Introduction: Nothing New Under the Sun

Apart from one year in Greece and several months in the Soviet Union, and then in Russia and the Ukraine, with brief visits to Orthodox in Moldova, Romania, Belarus, Czechia, Slovakia, Finland, Serbia and Bulgaria, I have spent 51 years as an Orthodox Christian in Western Europe, 41 of them as an Orthodox clergyman in Western Europe, in France, Portugal and England, but with liturgical celebrations in Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. My conclusions?

First of all, there is nothing new under the sun. This is because human nature does not change. Anyone who reads the Acts of the Apostles or the writings of the Church Fathers from the first centuries knows that all the difficulties and scandals of today have already occurred in the past. Of 80,000 Orthodox priests, I have perhaps met perhaps 1,000 and of the 1,000 Orthodox bishops, I have met about 100. I have never seen anything new compared to the past.

Seven Local Churches exist in the Western European Diaspora today: the Romanian, the Greek (Constantinople), the Russian (divided into three parts, one of which refuses to be in communion with another, so is in fact in schism, as well as the 100 new but independent parishes of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church), the Serbian, and then the three very small groups under the Churches of Antioch, Bulgaria and Georgia. Only the three first big Churches carry any weight in terms of the Diaspora Church as a whole.

The Three Big Churches in 1976

Fifty years ago, there were two Russian bishops in this country. As they were both Russian, they were, naturally, at daggers drawn and out of communion with one another. One was an anthroposophist (look it up), a great eccentric who believed in Atlantis. The other one was a notorious womaniser. A few English people were allowed to join the two Russian groups, usually provided that they learned some Russian. This was because both groups were rapidly dying out (1917, after which most of the still living but elderly Russians had come here, was nearly sixty years before 1976). Priests, very few of them lived outside London and they were also elderly, spent much of their time doing funerals.

Fifty years ago, the Patriarchate of Constantinople in this country was dominated by Greek Cypriots, whose lives were largely devoted to Hellenism. Most had arrived here between 1950 and 1974. A homosexual archbishop preferred to ordain his boyfriends and one of his vicar-bishops was a pedophile, who at that time got away with it. Of course, there was at least one bishop who was excellent and many very virtuous priests and pious people. However, the opening to non-Greeks was all but non-existent. From the archbishop down, English people were told to go away, at best being told to join the Church of England or else to learn Greek, ‘if you want to become a Greek’, at worst being told to ‘go away’ by one Cypriot priest, only in the most vulgar way possible in the English language.

Fifty years ago, the Romanian Church was more or less inexistent, as the whole country was controlled by the Romanian Secret Police.

The Three Big Churches in 2026

Today, the Russians remain in small groups here, small because they have all failed to pass on the Faith to locally-born children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on. No Russian group has learned how to cope with assimilation. Today, the larger (still small) group is 100% attached to the Russian Federation, politically and in all other ways, and is much compromised by scandals. The smaller group, dominated by American Trumpians, just encourages the crazies and so spawns old calendarists, just as the Russian Church inside Russia once spawned old ritualists, and is much compromised by appalling scandals. Another even smaller group just hangs on. All three groups are dying out – for all have survived largely because of immigration from Moldova. By far the saddest thing about the Russian Church is that it did not learn from history and so it has condemned itself to repeat the same mistakes as before the Revolution. Today, inside the ex-Soviet Union, the Russian Church strangely resembles the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, with the same politicisation, the same militarisation, the same empty ritualism, the same inhuman rigidity, the same pharisaic and blind repetition that only they are ‘canonical’, the same blind obedience to the hierarchy and the State, regardless of Christ and His teaching.

Today, the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople in this country, although still dominated by Greek Cypriots whose lives are largely devoted to Hellenism, has a very dynamic archbishop, whose English is better than his Greek, and who is desperately trying to save his archdiocese from self-extinction despite his elderly flock. As he said to us a few months ago, he has one hundred priests who are so old that they are likely to die within the next five years and three candidates to replace them. For forty years the previous administration ignored all the warnings that this would happen. The saddest thing about the Greek Church is that they did not learn from the suicide of the Russian Church, so they are condemned to repeat the same suicide and also die out.

The Romanian Patriarchate is today by far the largest Church as a result of the immigration of four to five million Romanians and Moldovans here over the last 20 years. Overall, our two Autonomous Romanian Orthodox Metropolias in Western Europe have 10 bishops, 1,283 churches and 30 monasteries, which makes them by far the largest Local Church in Western Europe. We are about four times larger than the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople in Western Europe, five times larger than the Russian Church in Western Europe (most of which is composed of Romanian-speaking Moldovans) and incomparably larger than the tiny ROCOR and Antiochian dioceses, both with less than 100, mainly tiny (between 10 and 50 people), communities.

Conclusion: The Challenge for the Romanian Church

Between 1917 and 1962 by far the largest Diaspora Church in Western Europe, albeit divided into three warring groups, was the Russian Church. Between 1962 and 2007 by far the largest was the Patriarchate of Constantinople. But they both lost their dominating positions and indeed the respect of others, the Russians through their isolationist totalitarian politics, which excludes Non-Russians, and their lack of communion with others, the Greeks through their sheer racism. Can the Romanians, now by far the biggest group, keep their position and the respect of others?

The Romanian Church has many devout clergy and people. It has the Carpathian spirit of solidarity. We are together in the Romanian Church, this is the People’s Church, with a sense of community, family and friendship. The Romanian language is a Latin language, written in the Latin alphabet. There is neither the politics, nor the military-style rigidity of the Russians, nor the racism of the Greeks. Moreover, and most importantly, the Romanian Church alone is in communion with everyone, in schism with no-one. However, the Romanian Church still faces two great challenges.

The first weakness of the Romanian Church, at least in Romania, is the temptation of money. Any Romanian layperson will tell you of a bad experience in Romania with a member of the clergy who demanded money from them. This is why some Romanians have become Protestants. I have not seen this temptation in the Romanian Diaspora, but we cannot be complacent. The second weakness of the Romanian Church is the potential lack of openness to others, in other words, the weakness of nationalism. To found a new Local Church in the Diaspora means to be open to others, to warring Greeks and Russians in particular, to be able to co-operate with others in a common language, accepting different languages, calendars and customs, and not imposing one’s own. Is this possible? Will it too fail to learn from history and repeat the errors of the Russians, repeated by the Greeks? We await the inevitable verdict of the history of the future.