Author Archives: Father Andrew

Ashford, Kent: A New Community is Born

With the two parishes in Colchester and Norwich, both with weekly services and served by three priests, communities in Bury St Edmunds and Wisbech and hopes for new communities elsewhere, the presence of the Church Outside Russia in the eastern half of England has much increased since the episcopal changes and long-awaited ordinations after January 2017. With the blessing of His Grace Bishop Irenei, now a new community has been launched for the many Orthodox in Kent, whom we have been visiting for years, giving communion and baptising in people’s houses for lack of a church.

The new community is using a former farmhouse, now St Christopher’s Church, opposite the village green in Boughton Lees on the edge of Ashford (TN25 4HP – parking is in Lees Road, opposite the church, which has all facilities). Ashford is in a central position, with excellent national and international transport links, near Canterbury, Faversham, Maidstone, Rochester, Gillingham, Dover, Folkestone and Hastings. The community is dedicated to the Royal Martyrs, significant because the church is on the edge of Eastwell Manor, with its connections with the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna Romanova and her daughter, the future Queen Maria of Romania, who was born there in 1875.

This is even more significant because the community is being founded on the 100^th anniversary of the martyrdom of the Russian Orthodox Royal Family. The church was first visited on 15^th March, the feast of the Sovereign Icon of the Mother of God, which miraculously appeared after Tsar Nicholas was overthrown by treasonous aristocrats and apostate generals in 1917. The first liturgy took place on Saturday 21 April, the next will be on Saturday 19 May, the 150^th anniversary of the birth of the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas.

On Saturday 21 April, the five visits of the martyred Tsar to England were mentioned, including his visit to Gravesend in Kent. As the liturgy ended, a cricket match began on the green outside the church and the sounds of Orthodox singing were replaced by the sound of cricket ball against willow. We await the Orthodox of Kent at our next service.

Q and A since Easter 2018

Q: What would have happened if ROCOR and the Russian Patriarchate had not signed the Act of Canonical Communion in 2007?

A: First of all, if the two parts had not been reconciled by depoliticizing themselves (i. e. repenting), the Russian Orthodox Church would quite simply not have been reconstituted. Everything else flows from this one vital fact. The 2007 agreement was the necessary return to Church roots by all those who had strayed from Church Truth beneath the weight of Cold War politics.

For example, without even the preparation for this reconstitution, the Patriarchate would have continued to suffer from its fringes. Thus, the cleansing Sourozh schism of 2006 would not have happened, and instead of the Church being freed, She would have continued to have been oppressed by the fringes and their spiritual impurities. Then also, without ROCOR, the increase in the understanding of the universal meaning of the sacrifice of the Royal Martyrs and the desire to oppose old-fashioned ecumenism would have been far weaker within the Patriarchate.

On the other hand, ROCOR would have disintegrated, being deserted massively by its core clergy and people who would have gone to the Patriarchate, once it had repented. Myself among them, at least after the Sourozh schism after 2006. Our patience had already been wearing thin in the 1990s with the uncanonical and ‘un-catholic’ (= anti-soborny) actions of Metr Vitaly in accepting into the Church sectarian individuals and even criminals (though he did not know that) inside Russia (whereas we are precisely the Church Outside Russia). Equally, there was the nonsense promoted by the theologically ignorant or else CIA-paid (like Bp Gregory Grabbe) about the Patriarchal sacraments being graceless (sic!), which had begun after 1945 with the West’s declaration of the Cold War. Thus, ROCOR would have disappeared, leaving just a few tiny, irrelevant, politically-based, CIA-funded, pharisaical old-people’s sects, whose theology is non-existent and which spend their time cursing and warring with each other and against the Church of God.

Q: At the moment both parts of the Russian Church are present in Western Europe in separate but parallel dioceses and jurisdictions. Which part will emerge the victor?

A: By ‘victor’, I presume you mean the majority? The answer is very simple: the ‘victor’ will be the more pastorally and spiritually competent (or the less pastorally and spiritually incompetent, according to your viewpoint). The same is true of all Orthodox jurisdictions, not just Russian, and is also true everywhere in the Diaspora, not just in Western Europe.

Thus, there are those ‘jurisdictions’ that are destined to disappear (‘let the dead bury the dead’), because they are shackled to some modernist political ideology (large parts of the OCA, the Finnish Jurisdiction and the Paris Jurisdiction), or else to some ethnic/nationalist ideology or simoniac ghetto (the ‘ethnic’ or rather mononational jurisdictions), and those that will survive and become the dynamic foundations of new Local Churches.

Q: Why do you not take part in any internet fora?

A: Apart from the fact that I am too busy doing Orthodoxy, I believe that most such time-wasting fringe fora tend to encourage people with psychological problems. We should not encourage self-righteousness, priggishness, pompousness and the clericalism that comes from the Protestant world and has nothing to do with real Orthodoxy. The vast majority of Orthodox have nothing to do with internet fora. If you did not know that, you will have had a very warped view of Orthodox.

Q: The old generation of Anglican converts, now dead or else in their late 70s, 80s or 90s, is dying out and is not being replaced. Does this not suggest that the idea of English Orthodoxy has been a failure?

A: Not in the slightest. All this proves is that the theologically absurd idea of ‘Anglican Orthodoxy’, that of old-fashioned ecumenists like Nikolai Zernov, who died over 35 years ago, has been a failure. But those of us who were never took part in such a fantasy have always known this to be a failure and that it would die out. Either you are Anglican or else you are Orthodox, you cannot be both.

With rare exceptions, Anglicans do not become Orthodox, but, even after formally joining the Church, remain in a sort of Anglican world bubble. This is regardless of whether it is an arch-conservative Anglo-Catholic, clericalist, puritanical, misogynistic and old calendarist bubble, or an arch-liberal, Liberal Democrat, anti-clericalist, modernistic, feminist and new calendarist bubble. (The two are simply the opposite sides of exactly the same Non-Orthodox coin).

In my experience, the few Anglicans who still exist in this country are generally either aged over 60 or else Afro-Carribeans. Our interest has never been in converting Anglicans. Our interest has always been in firstly looking after our own Orthodox and secondly witnessing to the rest of the world – the 99% of the population who are not Anglican or have no idea what Anglicanism is.

The future in these islands is in English (English-language) Orthodoxy and it always has been. It has never been in a fake and fantasy ‘Anglican-Orthodoxy’. This is why we should pass by jurisdictions and parishes where you never become Orthodox and which keep converts in a state of delusion, that they are Orthodox when in fact they are in a fool’s paradise of thinking that they are Orthodox when they are not, but just in a state of foolish intellectual pride.

You recognize such people because they are well-read (all the wrong books) and rage on about having ‘the true faith’. But what is the true faith? It is the Christian way of life. In the Gospels it is described as clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and those in prison etc. It is not reading books by self-appointed experts on ‘Orthodoxy’.

An elderly Anglican lady wrote to me some years ago about her son who had ‘become Orthodox’ and refused to attend the funeral of her husband (a retired Anglican vicar) as the son ‘could not pray with heretics’. She was outraged, though not as much as me. I told her that her son had not become Orthodox, but belonged to a sect of Pharisees that was not in communion with the Orthodox Church (all of which was true). To some extent she was relieved, to some extent she was worried because he had been taken over by a sectarian guru. I told her that all she could do was pray for him, for ‘a mother’s prayer avails much’.

Q: Someone said that most converts in English-speaking countries are Celts, with for example Irish names. Is this true?

A: I think this is largely racist and sentimental nonsense. It is in the same style as ‘Only Greeks/Russians/Romanians/Georgians/Serbs etc can be Orthodox’ because ‘God only speaks Greek/Russian/Romanian/ Georgian/ Serb’ etc. I have only known eight Irish people in Ireland who have joined the Orthodox Church in the last 45 years. Generally, Roman Catholics from any European country do not join the Orthodox Church because of their brainwashing and conditioning that the only Christians in the world are Catholics – either you are Catholic or else you are nothing. Similarly I only know a handful of Scottish and Welsh people who have become Orthodox in that period. This is because although Protestants do join the Church, generally they do not become Orthodox because they remain with their baggage of the Protestant moralistic mindset and so stay on the fringes of the Church. This is especially true of Calvinism which still dominates the religious (and anti-religious) mindset of the Scots and the Welsh.

However, there is a more serious point here. In order to become Orthodox (sadly, that should be the same as joining the Orthodox Church, but it is not), you have to give up the mythical superiority of your cultural prejudices, cleansing yourself of them and putting Christ above them. For many, less educated people, that is easy because they have never had the mythical superiority of cultural prejudices anyway. But for those who belong to the Establishment, this is virtually impossible. This is because the Establishment is wholly based on cultural prejudices, i. e. on not putting Christ first.

An example of this is the tragic case of the late David Balfour (1903-1989), who as a British spy and friend of the late Fr Sophrony Sakharov, obtained a Western passport for him in Paris after the latter’s expulsion from Mt Athos after World War II. Balfour was an Establishment figure and intellectual who had become a Jesuit, then got himself ordained as a Greek Orthodox priest and became the confessor of King George II of Greece. At the same time as this, he was working in Athens as a British spy, betraying all the secrets of confession of the King during World War II. He was of course eventually defrocked. (As for the King who was known for election-rigging, he was thrown out of Greece and went to live with his mistress in an expensive part of London, but that is another story).

Balfour’s story is a very typical story of someone who put the Western Establishment first. There have been many other converts like him, most of them who got ordained (often through simony), then get defrocked or sidelined. I have seen so many of them, washed-up intellectuals with their doctorates, and/or private school aristocrats who have never made it, never having been accepted by the Orthodox people. What a pity that the Greek Church was so naïve that it received this predatory individual Balfour. I only met him in the 70s, when he still came over as an incredibly arrogant and unrepentant person. I hope he did repent before the end.

Q: Whom do you hope to see canonized in your lifetime?

A: There are many figures, but I hope that the first will be the visionary Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), who bore the prophetic message that is already coming true. He carried a revelation from heaven who may help change the destiny of the world by helping to bring about mass repentance in Russia that we are still waiting for. Only after mass repentance can Russia begins its universal mission of preaching repentance to the rest of the world, which another prophet, St Seraphim of Sarov, canonized on the insistence of the martyred Tsar, spoke of. This is all necessary in order to prepare the world before the end.

Q: Do you consider that as Russian Orthodox in the West we should be, as it were, ‘ambassadors’ of the Russian Federation?

A: Not at all! What a terrible idea! The Russian Federation is a temporary and secular political settlement to a problem caused by 1917 and is not long for this world. However, what we are is ambassadors of the once and future Christian Empire and Emperor, which will be restored. Restored, but only after we have overcome the Soviet subculture of today’s Russian Federation and the petty Balkan racism and disintegration in the rest of the once Orthodox world, as we so clearly saw at the pathetic forum in Crete in 2016.

Smoke Grenades from Salisbury and Western Chemical Weapons Found among Terrorist Stockpiles in Syria

http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13970130001004

Patriarch John of the Church of Antioch Condemns Western Aggression

Patriarch John X and other Christian representatives in Syria have issued a statement, condemning the treacherous attack against Syria by the USA and the former colonial powers who divided the Ottoman Empire, the UK and France, on the absurd pretext that the Syrian government uses chemical weapons. He has stated that ‘this cruel aggression is an obvious infringement of international law and the UN Constitution’, as it is an unjustified attack against a sovereign country, committed by countries which Syria in no way threatened. He also stated that there was absolutely no proof that the Syrian government has or uses any chemical weapons. (Obvious, because the airstrikes did not release any chemicals into the air – Editor).

The statement says that the strikes have delayed the investigation by the International Commission on chemical weapons, merely escalates the conflict, ruins hopes of peace and that the unjust attack encourages terrorist organizations and their barbarism. The Patriarch called on the UN Security Council to guarantee peace instead of furthering escalation of wars. He called on ‘all Churches to carry out their Christian duties, according to the Gospel, and condemn the aggression’. We hope that the Antiochian Diocese in these islands will express support for their brave Patriarch, who is a true Athonite monk.

Repentance?

‘According to information from the Swiss Federal Institute for NBC-protection in Spiez, whose experts received samples collected in Salisbury by the OPCW specialists and finished testing them on 27 March, the experts of the Institute discovered traces of a toxic chemical called “BZ” and its precursors. It is a Schedule 2 substance under the Chemical Weapons Convention. “BZ” is a chemical agent which is used to temporary incapacitate people. The desired psychotoxic effect is reached in 30-60 minutes after application of the agent and lasts up to four days.

This agent was used in the armed forces of the USA, United Kingdom and several other NATO member states. No stocks of such substance ever existed either in the Soviet Union or in the Russian Federation. In the view of the experts, such a concentration of the A-234 (Novichok) agent would result in an inevitable fatal outcome after its administration. Moreover, considering its high volatility, the detection of this substance in its initial state (pure form and high concentration) is extremely suspicious, as the samples were taken several weeks after the poisoning.

It looks highly likely that the “BZ” nerve agent was used in Salisbury. The fact that Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey have already been discharged from hospital (though have been forbidden from speaking to the media – Editor) and Sergei Skripal is on his way to recovery, only supports such a conclusion’.

Source: https://www.rusemb.org.uk/fnapr/6486

Following the Trump bombast, British Establishment lies, May’s minority government acting illegally and anti-democratically, bombing another sovereign state with weapons of mass destruction, when that state presented no threat at all to the UK, what will happen to the Swiss report? Will there follow an apology? Repentance? Publication by the closely censored British media? Of course not. Liars do not do that. And how do we know? Because the father of lies is Satan and he too is incapable of repenting.

The Western Elite Backs Down – For the Moment

Behold, Damascus will cease to be a city and be a ruinous heap.

Isaiah 17, 1

Yet more aggressive and illegal Western airstrikes on the sovereign state of Syria have this time caused no victims. 100 missiles were fired off, but most of them were intercepted and destroyed before they could do any damage. Another billion dollars wasted in token strikes in order to justify imperialism, money that could instead have been used to feed the millions of victims of the Western war against Syria, which dared to oppose Israel.

With its fake news about chemical weapons released in concert by Western State-controlled media, controlled by arms merchants and six foreign-owned news corporations, with statements that would make even Dr Goebbels blush, we are seeing with Syria and Russia a repeat of the ‘Germans kill Belgian babies’ stories of over 100 years ago and Iraq’s mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’. We now see why the British Establishment created the false-flag incident in Salisbury on 4 March. Then, British spies attempted to poison two Russian citizens and later kidnapped one of them, who previously lived quietly in Russia. We see that all this was linked with the greater geopolitical aim of overthrowing the Syrian government, regularly bombed by the murderous Western proxy-State of Israel, so that the Western ally of Qatar can build its long-dreamed of pipeline through Syria to EU-imprisoned Europe.

The Western media have conveniently forgotten how the West invented chemical weapons, refusing to ban them, as the Russian Empire proposed at the end of the 19^th century. They have forgotten the thousands of dead and 500,000 injured in Bhopal in 1984 through its chemicals. Meanwhile, Western-backed terrorists (‘rebels’ in BBC-speak) continue to massacre in Syria, using their Saudi-supplied chemical weapons, British bombs rain down from British-supplied warplanes on tens of thousands of innocent women and children in the Yemen, Western-destroyed Afghanistan is ruled by Muslim drug-barons who feed the ghettoes of the West in new opium wars, Western-destroyed Iraq lies in ruins, Western-destroyed Libya and Western-created Kosovo are ruled by immigrant-smuggling, arms-smuggling and human organ-smuggling terrorists, and, in Europe, Ukrainian citizens die every day beneath the shells of the Western-installed junta in Kiev in the war that the Western media are banned from reporting on.

At least for now the West has backed down from starting WWIII, for someone was praying. Just as in 1962 it was forced to withdraw its missiles from Soviet borders in Turkey and so the Soviet Union was to its relief able to send back its missile-laden ships from Cuba, now we see the same. Like any bully, the West backs down once someone powerful enough stands up to it. However, it is clear that now a greater settlement is going to be needed. Having set up NATO on Russian borders in Europe and Asia, despite promising not to, having invaded Russia through its Georgian proxy ten years ago and then overthrown the democratic Ukrainian government and set up its genocidal Fascist puppet junta in Kiev, so many injustices have now accumulated, that the time of reckoning for the West is coming soon.

The Western Establishment has broken its word every time, betrayed the whole free world, including its own trapped peoples, all in the interests of the parasitic elite. It does the will of Satan. As Christians we must oppose it. It is 1% of the world against 99% of the world, which 99% are the real international community. But the Truth, so hated by the Western elite and beloved by conscious Christians, sets us free.

Western World Goes Insane

In the 1980s the governments of the Western world (10% of the whole world) backed Islamist terrorism against the Soviet Union, recruiting for example the terrorist Bin Laden in the CIA, ignoring the (very real) possibility of blowback. After the fall of the Western-invented atheist Soviet Union in 1991, in its demented pursuit of world domination (‘globalism’) the Western world then attempted to crush the peoples of the former Soviet Union and the opposition of the Islamic world, which it had trained and equipped.

Thus, there followed two invasions of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the attempted destruction of the Magreb, Egypt, Nigeria, Syria, Turkey, the Yemen and threatening Iraq (and North Korea) with nuclear holocaust, overthrowing the governments of Georgia and the Ukraine, and arming Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrein and Qatar to the teeth. So we see how the pursuit of world conquest over the last 27 years has included murdering and forcing to flee millions of innocent victims of Western imperialism.

Backing sadistic Islamist terrorists in Syria who use poison gas and supporting the State terrorism of Israel, the Western world is now preparing to attack once more the government of Syria. US warships are sailing to mass not far from Armageddon in Israel, desperately trying to obtain the support of France and the UK. Russian and Chinese warships are set to oppose them. Turkish, Iranian and Syrian forces will also support them.

In the UK, whose secret services murdered one Russian over a decade ago and attempted to murder another two last month, people fear. The bankrupt government of the UK has no money for decent healthcare, education or roads, but always has money for arms of mass death and destruction. In France and the US ($21 trillion national debt) the situation is similar. Will common sense prevail over the psychopathic Western elite, which so pretentiously calls itself ‘the international community’? The 90% of the world, where common sense does prevail, looks on and prays.

Questions and Answers from Lent 2018: A Compendium

Q: Is it true that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Communism was replaced by Orthodoxy?

A: If only it were so! The rotten fruit of Communism (in which probably no-one any longer believed, except for old people and some in a few remote provinces), was 95% replaced by Mammonism, what is called Western consumerism, and 5% by living (and not nominal) Orthodoxy. This is no surprise, since it took Communism three generations to destroy 95% of Orthodoxy. As I have said many times over the last 27 years since the fall of Communism, it will take three generations to restore Orthodoxy there even to the very low pre-Revolutionary level (unless there is a sudden miracle, which we are all praying for). And we do not want the level of before the Revolution, because that is precisely what caused the Revolution.

Orthodoxy then was marked by the betrayal of the aristocratic elite, whether liberal or conservative, who exploited the poor masses, and by mass nominalism, by Theological Academies which the ever-memorable Metr Antony of Kiev (himself slandered as a heretic by some of today’s ‘Orthodox’ academics!) called ‘the graves of Orthodoxy’, by seminaries with thieves like Stalin in them, by simony, ambition, careerism and by priests who were not priests but ‘popy’. (418 such ‘priests’ actually defrocked themselves immediately after the Revolution, proving that they had no faith, but were just State civil servants, ritualists making money from the naïve). Mass Orthodoxy has not been restored in Russia because there has not yet been mass repentance. The Tsar and his followers are still slandered in the mass media and not least by notorious, pseudo-Orthodox academics in today’s Academies of Theology and seminaries. Careerism (often taking the form of ecumenism) and love of money have revived. Even the monastic revival only concerns only some 10,000.

There is very far to go. The spiritual disease of nominalism is rampant in today’s Russian Church. Only when another 100,000 churches have been built, superstition and ritualism are overcome, shopping malls are no longer built, people dress decently in the streets, abortion is outlawed, the education and health systems and the media reflect Orthodoxy, the State has returned to the Orthodox calendar and such righteous people as St Maria (Vyrubova) of Helsinki and Elder Nikolai (Guryanov) have been canonized, will we be able to say that ‘Communism was replaced by Orthodoxy’.

Q: Why are so many Eastern Europeans so passive as regards Church activities?

A: This is the fruit of Communism, State control, among many people. Many do not think that they are the Church – which they are. They expect everything to be done for them, by ‘professionals’, from clergy to paid choirs. Such nominal Orthodox think of the Church as a ‘show’, a piece of ‘theatre’, just like the aristocrats from before the Revolution.

Q: Do you agree that the main problem of Orthodox life in the Diaspora is the jurisdictions?

A: No, definitely not. Jurisdictions are just an effect, not the cause. The cause is the mentality of what I would call ‘clubbism’, which is the bane of the Church in the Diaspora. Yes, it is nice to be with the like-minded, but that is not what the Church is about. It is about the salvation of the soul from evil. Yes, I agree, in so-called Orthodox countries (they do not exist any more), you will find different sorts of parish in the same town and those parishes are sociologically defined, but in the Diaspora it is much worse. Thus in this country you can find parishes which are in fact Greek clubs (usually subdivided into Cypriot clubs, Cretan clubs and mainland Greek clubs), Romanian clubs, Russian clubs, Serbian clubs, ex-Anglican clubs, ex-Anglo-Catholic clubs, ex-sectarian clubs, liberal Anglican clubs, upper-middle class intellectual clubs etc. This bane of the Diaspora comes from the fact that people do not seek the Kingdom of God first, but put their own interests above it.

Q: Why did Christ say the words: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’?

A: Until the time of Christ all human souls went down to Hades in death. Here they were held captive in torment. Thus, at death Christ in His human nature felt forsaken by God, for Hades is the place where God is not because He is rejected there. Thanks to Christ, Who, as sinless, the devil could not hold captive, all in Hades who accepted Christ’s message were freed. This is what we can see on icons of the Resurrection, Christ freeing humanity through Adam and Eve. This is what we mean by the harrowing of hell.

Q: What is the origin of the word Lent?

A: It is the Old English word for spring (‘lenctan’) and it means the period when the days lengthen – Lent and lengthen are the same word. However, already in ancient time it came to mean the spring fast. Lent therefore is the English for ‘the Great Fast’. This is why it is absurd to talk about ‘the Great Fast’, like Fr Alexander Schmemann did (English was his third language).

Q: Why is sitting with crossed legs or standing with your arms behind your back not acceptable in Orthodox churches?

A: Quite simply because such an attitude does not denote a prayerful attitude. We should stand with our arms by our sides.

Q: Can you see a visible difference between Patriarchal and ROCOR priests?

A: Yes, you often can, quite literally. The Patriarchate (like the Rue Daru jurisdiction also) hands out awards like confetti! It is a standing joke in Moscow about how grey-haired ROCOR priests have almost no awards, while Patriarchal priests, twenty years younger, are covered with them! Such are ROCOR bishops!

Q: What words would you like on your gravestone, apart from your name and date?

A: What an unusual question, though I think I was asked the same thing before. I would like the words: ‘The truth will set you free’.

Q: What is the first thing you have on Easter Night, once Lent is over?

A: A mug of milky tea.

In Memoriam: Michael McCall

Christ is Risen!

It has always been the desire of devout Orthodox Christians to die on the Resurrection Day of Easter. Thus, we recall the life of a righteous layman, Michael McCall, who lived without a television, a car or a mobile phone. He fell asleep peacefully at his home on the Isle of Wight on 8 April, Orthodox Easter Day, at the age of 62, having suffered stomach pains since Great Friday.

Nobody would have guessed that Michael had a Cambridge doctorate in mathematics, so modest was he. A bachelor, he joined the Orthodox Church 25 years ago and was known for his almost monastic life and great modesty. A pilgrim to Jerusalem and frequently partaking in pilgrimages to Iona (near where his ancestors had come from), he was a very generous donor to various churches. Among them the Colchester parish, to which he donated £50,000 and the Norwich parish, to which he donated £5,000. It is only now that we reveal his generosity, for he donated strictly on condition that this would not be revealed in his lifetime.

Michael wrote to me only on Great Wednesday, confirming that he would be coming to us for the Ascension. His Ascension is taking place now.

Michael was an example to us all. Funeral details are yet to be announced, but her will be interred in the Orthodox cemetery at Brookwood near Woking.

To the servant of God the Righteous Pilgrim Michael: Eternal Memory!

He is Risen Indeed!

An Easter Present