Author Archives: Father Andrew

Pelagianism Past and Present

The collapse of empires brings much spiritual confusion and an attraction to the exotic. Thus, the collapse of the Soviet Union a generation ago led to some Russians adopting occultism, Hare Krishna and even Catholicism (!), the collapse of the British Empire led to some British people adopting irrationalism, Transcendental Meditation and even Islam. In ancient times the collapse of the pagan Roman Empire led to its citizens adopting all manner of ‘end of the world’ -isms. For example, in provincial Britain one secularist philosopher came up with a heresy of Christianity which asserted that man did not really need God, that he could cope quite well on his own in effortless consumerism. His name was Pelagius and his humanist fantasy of confidence in man became known as Pelagianism.

His fantasy was typical of the psychology of provincials who placed an irrational and over-confident false hope in man’s ability to survive, just when he faced the menace of the collapse of the Empire. Today, as the Western Empire, headquartered in the USA and taking in Western Europe and Japan, collapses all around, both economically through debt and morally through depravity, we see the same phenomenon. It is the collapsing West that has heard talk of ‘The Triumph of the West’, ‘The West is Best’, ‘The End of History’ etc. It is most ironic, but such things always happen among the spiritually blind just before the end. Such was the case among the pagan Romans 1600 years ago, such is the case in the pagan West today, with its defeated NATO legions and EU vassal states held hostage.

What we have to do in such negative times is to find the positive way ahead out of and after the collapse which is already taking place. What will survive from beneath the rubble is all that is spiritually living. That which was invented for reasons of elitist self-justification 1000 years ago and manipulation of the masses 500 years ago will not last. The old manmade, crowd control religions with their hypocritical moralizing, the old State-controlled Western propaganda media used to justify imperialism and exploitation, the irrational philosophies of death whose founders are dead, are all doomed. Just as the poor slaves of pagan Rome brought the Light of Christ to that fallen and discredited Empire, so we plebs can bring the Resurrection again here and now. If not, then the end is here.

Those Who Lapse and Those Who Last: The End of ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’ and the Beginning of Orthodoxy in Europe

For some 40 years between the 1960s and the end of the twentieth century, some two thousand Anglicans joined certain parishes of the Orthodox Churches in England – mainly those under the then Parisian ‘Sourozh Diocese’. Together with a small number of ordinary (Non-Anglican) English people, they joined the Church for many reasons. Some of us, perhaps especially the Non-Anglicans, joined because we were sincerely seeking, not being influenced by any personality, but called by Christ to help rebuild His Church in the Western desert. For us, the Orthodox Church was and is the only Church, our spiritual home, to which we had come after realizing that this is God’s Will for us and our souls will die without spiritual food, that is, outside the Church. We have lasted and not lapsed because for us, belonging to the Church has always been a matter of spiritual survival, although and because we have been voices crying in the anti-Orthodox and so secularist wilderness.

However, some did not last but lapsed, for it seems that they were not attached to the Orthodox Church and Faith. Dissatisfied with the ever-changing and ever-new fads of Anglicanism, they attached themselves only to some personality or intellectual philosophy, and not to the Church Herself. Some were perhaps received by marginal figures who, without support from Churched Orthodox, needed to build personality cults for themselves among the naïve, ill-prepared, uninstructed or deluded. In other words, attraction operated for negative reasons, by being against something else, and some never accepted the Church as She is. Deluded by anti-Incarnational fantasies, sometimes of Hindu or Buddhist origin, Russian fakirs and charlatans and secondary and superficial attractions, some remained ‘converts’, not actually becoming Orthodox because of their baggage. They joined the Church, but did not become and live as Orthodox Christians.

The fundamental error of such ‘converts’, as they often liked to call themselves, consisted in not first separating themselves from the 900 + years of the anti-Orthodox and therefore also anti-English, Norman-founded British Establishment. This included its Anglican extension under the syphilitic Tudor tyrant Henry VIII and his followers, not least his murderous ‘theologian’ daughter Elizabeth, the genocidal Cromwell and then various other mercantile Dutch, German and ‘British’ Protestant Imperialists with their ‘Rule Britannia’ jingoism that invaded and enslaved the world. In no way therefore were they able to adopt the Orthodox Faith, for they had not first cleansed their minds and souls from the Anti-Orthodoxy, which they had been conditioned and deluded into thinking of as ‘Western Christianity’. Not having first made room in their minds and souls for the Orthodox Church, the only authentic Western or any other Christianity, they could not last and so lapsed.

Unwilling and so unable to live according to the Orthodox way of life and the Orthodox view of the world and so to think naturally in an Orthodox way, many lapsed completely, some returned to Anglicanism, and others lapsed into a fringe ‘Anglican Orthodoxy’. This inability and unwillingness to integrate meant that these latter tended to form exclusive cliques and convert clubs, which made their church into a ‘Halfodox’ hobby, Anglicanism with icons. Thus, some allowed the baggage which they had brought with them into the Church to define their lives and block possible spiritual growth and understanding. This was because their Western-founded Norman Establishment has always called us, the people, ‘Anglo-Saxons’ or ‘plebs’, although we have always called ourselves simply ‘English’. Their alien Norman Establishment has always patronisingly despised us natives and all who ‘go native’, that is, all who are Orthodox Christians in mind and heart, who are foreign to them.

With this mentality of Establishment condescension and pride towards us English, they also rejected the Orthodox people, with our unintellectual and unphilosophical simplicity and uncomplicated and unmoralizing piety. Thus, some refused in their imagined racial ‘superiority’ and intellectual theorizing to ‘go native’. Between about 2000 and 2010, with Anglicanism altogether disappearing into the New Age blur, few Anglicans asked to be received into the Church, while the by then ageing converts from the last century began to isolate themselves and die out. In recent years, however, a new period has begun. Some ordinary (Non-Anglican) English people from the vast majority have begun to join the Orthodox Church. Like the few Non-Anglicans among those who had preceded them, they have had little difficulty in renouncing the Norman-founded British Establishment and its corrupted culture, because they have in any case never even belonged to it.

Thus, unlike some who had preceded them, they have never been tempted to put British Establishment culture above Christ, so betraying Christ, His Church and also His Orthodox England. For this reason they can begin to develop a real English Orthodox culture. Far more importantly, what has happened in England is only an example of the wider situation all over Western Europe. The betrayal of Western Europe by its Christophobic elite, making it into a wayward, schismatic and isolated province through heresy in 1054 and then apostasy, the betrayal of the real England, Orthodox England, finally destroyed in 1066, the repeated Western betrayals of the Christian Emperors and invasions of the multinational Christian Empire between 1204 and 1917, these are what real Orthodox in Europe reject. What we accept is the end of the old compromised ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’ of the philosophers and the beginning of the real Orthodoxy of the saints of Europe, the Restoration of Europe.

The choice for Christophobic and so Russophobic Europe today is fast becoming Apocalypse or Repentance. Europe, on its suicidal death-bed, caught between self-invented Secularism and self-imposed Islamism, has a last chance. If the peoples of Europe can yet throw off the degeneration of their millennial brainwashing, they can still learn that the truth will set them free from stepping lemming-like off the precipice into the abyss. If they can accept that their elites have deluded them into thinking that they are ‘free’, by being enslaved to the elites’ millennial secularist ideology, regardless of whether it is called Roman Catholic, Scholastic, Protestant, Anglican, Conservative, Socialist, Communist, Democratic, Liberal, Agnostic, Atheist, Post-Modernist, then suicide can be averted. If they can accept that their roots are only in the Tradition, Orthodox Christianity, the Church of God, and not in any latecomer manmade religion, then Repentance even at this late hour is still possible.

An Intercepted Message: Victory is At Hand!

The following message has been sent to us, intercepted from the Dark Net.

Hell Headquarters
12 December 2014

To All the Disincarnate,

The one whose name we dare not mention describes Faith in what the humans call ‘The New Testament’, but we demons call ‘The Words of Death’. There he describes the words and acts of Faith and his struggle against the immoral institutionalism of Religion and the Pharisees and the amoral indifferentism of Pilate and the Saducees.

Over the last millennium we have seen our success in gradually creating our complete infestation of the Western world, bringing it back from Faith into the institutional religion of Phariseeism and the indifferentism of Saduceeism.

1. Phariseeism

As you will recall, our first success came when we created our structure of Command, when we invented feudalist Papalism 1,000 years ago. For some 500 years after that we worked very hard on corrupting the top, institutionalizing Faith by putting it under earthly command and so making it into mere Religion.

2. Saduceeism

As you will recall, our second success came when we created our structure of Control, when we invented individualist Lutheranism 500 years ago. For some 500 years after that we worked very hard on controlling the masses by reducing faith to mere moralism and the myths of individualism (freedom and democracy), so that we could exploit them in our industrial ‘civilization’.

3. Destructionism

Brothers! Now comes the moment of our triumph. Thanks to 1,000 years of OUR patience, they are now so brainwashed that they believe that they are free because we tell them that! At last, they are ripe for total repaganization by having their identities destroyed. Soon they will no longer be men and women, fathers and mothers, but transgender zombies who will do as they are told by our politically correct State. Our final victory is at hand!

There will no longer be any ladies and gentlewomen, because they have lost their souls. According to one of our greatest agents, Darwin, they now believe that they are, at best, intelligent apes, who are guided by us whom inspire the basest instincts in them. At worst, they now know that they are inconvenient and so deserve abortion or euthanasia and then incineration, of which our great friend Hitler, an admirer of Darwin, was the ideological forerunner.

However, on the verge of victory, we must be careful: despite our globalization of the West, there are still outposts of resistance outside and even inside the Western world. Beware of being expelled by them! Victory is at hand, but is still not yet quite ours. Remember that gradualism is the key to our success. Soon all Earth will be Hell. This will be our great prize. Remember it.

The Aleut Martyrs At Last Commemorated

As is well-known, Native Americans, North and South, were massacred and maltreated by European invaders and settlers. Nearly all of the Native Americans were animists, and like their forebears in Siberia believed in shamanism, pantheism and nature-worship. However, some in Alaska and the Aleutian Islands were Orthodox Christians.

75 years late a small Orthodox group in North America known as ‘The Orthodox Church in America’ (OCA), responsible for Orthodox in Alaska, has decided to commemorate the nearly 100 mainly Russian Orthodox Aleuts who died as a result of US mistreatment during the Second World War and the nearly 800 survivors. Their Orthodox church and homes were burned down by the US authorities. This is very much to be welcomed. What is regrettable is that it has taken so long. One suspects that this OCA group may be ethnically biased towards the US Establishment. A non-phyletistic, politically free group would surely have acted long ago. See:

https://oca.org/news/headline-news/holy-synod-commemorates-75th-anniversary-of-wwii-internment-of-aleut-people

https://www.nps.gov/aleu/learn/historyculture/unangan-internment.htm

The Wild West Is Winning

There are many Wests.

There is the West of good roads, clean water, villas with baths and central heating. There is the West of pagan Romans who liked to see people killing each other for their amusement and slaughtered heathen peoples in order to steal their lands. There is the West of the Age of Saints that loved Christ. There is the West of barbarian invasions and slaughter. There is the West of settlement, learning and beautiful illuminated manuscripts. There is the West of terrorists on horseback called knights, protection racket castles, short-living serfs and feudal exploitation. There is the West of Scholastic philosophy and learning that argued about angels and pinheads. There is the West that continually started aggressive wars and was primitive, dirty and disease-ridden. There is the West of much admired art, sculpture and book printing. There is the West that committed genocide in New Worlds, enslaved their peoples and destroyed their cultures.

There is the West that invented new religions and killed and oppressed its people using these religions as pretexts. There is the West that killed its children and exploited its poor in filth. There is the West that made classical music. There is the West that invaded almost the whole of the rest of the world, impoverished and massacred its native peoples and tried to strip them of their natural resources. There is the West of knowledge, science, medicine and technology. There is the West that invented guns and bombs of terrifying power. There is the West of culture, refinement, literature, opera and ballet. There is the West that started World Wars, mutilating and massacring its youth by the million. There is the West that works for justice and peace. There is the West that forces itself on the rest of the world and destroys and pollutes local cultures and family life, imposing mass abortion, euthanasia, perversion and worldwide electronic dictatorship.

There is the West of culture, light and life and the West of destruction, darkness and death. The first we call the West of the Saints, the second we call the Wild West. The first is the West of the highest common denominator – of Christ and holiness. The second is the West of the lowest common denominator – of Antichrist and anti-holiness. The second has been winning for a thousand years. But nothing is inevitable.

Suggestions for a Future Cathedral on the Site of the Martyrdom of the Imperial Family and their Faithful Servants

In my article of 9 July on the authenticity of the remains disinterred near Ekaterinburg in 1991 and 2007 and said to belong to the Russian Royal Family and their servants, I suggested that a great Cathedral be built on the site of the martyrdom of the seven members of the Imperial Family and their four faithful servants. I have been asked how I see this. Not in any way responsible for this and with no influence with the powers that be, I can only make humble suggestions, like anyone of the 164 million strong flock of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here they are:

Firstly, all four of the Imperial servants, the cook Ivan Kharitonov, the footman Alexei Trupp, the shy parlour-maid Anna Demidova, as well as the distinguished and learned Dr Evgeny Botkin, must be canonized by the whole Russian Orthodox Church, and not just the New Martyr Evgeny. Although canonized long ago by the Church Outside Russia in 1981, three of them still await canonization by the whole Church. Of them Alexei Trupp, a Roman Catholic, was considered by the Synod of Bishops of the Church Outside Russia, as explained to me by the late Archbishop Antony of Los Angeles, to have been baptised in his own blood (as so many of the early martyrs of the Church and those of the Old Testament). All four were faithful to the end to the Imperial Family, preferring to be martyred together with them than to run away. It seems strange to canonize one and not the three others.

Secondly, special geological and engineering surveys would have to be carried out before any building could begin. The area is marshy and mining has been carried out. Piles would have to be driven and other preparations made in order to avoid possible subsidence.

Thirdly, the Ekaterinburg area would have to be renamed and all other traces of Soviet-period commemoration of the monsters who carried out the martyrdom removed, through renaming and removal of statues.

Fourthly, in collaboration between Church and State, the State and local authorities would have to provide appropriate infrastructure, in particular roads to the site.

Given this, we can imagine a Cathedral with a central cupola for the Saviour, seven others around it for each of the five women and two males of the Imperial Family, and then a further ring of four cupolas symbolizing the faithful servants. That for Alexei Trupp would represent that part of the Western world which in penitence also bows before the feat of martyrdom of the Imperial Family. That for Anna Demidova would represent faithful womankind. That for Ivan Kharitonov would represent the faithfulness of those who labour with their hands. That for Evgeny Botkin would represent the faithfulness of those who labour with their minds. This Cathedral would be built on the contributions of the Orthodox faithful from all over the world and of all nationalities. It would be a ‘Universal’ Cathedral (Вселенский Собор), welcoming the penitent and pilgrims from all over the world. And alongside the Cathedral would grow up a pilgrimage centre, a monastery and a convent.

Who is the Traitor Now?

(Slightly edited with permission from a US reader’s blog).

The loudest Liberal Globalist haters of Russia are also haters of America under President Trump, a post-Brexit Britain and Europeans. These people hate Russia because under Putin they are thwarted from having complete domination of Eurasia over which they seek to impose the European Union (EU) and NATO, which they view as “stepping stones” to total global control. Putin stands in their way of this, and an independent Britain does the same, and any other “-exits.”

Trump has pledged to put American interests first, over those of these “Liberal” Globalists who seek the submergence of every European country and America with unending Third World and, especially in the case of the former, Muslim, immigration. Their hatred of Trump for seeking a thawing of relations with Putin makes sense in that both men are enemies to their dreams of their Global Empire, and these Globalists, through their ownership and control of the large corporate (i.e. “mainstream”) news media, are able to unendingly demonize both Putin and Trump. I believe that they will go, and indeed are going, so far as to promote civil wars in America and Europe and even world war with Russia. They are not thinking rationally or humanely, or prudently, in order to further their goals.

The fact that there are Conservatives who act as their objective allies under the guise of being “Never Trump” and Neo-Conservative is worse, for these people know better about the Globalists, yet, for their variously ideological reasons, personal embitterment, and perhaps, self-righteousness, are willing to surrender their country to Globalists in order to seek confrontation with Russia abroad and bring down a President whom they irrationally hate. Past, and present, American interference in the relations of other countries’ elections is never talked about, including that of Ukraine, whose pro-Russian, democratically elected government the Obama administration helped overthrow, right on Russia’s border, containing sizeable numbers of pro-Moscow Russians in eastern territories, and pro-Western Ukrainians in its far western territories (formerly Poland), has been the largest and most dangerous “bone of contention” between Western-based Globalists and Russia. Whatever one thinks about Ukraine’s proper borders, their borders are irrelevant to the question of America’s and the West’s survival. To put them, now especially, at the very apex of American and European interests is, in a sense, to adopt Ukrainian nationalism as one’s chief loyalty, or at least as being more useful to advancing Globalist objectives of expansion, while rejecting American or British or German nationalism as a retardant on Globalist objectives.

The EU, NATO, and Globalists and Republican NeoCons like Graham and McCain have SEMANTICALLY substituted obedience to their plans for Global control as being “loyalty to America and the West.” American patriots should recognize that the Globalists have made the hatred of Russia under Putin MORE important than actually having pro-American foreign AND domestic policies, and in fact their other policies, i.e. like immigration, actually harm Americans; they have made this rash foreign policy of confrontation with a country that does not threaten us their test of loyalty and treason, while actually sacrificing, willingly and in a calculated manner, the very defense and survival of America and the nations of Europe, while demonizing those seeking “detente,” or better, peaceful relations with Russia, whose public philosophy in morals is far closer than those of “our” godless, Globalist Establishments in the West.

The Globalists, it cannot be overstressed, hate Christianity and White people, what the historic West was, and both of which they seek to destroy, and in so doing really are the epitome of treason, but, through their control of the media, they have reapplied the names of “treason” and “traitor” to patriots like Trump and his supporters, who have the pragmatic desire for a more multipolar world, one that also will keep the Globalists from achieving their goals of world domination and keeping us out of needless wars. It is the Globalists and their Vichy Conservative allies who are the traitors, the former by principle and the latter by their spite, are cooperating with them. To the extent that American and European patriots are “pro-Russian,” it is because they see Russia as a bulwark, as allies, against the Western-based, but thoroughly anti-Western in substance, Globalists.

The Big Question of who and what is a traitor today revolves around the question of who is the biggest threat to the actual West: The Globalists inside the West whose goal is the destruction of the West and its peoples, and their lapdog “Conservative” allies whom the Globalists will reward with the sinecures of a castrated, “loyal opposition,” free to expound academic doctrines of purity in political economy in unread “position papers”, academic articles, and political “platforms” that double as tissue paper, or the national patriots who seek to end the Globalists’ domination and get out from under their wars of empire, and who see Putin as an ally in their patriotic struggle?

For American and European patriots to see support in Russia is not unlike the rebellious Protestant American colonists who sought an alliance with Catholic, Monarchical France in their struggle to break away from the British Empire in 1776. I can imagine that they were accused of being “pro French” and “pro Catholic” by some of their Loyalist neighbors, or at least “anti-British” in seeking this alliance, but their motives were to make American independent of Britain, not making America dependent on or even resembling France in religion and government. In a hierarchy of values, loyalty to nation and culture is the far truer test of who is a patriot and who is a traitor than seeking peaceful relations with foreign states which do not threaten us. The Globalists’ efforts to invert this priority, in order to subvert what is primary, is both cynical and dangerous, and if they persist in it, may do irreparable harm to America, the West, and indeed, the whole world.

Can We Kneel in Church on Sundays?

I have a question about something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve read that the Church canons say that you are not supposed to kneel or prostrate on Sundays, but I was wondering how strictly that’s interpreted in practice?

I currently attend a Romanian parish and among Romanians (as you probably know) it is customary to kneel during the Our Father, the Creed, the Gospel reading etc and some people kneel throughout much of the liturgy. I personally think it is a beautiful sign of reverence but I was wondering why it has become customary and accepted in Romania but not in other places, and if the “prohibition” against kneeling on Sundays is really necessary or what the purpose of it really is?

I know some other parishes where people barely show any reverence at all so it still seems to me to be better to kneel or prostrate than to just be completely passive…

Question from a Correspondent in Europe

‘Since some people kneel in church on Sundays and on the days of Pentecost, with a view to preserving uniformity in all parishes it has seemed best to the holy Council for prayers to be offered to God while standing’.

Canon XX of the First Universal Council

The canons you refer to are the above, Canon XC of the Sixth Universal Council and Canon XV of St Peter the Martyr of Alexandria, all from the first seven centuries. So, yes, on paper, you do not kneel on the liturgical day of Sunday (Saturday evening to Sunday evening) and not between Easter and Pentecost (the kneeling prayers read at Vespers of Pentecost are the first when you kneel). Why? Because Sunday is the day of the Resurrection and the period between Easter and Pentecost effectively the afterfeast of the Feast of the Resurrection. If we are risen with Christ, then we are risen and so stand.

So much for the theory. What about practice?

One of the easiest ways to tell the difference between certain converts and Orthodox is whether they kneel on Sundays or not (especially on the Sunday of the Cross during Lent). Converts, whether of the zealot old calendarist or of the liberal new calendarist variety (extremes always meet), refuse to kneel because of their head knowledge, Orthodox kneel because of the movements of their hearts. As one person has said in answer to an uptight convert who insisted that Orthodox stand during services: ‘No they don’t: Russians stand, Greeks sit and Romanians kneel’.

Why this difference? It is all a question of piety – or lack of piety. Sitting is a lack of piety (unless the person is ill, heavily pregnant etc), which has entered the Greek Churches (including the Antiochian) only very, very recently. Pious Russians are horrified when Greeks and Antiochians sit during the Epistle. But kneeling is a great sacrifice. I admire those Romanians who kneel throughout the liturgy as an act of piety which accords with their temperament. I don’t think I could do it physically. Equally standing is also a matter of asceticism.

A common Russian practice among bishops and priests is to kneel at certain points during the Liturgy, for example during ‘Our Father’.

Certain converts, often of a Protestant background, tend to interpret the canons literally, according to the letter. Such individuals, it seems, used to be fundamentalists in their interpretation of the Scriptures, and quote canons as they used to quote chapter and verse, hoping perhaps to send their fellow human-beings to hell (and themselves to a very prideful heaven). If this is the case, then it is all pure phariseeism. (‘Do not heal or do good on the Sabbath day’).

Conclusion: Pray and then do what your heart tells you to do, observing those around you, so that you scandalize no-one. This is called humility and it stands above the letter of the law because it keeps the spirit of the law. When I as a priest see metropolitans and bishops, or for that matter pious laypeople, kneeling on a Sunday, I have no hesitation in kneeling with them. We should refuse to put ourselves above others. I only know that of Christ returns next Sunday, I will neither sit, nor stand, but be on my knees in front of Him.

1917-2017: On the Holy Relics of the Imperial Family and Their Faithful Servants

Foreword

I write as a priest who has served the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in Paris, Lisbon and England, who loves the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and as a monarchist who hopes for justice through the restoration of Tsardom in Russia. Since the 1970s I have venerated the saint-loving St John of Shanghai, founding the first church in Western Europe dedicated to him after his canonization. I have also always venerated the other saints of the Church Outside Russia, like St Seraphim of Sofia, and our founding bishops, all of whom revered the Tsar-Martyr. Part of my veneration also comes from the fact that the internationally-minded Tsar was a forward-looking missionary, building seventeen magnificent churches precisely in Western Europe for the Orthodox faithful, and looking after Orthodox on three continents.

Like all his followers, the Tsar-loving St John of Shanghai was opposed not only by liberals, ecumenists and modernists, who despised, compromised or had entirely lost the Faith, but also by narrow, Old Believer-type nationalists, some of whom put him on trial in San Francisco. In general, it can be said that attitudes to St John, as to the Tsar, are litmus papers that tell us of love for the Church or, on the other hand, contempt for the Church. I have now been asked what I think of the remains disinterred near Ekaterinburg in 1991 and claimed to be those of five members of the Tsar’s Family and their four servants. With my great-grandfather born in the same year as the Tsar-Martyr and myself born on 19 July, the day of the final disposal of the remains of the Imperial Martyrs, my eagerness to see truth and justice before I die is also personal.

How My Views Were Formed

I was brought up surrounded by the blasphemous Western propaganda which asserts that the last Christian Emperor, the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, was a weak-willed, decadent, incompetent reactionary, who was controlled by others, did not care about his people, and in general ‘got what he deserved’. Significantly, in those Cold War times, this propaganda was more or less identical to Soviet propaganda. This indicated that Western materialism and Soviet materialism were essentially the same. I disbelieved all such propaganda, sensing that it was lies with ulterior, power-grabbing motives, but I lacked arguments to counter it. In the 1960s I neither mastered Russian, nor had access to the often obscure émigré publications about the world-changing overthrow of the Tsar which told the truth. So I waited to discover more.

From the mid-1970s onwards I came to discover émigrés, truly White ones, all of whose words and writings have been confirmed by historians and researchers in the new, post-Soviet Russia, where truth is valued by many, even though a legitimate Tsar has not yet been restored. I understood that the Tsar had fallen victim, not to old-fashioned Marxists, but to an elitist conspiracy of aristocrats, generals and Duma masons, strongly backed by the Western Powers, supposed ‘Allies’. After very careful examination of the evidence over decades, I also came personally to venerate those around the Royal Martyrs. These included the much-slandered St Maria of Helsinki (Anna Vyrubova) and the Martyr Gregory (Rasputin), to whom I composed an akathist in English, published last year on the centenary of his martyrdom.

As a priest I met the last émigrés both in the Church Outside Russia and those in breakaway groups, like that in Paris. I was acquainted with many of the last exiled representatives of the Tsar’s Russia to have been adults before the Revolution. I knew both sides of the emigration. Some were truly White, patriots who honoured the Tsar, both when he was alive and afterwards. With others, it was the opposite, they simply wanted their money, estates and lost power back. They had little love for the Church, Russia or its people, contemptuously calling them ‘Soviets’, and many of them were compromised by sympathy for Hitler or by working for spy agencies, whether in Britain, France, Canada or the USA. They would never accept the miraculous 2007 act of repentance between the Patriarchate and the Church Outside Russia.

There was something rotten in parts of the emigration. It may be called ‘Paris-ism’. The aristocratic émigrés who confessed this ideology and who often lived in Paris had inverted the Imperial Christian motto of ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People’, ‘the Faith, the Tsar and Rus’. They had abandoned the Russian Orthodox Church, were anti-Tsar and anti-people (by being anti-Rasputin – his great grand-daughter is still alive, despised by them, in Paris). It was precisely the Rus-hating oligarchic aristocracy, greedy for power, which had overthrown the Tsar. Those so-called ‘White’ émigrés, in fact not White at all, had carried out the February Revolution that had led directly to the Red Revolution of October. The noble Tsar, forced into abdication, had stood above them all, rejecting the bloodshed of civil war among his beloved peoples.

In the 1990s, amid the political manipulations of the shameful, anti-Russian, US-backed Yeltsin and his corrupt regime, like most other Orthodox I had not been convinced of the authenticity of the Ekaterinburg remains. I distrusted the political appointee investigator of the 1990s, V.N. Solovyov, a disrespectful non-Churchman. There were far too many contradictions and inconsistencies in the results, not least in the DNA results. Nothing was satisfying. In any case two of the eleven skeletons of the Imperial Family and their servants were still missing. Then, in 2007, the remains of two skeletons were found. One of our hierarchs, Bishop, now Archbishop, Agapit of Stuttgart, became convinced of the authenticity of the remains, which for him had become holy relics. For my part I awaited the results of a Church investigation with an open mind.

I wanted the list of questions about the remains submitted by the Church to be answered. At last, the much trusted Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov) was put in charge of a new, Church-led investigation, to be published in this centenary year of the so-called ‘Russian Revolutions’ of 1917. On 3 July 2017 a first interview was published with Professor V.L. Popov, once a sceptic, confirming that the remains were authentic (http://www.pravoslavie.ru/104826.html). It seemed that Nikolai Sokolov, the White Army’s investigator into the Imperial Martyrs, had been mistaken in his report, which had been rushed, through no fault of his own. Not a chemist, he had thought the Martyrs’ bodies had been destroyed by fire and acid and so had not followed his investigation by digging at Porosenkov Log. My view of what had happened has become clear (1).

Afterword

With the results now appearing and publication of the vital DNA results eagerly awaited, it seems that the story has become clear. The remains entombed in the Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral and those of Sts Alexei and Maria kept in store are authentic and so must be enshrined. The great Church-on-the-Blood that stands on the site of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg will continue to be a place of veneration. The shrine and the seven churches at Ganina Yama will remain as the first place where the martyrs’ relics were taken. However, at Porosenkov Log, a great new Cathedral has to be built, a Cathedral of Reparation for the greatest crime of the age, a twelve-domed Cathedral dedicated to the seven Royal Martyrs and their four martyred servants, who joined Christ. Building can begin on the centenary of their martyrdom, in 2018.

This is called on to become a great centre of pilgrimage, the third and final destination for the faithful after Ekaterinburg and Ganina Yama. The holy relics can there be enshrined for the veneration of pilgrims from all over the world. We have no doubt that then, once the relics are properly enshrined and honoured, long-awaited miracles will begin. Tiny fragments of the relics may be distributed elsewhere, especially in Saint Petersburg, but the place where their relics were finally buried is to become a centre of worldwide repentance for all, Russians and Non-Russians alike, who committed ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’ against the Faith, the Tsar and Rus. Only then can the injustice committed 100 years ago be paid for and humanity, descended since the Pigs’ Ravine to the level of the Gergesene swine, turn back from the brink.

1. What Happened

The seven Royal Martyrs and their four servants were horribly and brutally martyred in the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, in the Urals between Europe and Asia, in the darkness just after midnight on 17 July 1918. Their bodies were taken some nine miles north by lorry to marshy ground called Ganina Yama (Gabriel’s Hole). Here, the lorry bogged down, the bodies were laid on the grass, stripped, burned, dumped into a supposed mineshaft and sprinkled with sulphuric acid.

We now know that only then was it discovered that the supposed mineshaft was quite shallow, only some three metres deep. The exhausted murderers learned of deeper mines west of Ekaterinburg, some four miles away. They obtained barrels of petrol, kerosene, sulphuric acid and firewood and returned at about 4.00 am on 18 July. They hauled the corpses out of the shaft and loaded them back onto the lorry, awaiting final disposal in the new location under cover of night.

In the early morning of 19 July, the lorry transporting the bodies again got stuck in mud on the Koptyaki Road near a place called Porosenkov Log (Pigs’ Ravine). The exhausted murderers decided to bury them here. They dug a shallow grave, doused the bodies in sulphuric acid again, smashed their faces with rifle butts and buried nine of them, covering them with quicklime, hoping to prevent identification, and placed railway sleepers over the grave so as to disguise their crime.

In an attempt to confuse anyone who might discover the first grave with only nine, and not eleven, bodies (the confusion caused was for long successful), the murderers had separated the bodies of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters from the nine others. These were to be buried about fifteen metres (fifty feet) away. These two bodies were also burned, their remaining bones smashed and then they were thrown into a smaller pit. The burial was completed at 6.00 am on 19 July.

After Ekaterinburg was liberated by the White Army on 25 July, a Commission was established under a legal investigator called Nikolai Sokolov. He discovered a number of the Romanovs’ belongings in and around Ganina Yama where the bodies had first been buried. However, not a chemist, he wrongly concluded that the bodies had been utterly destroyed (an impossibility) in a bonfire there with petrol and sulphuric acid. He had failed to find the real burial place on the Koptyaki Road.

The return of Bolshevik forces in July 1919 forced the conscientious Sokolov to leave in haste, his enquiry incomplete, taking only the box containing the items that he had recovered. His preliminary report was published that same year. On 30-31 May 1979, after years of research, a local amateur and a film-maker located the grave. They removed three skulls but, worried about the consequences of finding the grave, they reburied them. Only on 10 April 1989 was the find publicly revealed.

As a result, all the remains were disinterred in 1991 by Soviet officials in a hasty ‘official exhumation’ that destroyed precious evidence. In February 1998 the Yeltsin regime (twenty-one years before, Yeltsin had been responsible for destroying the Ipatiev House) decided to reinter the remains in the Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. Although they were interred here in July 1998, their identity had still not been authenticated beyond doubt, leaving many questions unanswered.

On 29 July 2007 amateur investigators found the small pit containing the remains of Alexei and his sister, located not far from the main grave on the Koptyaki Road. Although criminal investigators and geneticists initially identified them as Alexei and Maria, they were stored pending a decision from the Russian Orthodox Church, which had requested a thorough and detailed authentication to eliminate all doubts. This has only recently been allowed and the results, positive, are now being published.

‘Pan-Orthodox’ = Non-Orthodox?

Even in the Russian Orthodox Church we sometimes hear of ‘Pan-Orthodox’ organizations, assemblies, conferences, meetings, even of ‘Pan-Orthodox liturgies’. But what does this mean? Every liturgy is ‘Pan-Orthodox’, inasmuch as all Orthodox are invited to partake, indeed the whole world is called on to pray. Sadly, the phrase ‘Pan-Orthodox’ really means ‘only for selected Orthodox’. In fact, it means ‘for new calendarists only’ (thus, excluding 85% of Orthodox), and for ecumenists, modernists, freemasons and liberal intellectuals (thus, excluding 99.9% of the rest). How has this distortion of meaning come about?

This distorted word has come from two opposing visions of the unity of the Church, especially in the Diaspora. The first vision for unity, the ‘Pan-Orthodox’ one, is based on a levelling down to the lowest common denominator, in fact, on protestantization and secularization. The other vision for unity, the Orthodox one, is based on a levelling up to the highest common denominator, in fact it is ascetic and leads to holiness. Although the first vision will at first be more popular and more common, because it is not Spirit-bearing, it will not last. It is therefore only the second vision that endures and triumphs.

We can see this in last year’s ‘Pan-Orthodox’ (!!!) meeting in Crete. This has caused a huge crisis in the Greek and new calendarist (for example Romanian) world, which attended it and signed various papers, and that world is now concerned with the ‘reception’ of that peculiar meeting. This is utterly irrelevant to the majority of Orthodox, who are hardly aware of this crisis, since they refused even to attend such an absurd meeting with its Non-Orthodox agenda and have since forgotten it and laugh when they hear it called ‘a Council’. We are pre-Crete and post-Crete and living; they are con-Crete and dead.

We would rather suffer martyrdom than sign any of those papers. Such is ‘Pan-Orthodox’. In order to be ‘Pan-Orthodox’, you first have to be Orthodox. That is what the ‘Orthodox-lite’, ‘Euro-Orthodox’ ecumenists, modernists and liberals have no understanding of. In being all things to all men, they have ended up being nothing to no-one, in other words, a laughing-stock of those in the past. This is why we ignore them, safe with our Orthodox bishops and Orthodox faithful. This is why we shall continue to be authentically ‘Pan-Orthodox’, welcoming all, multinational and multilingual and faithful to the Tradition.