https://spzh.eu/en/chelovek-i-cerkovy/91769-churchly-malady-of-episcopacy-collapse-of-governance-or-crisis-of-spirit
Author Archives: Father Andrew
Did World War III Begin with the War against Iran on 28 February 2026?
Some consider that World War II was simply a continuation of World War I and the two Wars form merely a single World War. But however closely the two World Wars were linked and despite the clear fact that the second was caused by the first, they are events which are separated by a generation. Following the two World Wars, some consider that a Third World War is inevitable in order to resolve the outstanding injustices left over from the Second, just as the latter was made inevitable after the injustices left over from the First. Some even consider that World War III has just begun. How do we look at this amid the death and destruction in Israel, Iran and on US bases in the Gulf?
The first very dramatic two months of 2026 opened with delusional American threats to the Greenland territory of its foolish ‘ally’ Denmark (when Trump takes Greenland, hypocritical Danish complaints will not be heeded); the unheard of kidnapping of the democratically-elected President of Venezuela, which cast aside all international law and the Charter of the all but dead United Nations, which has been dropped by Trump’s USA; the revelations that the Western world is ruled by a satanic Epstein class of perverts and cocaine addicts; threats the sovereignty of Cuba; a full-scale, unprovoked war against Iran. The USA has become a terrorist rogue state, an international pariah.
In the course of this latter insanity against Iran, the dictator of the American Empire from his Imperial Throne in the White House insulted Zelensky as ‘a circus director’ and called Starmer ‘no Churchill’. At least both those descriptions were blindingly obvious. Tell us something we did not know already. But otherwise, the narcissistic psychopath, Trump, has become a delusional megalomaniac. He has painted himself and his Western vassals and puppets into an oil-starved, food-starved and bankrupt corner. Will popular street protests begin against so-called Western ‘leaders’? It would seem quite possible, when the Western peoples start to suffer from rising prices.
In answer to our original question, we would say that World War III began on 9 May 1945, that is, as soon as World War II ended. Only weeks after the death of Roosevelt on 12 April 1945, Churchill proposed his insane ‘Operation Unthinkable’, an immediate triggering of war against the USSR. Although that scheme was rejected, the US still unnecessarily dropped two atom bombs on Japan, not against Japan, but as a warning to the USSR. So began the ill-named ‘Cold War’, the Third World War, which has in fact been a series of hot wars and terrorist overthrows of democracy throughout Latin America and Western Europe, in Italy and Greece (the colonels), in France and Germany.
In November 1963 the peace-making President Kennedy was cruelly assassinated, probably by the CIA. Then the USA changed from being a Constitutional Republic to an Autocratic Empire under the authoritarian Uniparty of oligarchs, as became apparent in the ensuing US genocide of two million Vietnamese. After the Western ideology of Marxism unsurprisingly bankrupted the USSR in 1991, there came the invasion of Afghanistan and the US rape of oil-rich Iraq after the Saudi attack on the USA on 9/11/2001. In 2004 came the first US attempt to usurp power in the Ukraine, which culminated in the bloodshed of 2014 and then genocide, which is ongoing now.
In 2019 came covid, the US attempt to seize power worldwide through biological warfare. That ill-thought through scheme backfired and panic among Western leaders, who knew what had happened, set in, as they attempted to lock up their peoples in a gigantic prison. There followed a second, Vietnam-style, humiliation of the US in 2021 in Afghanistan, that graveyard of empires from the Empire of Alexander the Great to the British and American Empires. Then came the US attempt to destroy and dismember Russia through its Ukrainian proxy, opposed on 24 February 2022, and next, on 28 February 2026, the US aggression against Iran both through its Israeli proxy and directly.
Some hope that Trump will fall so ill, either physically or mentally, that he will have to be removed by those around him. Others hope that he will be impeached for his many, many illegal acts, including those connected to the Epstein scandal. Others hope for regime change, that he will be assassinated in a palace revolt and be replaced by his Vice-President. The latter has clearly always been against the terrorist war on Iran and is not in any way compromised in the Epstein/Mossad scandal. However, for the moment all that Trump can do is beg Iran and Russia for a ceasefire again and again. However, this war will end only when Iran is no longer threatened.
Having with his ‘can-do-anything-I-want’, spoilt brat, American hubris ignored the advice of all, together with Israel he attacked Iran without provocation and without a strategy. This attack came after his failure to destroy Iran in his twelve-day war of decapitation in June 2025, and his failure to regime-change the country through the ill-organised protests of a few dissidents in January 2026. Civilisations do not depend on one man; Trump does not understand that, as he has no sense of history. Now Trump is desperately trying to find proxies, Kurds, Azeris or others, to fight for him. They are refusing to do so, and he is finding out that he has to order bodybags for his hundreds of dead troops.
As karma comes and Tel Aviv is being turned into a second Gaza, Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ has been transformed into a Board of War, just as his Department of Defence is now the Department of War. His ‘Board of Peace’ will never replace the United Nations, as he recently dreamed. Trump, the new Charlemagne, is lost in his own delusional contradictions, for narcissists always believe in their own delusions. We know, as we had to deal with another narcissistic psychopathic bully in London, who leads an American sect. There is now only one thing stopping peace and that is Trump’s pride, for like all narcissists, he can never admit that he was wrong. Hubris goes before the fall.
The US fought for 20 years, killed hundreds of thousands and spent two trillion dollars in Afghanistan in order to replace the anti-Russian Taliban with the pro-Russian Taliban. Now in twelve days the US has killed thousands and spent twenty billion dollars in order to replace an anti-nuclear Khamenei with a pro-nuclear Khamenei. Oil is doubling in price since the US-Israeli war began and Ukrainianised Europe and the Ukraine are panicking. Now that Europe has ‘liberated’ itself from Russian oil and gas, it has also ‘liberated’ itself from Gulf oil and gas. Bravo to the geniuses of the European governing elite. Where was that elite educated? Or were they simply brainwashed by their ‘education’?
Soon oil will reach $120 a barrel and then $150 a barrel, effectively tripling. All thanks to that elite. To bring peace, and Iran is ready, if need be, for a ten-year long war of attrition, Iran has three demands: End the illegal US sanctions against Iran; Withdraw all US forces from West Asia and close all US bases in West Asia, in Israel, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and in the puppet monarchies of the Gulf, leading to the liberation of Palestine; Pay compensation to Iran for damage caused to its people since 1979. Then the liberation of West Asia, which is what this war is all about, will have been achieved and the peoples of the Gulf will have been liberated from their corrupt Western monarchies.
The Trump regime has shot itself in both feet – first in the Ukraine and now in Iran. No wonder the USA can no longer walk. Because of its defeat in the Ukraine, North Asia – led by Russia – is free, after 300 years of Western captivity, and it will take Western Europe, its Epstein elite overthrown, with it. East Asia – led by China – is also now free and it will take the former US puppets, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and all Oceania, including Australia, with it. South Asia – India – will be freed once West Asia – led by Iran – is free. And Africa is already joining BRICS, ejecting the last European colonialists. The USA is being sent back home to Northern America.
The US regime has long been controlled by Israeli Zionists like Netanyahu and, before him, by Epstein, by alcoholics like Hegseth and Graham, and by other ‘Christian Zionists’. But there is no such thing as that. You cannot be a Christian and a Zionist. We shall call them Protestant Zionists, a heresy. There are, it seems, some seven million of these deluded Americans, only 2% of the population, but with huge influence. They believe that through wars in which millions of innocents die, they can hasten the coming of Antichrist and Armageddon. Thus, they do the devil’s work, for he loves it when people are massacred in wars, blood rituals in his name, especially World Wars.
Some are asking if Trump is the Antichrist. Obviously not. Do not flatter him. All the prophecies describe someone else, far more intelligent and cunning, and of another origin. But like many other recent US Presidents, he is most certainly a servant and forerunner of Antichrist. The Trump regime’s desperate divide and conquer strategy to try and remain No 1, can be seen in its desire for the Balkanisation of Russia, West Asia and any other country whose natural resources it wants to steal and control. However, Globalist Antichrist is resisted by the anti-centralising Sovereign Lands which are joining BRICS. We support that resistance, for we oppose Antichrist and his divisions and wars.
In reply to our own question at the beginning, we have said that World War III began long ago, in 1945, for there has been no peace in the world since 1945, only continual wars. Unlike the first two World Wars, World War III has not been a matter of four or five years. It has been going on continually in phases for over eighty years. Moreover, those phases have been global, ranging from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Ukraine, Syria to Iran, wherever the Western elite is trying to force others into its Globalist straitjacket. But that elite, composed of Zionist psychopaths like Trump and his master Netanyahu, are the ones who need the straitjackets and the madhouse.
The Heresy of Zionism and the Tragedy of War
https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2026/03/05/eres_sionizma_i_tragediya_voiny
Operation Epic Fury, also called Operation Epic Failure or Epstein Failure, continues in Israeli-US attacks on Iran and Iranian attacks on them and their assets in West Asia. None should be surprised: it was announced that this would be a Regional War weeks ago. According to at least one US commander: ‘Trump has been anointed by Jesus in order to fight at Armageddon so that Jesus can come back and then we will enter the rapture’. This particular heresy is called ‘Zionism’. It came to prominence in 1916 under the influence of the British ‘Round Table’.
Bankrupt, the members of the Round Table realised that the Anglo-Norman rulers of the Establishment needed to eliminate Imperial Russia in order to obtain finance from Zionist banks. Drained of strength, they realised that they needed to sacrifice fresh, American, blood to win their war. Thus, they planned for 1917 the fall of Imperial Russia, which had until then restrained the Zionist heresy, the entry into the Great European War of the USA and the Balfour Declaration that the British elite would recognise a Zionist State to be established in Palestine.
The Zionist heresy does not know that Antichrist will come before Christ returns and that there will be no ‘rapture’. This is because Zionism is an Old Testament religion, the religion of the Pharisees, that of those who murdered Christ. Those who still live in the Old Testament, those who have still not received the New Testament revelation or openly rejected it, whether formally Jews or Muslims or pseudo-Christians, will confuse Antichrist with Christ and worship Antichrist. Here we have the explanation for what is happening now.
After Imperialism, Commonwealth: The Russian Church After the Dissection of the Soviet Ukraine
Introduction: The DeSovietisation of the Ukraine
The Soviet Ukraine was a creation of three bloody tyrants, Lenin, Stalin and Khrushshev, between 1922 and 1954. It is the decisions of these tyrants that the West has supported all these years. That Ukraine was always divided into three parts, Eastern, Central and Western. After the conflict there is over, quite possibly this year, the Eastern part (with the south), called Novorossiya, will return to Russia; the Central part and some of the Western part will become the New Ukraine, which we shall call Kievska Rus, a mirror image of the equally landlocked Belarus to the north; most of the Western part will return to Poland, Hungary (and perhaps Slovakia) and Romania, from where Stalin stole it. But what will happen to the Russian Church, deprived of several thousand churches and priests in Central and Western Ukraine? Having identified with the militant Russian nationalism of the Russian State, the Russian episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church has lost the loyalty of Ukrainians.
The Defeat of Post-Soviet Centralisation and the Remedy of Autocephaly
Why would those Ukrainians continue to be subject to the Muscovite Church of Russians, who have killed or maimed their grandsons, sons, husbands and fathers? That Russian episcopate has in general renounced Non-Russian nationalities, whom it has in effect either ignored or else persecuted. It has renounced the Orthodox in Kievska Rus (mainly the old Central Soviet Ukraine), and in the west of that Soviet Ukraine. In the latter, Orthodox who live in areas which return to Poland will rejoin the Polish Orthodox Church, any who return to Slovakia will rejoin the Church of the Czechs and Slovakia, those who return to Romania will rejoin the Romanian Orthodox Church (some already have), and those who return to Hungary will have to be awarded Autocephaly in a new Hungarian Orthodox Church. As for the Orthodox who live in an independent Kievska Rus, they will also need Autocephaly, which they have already de facto had since 2022, thus creating an eighteenth Local Church.
Thus, that Russian episcopate has also renounced the multinational Russian Church of the emigration, which I served for 47 years, and its heroes like St John of Shanghai and his successor Archbishop Antony of Geneva. It has renounced all the others who carried the mission of the Church to Non-Russian nationalities, including the Estonian-born Patriarch Alexiy II, who in 2003 saw the Russian Church in Western Europe as the foundation-stone of a new Autocephalous Church there. That episcopate has therefore renounced the remains of the Russian emigration. The smaller part, based in Paris, is now destined to merge into a larger Non-Russian Orthodox Church of Western Europe (see below). The larger part, based in New York, completely out of control and unchecked by Moscow, has lost its way in uncanonical disorder, identifying with sectarianism, the pedophile warmongering Trump regime and the CIA, several of whose assets belong to its clergy.
Moscow has also renounced its own emigration, most of which is in Western Europe, but also in Northern America and Latin America. This is heavily dependent on Moldovans, especially so in Ireland and in Iberia and Italy, where both bishops are Moldovans. For Orthodox in Moldova are returning to the Romanian Church, some 300 parishes leaving Moscow so far. Once Russian troops arrive in Odessa, after which NATO, the EU and the UK will begin to collapse, that return to the Romanian Church in the face of Russian nationalism will turn into a rush. The Russian nationalist episcopate has also renounced Orthodox in the Baltics, who need independence (autocephaly). It is also renouncing the Orthodox in Belarus and in the five stans of Central Asia, in both of which some voices are asking for new autocephalies. This means that the Russian Church will be reduced from 145 million faithful to 105 million.
Virtually all of these will be living in the Russian Federation and in a Novorossiya reunited with that Federation. Just a few will be left living outside it, attached to Russian embassy and consulate churches in and around the capitals of the Western world, in Japan (20,000?), South-East Asia (20,000?) and in China (100?). As for those in Africa, Moscow will have to negotiate autocephaly for Africans with the Patriarchate of Alexandria, with the mutual exit of interfering and imperialistic Greeks and Russians alike. An African Patriarchate of Alexandria, with an administrative centre perhaps in Kenya, will follow. Thus, there will be autocephalies for Kievska Rus, Belarus, Central Asia, the Baltics, Hungary, Western Europe (under the majority – the Romanian Church), Northern America, absorbing the renamed OCA, and Oceania (both under majority Constantinople) and in Latin America (under majority Antioch).
Conclusion: The Defeat of the ‘Princes of the Church’
This will create twenty-four Local Orthodox Churches instead of sixteen as now, with two of those, the Patriarchate of Alexandria and the OCA, renewed and reconstituted. The eight new Autocephalies will cover Kievska Rus, Belarus, Western Europe, Central Asia, Hungary, Latin America, Oceania, and the Baltics. The Russian Orthodox Church will have been humbled, taking its place as one of the renewed Family of Churches. It will have lost its imperialist temptation to dominate all, just like discredited Constantinople. Both Patriarchates were contaminated by Imperialism. Both will have to accept that they are merely parts, however large, 50% of the whole Church, and however ancient, dating back to Constantine, of a Family of equals, a Commonwealth. This will see restored the Catholicity of the Church, a Family in communion with each other and the defeat of imperialist and nationalist centralism.
The Madness of King Donald and the World Responsibility of Orthodoxy
The War for the Liberation of West Asia and the Ending of Western Domination
It seems that every 250 years, the people of the USA need to gain the courage to choose a Constitutional People’s Republic against an Oligarchic Autocratic Empire, led by some narcissistic, megalomaniac Napoleon. Having lost its Empire in North Asia (Russia), despite arming to the teeth its proxy in the Ukraine, East Asia (China), despite its armed and occupied proxies in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan, South Asia (India), despite inferiority complexed traitors inside India, and Central Asia, despite CIA bribes of corrupt locals, the US elite is still desperately trying to hold on to its last foothold, West Asia (Iran), despite its overarmed and subsidised Israeli proxy.
The only bases that the USA has ever held in Asia have been on its fringes, on islands, coastal strips and peninsulas: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Israel, the UK and the North-Western Peninsula of Asia, called Western Europe. It lost everywhere else, in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Now the Western world is being pushed out of West Asia (‘the Middle East’ in its ethnocentric vocabulary). The feudal and corrupt Gulf tyrannies such as Shia Bahrein and Qatar, the puppets of the Western world, and the hated CIA puppet regime in Pakistan, which imprisoned its real leader, are set to fall and their Shia peoples are set to be liberated from persecution.
A wave of regional war has been unleashed by the USA by murdering the elderly and ill Shia leader Ali Khamenei, who wanted to die as a martyr. An erudite peacemaker who forbade nuclear weapons, he was in everything the opposite of the Western leader, Trump, who rejects international law and obeys only his Epstein conscience, supported by his vassals in the Western world. Having murdered 165 Iranian girls in a primary school, Trump has unleashed a war without end. He spreads his anti-BRICS tentacles from the Arctic to the Ukraine and now to Iran, in order to cut off the north-south trade corridor from Russia to Iran and the new east-west silk road of China.
The Iranians may have killed the sabbath-breaking Netanyahu (real name Mileikowsky), who was/is wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocidal war crimes. They have also attacked and damaged Trump’s real estate interests in the Gulf, as well as downing at least three US planes, attacking US ships and attacking Gulf hotels occupied by US troops. This long war, and it will be long, could end the Pan-Western settler State Israel and the end of pro-Western despots in the Gulf, in the Jordan and Syria. Here a terrorist regime has been installed by the USA. This may also be the end of the Western European trio, Merz, Starmer and Macron, who are so hated by their peoples.
Will two million Chinese troops be sent to Mesopotamia, hurrying to aid Iran via the new railway from China to West Asia? We do not know. Washington thought that this war was the solution to the chronic and exploding US debt crisis and a distraction to Epstein. It is not. It merely hastens the end of the millennial ‘Globalist’ tyranny of the West over the Rest. Now all refuse to negotiate with the backstabbers from the White House, since they even backstabbed, again, amid peace talks. The corrupt 20% of the West who form the Zionist Epstein class faces its nemesis. The Western peoples now glimpse freedom on the horizon. But at what cost will that freedom come?
For the moment, the family of the Israeli leader have fled, as has the family of the Ukrainian leader. Now that the delusional Trump, who believed in his own propaganda, is losing against Iran, ships, planes and bases destroyed or damaged, he is pleading for peace, but he has opened a Pandora’s Box. Peace will not come, as Iran wants to cleanse West Asia of the Empire’s proxies. One third of Trump’s Navy and his Air Force face obliteration, though no doubt at great cost to Iran. But the USA faces ejection back to Northern America and Western Europe at last faces the humbled reality that it is just another part of the world. The clock is turning back 250 years from 2026 to 1776.
The whole Muslim world, nearly one in four people on the planet, has been incensed by the full-scale, unprovoked Israeli-US attack on Iran and their assassination of its spiritual leader. The missiles aimed at Iran – they dare not bomb it, Western warplanes would be shot down – have sparked a firestorm. That has further discredited and bankrupted the whole Epstein ruling class of the Western world, together with its religions, Zionist Protestantism, based on the Hebrew Old Testament, and Imperialist Papism, based on Western barbarianism. Therefore, the future of the Church and authentic Christianity now depends on the Orthodox Church, which is only a tenth of the size of Islam. That is a terrifying responsibility, but there is nothing new in this.
Half a Century in the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (2)
Fleeing the Extremes
The first Christian Emperor was called Constantine. The last Orthodox Emperor was called Nicholas. He was overthrown in the so-called 1917 Revolution, that is, in the palace coup of the aristocratic traitors to the Tsar, orchestrated by the British ruling class. As a result, all the Orthodox Churches, which the Tsar had protected when still in power lost their protector and were called either to martyrdom or else to confessordom. Once infiltrated, the Churches had to resist either the CIA, by confessordom, or else of the KGB, by martyrdom and their earlier equivalents. (Earlier they had had different names, but they were still engaged in the same intrigues). Our balancing act has meant avoiding both these extremes. In our context this has not yet meant becoming martyrs, but it has meant becoming confessors.
Combating the extremes has on the one hand meant avoiding and combating globalism, liberalism, modernism, freemasonry and Vatican-style perversions and, on the other hand, avoiding and combating sectarianism, phariseeism, hateful censoriousness, political ultra-conservatism and Old Ritualist style obscurantism. Both extremes are marked by anti-Christian ‘bishops’, who are in fact thieves, homosexuals and pedophiles. Thus, we fought against the influence of the liberal modernists in the Orthodox Churches in the 1970s and 1980s and then against the sectarian pharisees in the Orthodox Churches in the 1990s and 2000s, until Russian Church unity was achieved in 2007. This was a victory over both extremes, a miracle. But the devil does not like miracles and those who announce that God is Love.
The devil attacked the Greek Church of Constantinople through nationalist racism, called ‘phyletism’ in Greek. However, he attacked the Russian Church, replacing faith and piety with the negativity of nationalist politics, which led to State-orchestrated ritualism, rigid militarism with its blind obedience and harsh punishments, instead of integrity. Professional choirs assured that everything was provided and the people were made passive, without responsibility. From there it was only one step to anti-clericalism. As they say in Russian, ‘mnogo popov, malo batjushek’, ‘there are many fake priests, but few real ones’. And so in the Russian Church, persecution always comes from the bishops. Thus, the Russian Church isolated itself and fell out of communion and catholicity with the 15 other Local Orthodox Churches.
The USA
Thus, our 2007 victory was to give us only temporary respite, a decade of peace. The programme of Americanisation, or more precisely of Trumpisation, of the American Synod of the Russian Church, known as ROCOR, began in 2017. It sent out its US agents to the still ‘unreformed’ (= normal and traditional) parts of ROCOR in Western Europe and Australia to transform these too into ignorant and arrogant convert crazy zones, like themselves, who yearned to create a rigid and ritualistic sect. This all coincided, and not coincidentally, with President Trump’s first term of belligerent Americanism and also with the second phase of the infiltration of ROCOR by the CIA. The latter activated its sleeping agents in the American Synod and recruited new ones, sending them out worldwide to what is an ecclesiastical NGO.
The Age of Trump also coincided with the consequences of the earlier activities of the notorious Mossad agents, Maxwell and Epstein, who worked hand in hand for the greater glory of worldwide Zionism. Epstein was before his murder the model psychopath: charming, superficially brilliant, very manipulative, narcissistic, a pathological liar, with no sense of empathy, a ruthless pervert and a cynical egomaniac. His psychopathic spirit became the standard for the Age and for the CIA agents in question. So much for the psychopathic narcissists of the USA and its Epstein regime. What of the other half of the Western world, Europe and the UK? Here we have not narcissistic psychopathy, but the creeping power grab of centralising Sovietisation, the old megalomaniac temptations of power and money.
Europe and the UK
Immediately after the fall of the SU (Soviet Union) at the end of 1991, the EU (European Union) was founded. The demons behind the former Union had simply fled westwards to an easier prey, the new Gadarene swine of Western Europe. Russia was no longer attractive, as it cast off the yoke of compulsory atheism. Thus, with the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, the EU became a geopolitical project. Instead of a trading community, it had become the political wing of militaristic NATO. The creeping centralising Sovietisation and Epsteinisation of the EU, obvious in its practices, was also clear in its vocabulary. Thus, the (European) Council is the translation of ‘Soviet’, the EU Commissioners mirror Soviet Commissars, the oligarchy mirrors the nomenklatura and the ‘narrative’ mirrors ‘the Party line’. SU = EU.
As for England, it continued on its historic cycle. In 597 it was converted to Christ from that Old Rome, which still openly condemned universal pretensions. In 1066 it was converted to barbarianism from Norman France, sponsored by the ideology of the new schismatic and ‘universal’ Rome, which stifled Christ with the Pope and England with Britain. In 1535 it was converted to anti-sacramentalism from Luther’s neo-pagan Germany. In 2004 it was converted to imperial delusions from Nazi Ukraine and its orange revolution. The cycle is repeated every 469 years. Today, the British Establishment is trying to revive its long-lost past glory, which was not glory, but shame. This imperialism is repeated all through the ex-imperialist Western European ruling class, nostalgic for its delusions of greatness.
The Collapse of Kiev Creates Regime Changes in the USA, Europe and the UK
What the ruling elites in both the EU and the UK have not understood is that all unions break up. The Soviet Union, the USSR, broke up. So did Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and now the Ukraine, so will Belgium, the EU, the UK, and quite possibly the US. The Four Nations of Britain and a reunited Ireland can work together, not in a Union or a Federation (which is a half-way house from a Union, as is the semi-Soviet Russian Federation), but in a Sovereign Confederation, the Ionan Confederation, IONA, the ‘Isles of the North Atlantic’. England must yet depose the British monarchs who have ruled it for so long, invited by the merchant-oligarchs of the City of London from Germany to become an Imperial House, but the Imperial Age is long over and so are they. A new Sovereign England must restore its own English Royal House.
As for the EU and the UK, they are entirely dependent on the black hole of the Kiev regime. They have bet everything on that loser, playing at the casino wheel of geopolitics, without knowledge and understanding, but with a fanatical and blinding, ever-expanding ideology of European unionism. But every time that Europe falls to union, and it is always a fall, whether under Napoleon, or Hitler, or the EU, it then sets about attacking Russia. ‘Europe’ always attacks European Russia, because Russia does not conform to the morally and financially bankrupt ideological narrative of the Eurocommissars. This is why they do not want peace. War is their self-justification, as only war gives them a unifying purpose. However, the Russian Federation frustrates them immensely, for it is playing the long game against the Kiev regime.
Moscow’s methodical advance by attrition, metre by metre, keeping its losses very low, is because it is awaiting the political collapse of Kiev, which will precede its military collapse. (This was why Germany, Britain and France, as Japan had tried in 1904-5, first brought about Russian political collapse in 1917, since political collapse always precedes military collapse). When political Kiev collapses, its army will have nothing left to fight for. Then, Russia will take over most of the old Soviet Ukraine at little cost, allowing Poland, Romania, Hungary and perhaps Slovakia to take back the far western fragments of Stalin’s Ukraine which used to belong to them, as they wish. And then there will be regime change, not in Moscow, but, ironically, in peace-hating Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and wherever Kiev Fascism was supported.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy Over the Ten-Year Marketing Plan
You are new to the Church, very young, untrained and inexperienced, you know very little and you despise your fellow human-beings, because you consider yourself to be a ‘prince of the Church’. You are very vain, very ambitious, very manipulative and have a ruthless desire to make as much money as possible by first gaining as much power as possible. You have been put in control of some twenty scattered Orthodox churches, without any supervision. What do you do?
You have to make sure that no-one will stand in your way by expelling all opposition to your revolution. You must expel all those who predate you and hold the Tradition and whom you so despise. Then there will be ever fewer people of the nationality who used to attend those churches, as they feel that they are no longer catered for. As a result, those churches will empty. This suits you, since only once you have gained total control over them, can you asset-strip them. To do all this. you formulate a five-point, ten-year plan, backed up by a set of websites, which you control. The five points are:
- As you have no attachment to a root nationality, set yourself a sectarian and not national selling point, claiming that you exclusively represent the ‘One True Church’. All the others are worthy only of contempt and hatred because they have ‘compromised’ the Church, whereas you alone ‘have not’.
- Expel anyone of the nationality which those churches are supposed to cater for. They are too independent and despise your ignorance.
- Expel anyone who speaks the language or knows the history and culture of that nationality. They are too independent and despise your ignorance.
- Expel anyone with knowledge and experience of Orthodox Church life. They are too independent and despise your ignorance.
- Then you can replace them all by recruiting crazy newcomers, some of whom are perverts, who know even less than you and so can be manipulated easily. Ignorant, they will treat you as a guru, which is exactly what you need to assert in order to become an asset-stripping cult-leader.
You don’t care about the consequences of your marketing policy, the reduction of the Church to a sect and the human distress you cause to those who devoted their lives to the Church, of which you have deprived them. You don’t care because you will have returned abroad by the time others realise what you have done, taking your ‘winnings’ with you.
The Orthodox Churches: 200 Million Faithful and 75,000 Priests (Revised Statistics for 2026)
The Orthodox Churches form a family of Local Churches like the Churches of the Galatians, the Ephesians, the Romans, the Thessalonians, the Colossians etc, as described in the letters written to them by the holy Apostle Paul. Each of the Local Orthodox Churches has a main administrative figure, a chief bishop known as a Patriarch, or in the case of smaller Churches, a Metropolitan or Archbishop. However, the Church as a whole has no earthly head, because the head of the Orthodox Church is our Lord Jesus Christ. His authority is expressed in the Orthodox Churches through the Holy Spirit as revealed particularly through the Holy Scriptures, Church Councils and the Saints. Below you will find details of the currently 16 Local Orthodox Churches (the number is increasing) and their approximate sizes: Bishops: 957. Priests: 75,075. Parishes: 72,494. Monasteries: 2,758. Faithful: approx. 200,000,000.
Russia: Bishops: 382. Priests: 35,648. Parishes: 38,647. Monasteries: 972. Faithful: 149,000,000
This is the largest Local Orthodox Church and accounts for 70% of Orthodox. It cares for Orthodox living on canonical Russian Orthodox territory, spread over one fifth of the planet (the former Soviet Union except for Georgia, plus China and Japan) and peopled by over 62 nationalities, with autonomous (semi-independent) Churches in several countries outside Russia. Its territories include the Russian Federation, and, for the moment, the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Transcarpathia (the main part of Carpatho-Russia), Kazakhstan, Central Asia and the Baltic Republics. The Russian Church also includes the autonomous Japanese Orthodox Church and the Chinese Orthodox Church, as well as Exarchates in Belarus, Western Europe, South-East Asia and Africa.
Romania: Bishops: 60. Priests: 15,068. Parishes: 15,717. Monasteries: 359. Faithful: 19,000,000
Also known as the Patriarchate of Bucharest, apart from in Romania and Moldova (Bessarabia) there are also many Romanian parishes in the Diaspora. This is especially the case in Western Europe, where the Autonomous Romanian Orthodox Metropolias in Western Europe have over four million faithful, ten bishops and 1,283 churches.
Greece: Bishops: 101. Priests: 8,515. Parishes: 8,000. Monasteries: 541. Faithful: 9,381,000
Under the Archbishop of Athens, this Church cares for all Orthodox in Greece.
Serbia: Bishops: 44. Priests: 3,000. Parishes: 3,100. Monasteries: 204. Faithful: 6,500,000
The canonical territory of the Patriarchate of Belgrade covers Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Slovenia. There are also many parishes in the Serbian Diaspora.
Bulgaria: Bishops: 15. Priests: 2,000. Parishes: 2,600. Monasteries: 120. Faithful: 4,091,000
The Patriarchate of Sofia covers Bulgaria and a number of churches in the Diaspora.
Georgia: Bishops: 47. Priests: 1,100. Parishes: 550. Monasteries: 172. Faithful: 3,097,000
The Patriarchate of Tbilisi covers Georgia and a small Georgian Diaspora.
Constantinople: Bishops: 125. Priests: 5,935. Parishes: 3,196. Monasteries: 56. Faithful: 3,050,000
This includes Greek Orthodox in Istanbul (about 1,000), those on Greek islands such as Crete and Rhodes (700,000), and above all the Greek Diaspora in the Americas, Western Europe and Australia.
Antioch: Bishops: 41. Priests: 408. Parishes: 496. Monasteries: 32. Faithful: 2,000,000
The canonical territory of the Arab Patriarch, who lives in Damascus, includes Syria, the Lebanon and Iraq.
Macedonia: Bishops: 14. Priests: 500. Parishes: 500. Monasteries: 20. Faithful: 1,610,000
This Church looks after Orthodox in North Macedonia and in the Diaspora, in Australia and elsewhere.
Alexandria: Bishops: 33. Priests: 250. Parishes: 750. Monasteries: 3. Faithful: 800,000
Although for historical reasons its Patriarch is a Greek and his appointment is in the care of the Greek government, this Patriarchate is in Egypt. It also cares for St Catherine’s Monastery on Mt Sinai, but most of its faithful are Africans in 54 African countries.
Cyprus: Bishops: 17. Priests: 600. Parishes: 628. Monasteries: 67. Faithful: 654,000
Under an Archbishop, this Church cares for all Greek Orthodox in Cyprus
Poland: Bishops: 12. Priests: 420. Parishes: 278. Monasteries: 13. Faithful: 504,000
Under the Metropolitan of Warsaw, this Church cares for Orthodox of all origins who live mainly in eastern Poland.
Albania: Bishops: 6. Priests: 135. Parishes: 911. Monasteries: 150. Faithful: 173,000
Under the Archbishop of Tirana, this Church cares for Orthodox in Albania, many of whom are of Greek origin and live near the Greek border.
The Czech Lands and Slovakia: Bishops: 6. Priests: 197. Parishes: 240. Monasteries: 4. Faithful: 170,000
Led by a Metropolitan, this Church cares for Carpatho-Russian, Slovak and Czech Orthodox, as well as large numbers of Ukrainian Orthodox immigrants.
Jerusalem: Bishops: 14. Priests: 50. Parishes: 50. Monasteries: 25. Faithful: 130,000
Although its Patriarch is a Greek and his appointment is in the care of the Greek government, the flock consists of Palestinian Orthodox in Palestine and the Jordan.
North America (OCA): Bishops: 14. Priests: 1,098. Parishes: 700. Monasteries: 20. Faithful: 100,000
This Church began from the descendants of Slav immigrants to North America from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, but is now a multinational group, not recognised by all but destined to be part of a future Northern American Orthodox Church.
We would be grateful to readers for any revisions to the above: it is very difficult to obtain exact statistics, though above we have done our best.
The Rout of NATO in its Proxy War against Russia and the Crisis for the Russian Church
A fish rots from the head.
International Proverb
2022
Four years ago, on 24 February 2022, a small and underequipped Russian expeditionary force at last, eight years too late, went into eastern Ukraine to stop the western Ukrainian (Galician) genocide of eastern and southern Ukrainians. There, over 14,000 civilians, men, women and over 400 children, had already been slaughtered by Nazi fanatics from the western Ukraine, many others had been maimed. The Russian aim was to force the western Ukrainians, who had been put into power in Kiev by the USA by violence, into talks. They wanted Kiev to grant human rights to all citizens of the Ukraine.
Millions of mainly eastern Ukrainians had already fled to Russia to escape the genocide by Kiev. And millions of mainly western Ukrainians then fled to Western countries where they were welcomed for political reasons with free accommodation and generous welfare payments. These bankrupting measures made hard-working Western people very jealous. Those mainly western Ukrainians, often with luxury cars, had fled their quite safe homes and jobs in order to protect their sons, so that they would not have to die for NATO in the Ukraine.
The talks, agreed to almost immediately by terrified Kiev, were successful, but on 1 April 2022 the main Western clown intervened and forbade Kiev to make peace. The Russians were taken aback. In their extreme naivety (and also incompetence, corruption, military unpreparedness and stubborn refusal to listen to others), they had not thought that NATO would want to start a war to destroy the Russian Federation and that it would accuse Russia, by far the largest country in the world and with a relatively small population, of wanting to expand its territory!!!
And in their naivety (and self-centredness and inward-looking isolation) the Russians had never considered that millions of Ukrainians would have been so brainwashed by propaganda that they would be willing to die on behalf of anti-Ukrainian NATO against Russia. The result of this naivety was that in the autumn and winter of 2022 the small and underequipped Russian expeditionary forces were humiliated and had to retreat, giving back cities and land to the Ukrainians.
2023-2026
In 2023 the Russians were forced to go on the defensive against the crazy, British-planned attempt by Kiev to break through to the Sea of Azov and take back more land from the Russian forces. Then the Ukrainian equivalent of the whole British Army was destroyed, all for nothing. Russia does know how to defend itself. After six massive Collective Western invasions of Russia by Europeans over the last 425 years (and none of Europe by Russia), the Russians have learned how to defend themselves.
From then on, and throughout 2024 and 2025, the conflict became a war of attrition. Mountains and mountains of obsolete Soviet and very expensive, but also obsolete, NATO equipment were destroyed. 1.8 million Ukrainian troops were killed, seriously wounded, captured, or else surrendered. Hundreds of thousands more deserted. This was not least as a result of their futile and very costly invasion of the southern tip of the Kursk province of Russia, which turned into a trap for them, if it was not planned as such.
Meanwhile, Russophobic Western Europe, which had cut itself off from Russian oil and gas, had slid into recession and bankruptcy. The USA had to undergo regime change with Trump, in order to avoid bankruptcy and yet another humiliating defeat, as per Vietnam and Afghanistan. Trump hurried to plead for peace with Moscow, which was demilitarising not only the Ukraine, but also the whole Collective West. In order to meet its aims, declared quite clearly on 24 February 2022, Moscow would now have to denazify the Ukraine and, as a much more difficult aim, denazify that same Collective West.
Given the massive attrition of NATO’s Ukrainian forces, Russia’s vastly superior industrial and military might and very small losses (about 100,000), 2026 will probably end the conflict, liberating the whole of the Ukraine, with its whole eastern and southern half, Russian until 1922, returning to Russia. And this will mean the rout of NATO and consequently the collapse of the EU leadership, effectively creating a self-imposed regime change. Now, some cowardly Western European leaders are starting to plead with Russia for mercy and to restore the relations which they themselves destroyed. Too late, Western Europe declared war on Russia, not the other way round. Russia will surely ignore the West until it repents and apologises.
The Rout of the West
Europe’s outdated, badly designed, but vastly overpriced arms, tanks, drones and artillery have been used to try and destroy Russia, though Russia has never tried to attack Western Europe. Europe’s outclassed military equipment has burned on the steppes. Now the Age of Impunity is over for the West. It has demilitarised and destroyed itself by its hubris. Only European hubris imagined that Russia is not by far the largest economy in all Europe and the fourth largest in the world, but just a ‘third world’ economy with some oil and gas and a few obsolete missiles.
Russia is all too capable of incompetence (for example, as with the Wagner group), but when it is motivated, it is unbeatable. Bismarck knew that. And all Western invasions of Russia have always ended in victory – for the Russians, and in rout – for the West. Why not learn from history? Ask Napoleon, Hitler and Biden. Megalomania never wins. However, megalomania is also why the Soviet Union collapsed. Its megalomania thought that it could run a multinational, but highly centralised Union. It could not.
The extraordinary thing is that the European Union (started the day after the collapse of the Soviet Union) repeated the same error. So far two countries have left that European Union, Greenland and the UK, (much wealthier Iceland, Norway and Switzerland and pro-Russian Serbia and its satellites never even bothered to join). Hungary, Slovakia and other countries nearby and with similar histories will be the next to leave. Centralisation means atrophy. It happened in the Soviet Union – I saw it with my own eyes. Since 1992 centralisation, and so atrophy, has also happened with the ‘European Union’. I saw it with my own eyes.
The leaders of the European Union, living in a fairy-tale of delusion, wishful thinking, virtual reality and fantasy, have no ambitions, no innovations, no initiatives, no new industries, no new technologies, no social media, no satellite navigation, no AI, no clothing fashions, no popular music, no creative culture of their own. All is copied from the USA, of which Europe is a colony and vassal in every way, politically and economically, spiritually and morally, socially and culturally. The first part of Europe to fall will be the UK. This is a country that has been ruled by a treasonous, Globalist elite of Zionists, cocaine-riddled homosexuals and pedophiles ever since 1997, when a Zionist homosexual’s creation, ‘New Labour’, came to power. Their first act was to abolish the death sentence for treason, that is, for themselves. And then, quite naturally, they made patriotism into a crime.
America and Russia
The American elite believes (believes, because it is an article of faith for them) that their country is exclusive, superior and exceptional. This is because they inherited the intolerant and bigoted mentality of fanatical Protestants, who were often sexually perverted misogynists, who could not get on with their compatriots and so left England. And when the zealots and fanatics left, English people who stayed behind, said: ‘Good riddance’.
This is why most Americans have no understanding of Europeans, including of the English. Unlike them, we are flexible, not driven by a fanatical ideology or filled with gunslinging hatred. We got rid of the Calvinists. We do not want them back. Our flexibility is why, today, despite the present dictatorial regime in the UK, voted in by only 19% of the electorate, there will be transformations. The morally deeply compromised Starmer will have to go and King Charles, who protected his brother from prison, will have to abdicate, simply in order to save the monarchy.
Today we are witnessing the great Russian military victory in the Ukraine and the rout of the degenerate perverts of the Western European and the US elite. The perverts bet everything on their loser Zelensky, the most highly paid court jester in the world, whom they put into power, despite what was evident to almost everyone: that he could not speak Ukrainian or English and is incompetent. The Western neo-feudal, oligarchic elite, degenerate, corrupt and irrelevant, will be swept aside, even though it has existed not just for eighty years, but for centuries.
The moral bankruptcy of the West is now obvious to the whole world. The members of the Western elite are not even immoral, but amoral. They behave like animals. However, for Russia, military victory also means something else. To win a military victory is only the start. Then you have to win the peace. And here is Russia’s great weakness, neither its generals, nor its politicians, nor its industrialists, nor its economists, but the hierarchy of its national Church.
The Meaning for the Orthodox Church
In Orthodox Church life, the members of the Greek Church elite, still proud of an Empire which fell nearly 600 years ago (!), are racially exclusive, ‘phyletist’ in Greek, that is, obsessed by Hellenism. However, the members of the Russian Church elite are totalitarian, that is, their mentality is exclusive, they are national conformists, whatever your race. Thus, in Church terms, the Russians put themselves out of communion with the Greek Orthodox world and then lost the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic States. They are, in effect, schismatic.
Moreover, they are on the point of losing Belarus and Central Asia, not to mention the whole of the Diaspora. Here is the fruit of their political centralisation. People of different languages and cultures will leave you, unless you accept them and co-operate with them as a Family. We must give independence to our children, allowing them to live as adults, instead of holding them in a straitjacket, and treating them as though you were driving a Soviet tank over them. Here is the catastrophic Russian failure, which saddens all Orthodox.
In 2003 Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow, whom I knew, expressed the hope that the Russian Church in Western Europe would become the foundation of a new Local Church of Western Europe. He was a churchman who had been born in and grown up in the Russian emigration in Estonia. He expressed our great hope, which we had been waiting for ever since 1988. It was to be dashed. However, after Patriarch Alexei passed away in 2008, all went from possible to impossible in Moscow, for all understanding of Non-Russians ceased. Russian nationalism set in. Thus, was lost the Ukraine and Moldova. The Russian Church Diaspora, composed largely of Moldovans, is also lost, as Non-Russians in the Diaspora are treated as third-class citizens, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova has publicly and privately remarked to us.
Just as the Greek Orthodox Diaspora committed suicide through racism, so the Russian Orthodox Diaspora committed suicide through the totalitarian and centralising mentality of the Church elite. The breath of freedom is here, but the Russian Church elite has not yet noticed. Russia has won a huge military victory against the whole Western elite. But its Church elite has suffered a huge spiritual defeat: it only has itself to blame. Bishops who hate priests (especially those senior to them and more experienced than them), and detest women and children, are the ones to blame. There is an English proverb which says: ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness’. The proverb of such Russian bishops says: ‘It is better to curse the darkness than to light a candle’.
Half a Century in the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (1)
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. Today some 85% of Orthodox here are Romanian or Moldovan. 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.