Recent Articles by
Archpriest Andrew Phillips,
St John’s Orthodox Church, Colchester, England
‘No Cross, No Crown’
This 65-page spiral-bound booklet The Force of Simple Orthodoxy is available from: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk for £6 or $12 post-free, payable to Paypal at the above e-mail. The contents are listed below.
The last five years have been catastrophic for the administrative elites of the Orthodox Church. First, we witnessed the trampling down of the most basic canons by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and the falling out of communion with the Russian Church of almost the whole Greek Orthodox administration (not the simple clergy and people – hence the title), under foreign political threats and the financial pressure of vulgar bribes.
Then there followed no less cowardice in the face of the absurd covid manipulation and scare. The incredible and repeated scandals of Eastern Papism involved here, in terms of financial irregularity, moral perversion and the dogmatic compromises of ecumenism, have brought the spiritually weak to abandon the Church. ‘If they behave like that, why should I bother?’ However regrettable, this attitude is quite understandable, given the scandalous conduct of those on high, who were supposed to set us an example.
Then, in 2022, the American elite’s war in and on the Ukraine that had begun overtly in 2014 sucked in the Russian Federation. We witnessed at once the collapse of the once multinational, but tragically centralised Patriarchate of Moscow into authoritarian Papism and nationalism. Having discredited itself, nearly all Non-Russians, a third of the total, left it or were expelled from it. Until it purifies itself and peels off its post-Soviet, Soviet and pre-Soviet deviations of love of oligarchs’ money, fawning love of Sergianist power and love of possession respectively, nothing will change. Still stuck in the museum quagmire of the recent past, the Church administration has yet to become multipolar, as the Russian State has already become.
The Moscow collapse concerns not least its once respected American branch. In the last five years it too sold itself out for post-Soviet money, sovietising itself, then tragically fell into schism, followed by persecution, slander and open lies, and is now on the verge of repeating the Donatist rebaptism heresy. (Heresy always follows schism, just as schism always follows moral iniquity, as sure as night follows day). Many who had been faithful in blood, sweat and tears to the old Russian Church for fifty years and more have been expelled from it. The rest, like its last ever-memorable Metropolitan, are spinning in their graves.
Given the shameful apostasy of Heterodoxy over the last sixty years, what are Orthodox to do in the face of the no less shameful spiritual and so moral collapse of both the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox administrations, supposedly responsible for the majority of the Church? Have we really come to that point when, ‘When the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth? (Lk 18, 8). Indeed, ‘Let them that are in Judea flee into the mountains’ (Matt. 24, 16). This booklet suggests some answers, to be found from the Hebrides to the Carpathians.
Contents
Foreword: Memories are Made of This
- The Force of Simple Orthodoxy
- The First 250 Years of Orthodox Suffolk
- The Fen Thebaid
- Who Betrayed the Europeans?
- The Struggle for the Inevitable Local Church
- How the Orthodox Church Was Restructured
- An Interview
- Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy
Afterword: On Edmund the Martyred King