Author Archives: Father Andrew

The Saints and the Bad Old Days

My interest in the saints deepened greatly in the 1970s and 1980s, once I had come into contact with the quite extraordinary spiritual and moral decadence of the Orthodox emigration of various nationalities. These immigrants included self-appointed ‘elders’, fraudulent gurus, so-called ‘Orthodox’ bishops who were not even Christians, bishops and priests who were simoniacs, criminals, perverts, bureaucrats, political appointees and who included the usual assortment of clerical narcissists. At least saints could provide positive models to counter the reality.

In those decadent days, and even much after, there were by and large four criteria for ordination to the priesthood if you were English (and indeed Western in general):

Be an adept of a sect or cult grouped around a bishop or priest (a self-appointed ‘starets’) with their various perversions, or else be an adept of some extremist sect based on a political ideology of left or right. Neither of these options had a future. Bishops and priests do not join political parties or tell people who to vote for (either publicly or privately), we only try to influence the course of events positively, in favour of the Church as the Body of Christ.

Be a freemason.

Be an Anglican vicar.

Be fluent in a foreign language e.g. Greek or Russian.

The first two criteria were spiritually and morally repugnant to me, the third not even conceivable, as I have never been an Anglican and have never had any desire to become one; Anglicanism is quite foreign to me as an Englishman, as it is to most Englishmen: there remained only the fourth criterion.

Hopefully, in the future, the criteria for ordination will become spiritual, that there is a group of Orthodox people in a certain place who put forward a man without canonical impediments who is not unwilling, and whose wife is not unwilling for him, to become a candidate for eventual ordination to the priesthood, once he has passed through all the necessary steps. The bad old days, when married men were excluded from consideration simply because they were married, or men were excluded from consideration because they had spiritual interests, as was the case in my youth, will be over. I thank all those who persecuted me; they made me more interested in the Lives of the Saints.

 

Our Duty: To Pray for the Hierarchy of the Greek Orthodox Church

From the very outset nearly 200 years ago the small Church of Greece was so spiritually weak that it fell victim to nationalism. Thus, nearly 100 years ago, it decided to obey the Greek State and adopted the Roman Catholic calendar. Then it fell for Western-imposed ecumenism, it put pews into its churches (that was starting forty years ago when I lived and worked in Greece), then Greek men and women stopped dressing appropriately for church. Now some in it seem to be about to fall for the anti-Orthodox American bait and recognize the absurd, schismatic semi-Uniat Anti-Orthodox Church (AOC) in (the Western) Ukraine, set up there under immense US political pressure on the Greek nationalist bishops in Istanbul.

Some rather extreme people would say: Birds of a feather flock together: fanatical Greek nationalists attract fanatical Ukrainian nationalists. They all have the same thing in common: they have no love for Christ, only for their primitive tribal racism. Therefore, they can join with the American elite and destroy the multilingual Orthodox Church of Russia with its more than seventy nationalities. Here are the fruits of Greek racial jealousy at a Church that is 16 times bigger than itself.

The US political elite knows exactly how to flatter that weakness. US ambassadors in the Balkans have received their instructions, appointing one Archbishop or Patriarch after another. Having spread the poison of Balkanization to the extreme west of the Ukraine, they have returned to impoverished Greece, ever the soft underbelly of the Orthodox world, so weak that it could not even keep the Orthodox calendar and the other values of Christian Civilization, ever ready to buckle under ‘financial aid’.

Some rather extreme people would quote St John the Baptist and say that the axe must be laid to the root of the Church of Greece. Having fallen into racism, it is ‘ready for the chop’. And then they add, and let the Russian Church take over Mt Athos and all those on the old calendar in Greece and set up a real Church. It must seize the leadership of the Orthodox world, of which the Greeks have shown themselves once more, as at Florence, totally unworthy. Extremists add:

‘Stop the ecumenical dances with Rome and Canterbury and the WCC and the Baltic and Finnish Lutherans. Anyway, these have no real influence left — least of all the WCC and Canterbury. Whether Moscow is present or absent in WCC meetings will not matter anything to anyone. These Western bodies are withering on the vine and will never do anything meaningful to alleviate the West’s inborn hatred of Russia. They have not done anything regarding the Ukraine! Whatever Russia does to be friendly to the West will not avail it anything — what the West wants (consciously or not) is Russia’s subjection. The Russian Church has the opportunity to stand fast and stand gloriously alone, as the Third Rome, as the only great Christian Church that still believes in the primacy of truth over (false) unity and (false) charity. If Rue Daru can repent, then why not the old calendarists’?

However, all of this talk is far too premature. Our real concern is the unity of the ten-million strong Church of Greece. If its Archbishop dares to concelebrate with Sergey (‘Epifany’) Dumenko, the head of the fictitious Church of the Ukraine’, there will be a schism in that Local Church. This is our main concern. We leave petty racist jealousy and politics aside. Today the Greek Orthodox Church faces a self-imposed internal schism between the Orthodox and those who are falling into the phyletist heresy of provincial racism. Pray!

 

How to Deal with Disappointments – or Falling in Love Again Every Day

Marriages can all too easily get tired, especially once children appear. Every married person knows this. In Western cultures, firstly in North America, then the UK and all over Western Europe, and increasingly even in Central and Eastern Europe as those countries too are Americanized, secularist values are being adopted. This alien secularism means ugliness, which says: Why bother to be beautiful when God did not make us and we are going to die like animals anyway?

Thus, adopting secularist values, some Orthodox wives give up looking after themselves, constantly criticize their husbands and men in general, dress badly and eat badly, jeans and T-shirts all the time, too weak to swim against the surrounding tide. As regards some Orthodox husbands, they begin looking at other women, giving up the constant self-sacrifice that real men, real husbands and fathers, make for their beautiful wives and obedient children, and fall into alcoholic and other abuses. Like the secularists, they say: ‘We are free, let it all hang out, who cares anyway?. These secularist values are in fact all about loss of respect for God, for others and for self. These ugly values, loss of respect and self-respect are not the values of our Orthodox Christian Civilization.

Orthodox women should keep themselves beautiful, following Orthodox values. They should look after their bodies and looks, disciplining themselves, careful what and how much they eat, looking after their hair, looks, dress and shoes – but keeping modesty, without falling into vanity and foolish expense on vain luxuries and excessive make-up: such care of self is only for their husbands, not for anyone else. As for Orthodox men, they must keep sacrificing themselves at work and in the home, being good husbands and fathers, sharing all income, disciplining themselves too, not abusing their bodies and minds with alcohol, any other drug or tattoos, spending time with their beloved and unique wives and children. They too should look after their bodies and looks, not in order to attract other women, but only their beautiful wives.

At the Orthodox wedding, we are crowned. These crowns have a double meaning: martyrdom and royalty. Thus, in family life we become martyrs through self-sacrifice for each other and for our children. But in marriage we also become royal, we are kings and queens of our households. There is nothing so beautiful as the little wrinkles that come from love. Our marriages have to be constantly renewed: Orthodox married life is about falling in love again every day.

How to Deal with Disappointments – or Discovering God’s Love for Us

Life is made up of joys and disappointments, sometimes the former predominate, sometimes the latter. As popular wisdom proclaims, ‘after rain comes the sun’ and ‘there is light at the end of the tunnel’. However, disappointments are in reality our appointments with destiny, that is, through disappointments we can finally find out what God’s Will is for us. Thus, disappointments are always a recall, a wake-up call, a reality check, reminding us that our only ultimate Appointment is the inevitable one, when we shall stand before the Face of God and our whole lives will be judged in an instant by His mere presence.

Thus, disappointments in life bring many surprises. These come from Providence, which is God’s Love in human affairs despite us, whether international, national, family or personal. affairs. How acutely disappointed the Royal Martyrs or the Patriarch St Tikhon could have been, when they were rejected, persecuted, betrayed and worse. But they were not, because their disappointment led them to God’s will for them, along the path to holiness. It is almost as if we should thank God for our disappointments. Popular wisdom confirms this too, as we say ‘a blessing in disguise’ and that, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’. Glory to God for all things!

 

The Barbarian West

The millennial Western Empire is surely the cruellest empire of all time. In its barbarism it seems comparable only to the pagan Roman Empire, the killing machine of ancient times. In its ironic propaganda this labelled all Non-Romans as ‘barbarians’ – thus like the ‘Aryan’ Nazis giving itself the right to slaughter all others at will. Despite the Roman Empire’s vain vaunting, in reality, its ‘superiority’ lay only in its military technology, its ability to massacre, terrorize and subjugate by force of arms, in order to asset-strip its vassals and colonies. And so it is today. ‘The West’ has no spiritual or moral superiority – merely a technical one.

For the Western Empire is the only Empire which not only possesses, but which also uses, nuclear weapons of mass destruction – in 1945 in defeated but not yet colonized Japan. It is also the source of all the technology of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. It is by popular consent a menace to the real free world and the real international community of some 180 nations. It has set up its CIA torture chambers from Libya to US-puppets like Romania and Lithuania. Its bombs, marked ‘Happy Easter’ rained down, killing and mutilating in Serbia, where its uranium-tipped shells still deform new-born babies twenty years later. Its bombs also fell on Afghan weddings and hospitals, on the civilians of Iraq and Libya and Syria, as earlier on those of Germany and Japan.

However, this ‘West’ is not geographical; many born and bred in the geographical West do not belong to ‘the West’ and at the same time many who do not live in the geographical West do belong to ‘the West’. ‘The West’ is in fact a construct, a concept which engages only those who accept and welcome the ideological domination of secularism – the power and wealth of the Western elite. When was this ‘West’ (calling itself by various totally inaccurate names like ‘the free world’ or ‘the international community’, much to the bewilderment of the vast majority of the world’s people who are not ‘Western’) first formed?

Was it in 1989? This was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the West’s so-called ‘Cold War’, with which it had justified millions of victims in dozens of proxy hot wars and trillions of dollars of military spending, the need for which was invented by the US military-industrial complex immediately after the Second World War. After all, it was immediately after 1989 that the West began terrorizing and bullying the Muslim world in order to justify that spending and rid itself of some of those weapons. But this terrorization and bullying of the Muslim world had begun over 900 years before, in 1095, with the launch of the First ‘Crusade’.

Was it in 1945? This marked the US invasion of Western Europe and its defeat of Japan in its war to gain strategic control of the Pacific. Victory in 1945 led the USA to invent a host of acronyms for the control and vassalage of others, such as the UN, NATO, SEATO, IMF, GATT, WTO, OECD, EEC, EU etc. But this was not the first US invasion of Western Europe – that was in1917.

Was it in 1917? The great European suicide caused by the rivalry of its nationalist ‘empires’ meant that the US, seeing its moment to become the leader of the world, intervened. But the Western European world had been slaughtering its own peoples and those of the rest of the world long before its creation, the USA, came to prominence.

Was it in the American Civil War which ended in 1865? Despite the self-justifying propaganda claims, this dreadful war was not about freeing slaves. It was about the Unionist imperialism of the industrial North of the USA, which needed to recruit cheap labour in the South whose freedom to move to factories in the North was therefore essential for it. Defeating Confederatism, this Unionist imperialism went on to massacre even more Native Americans and steal their ancestral lands, take over Cuba and the Philippines and so begin the economic colonization (‘banana republicization’) of Latin America (‘our backyard’). But Western imperialism began long before this.

Was it at Waterloo in 1815? Long before US imperialism, its British founders had been practising it. After the victory at Waterloo over its French rival, anything became possible for the British Establishment, including the genocidal depopulation of Ireland through State-created famine in the 1840s (a famine with millions of victims repeated by the Georgian bandit Stalin in Southern Russia eighty years later and again by the British Establishment in Bengal in 1943), the invasion of Russia (’The Crimean War’), the salt hedge in India, ‘the Opium Wars’ (British genocide in China and the rape of Africa (though other Western Europeans were also involved in this). But British, and Western, imperialism began long before this.

Was it in the Reformation which began in 1517? Here began the justification for ‘Wars of Religion’ (sic!), the Judaic idolatry of money called Capitalism, which was later to lead to the dictatorship of the odious and genocidal dictator Cromwell (the English Hitler), who then had his statue erected outside the equally dictatorial British Parliament and became the hero of Thatcher. But Western, and not just Protestant but also Roman Catholic, imperialism began before this, not least in the case of the gold-grasping Italian merchant Columbus.

Was it in the Hundred Years War from 1337 to 1453 between England and France (more exactly between the Roman Catholic French elite of England and the Roman Catholic French elite of France)? But the Roman Catholics had been massacring each other long before this.

Was it in the Roman Catholic Inquisitions with their killings, burnings and tortures which began in France in the 12th century and continued against Cathars, Waldensians and anyone else who disagreed with the totalitarian power of the Papacy for centuries both inside and outside Roman Catholic countries? But Roman Catholicism had been killing and burning people since the Western elite invented it in the 11th century.

No, the construct of ‘the West’ was definitively formed in the mid-11th century as the restored (‘Holy’ – sic!) pagan Roman Empire – first attempted, but fortunately unsuccessfully, by the barbarian Charlemagne in the eighth century, with his massacre of the Saxons and the use by his courtiers of pagan Roman nicknames. Until then, ‘Western’ culture had simply been part of the universal Orthodox Christian culture of all lands, where the apostles had converted local people. It was here that their heirs, martyrs, confessors and Church Fathers, had continued to live according to apostolic tradition until that dried up in the Western lands in the 11th century. From then on ‘the West’ became a secularist ideology, a construct, based on the purely secularist old pagan Roman Empire. Here is where all went wrong.

The Coronation of the Tsar from Paraguay

Moscow, 17 July 2028

All will remember how after the mysterious death of President Putin at the age of 71 in May 2024, the Russian Federation and the countries which had once formed the Soviet Union, as well as all of Eastern, Central Europe and Western Europe, fell into political chaos. Any number of professional Russian politicians vied with each other for power. But all were discredited; some were utterly corrupt, some were simply buffoons. At that time, when the EU had just collapsed in acrimony, the inward-looking and economically feeble USA was bitterly divided after the fall of the oligarch Trump from power and politicians there were urging States to secede from the Union, and China’s corrupt Communist Party had at last been overthrown after 75 years, it seemed as though the whole world was collapsing. Many anxiously wondered: What would the new world order that was being born look like?

Increasingly, in the Russian Federation a very large majority of citizens decided that they needed a strong but not corrupt leader. Naturally, virtually all turned to the hope for the restoration of the monarchy. Various descendants of the Romanov family came forward in reply. However, most of them could not even speak Russian, many had nothing to do with the Church and only very few had any grasp of the political situation in Russia, in neighbouring countries, many of which, like the former US-run Ukraine, had already fallen apart, or else were in chaos, or indeed of the situation anywhere else in the world. A strong man, a man of the moment and a man with understanding and capable of clear-sighted action had to be found. Among the multitude of Romanov candidates, not a single one seemed even vaguely suitable. And then something quite unexpected and even extraordinary happened.

It was in Paraguay in March 2027, in a small and remote town in Alto Paraguay near the Bolivian border, which had been founded by Russian émigrés in 1928, that a previously unknown Romanov descendant was found. He was discovered by a Russian journalist who had been reporting on the earliest Russian emigration in South America. The settlement was so remote and self-sufficient that it was isolated from Spanish speakers. Everyone still spoke pure, pre-Revolutionary Russian, handed down by great-grandparents to the present generation. There, born in 1989, lived a certain Alexei Romanov, a descendant of Tsar Nicholas I. His great-grandparents, born in Saint Petersburg in 1900, had helped establish the settlement in 1928, his grandparents had been born there in 1930 and his parents in 1956. Alexei had been brought up in piety, but had also mastered Spanish, receiving an excellent education.

Interviewed by the journalist, he had shown his fluency in Russian and also a profound understanding of both Russian history and culture and of the modern world. When the interview was broadcast in the Russian Federation, people were ecstatic, seeing in him the Tsar they had long been seeking. Married to Olga, a descendant of the Dolgoruky family, they had three children. All will remember the family’s visit to Moscow in November 2027 and how the crowds were united in their enthusiasm at his words and at the family’s purely Russian Orthodox way of life and values. Now today, amid the rejoicing of tens of millions, Moscow has celebrated his coronation and that of his wife Tsarina Olga. A new focus of unity has been found in this broken world and countries of the former Russian Empire and very many beyond them are looking with hope to the new Tsar.

 

Q and A September 2019

The Orthodox Faith and Constantinople: The Fall from being the First among Equals to being the Last without Equals.

Q: What is the situation of the Rue Daru Archdiocese now at the end of this very important month for it?

A: As I understand it, after the meeting of its clergy in Paris on 28 September, some three-quarters of the parishes that had not already left (those in Scandinavia and the two in Italy) have remained faithful to Archbishop Jean. The exceptions appear to be only five communities in Continental Europe (mainly those under a troubled young priest in Belgium, the one in Germany and the modernist, anti-iconostasis group in Meudon near Paris). However, several tiny communities of Protestant-minded dissidents in England, who have existed as part of Rue Daru since 2006, when they were adopted into the Rue Daru set-up by the late Archbishop Gabriel, who did not understand the real problems. Among the Rue Daru Orthodox in Paris, these provincials are seen very much as trouble-makers.

Thus, it seems that the majority of Rue Daru have returned to the Russian Orthodox Church, scrambling up out of the ever-deeper ditch dug by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which is now negotiating with Uniats in Rome, between itself and the rest of the Orthodox Church. In other words, 99% of the Orthodox world stands shoulder to shoulder with the Russian Orthodox Church, while the tiny, US-run Constantinople, stoops in unsplendid isolation

Q: There are Orthodox who say that the dispute between Constantinople and the Russian Church about the Ukraine is simply a racial and political one, all about power, and we should not get involved. What would you answer them?

A: This is the self-justification of those who, precisely, do not want to get involved, that is, who are disincarnate Orthodox, who think of Orthodoxy as a mere idea. These are the fence-sitters and, as they say, fence-sitters are those who refuse to climb the fence. The fact is that 12 Local Churches, including the Alexandrian, the Jerusalem, the Cypriot and the Albanian (their episcopates are all basically ethnic Greeks), the Romanians, the Georgians, the Arabs, as well as Slavs, support the Russian Church, against 1 Local Church, the US-controlled Constantinople. This is not therefore a racial argument. Nor is it a political one, for the Cold War is long over (except in the minds of those who like wars to make money from arms sales and like hating others). In fact, this is a dogmatic argument. Either you are Orthodox (13 Local Churches) or not (1 Local Church). Either you have an Orthodox understanding of the Church (ecclesiology) (13 Local Churches), or a Non-Orthodox one (1 Local Church).

Q: Will the Patriarchate of Constantinople be punished for its schismatic actions in the Ukraine?

A: It has already punished itself, as it has cut itself off from the majority of the Church. It has gone from being the first among equals to the last without equals. We must never forget that God is not mocked, for He is an all-consuming fire. I fear for the terrible events that will now follow if there is no repentance on the part of those in the Phanar who have carried out these acts because of US bribery and political threats.

The Russian Orthodox Church

Q: Many traditional aspects of the Russian Orthodox Church remind me of the Church of England and the Catholic Church before the 1960s. Surely, the Russian Orthodox Church is just backward? Once it catches up with the West, exactly the same things will happen to it as here. I mean Slavonic will be replaced by modern Russian, guitar music will accompany the liturgy, there will be happy-clappy services with people sitting down (as in Greek churches already), women will not cover their heads, there will be no Eucharistic fasts or fasts in general and no confession before communion, there will be women priests and gay marriage. Don’t you think so?

A: The idea of ‘catching up with the West’ is very amusing! I think in reality that it is the West that has to catch up with Russia, as the West is still stuck in its so-called ‘post-Christian’ and modernist time-warp dating back to the now old-fashioned 1960s. You are forgetting that today’s post-modernist, post-post-Christian Russia has seen the future already and not only survived and rejected it, but overcome it. The West, on the other hand, has still got to go through open persecution. However, I fear that the Catholic-Protestant West (and modernist Orthodox on the fringes, like some in Constantinople and Greece) will not survive that persecution. In which case, only faithful Orthodoxy will survive.

Orthodox Teaching and Practice

Q: What is the sense of the sacred?

A: The sense of the sacred is normal for anyone who has some sort of spiritual life or sense, who senses the spiritual presence of the other world, just beyond the veil of this world. It is why in Church we have an iconostasis, why there is no instrumental music, why icons have a different perspective, why we stand and do not sit and why we use an older form of liturgical language. Everything in Church is different from this world, which has no sense of the sacred.

Q: Do Orthodox believe the dogma that Adam and Eve were real people, from whom we are all descended? Or are they symbolic myths?

A: Of course, we are descended from them. They are portrayed in the Icon of the Resurrection, being freed from hades. We also inherited ‘the sin of Adam’, ancestral sin, from them. Moreover, DNA is now confirming our descent from them. However, this is not a dogma. A dogma is the Holy Trinity or that Christ is true God and true man, that He has two natures in one Person. That Adam and Eve are our ancestors is a belief, not a dogma.

Q: Do Uniats have the same three-bar cross as the Russian Orthodox world?

A: Interestingly, not quite, for of course like everything Uniat, it is not quite the same, it is ‘off’, askew. Significantly, the lowest bar of the Uniat three-bar cross does not point to the right, to Dismas, the good thief who repented, but it is always horizontal. This signifies that the Uniats have not repented. This is clearly the case, since they are Uniat, i.e. in a state of non-repentance for their apostasy.

Q: Why is the old calendar so important?

A: First of all, it is not ‘the old calendar’, but the Church calendar, which all the Fathers, East and West, agreed to at the First Universal Council in 325, nearly 1700 years ago. It was accepted by all until the end of the 16th century, when for purely secular reasons a change was made by heterodox, who had long before already split away from the Church and introduced a heretical teaching on the Holy Trinity. Their calendar is called the (Roman) Catholic calendar.

First, the Bolsheviks under Lenin tried to impose this Catholic calendar, then in Finland the Lutheran Finnish State persecuted churches there under the homosexual Archbishop German Aav, in Greece there was and is St Catherine the New Martyr who was martyred resisting it, then there were the Fascists under Hitler in the Ukraine who also tried to impose it. We too shall resist to the end, remaining faithful to the Church. Are you faithful – or not?

Q: Have you ever served on the new calendar and would you ever do so?

A: I never have done and would certainly avoid doing so. However, I have served and would serve with clergy who are obliged to serve the fixed feasts on the new calendar out of obedience. As I said to one who used to be a member of ROCOR (why, I am not sure), I have never been, am not and never will be an old calendarist – which is quite a different thing from being on the old calendar. Interestingly, the priest I said this to, in despair that ROCOR would not support old calendarism, left ROCOR and joined a sect which in his heart he had always wanted to belong to.

Q: How do we answer feminists who say that God is as much a woman as a man and the term ‘God the Mother’ is quite acceptable?

A: First of all, they contradict the words of Christ, the Son of God (not the Daughter of God), Who always refers to God the Father, as recorded in the Gospels. So to refer to ‘God the Mother’ is anti-biblical, anti-apostolic, anti-patristic, anti-spiritual, anti-Church and by origin worldly or secular, contradicting 2,000 years of revelations of the Holy Spirit. I think it is interesting, that such extremists want God to be female. So why don’t they want the devil to be female too? After all, in the name of equality, it should be so!

Q: Surely St Paul’s command that women should cover their heads in church (1 Cor 11) is just Jewish ritualism? Why should we observe it? Especially when Orthodox clergy have long hair!

A: Some things are Jewish (or rather Middle Eastern) hygiene ritualism, for example, circumcision or not eating pork, as it is observed by both Jews and their Muslim cousins. Other things are not and this is one of them – it is universal.

Thus, in English, we have the expression ‘to let your hair down’. This means to stop being sober and modest. In English history we can see how the Cavaliers, who were morally rather loose, especially in sexual matters,  had long hair, but the Puritans were ‘roundheads’, with short back and sides – still the British and US Army haircut even today. In the 1960s sexual ‘liberation’ was marked by young people growing their hair long, throwing off the old restraints of Protestant moralism. It is everywhere well-known that women can make themselves sexually attractive with long hair – you only have to look at any street and you will see three or four times as many women’s hairdressers as men’s barbers, and women spend far more on haircare than men. The Apostle’s instruction is simply about modesty and sobriety.

As regards long hair as worn by some Orthodox clergy (probably a minority), this started to come in very late, probably in about the 15th century, under the influence of ascetics and hermits, who did not trim their hair (head or facial), simply because they had no scissors. Thus, the Old Ritualists in Russia, who date from the 17th century, still never trim their beards, but always have very short hair. In the early centuries laymen and clergy always trimmed their hair (and monastics wore tonsures, like St Gregory Palamas), as the Apostle commands (1 Cor 11, 14). When clergy do have long hair (this is usually monastic clergy), then they tie it back neatly, still not ‘letting it down’. Anything else seems either vain or else effeminate.

 

The Centre Can Hold Because of the Cleansing of the Church

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

William Yeats, The Second Coming

 

All three groups of Russian Orthodox émigrés have now been cleansed off their extremes:

In 2006 the Patriarchate of Moscow suffered schism in Great Britain and France as the vestiges of old-fashioned modernism and ecumenism finally cast themselves off. Those who adhered to their Russophobic cultural prejudices and desire to dilute Orthodoxy into just another department of Western Establishment ideology left the Russian Orthodox Church for the pseudo-Orthodox US-run Phanariot group in Turkey. The Church was cleansed of those who had no love for the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Christian Empire of Orthodox Civilization and preferred compromised Western secularism to the fullness of the Church of God.

In 2007 ROCOR, the Church Outside Russia, in turn at last lost its censorious, sectarian fringes in tiny schisms to various strange and extremist sects which justify phariseeism. The Church was cleansed.

Now, in 2019, the Rue Daru Archdiocese (the former ‘Paris Jurisdiction’) has lost its extremists, in fact rather a large minority of modernist marginals. Why has it taken so long? Because this was the group most deeply infected by extremism, in this case, of the ‘liberal’ kind, so well-known for its intolerance and terrorist witch-hunts against faithful Orthodox over the decades. As a result, many had already left, even decades ago, persecuted by modernists and freemasons in the group. The minority dissidents, who prefer to celebrate Parisian philosophers who died 60-80 years ago rather than the Saints of God, will now fully merge with the US-run Turkish group in the Phanar (if they have not already done so).

Many of this dissident group are in England. There is also one parish in Brussels that has left for the Romanian Church (its Russophobic priest had already been suspended by the Turkish group a few years back, so he could not return there) and some parishes in France which still remain undecided. However, the fact is that Church has been cleansed, with the Orthodox returning to the Russian Church, the extremists falling away. Moreover, many in Paris who had left in disgust that the Church there was not commemorating the Orthodox Patriarch Kyrill, the leader of the Orthodox world, already returned last Sunday to congratulate Archbishop Jean, who was in tears of joy, on his final decision.

As perhaps the only priest who had suffered from ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ of all three groups of aggressive, troll-like extremists, I cannot but rejoice with our brothers and sisters who have at last escaped the clutches of the Phanariots. The plot of the Phanar to hand over St Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris to Ukrainian schismatics and rededicate it to apostate traitors and mass-murderers like the robber of souls, Andrei Bobola or Josaphat, has failed.

Meanwhile, the Phanar’s incoherent and schismatic head, Patriarch Bartholomew, yesterday met Pope Francis and the head of the Ukrainian Uniats in Rome to discuss merging the Uniats with his tiny and failed OCU organization in the Ukraine. A joint Phanariot-Papist Galician Synagogue of Fascist Ukrainian xenophobes may soon be formed there, uniting all haters of the Church of God. It will be financed by the State Department in Washington, which has already sent out its ambassadors in the Balkans to bully and bribe Local Churches into recognizing the Galician Synagogue. In this they failed.

The centre can hold – because only extremes fall apart, and this is how the Church is cleansed. Glory to God for His Providence, for the evil inflicted by the Phanariots has had the reverse effect. The Orthodox have been strengthened, being cleansed from the pseudo-Orthodox fringes who have fallen away.

 

 

His Holiness Speaks about the Return of Rue Daru

“Reunion must happen forever”

09/16/2019

According to His Holiness Patriarch  Kyrill, the reunion of the Archdiocese of the Western European parishes of the Russian Tradition with the Russian Church is the final act that closes the drama of the Revolution…

The Sunday, 15 September, the 13th Sunday after Pentecost, the Patriarch of Moscow and All the Russias Kyrill celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the church of St Olga in the district of Ostankino in Moscow. At the end of the service, His Holiness gave a sermon.

“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In today’s apostolic reading, and this was an excerpt from the First Epistle to the Corinthians of the Apostle Paul, we find the words: “Brothers, watch, stand in the faith, be courageous” (1 Cor. 16:13). We must take these words as the great command of the apostle, ”called the High Hierarch. – It is remarkable that the list of virtues that a Christian should possess begins with the word “watch.” What does it mean to stay awake? It means not to sleep, to be conscious; and a person in consciousness is able to establish a connection with the outside world, perceive the outside world, analyze what is happening around him, and thus build his relationship with the outside world. ”

“This raises a very important question. What criteria should we be guided to evaluate the world around us, everything that happens around us? – asks the Primate of the Russian Church. – Of course, you can use political, scientific, artistic criteria, but they do not cover the entirety of the human worldview. And more often than not, we evaluate the world around us, assuming ourselves as a criterion. What is right from our point of view, what is good for us, then becomes the measure of the assessment of everything that is happening around. This is a great mistake, because the assessment of the world around cannot be reduced to a personal understanding of what is happening or to personal interests. But not only individuals suffer from this sin – sometimes whole groups, communities of people are subject to this sin. So, starting from the 18th century, godlessness gradually began to supplant faith from the consciousness of our intelligentsia. And when, instead of the Divine truth and the word of God, personal interests, the interests of the bearers of certain political and ideological views became the criterion, then the death of the people began, which led to the catastrophe of the Revolution and civil war. ”

“We are talking about the Revolution, about the civil war as a distant past – indeed, for the modern generation it is the time of their great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers. But, having gone into the past, these terrible events of our history should not be left without a nationwide assessment, the First Hierarch is convinced. – After all, this is what happened: people laid the basis of their actions for the political and ideological criteria that divided the people, divided the country. The result of this division was the expulsion of a huge number of Russian Orthodox people, our people, our fellow citizens, abroad. This outcome greatly weakened our intellectual, spiritual strengths, and it took decades to restore everything that was lost as a result of the breakdown of our whole life. ”

“However, the consequences of this outcome persist in some sense to this day,” he said. – We know that the Russian Orthodox Church was divided. Emigres created the Russian Church Outside Russia with its center in Sremsky Karlovtsy in Serbia, but there was another group of Orthodox people who grouped around Metropolitan Eulogius – it was conventionally called the Paris emigration. And those children of the Russian Orthodox Church who maintained contact with Moscow made up the third part of the entire Russian emigration. This division reflected political contradictions, which led Russia to the Revolution. And our cherished dream was the unification of the whole Russian emigration, the unification of the Russian Church outside Russia. We know that in 2007, by the grace of God, the miracle of reunification with the Russian Church of that part of the emigration was revealed to all of us, which belonged to the Russian Church Outside Russia. This reunion solemnly took place in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, but it did not affect the emigres grouped around Paris. ”

“It so happened that the Russian Orthodox people who had Paris as their center and Metropolitan Eulogius as their ruling bishop ended up in the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople, and this state of affairs persisted to this day. But yesterday there was an event that could become historic. I say “it could become,” because much remains to be done to ensure that this action brings results. But such an act – Archbishop John, who is in Paris and leads the very fragment of the Russian emigration that did not belong to the Russian Church Outside Russia or the Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, sent me a request for reunification with the Russian Orthodox Church, ”said the Primate.

“This happened yesterday, September 14, that is, September 1, according to the old style, on the first day of the church new year, or, as we say, the beginning of the indiction. Opening this petition, I realized that the deed of Archbishop John is full of many meanings. Because the implementation of this petition closes the topic of the division of the Russian Church outside Russia, the separation of Russians living abroad, and the fact that this happened on the first day of the Church New Year, helps to understand that reunification should happen forever, for all the times that lie ahead. This opens up the possibility of establishing the full unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, in the homeland and abroad, ”said Patriarch Kyrill.

“Yesterday, we held a meeting of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church by telephone, because there was no time to gather the Most Reverend members of the Synod. But I talked with everyone and received not just consent, but ardent consent. It was necessary to hear the intonations with which the members of the Synod responded to my message about what had happened. When I asked them if they voted for this decision, I received an enthusiastic answer: “We don’t just vote, we vote with all our hearts.” And indeed it is so. Because it cannot be a matter of secondary importance, indifferent to every Orthodox Russian person, for every member of the Russian Orthodox Church, regardless of his nationality, the restoration of the unity of our Church and the unity of our people, ”the Primate was convinced.

“Having satisfied the request of His Grace John, who headed the Exarchate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in Western Europe of the Russian tradition, the Holy Synod reunites by its decision all Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe with the Mother Church. We thank the Lord for the mercy that has been shown. This is not just a church act – most likely, this is the final act that closes the drama of Revolution, civil war, the drama of the division of our people. Therefore, today our prayer to the Lord is a prayer of thanksgiving for the fact that He, having led our people in Russia and scattered abroad through divisions, through unrest, through persecution and upheaval, today opens up the possibility for us to feel like a single people, united by a single Russian Orthodox Church. Thank God for everything! Amen, ” concluded the Primate of the Russian Church.

http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2019/09/16/vossoedinenie_dolzhno_proizojti_navsegda/