at last found ‘the One True Church’, hypnotising them into spiritual illusion (in Russian ‘prelest’). It was spiritual corn syrup for naïve Americans and a pool of votes for the desperate Republican Party, openly and naively supported by the then ROCOR Metropolitan. ‘You see’, he said, ‘we must vote Trump, as he took part in the anti-abortion march for life in Washington’. Astounded by his naivety, I thought, does he not understand that some politicians will do anything for votes? Does he not know about the misogyny of this man? Does he not know about his Epstein connections?
One day, after this nightmare is over, Moscow will wake up, ceasing to be distracted by the tragedy in the Ukraine, by the Greek invasion of its canonical territory there and in the Baltics, by nationalist centralisation, by the error in Africa, the distressing episcopal scandals of careerism, corruption and depravity, and behave as pastors and not as politicians. Then it will at last deal with ROCOR’s rebellion against the Orthodox Tradition and communion, and apostasy from it, too late realising the huge self-imposed losses of pastors, people and international credibility. Meanwhile, the other fifteen Local Orthodox Churches continue to witness, and we continue in them and with them. Moscow will have to catch us, through overcoming its schisms, restoring communion and concelebration, decentralising its Non-Russian parts, returning to the canonicity/conciliarity/catholicity of the Church.
