Author Archives: Father Andrew

The City is Lost! The Church is Found!

Introduction: The Bad Old Days

It is always sad to see the clerical elite of Local Churches fall into the sins of treachery and apostasy. It happened in Constantinople just before its Fall in 1453, when those in charge fell into the sin of Uniatism, hoping that the Vatican, and not God, would save them from the Muslim invader. It happened in 1948 when CIA thugs kidnapped the canonical Patriarch Maximos V and threatened to kill him if he did not get into their Presidential aeroplane and go into exile in Geneva, appointing in his place the half-Orthodox American Archbishop Athenagoras. As an eyewitness, his Archdeacon and later the Bishop of Birmingham, told me, Patriarch Maximos said as he was being forcemarched away: ‘The City is lost!’

And now it is happening again, with the latest anti-canonical decisions of the latest Patriarch, a Turkish citizen who depends entirely on the US State Department for his survival, with his absurd ‘Council of Crete’ and, above all, his meddling in the territories of other Local Churches. Whether in the USA (setting up its own jurisdiction, thus destroying Church unity), in Russia (supporting the renovationists against St Tikhon), in Finland (the notorious Aav schism), in France (the Evlogian schism), in Estonia (the ‘Apostolic Orthodox’ schism), in England (the Sourozh schism), in Greece (in the ‘New Territories’), in Macedonia or now in the Ukraine, tiny Constantinople has been trying to create for itself a flock which it does not have, by stealing the flocks of other Churches, in disobedience to the most basic canons, but with the support of illegitimate, US-backed, regimes.

Of course, there is still, but only just, time for repentance for the latest intended insanity of Constantinople. This is in the impoverished and wartorn Ukraine, controlled by vicious US-sponsored corrupt oligarchs, who live no differently from primitive African tribal leaders. However, if repentance does not come, despite the last minute journey to the Phanar and the desperate pleas of Patriarch Kyrill for repentance last week, then Constantinople with its tiny flock will fall away from the Church. This would be tragic for them – but not for the rest of the Church, for Divine Providence can always bring good out of human stupidity.

Possible Positive Results

Firstly, as Constantinople, for centuries the plaything of foreign powers and their bribes, has over a century become the bastion of modernism, all the Orthodox parts of that sorry Patriarchate, its faithful clergy and people and Mt Athos, could transfer to an Orthodox Church, at last feeling at ease under genuine Orthodox bishops. Here the most likely option would be to enter the present Church of Greece, though with long-awaited guarantees for the internationalization of Athos and so permission for thousands of monks from other countries to live there. This would become inevitable if the Archbishop of Athens took the title of Patriarch of Constantinople. This would be logical, given that the present one is falling into schism and even heresy.

Secondly, the modernists with their papal calendar and liturgical illiteracy, who have infiltrated some smaller Local Churches, would find themselves without support. Thus, we might see the eight smaller Churches, Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, returning to the Orthodox calendar, as the Church of Poland already has. In this way, they would repent and rejoin the 80% of the Orthodox world that remained faithful in the Churches of Russia, Serbia, Georgia and Jerusalem. The old calendar schisms in the above eight Churches could thus also be overcome.

Thirdly, it could lead to solving the divisive Diaspora problem, created initially by the phyletism of Constantinople. This would put all Orthodox nationalities under the single but multinational jurisdiction of the Russian Church, as was the case in the USA before the 1917 Revolution. This is not some sort of hegemony a la Constantinople, Eastern Papism or ecclesiastical imperialism, but preparation for autocephaly. This has been the case with other Orthodox missions of the Russian Orthodox Church down the centuries, from St Stephen of Perm to St John of Shanghai. Unlike Constantinople, the Russian Church has always helped towards independence, not created dependence. We cannot forget that Constantinople has never freely given any Church autocephaly, but has always clung on to power for as long as possible.

Conclusion: The Good New Days

In the future, we can see a real Orthodox Council, not a Halfodox one as in Crete, being held in order to anathematize the poison of the dogmatic, canonical, spiritual and moral errors of the Constantinople elite over the last 100 years, from new calendarism to liturgical modernism, from ecumenism to simony, from papism to the remarriage of priests.

In the future, we can see the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches returning and becoming autonomous Churches within the Russian Orthodox Church. We can see the Albanian Church returning and becoming an autonomous Church within the Church of Greece, or rather Patriarch of Constantinople, as it would then be called, making the present fourteen Local Churches into ten. We can see the diptychs being changed to classing these ten Local Churches by size: Russia, Romania, Constantinople (Greece), Serbia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Antioch, Alexandria, Cyprus and Jerusalem.

In the future, we can see four united and autonomous Metropolias being founded in the Diaspora under the Russian Church, awaiting Autocephaly in the fullness of time, like the Churches of Japan and China already. These would be the future: Church of Western Europe, grouping all the ex-Roman Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe, from Iceland to Finland and from Portugal to Hungary; Church of North America (thus ending its present jurisdictional chaos); Church of Latin America; Church of Oceania. This would leave only certain parts of Asia, like the Indian subcontinent and South-East Asia, to come under the jurisdiction of various Local Churches, perhaps the Antiochian and the Russian between them.

For 100 years, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in its purely worldly, prideful and racial fantasy of ecclesiastical imperialism, systematically followed divisive policies. These  have created schisms, both old calendarist, fragmenting the Church by repressing zeal, and phyletist, fragmenting the Church by nationalism, as at present in the Ukraine, all around the Orthodox world. It has made itself into an Eastern Papacy, thus gradually divorcing itself from the Church and its ecclesiology. Its departure from the Church in the coming months, however tragic for the often elderly individuals concerned, would actually clear the air, overcoming past injustices and obstructive barriers to unity, making progress at last possible after a century of frustration. This may be the moment that we have been waiting for ever since 1917.

 

 

Questions from Recent Correspondence (September 2018)

Church Matters

Q: Why does ROCOR still exist? Now that the Russian Orthodox Church is One, and Metr Nikodim Rotov, whom many considered to be a heretic and so to have compromised the Church inside Russia, dead for 40 years, why continue to have two parts?

A: The purpose of ROCOR as an administrative structure has always been purely temporary. Its spiritual purpose is to be St John the Baptist in the wilderness, heralding and preaching of the coming Tsar, for which the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was only the prelude, and then to disappear, its purpose served. Clearly, ROCOR had this purpose during the period of atheist captivity. However, as long as sections of the State (especially education, health, the mainly Western-controlled media) and sections of the population in the Russian Lands are still under corrupting atheist/Soviet influence and therefore there is still no Christian Tsar and Christian Empire based in Russia (‘Rus’), ROCOR will still exist, in some form or other, to tell the Truth and to call to repentance.

Q: Is this September’s decision by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to let widowed priests remarry canonical? And what of their decision to discuss granting some Ukrainians autocephaly in October? Could this be the moment when the Russian Patriarch talks over and becomes the real ’Oecumenical’ Patriarch?

A: Of course, this permission is not canonical! It is pure renovationism. True, some bishops in all Local Churches (as well as among the old calendarists) have always allowed some priests to remarry in such circumstances, turning a blind eye to the canons. However, these have always been exceptional and very rare acts made by economy. What is new here is that Constantinople has decided to do this systematically. This means that in trying to act papally, it has once again canonically cut itself off from the other thirteen Local Churches.

As regards a Ukrainian autocephaly, that would also be an utterly uncanonical act, made under US financial pressure ($15 million has been mentioned as the bribe). So much so that the Constantinople clerical elite would thus fall altogether away from communion with the Church, something that it has been threatening to do since 1925, if not since the fifteenth century. Some would say, ‘Good riddance’, that this might clear the air at long last. But perhaps the situation is not as bad as some say. The Constantinople elite may stand like a lemming on the cliff, but it has not yet jumped. Therefore, we will not push it.

As for the Russian Church taking over as the first among equals in the Church, it would first have to prove itself worthy and competent to do this. This means that all the bishops, and not just some, would have to become real missionaries and pastors, unlike many in other Local Churches too. They would also have to stop behaving like feudal lords and treat priests properly, instead of expelling them from parishes where they are loved, and stop treating Non-Russian priests and people as second-class citizens, instead of persecuting them, learning how to apologize.

Russia

Q: In the light of revelations this month about the murderers of the Skripals, what would you reply to the accusers of the Russian secret services?

A: No-one murdered the Skripals, though someone did attempt to murder them. Clearly, the crime was carried out by people who wanted to incriminate Russia. After all, it occurred just before the Russian World Cup and Russian elections, in which the Western candidate, a CIA recruit with immense Western financial backing, got only 5% of the vote. Had Russians wanted to murder the Skripals, a professional hitman from London could have been hired for the right sum. Pictures of two men walking along a road in Salisbury – no-one knows who they were – MI5 agents? – prove nothing. And the rare poison allegedly used, not kept anywhere in Russia today and the product of a country that ceased to exist 27 years ago, is kept just 8 miles from Salisbury at Porton Down. This is one of the most dreadful chemical weapons producers in the world and why the UN has not shut it down long ago remains a mystery. Also professional assassins would not then have thrown away the bottle used for the poison into a litter bin in a park in Salisbury!

Clearly, the criminals wanted it to be found so as to incriminate someone else. In any case, why would Russia want to kill a retired British spy, who had already served a jail term in Russia and then been released, together with his daughter, who lived safely in Moscow? And both of them, recovered from their illness, whatever it was,  but now under State censorship D-notices, have since been kidnapped by MI5 and disappeared. Who knows what MI5 has done with them? I see no reason why we should believe anything issued by the British Establishment, which has a centuries-old history of systematic lying, perfidious cunning and bloody assassination from the Norman Conquest, when it began, to Cromwell, from Ireland to Iraq and the other 180 countries it has invaded for no reason other than lust for power and riches. That is why a very large number of British people do not believe a single word of the Establishment about the Skripal case.

Q: You seem to admire contemporary Russia, but why? It is so corrupt!

A: I would agree with you about contemporary Russia, but then I do not admire it, just as I do not admire the contemporary West, which is also so corrupt. I admire contemporary Orthodox Russia – about 5% of the whole, quite unlike the rest of contemporary Russia – hopefully the leaven to leaven the lump, but God knows.

Contemporary Non-Orthodox Russia is the hangover from the drunken depravity of the Soviet Union. Every bad thing about it, abortion, divorce, pollution, corruption, statues of and places named after murderous Soviet monsters, usually not even Russians, like Lenin and Stalin, and trained in Western Europe, is the direct result of the Soviet Union. As I have said so many times before, the restoration of Orthodox Russia has only just begun. There is far to go.

The West

Q: Why is it important to venerate the Western saints?

A: Artificially cutting itself off from Eurasia, the Western European tip of the Eurasian Continent and its overseas colonies in North America have produced all sorts of things, from Gothic architecture to siege technology, from scholastic philosophy to the modern novel, from the spinning jenny to the latest mobile phone, from heavy artillery to the cluster bomb. However, the West has never produced a faith. It has only ever adopted and twisted Asian faiths and spiritual philosophies, deforming them into artificial, State-run religions. Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism are classic examples of such manmade religions, with a man, pope or king, that is, humanism, at their centre. Let us recall that Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam and nationalist Judaism and Shintoism are all Asian. Even the other continents (the Americas, Africa and Oceania) produced at least animism and then adopted superior Asian faiths with fervour. But not the West.

In other words, Western Europe alone has produced no faith apart from materialist and humanist idolatry. Indeed, the West, living in its parallel universe to the rest of the world, has always destroyed faiths, conquering and erasing all religious civilizations by organized violence (crusades, colonialism, consumerist materialism), whether in the Americas, Oceania, China, India or Russia (in 1917) and Greece (imposing the Western, Non-Christian calendar and modernism after losing its protection in 1917). This organized violence, even though today it may be economic violence or mocking political correctness (censorship) and be called ‘sanctions’, is its only ideology. Our love of the Western saints is to challenge that ideology, to show that there was once a true West and it did have genuine faith – Orthodox Christianity.

Q: What are the consequences of the Protestant rejection of the Mother of God?

A: The Mother of God represents the Incarnation. Without her God could never have become man. Therefore, when Protestants refuse to venerate her and even blaspheme against her, they reject the consequences of the Incarnation. For most of them, Christianity is therefore just a God-slot hobby, something to do on Sunday morning and does not impinge on any way on the rest of life, on politics, economics etc, which are affairs of the pagan State, but is just a private matter.

Q: In your view, why were monarchies overthrown by revolutions?

A: All the destroyed monarchies, Charles I in England, Louis XVI in France and Nicholas II in the Empire, were overthrown by the rich (aristocrats/merchants or oligarchs/businessmen as we would say nowadays) who stole or seized power for themselves, wanting to get even richer and even more powerful. The new regimes, under the lying propaganda camouflage of ‘freedom and democracy’ which the naïve believed in, was and is based on lies and theft, that is, on ‘kleptocracy’, the rule of thieves. Democracy has always been a myth for the naive. This is why ‘democracy’ is inherently hypocritical and constantly produces corruption scandals, both financial and moral.

Orthodox Life

Q: There are those who say that we should not write anything new, only repeating what has been said before, in case we say something wrong. What do you think?

A: This is an extremist viewpoint of people who are negative and insecure ‘converts’, who have never moved on from that early state of mind. It is interesting that in Russia, for example, in the 1990s, beneath the wave of tens of millions of converts, they reprinted massively, but that since the Year 2000 approximately, they have moved on and have produced a huge amount of original and creative works, far greater than anything before.

Q: My Ukrainian wife says that playing cards are satanic. Is this really true? Where is the harm?

A: I think it depends on what you are doing with the cards. If you are playing for money or playing as an addiction, it is satanic. If, on the other hand, you are playing Snap with the children, that is a very different story. As so often, it is not what you do, but why you do it.

Q: Should we fly the Union Jack?

A: If at church, then there should be no flags of any sort. As for the Union Jack, originating in the 17th century, it is a symbol of exploitation and imperialism. It is as alien and contradictory as is the expression ‘British Orthodoxy’. Just like ‘Soviet Orthodoxy’, you cannot have something that cannot exist, something that is a contradiction in terms. Personally, like many others, when asked my nationality, I always reply ‘English’. By all means fly a flag at home, but the Cross of St George, which is also the Standard of Jerusalem, of the Resurrection of Christ.

 

 

 

 

 

Make or Break Time for the UK’s Political Parties

Small political parties in the UK are mere one-issue protest groups in the anti-democratic First Post the Post electoral system in the UK (as also in the US). Thus there are the regional/nationalist Parties in Scotland and Wales, the regional sectarian parties in Northern Ireland, the Liberal Democrats for the upper middle-class drinking claret in their villas in Tuscany and Provence, the Ecologists (Greens) for the disinherited ecologists and the one-issue UKIP Party, the ‘party’ now over, was killed by its own success. However, very unusually, perhaps as never before, the two big Parties, Labour and Conservative, the only ones that can ever form governments in this system, are both at the same time completely split. Essentially, both are split on the same issue – not Brexit, but Zionism. Here there are many ironies.

Thus, the Prime Minister May, a remainer, is officially in charge of the government because Cameron, a remainer, considered that he could not stay on as Prime Minister after the people’s anti-remain vote on Brexit two years ago. Apparently, she can! As for the EU, it refuses to negotiate, as, if the UK succeeds in negotiating favourable terms, it is afraid that other countries will also seek freedom from its expensive dictatorship. This is a foolish policy because since the UK will leave the EU anyway, if it leaves without agreement, the EU will suffer even more than the UK. In any case, the Conservative Party is, just as it was in the nineteenth century on the Corn Laws, totally split, as to whether it is the English National Party that puts the national identity first or simply the Mammonist Party that puts money first.

The Labour Party, having returned to its socialist roots and stopped being an ultra-Conservative Party, as it was under ‘Tory Blair’, is split by attitudes to Zionism. Its leader, a man who appears to be stuck in the Che Guevara idealism of the 1970s, is, quite naturally, under attack by the Zionist UK media for being anti-Zionist. Of course, they do not say this, they say that he is ‘anti-Semitic’, as they hope that if they throw enough mud at him, some at least will stick. It seems curious that he, the most anti-racist person in the country, does not counter-attack and refer to the fact that many of his best friends are Jewish (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jewish_anti-Zionism) and that by far the most important Zionists are not Jews at all – for example, President Trump, George Bush, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.

However, the fact is that globalism is simply a code-word for Zionism – in the 1960s it was called ‘Americanization’ and in the 1990s ‘the EU’. (In the same way, the old-fashioned mythical term ‘the Free World’ was changed to ‘the International (sic!) Community’ – translate as ‘the G7’ or ’the 10%’ or ‘the Western clique’). The code-words change, but not the realities. Regardless of whether people are Labour or Conservative, there is only one struggle in Europe today: for national identity and the survival of sovereignty, regardless of left or right, against One Worldism. The arch-conservative Catholic aristocrat, Jacob Rees-Mogg (‘the Honourable Member for the eighteenth century’) and the semi-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn are at one, as too are  the multi-millionaires, ‘Tory Blur’ and the slave-owner’s scion, David Cameron.

All we lesser mortals can do is pray for Divine Intervention.

Most of a Life

Foreword

I may live another twenty or thirty years, but equally my time on earth may come to an end tomorrow, next week, in a month’s time, or next year. No-one knows, but I have no illusions. Now that I am coming to an end, it is fitting to set down the three tasks of my destiny which have filled my unworthily lived days. It is my belief that others will more effectively continue these tasks after me, just as many others worked on them both before me and at the same time. And although, not always in positions of power, they worked far more efficiently and with far greater success than me, it has often felt as though I were totally abandoned in these tasks. I never chose them – they fell to my lot despite my clear manifold human weaknesses and equally clear unsuitability and unwillingness to fulfil them.

With the Saints

My first task has been the modest contribution to spreading the veneration of the Saints of Western Europe in the Church. This meant fixing them in locally-issued calendars, praying and writing their lives and compiling, collecting and celebrating their services and icons. This was a bitter battle and cost me enormously, for resistance from all sides without exception was very harsh. Isolation was my lot. There were – and are – so many who resist the saints. Altogether, above all by the reposed Monk Joseph (Lambertson) whom I much encouraged, services were compiled to nearly one hundred saints or groups of saints of Western Europe who did not yet have one. Victory came slowly and over forty years later several such saints were included in the official Russian Orthodox calendar, with more to follow.

Church Unity

My second task has been to help contribute to the restoration of the unity of the two parts of the Russian Church and to call others outside it, for example those who had fallen away in Paris, to unity with it. My part was very, very minor, of course, but it must have helped, for people told me it had. Having visited the Soviet Union twice in the 70s and seen the lamentable state of much of the Patriarchate in England and France, I could see that nothing could be done until the fall of the Soviet Union. Only that would bring the liberation of the hostage episcopate there. So it was only in 2000 that it repented for its compromises with the atheist government and so its failure to recognize the New Martyrs and Confessors earlier, as well as for its politically-motivated compromises with heterodox.

Equally, however, the Church Outside Russia would have to reject decades of the spiritual impurity of sectarian politicking with the treacherous and tragic Vlasov movement and its CIA backers, as well as its own embarrassing failure to canonize the New Martyrs until as late as 1981. Victory came only in 2007 with the Act of Canonical Communion, signed in the presence of thousands of us in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, the Russian Patriarch and President and longsuffering clergy of both parts of the Church in attendance. That Cathedral had been built to commemorate the 19th century Orthodox victory over the French atheist Napoleon and rebuilt to commemorate the 20th century Orthodox victory over the German atheist Marx. Thus, the Cathedral became the place of a threefold victory.

A Life for the Tsar

My third task has been to help contribute to the restoration, now inevitable, of the Orthodox Empire, based in Russia under the coming Tsar, just as St Seraphim of Sarov prophesied nearly 200 years ago. This has been and is, if anything, the hardest of all. This is because it involves the Incarnation, that is, the political, economic and social ramifications of our understanding of the Incarnate Christ. Resistance here is ferocious and mocking, for our struggle is with the Devil himself. Firstly, we must defend the holiness of Tsar Nicholas, both in life and in death. Secondly, we must defend all those faithful to him, many not yet canonized. Thirdly, we must promote his shining vision, which was a century ahead of its time but tragically interrupted for a blood-soaked century by ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’, as he described.

Afterword

Some might say that then all has been completed. This is not so. The task for Rus, to spread veneration for the Western saints of the first millennium Church is to develop much further. The task for Faith, to see the full unity of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe in a single Metropolia, the foundation of the future new Local Church, helping build up a little part of it in my native East of England, is nearing its conclusion, but is not complete. Finally, the task for the Tsar, to explain his holiness and defend his healing vision of justice and balance after a century of global injustice and wars, which resulted directly from his overthrow by internal traitors, so-called allies, Great Britain, the USA and France, and enemies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and to implement that vision, so long delayed, has only just begun.

 

Twenty Years After Brexit: How the Northern Confederation Came Into Being

The last twenty years have been dramatic in the history of the fifty-two countries which make up today’s Northern Confederation. Looking back, the European Union, founded after 1945 by its US puppet-masters and based on a West Germany kept united in order to contain the Soviet Union, was a clear example of the arrogance and hubris of over-reach. And that hubris was caused by the EU elite’s total lack of contact with the real world. Today’s Confederation of Nations, a friendly group of free and sovereign nation-states based on the will of their independent peoples, is everything that the EU, a Fascist Customs Union, based on elitist tyranny, failed to be.

The real EU disasters began after the fall of the old Soviet Union at the end of 1991, which was deliberately timed to coincide with the US-imposed Maastricht Treaty and foundation of a ‘European Union’. This promised an absurd and much-feared Federal United States of Europe. There followed the launch of the euro and the imperialistic absorption and then rape and impoverishment of Eastern Europe. Then came the failure to deal with the rejection of the international EU elitist dictatorship by the British and European masses. Next were the catastrophes in the Ukraine and the Western Balkans, where the EU had bloodily meddled under US misguidance. This all meant that the EU had signed its own suicide-warrant.

After the UK voted to leave the EU twenty years ago today, followed by Eire, it broke apart. England, Scotland, Wales and the newly united Ireland, found themselves freed of EU tyranny. Such was their success as sovereign and free-trading nations that in 2025 ‘The Four’, as they were called were joined by other non-EU countries, then freedom-loving Scandinavia and their dependent Baltic countries, once they had freed themselves from US dictators. Thus, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, all joined what at once became known by the providential name of ‘The Northern Confederation’, making fourteen members in all and creating vengeful panic among the EU gerontocrats.

Seeing its success and tired of Brussels meddling in their internal affairs, within three years freedom-loving Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Lands, Austria and Slovenia had joined them, making nineteen members. However, the turning-point came a year later in 2029, when they were joined by the Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas III, and its dependent Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Moldova, Georgia and Malorossia, all non-EU countries. (Malorossia had been formed from the old Ukraine, which had collapsed in chaos and corruption, most of its territory happily returning to the Russian Federation and the extreme, and extremist, western tip unhappily returning to Poland, leaving a small central part around Kiev to form the new nation).

In 2030 these twenty-six were followed by Luxembourg, Malta, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania, making thirty-two nations. The EU had by now collapsed in acrimony and bankruptcy, with race riots breaking out among its few remaining members amid the panic of the ruling elite which had lost control and, indeed, all sense of reality. Some of its members eventually managed to escape and two years later the Northern Confederation was joined by Portugal, Spain, newly-independent Catalonia, Andorra, Serbia in its new borders with its reunited territories, Montenegro, Macedonia, Albania, Italy and San Marino, making forty-two members.

Three years later, in 2034, these were joined by the last old EU countries, at last admitting how wrong their former elites and their EU-controlled media had been. The delay in their joining had been caused by their enormous political problems, with Fascist minorities, immigrants and border issues to resolve. These countries were Poland, Croatia, the Netherlands – in its restored borders with what had been northern Belgium – newly-independent Brittany, and France with former southern Belgium now an integral part. Six months later these were followed by Bavaria (all six southern states of the old Germany) and Saxony (all seven northern states of the old Germany).

Now with forty-nine members and stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from Vladivostok to Rejkjavik, most observers thought that the Northern Confederation was complete, the old EU a dead nightmare. However, in January 2036, the forty-nine nation-states were joined by Canada and the newly-independent Alaska and New England (which had both freed themselves from the former USA, which had disunited and imploded in bankruptcy), making a true and continuous Northern Confederation. This made fifty-two independent but friendly sovereign nations, co-operating politically and economically, in effect uniting the northern quarter of the planet.

This leaves the world with four other stable groups of nations, or blocs – China with Mongolia, Tibet and reunited Korea, Christian (Sub-Saharan) Africa, Oceania (Australasia) and Latin America. These four blocs are now in relatively healthy situations. However, the remnants of the debt-ridden USA are in chaos. In bankrupt Japan, south-eastern Asia, the Indian Subcontinent and the stans, and in most of the Muslim world of North Africa and the Middle East there are also grave problems. Thus, the Northern Confederation leads the way. And all because of England’s historic vote for freedom exactly twenty years ago….

23 June 2036

 

International Nicholas II Conference, Colchester, 27 October 2018

This historic event will mark the 150th anniversary of the birth and 100th anniversary of the death and martyrdom of Russia’s last emperor and tsar.

Five speakers including Royal Russia Founder Paul Gilbert, Archpriest Andrew Philips, Nikolai Krasnov, authors Frances Welch and Marilyn Swezey, will deliver seven lectures on Nicholas II.

The Conference will take place in St John’s Orthodox Church in Colchester, England on Saturday, 27th October, between 10 am – 4 pm.

Tickets are £25 per person, and include all the lectures + refreshments. Parking is available. 

http://conference. tsarnicholas.info

Two Types of Missionary Work

Much is done in the name of missionary work. Some of it is good, but some of it is bad, for some compromises are made not in the name of pastoral dispensation (‘economy’), but in the name of seeking after personal popularity, that is, seeking after the vanity of fame, of having their photo everywhere. Those who do this (the name of the disgraced Protodeacon Andrey Kurayev comes to mind, among others…) always fall and their work comes to nothing.

The authentic missionary’s work is deep, it lasts for generations and centuries, it is always heartfelt, a living example of sacrifice. We can think of the apostles, and also equal to the apostles like St Helen and St Nina of Georgia, Sts Cyril and Methodius, St Olga, St Stephen of Perm, St Herman of Alaska, St Seraphim of Sarov, St John of Kronstadt, St Nicholas of Japan, St John of Shanghai….

The inauthentic missionary’s work, always headborne and not heartborne, is superficial and soon fades. Most of those ‘converted’ by its mere intellectualism fall into philosophy and theorizing, or else reformism, or else cynicism, always lapsing and disappearing, like their gurus, the pseudo-elders or self-appointed ‘startsy’, who ‘converted’ them to their personal fantasies.

How do we recognize the true missionary? ‘By their fruit, ye shall know them’.

 

When You Next Have Doubts….

Wonder at the vast night sky, the billions of galaxies and the quadrillions of stars and see God’s majesty and might, even if we are incapable of understanding His purpose.

Consider the distance of the Earth from the Sun and the tilt of the Earth on its axis and how this enables us to have seasons, and that if the Earth were at another distance or tilted at some other angle, no life would be possible on it.

Think about the balance of nature, how all the millions of species depend on one another and how if certain microscopic bacteria did not exist, nether would we.

Look at a snowflake and see how ‘in wisdom He has made all things’.

Pick up an acorn, examine the pattern on its cup. Is this mere chance? See how everything has a purpose, both practical and beautiful.

Taste a pear and ask yourself how it has this unique taste, different from an apple or some other fruit. Is this all random?

Gaze at the rain and think how saltwater is collected across the ocean, rises up, carried in clouds, but falls pure, when and where we need it, and that it too has its own beauty.

Listen to a song and ask why it moves us.

Watch a baby sleeping and understand that no human-being made this.

Smell a rose and grasp that only the Divine Maker can create such scents.

Stare at the sea and wonder at the vastness of the ocean and how its waters move because of gravity and the moon, invisible forces, which no man could ever make.

Touch a tree and try to understand how this grew from a tiny seed, its trunk and patterned bark, its branches, twigs, leaves, blossom and fruit, that come to life and die every year for centuries.

And then admit that you were foolish in your heart to have had doubts and understand that it was all your pride of mind.

The Pastor

At seminary, now nearly forty years ago, a debate raged about which was the most important subject: Dogmatic Theology, Liturgical Theology, Moral Theology, Ascetic Theology, the Holy Scriptures, Patristics, Church History, Canon Law, the Typikon, Languages, Psychology, Homilectics, Philosophy…Each teacher put forward convincing arguments for his subject and how vital it was. I listened attentively, ready to be convinced, but feeling that Moral Theology had a weaker argument, since it is only a branch or consequence, of Ascetic Theology, and that Philosophy was completely irrelevant in our impoverished Diaspora situation.

In retrospect, I now believe that the most important subject was the one not taught: Pastoral Theology. This, for me, is the summary of everything else, all else is contained within it, and it is the gauge of whether a parish works or not: if the priest does not understand the needs of his flock, does not adapt to them, while at the same time the flock adapts to the pastor and he leads them forward, on to repentance and so to an active Church life, then nothing else has any significance.

Sadly, the pastoral crisis rages everywhere. Outside the Church, Roman Catholicism has been largely destroyed by pervert clergy and a majority of Protestant clergy either seem to be atheists or else moralizing fanatics with some personal, sexual problem. However, inside the Church, we have little to be proud of. We have far too few churches and laypeople often distrust clergy, who are often seen as moneygrubbers. This comes about because a few actually are. As we say in Russian: ‘he is not a priest, but a ‘pop’’ (the contemptuous word for an ignorant, dishonest and, above all, heartless priest).

A rotten apple (and Judas was one of twelve apples who was) spoils the basket. Sadly, bandit-priests can be very manipulative – I have seen them, in all dioceses or ‘jurisdictions’, in all Local Churches, in all generations. They can manipulate and flatter naïve or already corrupt bishops, destroy a parish or even diocese, and a group of them can actually compromise whole Local Churches. This is why bishops have to listen to the people: they will boycott parishes, dioceses and Churches, where they allow such priests to perform services, or rather, to perform disservices. They are no example to anyone.

And so we come back to pastoral theology, which, actually and quite simply, is about loving our neighbours.

Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan said the following of the anti-pastor bandit-priest hypocrites, ‘do as I tell you, not as I do’, ordained by naive or else simoniac bishops, including those who before the Revolution betrayed the Tsar (as also did many bishops):

‘Rich priests crucified Christ, rich priests overthrew the Tsar, rich priests will lead the people to Antichrist’.