Category Archives: Ancient Western Holiness

The Situation of the Orthodox Church in 2024

Introduction

The Orthodox Church is a Confederation of sixteen Local Orthodox Churches, totalling some 200 million faithful, with about 80,000 priests and 1,000 bishops. Most Orthodox Christians live in Eastern Europe, though there are minorities in most countries in the world.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Greek Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople (now called Istanbul) stands out as the historically most prestigious Local Orthodox Church. For over a thousand years of history until 1453, it was powerful and in Constantinople there lived the only Orthodox Emperor. However, today this Patriarchate is very small in numbers, with a few million faithful at most, of whom fewer than one thousand actually live in Istanbul.

Of these sixteen Local Churches, the Russian Church of the Patriarchate of Moscow also stands out, partly because many see it as the successor to the Church of Constantinople, but above all because it has, or used to have, about 70% of the total number of the faithful, 140 million. This is because it is, or used to be, multinational, with a third of its members Non-Russians of many nationalities. This is unlike the other Local Churches which are in effect National Churches. However, today, this is increasingly less the case, as we shall see below.

The Negative

As a result of the pre-eminent positions of these two Local Churches, the powerbrokers of this world have always striven to take control of their senior clergy.

Thus, after the Ottoman capture of the City in 1453, the Constantinople Church gradually fell under foreign, later French or British, control, with their ambassadors appointing the leader or Patriarch of the Church for payments of money to the Ottomans. After the fall of the British Empire at the end of the Second World War, Constantinople came under the control of the successor Empire, the USA.

In 1948 its Patriarch, Maximos V, was removed by the Americans by force and flown in President Truman’s personal plane into exile in Switzerland, dying there in 1972. He was at once replaced with a Greek-American puppet-patriarch, who proceeded to do anything the Americans wanted. Some forty years ago I got to know a Greek bishop who had been Patriarch Maximos’ personal deacon at the time and was an eyewitness to those events. He told me how the CIA thugs took Patriarch Maximos with violent threats, intimidating him with possible death if he refused to obey them. ‘We have ways of making you come with us’, were their exact words.

As for the Russian Patriarchate, after 1700 it came under the control of Protestant-style laymen, called ‘oberprokurors’, who were appointed by the government. Russian bishops were appointed by politicians, some anti-Orthodox and often strongly anti-monastic, just as in the Protestant Churches, in Germany, Scandinavia or England. For example, in the latter country the Prime Minister, who may be an atheist or a Hindu for instance, is still responsible for appointing all Anglican bishops. As for the former Russian Empire, after 1917 the situation became even worse and Soviet atheist laymen openly persecuted and controlled the Russian episcopate, most of whom it murdered and martyred. After the fall of atheism in 1991, the Russian Church revived, but its senior clergy remained with the subservient mentality of the previous three centuries.

As a result of such politicisation, Orthodox who are part of the Russian Church but who live outside the borders of the Russian Federation and are not Russians, are leaving the various parts of the Russian Church. This is most obvious in the Ukraine, but also in Moldova, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as in Western countries. They do not wish to belong to any part of the Russian Church, which is being nationalised, that is, Russianised. They want to worship Christ, not a national, political system. In other words, the Russian Church is becoming alien to them. As one of its very young but senior metropolitans, filled with ethnic hatred and conceit, said when he expelled some Non-Russian clergy and faithful from the Church recently and handed them to another Local Church: ‘Too bad for them’.

In this way, clergy and people are leaving the Russian Church because of their desire for self-determination, they are ‘voting with their feet’. As a result, the missionary work of the Russian Church has all but ceased. Who wants to belong to a Church which persecutes its own? Only a few extremists. The numbers of the faithful in the Russian Church could eventually go down to 50% of the total number of Orthodox from 70%, as a result of the foundation of new Local, or National, Churches for Orthodox, who live in independent countries or regions outside the Russian Federation. These could be formed in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Western Europe, South-East Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America or elsewhere.

As a result of the acts of politicians there is at present a serious schism between the Constantinople and Russian Churches, which between them number some 72% of all Orthodox. In 2018 the Constantinople Church, egged on and very generously financed by the US State Department, was told to try and destroy the Russian Church. Therefore, Constantinople created a purely political schism with the Russian Church by opening its jurisdiction on what had for centuries been uniquely Russian territories, namely in Estonia, the Ukraine and now in Lithuania.

Consequently, since then the Russian Church has refused not only any communion with the Constantinople Church, but also with other Greek Churches or bishops who for ethnic, financial or political reasons support Constantinople. This includes the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Russian Church has in revenge opened many parishes on African territory, which Alexandria has claimed for nearly a century. Both sides are excommunicating each other and defrocking each other’s clergy tit for tat, quoting the canons in false justification for their own purely political and punitive purposes. There is no Love, only the spirit of revenge, and so the Church is under attack and there is chaos.

The Positive

Some might conclude from the above that the situation in the Orthodox Church is dark and desperate, given the views of senior hierarchs of both the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow and their schism. However, those outside the Church refuse to understand a vital fact: senior clergy are not the Church. This is important because senior clergy die and are replaced. There is no reason to think that the succeeding senior clergy will take the same line as before. All wars sooner or later end in negotiations.

For example, within the Patriarchate of Constantinople there are a great many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people, who remain faithful to Orthodoxy. Many there regret the anti-Russian aggressiveness of their Patriarchal authorities and their uncanonical actions under US pressure, just as they regret the equally aggressive Russian response. When asked by the faithful about those actions which have led directly to schism, such pious Greeks simply reply: ‘It is all politics. Pay no attention’.

In other words, the storm will pass, just as the storms of earlier centuries have also passed. And within the Russian Patriarchate, most also have the same viewpoint. Here there are also many pious bishops, priests, monastics and people who refuse to take part in the politicisation of any part of the Russian Church, either by the Russian secret service, the FSB, or the American, the CIA, which are both trying to undermine the Russian Church, bribing individual corrupt clerics.

As a local example we have for exactly fourteen years been greatly supported by a new White Russian family in East Anglia, Countess Benkendorf, strongly supported by Earl (to give him his English title, which neither of them uses publicly) Benkendorf. They support the Tsar and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, having a new martyr as a direct ancestor, and give no support to mere politicians in any part of the now unfree Russian Church. They are among the new White Russians who now live here in East Anglia, but are in fact relatives of the old White Russians. For the last ambassador of Imperial Russia to Great Britain was Count Alexander Benkendorf (+ 1917) who lived here with his wife Countess Sophia (+ 1928 in Ipswich), whose descendants were also friends of my late aunt in Colchester.

They are devoted to the local St Edmund the Martyr, the last King of East Anglia and have East Anglian rose-growers and sweet pea growers among their close friends. Earl and Countess Benkendorf reject all politics and extremes in the Russian Church, whether of the old politicised and money-minded White Russians, who worked for MI5 and MI6, or of the new nationalistic and secular-minded post-Soviet Russians. They remain in the centre, in the mainstream, following the golden mean, the middle way of the Fathers and the Saints. The Earl and Countess represent us all, they are our Connection, but they are just local examples of a far, far greater and worldwide movement.

Thus, apart from the majorities in both these Patriarchates who reject politicisation, most of the other fourteen Local Orthodox Churches, although slightly more or less close to one side or the other, still keep their independence. Nearly all stand somewhere in the middle, not taking sides, like the traditional Greeks and Russians described above. We note especially the position of the Romanian Church, the second largest Local Church, and of the Albanian Church, together with the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch and the Polish and Serbian Churches. They all show great independence. Here bishops and the faithful insist on the catholicity and conciliarity of the Church. We all call for a Church Council, where the Church can come to unity through depoliticisation, the rejection of bribes and political pressures from States and their secular minions, who wrongly think that they can buy the Church.

Conclusion

Non-believers, as well as those who believe only weakly, overlook Divine Providence in the history of the Church. The greatest proof that the Church is run not by human beings, but by Divine Providence, is that it has survived extraordinary human stupidity, pathological individuals and incompetence for nearly 2,000 years. Human institutions, like clerical elites, survive for a few centuries at best, and often only for a few decades or even a few years. God’s Providence protects us, for the Church belongs to Christ the Son of God, not to mere men, and Christ is always victorious.

 

Why Has the West Fallen into Atheist Culture, but not Russia?

Seeing this title, many will say: ‘Absurd! Russia fell into atheism for 75 years. Anyway, I know two Russians personally and they are both atheists and refuse to baptise their children. On the other hand, I know several Western people and they all go to church every week!’ To such, I simply reply: ‘You have misread the title’. Let me explain.

There are only a few places left in Europe where people still practise their Faith. Thus, there are still some believing Protestants in Northern Ireland, some real Roman Catholics in Malta and some active Orthodox, particularly in Moldova and parts of Romania. Outside that, church-going accounts at best for 1-2% of virtually any general population, whether in Spain, Greece, France, Russia, Italy, Bulgaria, Germany, the Ukraine or anywhere else in Europe.

Countries that a generation ago were still Roman Catholic, like Italy, Ireland and Poland, have long since dissolved into Secularism, which has long been the norm in Northern Europe. Ex-Protestant Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Britain have led the way and there the decline of religious practice has gone even faster, less than 1% of the population practise. The rest of the Western world is going the same way and rapidly, towards 0%, as the last believing generation dies out and is not replaced.

However, Christianity is about a lot more than church-going. That is only one indicator. Getting baptised, married and buried in church are others. Here again we can see that since the early 1960s, these practices too ceased, marriage ended in divorce, and Christian burial was largely replaced by pagan cremation in incinerators, like the Nazis used. With the Protestantisation of Roman Catholicism in the early 1960s, there is no real difference between it and Protestantism. However, the greatest indicator of real Christianity is your national, cultural values and the way of life you lead as a result of those values. The clearest example of this today is the acceptance of ‘homosexual’ marriage.

The acceptance of marriage as uniquely heterosexual was in fact the last Christian value left. ‘Homosexual’ marriage is the final stage in deChristianisation. It was introduced into the Netherlands in 2001 and through a range of other Western countries until Germany in 2017. After the understanding of marriage as uniquely heterosexual disappeared in formerly Protestant and Catholic countries in Europe and Northern America, others began to go. We can see this in the decision of the EU-appointed Greek ruling elite last week, when it in turn imposed ‘homosexual’ marriage on its population. Greeks are being asked to return to the sexual practices described by their pagan philosophers, writers and historians of the time before Christ.

After homosexual ‘marriage’, transgenderism, the result of the end and confusion of ‘traditional’ male/female roles, the subsequent breakdown of family life with the epidemic of divorce and so the absence of father and mother role-models for children, inevitably follows. Christianity in the countries which accept transgenderism is clearly more or less dead. In other words, in talking of Christianity we are not talking merely about church-going or about those who profess a mental atheism (‘I don’t believe in God’), we are talking about the way people live, their national culture.

For example, most people in Europe, from France to Russia, never set foot in any church, but they can still be divided into two categories, those who live values that belong to Christian culture and those who live values that belong to atheist culture. Despite Soviet atheism, their proportions between France and Russia are very different, in France an ever-decreasing minority belongs to Christian culture, in Russia an ever-increasing majority. In other words, it is the direction of travel that is significant. In this respect, France and Russia are like two trains which have passed by one another, going in opposite directions on different tracks.

Notably, a few decades ago we could see how in officially atheist Russia, ‘Soviet’ people professed Christian values. There homosexuality was banned and transgenderism was unthinkable, and people professed the ‘normal’ Christian values of social justice. ‘Social conservatism’ and social justice side by side. Indeed, the latter is unthinkable there today. This is what in today’s Western societies is called ‘social conservatism’, and yet for Christians it is what we call ‘normal’ and for us it is ‘homosexual’ marriage and transgenderism that are extremist.

Why the apparent contradiction between official Soviet atheism and actual practice in everyday life? Simply because although Soviet people were supposed to be atheists in their heads, they still professed the values of Christian culture in their hearts, that is, in their way of life. Moreover, when the Soviet regime fell in 1991, official atheism also fell and 100 million people got baptised within just a few years. They had not been baptised before, only because baptism had been forbidden, not because they did not want to be baptised. In reality, they had all the time been living largely according to Christian cultural values, an integral part of their national culture.

This is also clear from the fact that so-called ‘Soviet’ free healthcare, education and social protection had nothing to do with the atheist Soviet Union, but existed before it, in the Tsar’s Russia. They were simply an inheritance from pre-Soviet Russia, like literacy, which had reached a high level before 1917, or technical progress like electrification and industrialisation, which had all been developing very rapidly before 1917. Thus, the Soviet Union won the Second World War thanks to generals and officers from the Tsar’s Army and military technicians, military inventors, scientists and engineers, all trained in the Tsar’s Russia.

In other words, in Soviet Russia Christian culture survived, even though it excluded church-going, as the atheist elite had closed most churches. When atheism, a Western ideological import, collapsed there in 1991, Christian culture was fundamentally all that remained. The fact that a small minority of Russians are still atheists and their children are unbaptised does not mean that they do not profess Christian cultural values at all. What I am saying is that in Russia, Christianity has permeated the national culture so thoroughly that there is no real alternative to it and even those who are mentally atheists largely profess Christian culture in important respects.

In the West all is different, because for nearly a thousand years there have been two cultural spheres, one secular, the other religious. In other words, over nearly a thousand years of Western history the religious has progressively dissolved into the secular, like a religious flask that has emptied through percolation into a secular flask, through a millennial drip-feed. It is this that has resulted in modern Western Secularism. Here there is then a long-established inherently Western alternative to Christian culture – Secularism.

In Orthodox Christianity, as in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism, indeed in all world religions, civilisations and cultures, except in the Western, there is no separation into the religious and the secular. There is no separation of ‘Church’ and State. In the Orthodox context, the national culture is Orthodoxy. Thus, Russian Communist Young Pioneers said that: ‘We are all more or less Orthodox’, even as they were stopping people from going to church. The Belarussian President Lukashenko says that he is an ‘Orthodox atheist’. Unbaptised Serbs tell me that they are ‘Orthodox’. Greeks tell me that: ‘You go to church? You’re a better Orthodox than we are’. I emphasise the last three words ‘than we are’.

All these people are Orthodox by national culture, they cannot be anything else. If they are not, they denationalise themselves, like some Russians did to themselves in the 1990s and as homosexual Greek couples do to themselves today. Some who left Orthodoxy come back to Orthodoxy, saying that they cannot do otherwise because otherwise they renounce themselves. (This does not mean that they go to church. They will tell you that they are put off by money-grubbing priests, who are ordained by money-grubbing bishops – so am I, and I suffered at the sharp end of such for many, many years. That we do not care about money has always made our churches popular). However, in Orthodox societies once you are baptised or received back into the Church, it is for life. You cannot renounce that culture. You can sin, you can stop practising, you can even blaspheme, but you cannot renounce it. It is in your soul, it is in the culture which you belong to.

The question then is: Why is Western civilisation different from all others? Why does it have a secular alternative? What happened nearly a thousand years ago, when Secularism was born and made the West so different from all other faiths, civilisations and cultures, which have no secular alternative? Of a host of unanimous Western historians of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, English (Dawson, Southern, Morris, Brooke, Brown, Moore, Bartlett), French (Le Goff, Pognon, Feller, Poly, Bournazel) German (Tellenbach, Fichtenau, Leyser), Spanish (Fontana) and others, none perhaps has summed it up so well as Tom Holland in his 2008 work Millennium:  

‘The three decades that preceded the showdown in Canossa (in 1077) and the four that followed it were…a period when the ideals of Christendom…’changed in almost every respect’. Here…was the true making of the West…Pope Gregory VII (1020-1085) was…introducing to the modern West its first experience of revolution…In truth, there existed no precedent for the upheaval exemplified by Canossa – neither in the history of the Roman Church, nor in that of any other culture…there was only one break in the evolution of the West… a cataclysm without parallel in the annals of Eurasia’s other major cultures…the defining characteristic of Western civilisation. That the world can be divided into church and state, and that these two realms should exist distinct from each other: here are presumptions that the eleventh century made ‘fundamental to European society and culture, for the first time and permanently’…Certainly, to a pious Muslim, the notion that the political and religious spheres can be separated is a shocking one – as it was to many of Gregory’s opponents…Not that it had ever remotely been Gregory’s own intention to banish God from an entire dimension of human affairs…A piquant irony: that the very concept of a secular society should ultimately have been due to the papacy; Voltaire and the First Amendment, multiculturalism and gay weddings: all have served as waymarks on the road from Canossa. (Pp. xviii- xxii).

In other words, fatally split Western civilisation has for nearly a thousand years had an alternative to faith, and that alternative is inherently culturally Western. This alternative is called Secularism and it began nearly a thousand years ago when, ironically, the anti-people, pro-elitist Papacy decided to split its world into two spheres, the religious versus the secular, the compulsorily celibate clergy versus the people. This meant that, ironically, it was the Papacy with its new philosophy of ’scholastic theology’, which created an alternative to the religious – the secular, since it gave up on the concept of sacralising or incorporating the secular into the religious. And this philosophy claimed to be rational and reasonable.

In any case, today this Secularism dominates and predominates to such an extent that the religious sphere is dead and dying throughout the Western world. Moreover, the West has always aggressively tried to export this Secularism and impose it on the rest of the world. So far, outside the Western world, once the West had overthrown the Russian monarchy, Russian society fell to it for a time, but eventually it came out of Secularism because it was alien to its national tradition. Now, the Westernised Greek elite has fallen to it, though not the masses of the people. Other Orthodox too may fall to it, but in the end it will all be rejected. As for the future of the Western world itself, it has only one chance of survival. This is to return to its values of the First Millennium before the fatal choice of inventing Secularism that it made in the eleventh century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foreword to the Fourth Edition

The priest must be above the lordly arrogance of the well-born and overprotected and not cringe or fawn before that arrogance; he must not lower himself or be cowardly before the powerful of this world, but conduct himself with a sense of his clerical dignity, gravely, evenly, in a pastoral manner – and serve unhurriedly, not to please people. He must denounce whims, lordly arrogance and any coldness towards matters concerning the faith.

St John of Kronstadt

Local Transformations Since 2014

Fifty years since the first of the essays in Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition was written and nearly thirty years since the first edition was published, we have been asked to reissue the anthology, as the third edition has sold out. We are hoping that this will be ready by Easter.

Since that third edition appeared in 2014, we have bought and established more new churches in Eastern England, in Norwich and in Little Abington, just outside Cambridge. These followed the foundation of the new inter-Orthodox parish in my native Colchester in 2008, though we received not a penny from the Church authorities. Indeed, quite the opposite. We bought this extremely large wooden building and opened it as a church for Orthodox of all nationalities against the views of the clerical doomsayers, who later became jealous and tried to close us and even told others that we were closed (!), just as we gained ever more parishioners. Thus, we now have permanent parishes in Essex, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. This still leaves Suffolk without our own permanent church building. There is work to do here, though we do have a special, indeed mystical, place here in mind.

Not having closed our main church in Colchester during the covid persecution – at one point we were apparently the only church to be open in the country – our multinational parish community thrives. Furthermore, my native Colchester was made a City in one of the last acts of the old Queen. And once we were safely anchored inside the Romanian Orthodox Church in February 2022, we received another influx of Orthodox, including refugees from the tragic deviation of a schismatic and a spiritually alien ‘Russian Orthodox’ sect. (You do not obey schismatics). Today, in 2024, with a throughput of 5,000 Orthodox a year, an average Sunday brings 200 Orthodox to church and there are Sundays with as many as 400. Then the church building begins to look too small.

The Patriarchate of Bucharest allowed us to defend the church from the swaggering foreigner and ‘confound their politics and frustrate their knavish tricks’. First, the money-obsessed wished to take the church from us by legal subterfuge, then, power gone to their heads, he persecuted us and tried to close all our churches and missions and prevent us from providing services and books in understandable English. All this went against the fruit of our life’s work, forty years of struggle, which they tried to destroy. Thank God for the canonical protection of the Romanian Orthodox Church, as agreed by the two Patriarchs, in view of the new narcissistic cowboy culture of the psychopathic schism which we opposed.

With its repressed homosexuality (which is why it is so aggressive), bullying, betrayals and total lack of respect for local people, language and culture, it made the CIA task of destroying the Russian Church from the inside so easy and at no cost. It was all so different from the old and noble White Russian culture of the past. To this new mentality we repeat the old English saying: Tell the truth and shame the devil. We are English, our forebears fought against Hitler because we love freedom and we the people shall not be persecuted by any more arrogant foreigners.

International Transformations Since 2014

However, our small struggle in the East of England against a proud foreigner has been mirrored on a vast scale in world-shaking events. For the publication of this new edition comes at what we can only call a millennial turning-point in history, one which we already sensed was coming in the seventies of the last century and which is now here. The headlines succeed one another at breathtaking speed: Protestant apostasy, Brexit, Trump, a schismatic American-founded ‘church’ (another one) in the Ukraine, covid, transgenderism, the African Exarchate, the corruption of Washington, Prince Harry in a narcissistic trap, the proxy war in the Ukraine, the death of the Queen, the fall of Germany, genocide in Palestine, BRICS expansion, the apostasy of the papacy, the cancer of the new King. Astonishing tectonic shifts are turning the world upside down, the Angel of History is looking East, while the West, corroded and paralysed from the inside, looks on.

300 years after the Russian Orthodox Lands (Rus’) became an Empire, based on Western aristocratic ideology, and 100 years after the formation of the USSR, based on Western proletarian ideology, the now Russian Federation has been forced by Western aggression to choose between the West and the Rest (of the world). At the receiving end of Western bullying and betrayals in the Ukraine, the Federation was welcomed by the Rest, that which used to be called ‘the Global South’. This is a historic moment, the long-awaited restoration of the sovereign and multipolar world, the attack on which began not 500 years ago, as some wrongly write, but 1,000 years ago.

The ‘cancellation’ of Russia, illegally-sanctioned by the aggressive West, and the Shakespearian tragedy of the American war against the Ukraine and Russia in the Ukraine are precisely the processes which both the Russian Federation and the Russian Orthodox Church have to go through, in order to be cleansed of their spiritual, moral and financial corruption. Only then can the unity of the threefold Russian Lands be reconstituted. This war is precisely existential for this reconstitution of Rus’. Only thus will a renewed, de-Sovietised, decentralised and financially and morally cleansed Russian Orthodox Church be made ready for its real destiny after three long centuries of tragic losses, illusions, misdirections and divisions. The schismatic traitors and bullies, including those who have infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church, have been revealed. Indeed, we were used as one of the baits used to trap the naïve narcissists, who thought they were destroying us, before the Great Cleansing could begin.

The unnecessary American war against the tragic Ukraine and Russia, indeed against the whole of Rus’, which started in 2014 and is still being fought in the Ukraine, largely by Ukrainians on both sides, could have ended within a few weeks. Instead, the war is taking over two years, as the West has in fact demanded that the Russian Federation not only liberate, demilitarise and denazify the American-occupied Ukraine (its original aims), but the whole of NATO. Delusional narcissists and their lies (narcissists are by definition always delusional and always tell lies) will be driven out as the real enemies of both Ukrainians and Russians, just as we drove out the delusional narcissist here. As regards Europe, now a vassal of the USA, its spiritual and so moral self-destruction, which began in Sarajevo in 1914, continued in Warsaw in 1939 and was renewed in Kiev in 2014, continues apace.

The Hubris of the USA and Its Vassals

In Greek mythology Hubris, the narcissistic demon of insolence, violence and outrageously rude behaviour was, according to some, the daughter of Dyssevia, which means Impiety. And so it is in Biblical language too – the impiety of pride always goes before the fall. Hubris is the superiority complex of arrogant pride – we are better than you, exceptional, and therefore you must do whatever we want. This is in fact the cruel racial pride of Roman paganism which, revived, began to reinfest Western Europe in the eleventh century. It was the same delusion of hubris as had infested the builders of the Tower of Babel, then the eleventh-century Papacy, Great Britain before the Titanic and 1914, then was renamed Nazism in Germany, and from there contaminated the USA, indeed many ‘ex’-Nazis were at the founding of the CIA. This last infestation became especially severe after the fall of the Marxist pseudo-paradise, established in the former Russian Empire after 1917 and falling in 1991, whose fall the elite in Washington wrongly credited itself with.

This is not the end of history, as falsely announced in 1991, but it is the end of the history of that hubristic Western elite. For the great loser of the tragic war against the Ukraine and Russia, the result of 1991 and still ongoing in the Ukraine, is precisely the US elite. This war is existential for the elite, whose first victims are not the poor Ukrainians, but the longsuffering peoples of Northern America and Western Europe. The elite will have to dissolve its fragmenting NATO pact and flee back across the Atlantic in order to struggle to keep American unity, which is threatened by the current internal disintegration of the USA and its huge debt. Will Alaska return to Russia, as some believe?

All the US vassals in East Asia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia, will be freed, just as those on the now sinkable US aircraft carrier of Israel. Other losers will be the Baltics, Scandinavia and the UK, that is, the whole basically ex-Protestant North-Western and North-Eastern Europe, which so deludedly backed the ex-Protestant USA. Impoverished Europe has made itself not only the political and military graveyard of the United States, but also an economic graveyard.

In North-Western and South-Western Europe

The for now twenty countries of Western Europe (North-Western and South-Western Europe) will become a Confederation after the collapse of the US-made EU and after they have rebecome nation-states. These countries are for the moment: its leader, Germany, then Switzerland and Liechtenstein; Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland; the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; the UK and Ireland; France and Monaco; Andorra, Spain and Portugal; Italy, San Marino and Malta. Artificial unions like the UK and Belgium may not survive, new nations, like Catalonia, Scotland and Wales, may re-emerge. The tiny population of Scandinavia will have to back down from hostility to the reality of the reunited Russian Lands. In the UK, the US-manipulated British Establishment elite will be cast off, new leaders will appear. Hopefully, the liberation of the UK will lead to a reunited Ireland, to an independent Scotland and Wales and, above all, after a thousand-year wait, lead at last to a Sovereign England. Thus, the Isles of the North Atlantic (IONA) can be cleansed of the parasitic, vampire-like British imperial myth, which enslaved it after the 1066 tragedy and has sucked on our blood ever since.

In North-Eastern Europe

In North-Eastern Europe, the three tiny, impoverished and depopulated Baltic States and Finland may yet become truly independent republics, allied with the future Union State of Rus’ in order to survive economically. Certainly, they will all have to rid themselves of their US-appointed puppet elites, stop behaving like disruptive teenagers, come to terms with reality as mature adults and, with Russian help, become prosperous once more. The fifth country here, largely ex-Catholic Poland, already has its own Local Orthodox Church, and is where remaining traditional Catholics have worked out what is really going on. It will also have to make its peace in maturity with the reality of a reunited Rus’ and stop wasting money on useless weapons. This will be all the more urgent for the Polish Republic, once Germany returns to sanity from anti-German hysteria and commits anew to mutually beneficial agreements with the Russian Federation.

In South-Eastern Europe

The great victors of the American war in the ‘borderlands’, which is the translation of the Russian word, ‘Ukraina’, will be Hungary and Slovakia. Then, by repentance, can come a reunited Serbia and Montenegro, (North) Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova, Greece and Cyprus, followed by Austria, Slovenia, Croatia and Czechia, with a Bosnia-Herzegovina reintegrated and an at last prosperous Albania, attracting like a magnet Albanians at present living outside it, especially those in Serbian Kosovo and Macedonia. Thus, all the for now sixteen countries of South-Eastern Europe, many of them Orthodox, can be drawn into a Russia-friendly but independent Confederation, part of BRICS, supplied by Russian energy. All of them have a Local Orthodox Church except for Austria and Hungary, which will surely form a new Austro-Hungarian Local Church.

The Return of the Church

I apologise for the long geopolitical digression above. However, it is necessary, for the results of geotheology are precisely geopolitics and pastoral. Whereas once people could find some sort of spiritual refuge and survival in parts of the Protestant denominations, and then in Roman Catholicism, today most can see that in the Western world where those two decadent structures are not entirely dead, they are rapidly dying. The tragedy of the second millennium Western world is that it ended up by voluntarily and suicidally renouncing the values of its own Civilisation, thus ensuring its own death. However, this also means that the Western Lands now have an opportunity to return beyond those to their real roots in the first millennium.

When the masses return to the Church of their ancestors, we must be ready for them, like forerunners, who prepared the way for them. Schismatic psychopaths whose evil deeds have already gone down in history, will have to stop persecuting their own clergy, trying to close their own churches, forbidding their own clergy from doing missionary work, and receive former Roman Catholics and Protestants into the Church canonically, as the 1,000 canonical Orthodox bishops in the world do, outlawing such schismatic novelties as ‘corrective baptism’ and ‘corrective ordination’, as practised by at least one Russian bishop in the USA, and using accessible books written in accessible English, not in a pseudo-archaic American jargon.

Orthodoxy, which has providentially returned to Western Europe, must make ready to receive the believing remnant after it had been usurped for a millennium by structures which are now rapidly disappearing into the black hole of apostasy. The Orthodox Church, severely battered, bruised and abused after a thousand years of persecutions from both inside and outside, has returned. We are indeed at a turning-point. We have made ready for the return of many here in Eastern England, preparing the way against all the extremists of the secularist left and the arrogant foreigners of the secularist right, ever keeping to the Royal Path.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester,

England

 

The Globalist Empire or an Alliance of Sovereign Civilisations

Introduction: Missionary Work and Repentance

Missionary work among heterodox Christians in the Western world has had very limited success, because it needs millennial repentance to become Orthodox Christians. By ‘millennial repentance’ I mean not just the realisation that the West has been in a state of apostasy for a few decades, as nostalgic and conservative old people have it, or even a few centuries, as anti-Protestants have it, but for a full thousand years, for the whole second millennium of Western history. There must be a realisation that the apostasy began in the eleventh century, with ‘The Making of Europe’ (1). Between the year 1000 and the year 1100 the old Western European Civilisation of the Saints was usurped, revolutionised and replaced with a Feudal Empire of power and wealth (2). For example, the First Crusade did not begin in the Holy Land in 1096, but in England in 1066, though organised Western violence actually began in 1030. In other words, Western Europeans were the first victims of those who had usurped the Western Civilisation of the Saints, Americans are only the last. Newcomers to Orthodox Christianity have to grasp this.

Only once those who have shown an initial interest in the Church, have been to real services and have grasped this point, can newcomers start casting off their old mentality. This is vital because otherwise newcomers will come to the Church with their old negative baggage, try to impose it, naturally fail, and then lapse and disappear. It is not enough to join the Church, they must become Orthodox, taking on the Orthodox Christian mind and so way of life. Here there is a great difference with the heterodox mentality, which contents itself with abstract agreement, but there is no conversion of words into actions. Orthodox Christianity, as shown in the Gospels, the Acts (not Thoughts) of the Apostles and the Epistles is a way of life, not some intellectual abstraction or ideology. We are judged on our actions, not on our words and thoughts, for only actions incarnate words and thoughts. The most important witness to this is the Lives (not Thoughts) of the Saints, especially in our context, the Lives of the Saints of Western Europe, all those who are in communion with All the other Saints of Orthodoxy.

A Competitive Empire or Co-operating Civilisations

The contemporary world of eight billion human beings is divided into two parts, which are not at all halves. One part is a small, but extremely powerful and uniform minority and the other is a vast, until recently not powerful and diverse majority. The first part can be called ‘unipolar’, as it has only one centre, it is unicentric, imperial and anti-civilisational. The second part can be called ‘multipolar’, as it has many centres, it is polycentric, ’non-imperial’ and multicivilisational. For the sake of argument, we shall simplify the numbers involved and call them one billion and seven billion, though probably even a division into 5% of the world population and 95% of the population would be generous to the minority, given that so many of us who were born in Western countries have no sympathy for our elites and refuse to be brainwashed and zombified by their endless propaganda. On the one side is the Globalist Empire, and on the other side is the Sovereign World, an Alliance of Independent Civilisations, at present known as the Russian-founded BRICS. What exactly is meant by these two opposing realities?

The Empire: Western ‘Liberal Democracy’

One the one hand, there is the Empire, which is now centred in Washington. It consists of Northen America, the USA and Canada, and Western Europe, which at the moment can be defined as stretching as far as the borders of the Russian Lands. However, it also includes post-1945 vassal-states like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel. Although the Empire calls itself ‘democratic’, in reality, it is run by oligarchs (e.g. Trump) or the candidates of oligarchs (e.g. bank clerks like Macron and Sunak, Biden, Scholz and Starmer). People have to vote for one or other of them – no others are permitted, no free choice is allowed. The Empire is ruled by banksters and financiers, hence its system is called Capitalist. In other words, the Empire is ruled by the love of capital, venal and mercantile interests and banks. Although the first great bank, the Bank of Venice, was founded only in 1582, its history began among the merchants of Venice (fifteen years before Shakespeare wrote a play by this name), long before, for their bandits and thugs had already plundered and looted the Christian Capital in Constantinople in 1204.

The financial centre was transferred from unsafe and declining Venice to Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 1609, from there to a newly purged England in 1694 (the wars of Cromwell, the murderer of the King of England and a million Irishmen, had been financed from the Netherlands and the old line of monarchs replaced in 1688 by a false monarch, financed by Isaac Israel Suasso from the Netherlands). Finally, in the twentieth century the centre was transferred to New York with the Federal Reserve, established in 1913, not by coincidence one year before the First European War in 1914. The Globalist Empire is obsessed by finance (even the GDP of the Empire is unreal and is based only on finance, not on the production of goods), law of the jungle, ‘dog eat dog’ competition, stock exchanges, share prices, exchange rates, credit ratings etc. The essence of the Globalist Empire is Nazism, the power of the few over the many, regardless of how many hundreds of millions of people, especially, Non-Western Europeans die as a result of its ruthless imperialism and exploitation. Its only ‘value’ is inhuman – it is money.

The Sovereign World: The Alliance of Civilisations

In 1914, the only countries in the world which remained uncolonised by the Globalist Empire were monarchies: Russia, China, Ethiopia, Thailand, Morocco. Since monarchies ensured popular sovereignty in every sense, including religious, political and financial sovereignty, clearly, the Empire had to overthrow them, especially the Russian, which was by far the largest and by far the richest. However, even the overthrow of the Russian Monarchy by its globalist agents in 1917 and then the murder of the Tsar and his Family, ordered from New York, did not lead to Russia’s colonisation by the Empire, though various Western countries did attempt invasions of the former Russian Empire. Later, the same attempt to colonise China also backfired. Today, both Russia and China have essentially returned to being monarchies, even though President Vladimir Putin does not have the title of Tsar of All the Russias, he is that, and even though President Xi does not have the title of the Emperor of China, he is that. For they rule out of national interest, out of patriotism, they want their countries to be sovereign and independent.

With independent extractive, industrial and agricultural production and services, the economies of the Sovereign World are regulated by their States for the benefit of all the people, not just for a small number of ultra-wealthy oligarchs, as in the Globalist Empire, which is patterned by ‘trickle up’, not by ‘trickle down’ economies. The Empire laughably calls these countries ‘autocracies’. They are not, they are part of the Non-Colonial, Sovereign World. Many therefore want to join these ‘autocracies’, indeed, the whole conscious and still free world. The essence of the Sovereign World is Anti-Nazism, the power of the many over the few. This is attractive to the countries of the ‘Global South’, to all whose countries have been taken over at some point by the Globalist Empire. The Denazification of Europe is now under way, with the freeing of the occupied and Nazified Ukraine from the Empire. As for Hungary and Slovakia, they are escaping EU tyranny by themselves. Others, at first in Eastern Europe, then elsewhere, including in the so-called USA, will follow, as the peoples rise and take control of their own destinies.

The Cleansing of the Orthodox Church from Traitors to the Globalists

Of the many faiths and philosophies in the Sovereign World, such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Orthodox Christianity, it is the last that I have known very well for fifty years and from inside. Without the slightest doubt the main problem of Orthodox Christianity and the Orthodox Churches is the corruption of its episcopate, some of whom are traitors to the Faith of the Church. Some who know history will say that this has always been so and think at once of the notorious Patriarch Nestorius, always a politician, never a churchman. That is true, but never to such a vital degree as today. Episcopal corruption follows the same pattern as in the Empire’s founding ideologies of Non-Orthodox Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, many of whose leaders are careerists and were corrupted long before these individual Orthodox leaders. Here I will speak only of the largest Local Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, some 70% of the whole Church and which I know best. Two ideologies are promoted by these traitors and often by the selfsame individuals. These ideologies are:

Extremism

Extremism in the Church is represented by two political and secularist, that is, anti-spiritual, currents: ultra-liberalism/modernism/ecumenism and ultra-conservativism/traditionalism/sectarianism. The first is pro-Western, not traditional and likes to change or ‘reform’ the ways of the Church according to the latest secular fashions. The adherents are often intellectuals and appear to put greater trust in the delusions of their own intellectual powers than in the bimillennial Tradition of the Church and the piety of her people. The second set of individuals are often narrow, pharisaical, ghettoish, attaching huge importance to tiny details, erecting national, local or personal customs into vital and saving universal traditions. In other words, these provincialist people are intensely inward-looking and do not see the world around them. However, the differences between the two extremes are mostly ultimately irrelevant. This is because both are founded on and patterned by exactly the same psychology, not by theology, the Word of God. It is the same psychological deformation of the imposition of self.

Many of these individuals from both sides are easily exploited by the Secret Services of various States, though most notably by the richest and most powerful, the American CIA. Several of these treacherous individuals are, (if they love money especially much) consciously or (if stupid, naïve or particularly subject to flattery) unconsciously, CIA plants, infiltrated into the Russian Church in order to destroy her unity and oppose the liberation of the Ukraine, actually calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces! These individuals are flawed personalities, very weak in faith, and so are easily manipulated by payments of money, illusions of power or just by flattery, all of which they love. The liberals are pro-Protestants, promoting congregationalism and confederations of parishes. The conservatives are pro-Roman Catholics and promote centralising clerical power as they think that they are ‘princes of the Church’. Both are anti-Orthodox, anti-missionary, for their ghetto-like and self-centred narcissistic mentalities are sufficient for them. They both put their hope not in Christ, but ‘in princes and in the sons of men’.

Homosexuality 

I know perhaps 100 members of the 400-strong Russian episcopate. I know of 12 who are homosexual, both in the lands of the former USSR and in the West. There was always such a small minority and indeed their names are known from the Middle Ages, though one of the best-known is the notorious Greek Paisios (Ligarides) in the seventeenth century. Well-known contemporary cases are Bishop Gury in Paris, who in the 1990s had an affair with his boyfriend priest and was exiled as punishment to freezing Magadan, then two very young bishops, both called Ignaty (Buzin and Tarasov), both sent to monasteries (none of these three was defrocked), then Bishop Flavian (Mitrofanov). As a priest in London only a decade or so ago, he was notorious for his orgies and when he was made bishop after returning to Russia, it caused a huge scandal here. How could they do that? The Russian security services discovered that his boyfriend had a drugs laboratory in his apartment. This now defrocked bishop fled to London, where he had previously obtained British citizenship and where he is protected from justice.

Here are four cases. I will not speak of the other eight cases here. However, each of them is well-known for his disgusting perversions, as well as for his persecution of married clergy, women and children, whom they detest out of jealousy, and their narcissistic love of luxury, fancy houses, cars and money. Perhaps their existence and impunity are why there has only been a muted Orthodox reply to the new and shocking Roman Catholic decree of Papal blessings for homosexual couples? So far only the Metropolitan of Budapest, Hilarion (Alfeyev), has stated in an excellent interview with The American Conservative that the blessing of LGBT couples, confirmed by the Papal Fiducia Supplicans document, renders talks about the unity of Orthodox and Roman Catholics impossible. This is logical and consistent, for the introduction of the ‘marriage’ of LGBT couples led to the ending of conversations between the Russian Church and certain Protestant sects. Why not break off talks with Roman Catholics as well? It is disturbing to think that compromises with the Vatican may be impeding the statement of the Christian truth.

Conclusion: The Cleansing of the Unprincipled Traitors

Among Russian people there is a saying that when a man is ordained priest or consecrated bishop, a demon comes to him. When I first heard this saying in my teens, I was shocked. However, after a few years of experience, I came to understand it. What it means is that when a man receives grace, the demon also tempts him according to his weakness, whichever that may be. The non-ordained only undergoes ordinary temptations, as the demon is not too interested in him. However, the demon tempts a priest ten times more and a bishop a hundred times more, as a result of the spiritual potential they have gained through ordination or consecration. We can see this in the Gospels, where Christ overturned the tables of the moneychangers, which were not in someone’s house, but precisely in the Temple, and where we hear of the pharisees who love sitting ‘in the chief seats’ and being honoured (Matt. 23). And which bishops do the people love? The humble ones – like the slandered St Spyridon, St Nicholas, St John Chrysostom, St Nectarios of Aegina and St John of Shanghai, the bishops of the people.

When you have a destiny, you are driven, single-minded, for you know that you have to do the Will of God. You will not want to do what you are called to do by Him, because you are all too human and you want to live loosely like others. However, you cannot do otherwise, but you are inwardly compelled to follow the law of your being, which God planted inside you and which drives your conscience. You cannot do other than this, because otherwise you will die and you will kill your own soul. Do not mess with those who have a destiny to fulfil, they are always tougher than you because God has sent them, quite unworthy though they are. Like the prophets of old, we know what will happen in the future – it is inevitable, so we are not afraid, not intimidated by individuals who block the path to the fulfilment of God’s Will, whose Will must be done, sooner or later. You cannot live like others and so you follow the Royal Way, beyond extremes. In time, God will put everything and everyone in their place. The traitors who punish faithfulness to God will be cleansed by Divine Justice. I have long trembled for them.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

2 February 2024

Notes:

  1. For example: The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350, Robert Bartlett, 1993
  2. For example: The First European Revolution c. 970-1215, R.I. Moore, 2000

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Apostasy of Western ‘Civilisation’ and Our Salvation

Introduction: The Rise and Fall of the Western Empire

It has become customary to speak of the Middle Ages in Western Europe as a ‘Papal Empire’, later of ‘the Spanish Colonial Empire’, ‘the Portuguese Empire’, ‘the French Empire’, ‘the British Empire’ and most recently of ‘the American Empire’. In fact, all these empires have only been facets of one single empire, ‘the Western Empire’. Although this has been an Empire that has covered much of the world geographically, it is also an Empire of the Mind. One day, and probably quite soon, someone will write a book called ‘The History of Western Exceptionalism’ and will show how this imperialist mentality developed. Certainly, this will mention the model of the Pagan Roman Empire that obsessed the barbarians who invaded Western Europe and how a Frankish barbarian princeling called ‘Karl’, later known as ‘Charlemagne’, wanted to ‘renew’ that Pagan Empire and failed, but how he was still ‘the first neocon’.

More interestingly than this failed forerunner, it will then go on to speak of the crucial eleventh century, of the appearance of the Western superiority complex, ‘we are right, everyone else is wrong’, or as they say now ‘West is Best’. They will speak of elitist Papism and castle feudalism, of 1054 and 1066, of the ‘formation of a persecuting society’ to persecute all others, of hatred, intolerance, genocide and ‘crusades’, on which ‘Europe’ was created and united, of the bloodshed on which the Western Empire was founded. Since then, there followed 900 years of slow but steady rise to world domination and then the dramatic and suicidal events that began in Sarajevo in 1914 and led to those in Kiev in 2014, which have led to the progressive fall of that Empire to the mess that it is in today, when we have once more reached a millennial turning-point. Below we give an outline of what is happening now.

Belief and Unbelief

A few years ago, I took part in a BBC Radio 4 ‘religious’ programme – although as with all BBC ‘religious’ programmes its direction was purely secularist and in fact anti-religious. There I was told by a former MI6 agent/BBC journalist who took part that since only 2% of Russians go to church, the Orthodox Church and Orthodox Civilisation in Russia is irrelevant. I was astonished by his total lack of understanding and limited secularist/post-Protestant view of the importance of religion. But then what else can you expect of a typical British Establishment atheist? It is values and actions that matter, not how often you go to church to gain spiritual strength. He had missed the point. They all have.

Although only 2% of the population may be in church on an average Sunday in Russian Orthodox countries (though not necessarily the same 2%), the rest do believe. This is different from the West, where only 2% go to church, and it is the same 2%, but the rest do not believe. In other words, the West has lost the roots of its Civilisation, it no longer has any Civilisation. If it had a Civilisation, it would not support Ukrainian and Israeli genocide and would not promote LGBT. Here is the difference. The West no longer believes in its roots. What remains is its profound self-delusion. Whether it is slanted to the left or to the right is irrelevant – the disease is one and the same.

The European Union Repeats the Soviet Union’s Fate

As a result of this lack of belief in civilised values and actions, the main political and economic institution in the historic European centre of the Western world, the yellow-starred European Union (EU), is corrupting, fragmenting and collapsing in exactly the same way as the old red-starred Soviet Union (SU). It is a Soviet Union II. Just as most had stopped believing in the Soviet Union by the 1970s (as I know from living there then), knowing that its unelected commissars were lieing, that it was bankrupt in every sense and had failed in its aims, so most have stopped believing in the EU, because it too has failed, is bankrupt in every sense and has failed in its aims. Indeed, the EU’s once strongest ‘locomotive’ economy, the German, is being deindustrialised, is in recession and was overtaken last year by the booming Russian economy, which is now the fifth largest in the world and is due to overtake the Japanese economy in two to three years. In front of it then will be only the expanding Chinese and Indian economies and the disastrously flagging US economy.

The EU has not only failed to make Europeans prosperous, but it has also failed in its aim to unite Europe. For instance, it has failed to unite the Western European peninsula edge with most of Europe, which is mainly in Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus. It has failed to unite with the Western Balkans and failed to keep the UK in itself, let alone getting prosperous Switzerland, Norway and Iceland to join itself. On top of that, it is now financing on a huge scale the Nazi regime in Kiev and the proxy war in the Ukraine in order to try and force that country to join it. Just as few in the SU had the courage to say that the SU was dead, so too today, for the same reasons of censorship and punishment, few in the EU have the courage to say that the EU is dead. The difference is that in the SU, all people bought the Izvestiya and Pravda newspapers, because there was no toilet paper, but in the West some people still buy newspapers and, incredibly, read them and actually believe in them, despite the availability of toilet paper. Such is the level of the delusion of some of the EU population.

Delusionists: The Western World

After the defeat of its multinational Western invasion of Russia under Napoleon in 1812 and stalemating in its invasion of Russia in 1854-6 under the Franco-Ottoman-Sardinian-British, the West tried to fight its wars using proxies, ‘colonial’ troops, as cannon fodder. For example, in the nineteenth century in its colonies and also in the First and Second World Wars, which were essentially tribal European Wars, it used millions of Indian and African troops. The Ghurkas and the Foreign Legion are the remnants. The Far West, the USA, used this proxy method too and in both those wars joined in after they had begun, hoping for easy pickings after the suicidal Europeans. In the Second World War, the Anglo-Americans hoped that the Nazis and the Russians and their allies would kill each other and then they would be able to pick up the pieces. That did not entirely happen. Nevertheless, in the 1990s the West used the same proxy technique in yet another anti-Russian war, using Chechens. However, the Chechens realised that they were being used by the West, turned on their Western masters and sided with the Russians.

In the latest Western War against Russia, being fought by proxies in the Ukraine, similar things are occurring, as Ukrainians slowly realise that they too have been deceived and betrayed by the West. Here again, the Western Ukrainian proxies, encouraged to die ‘until the last Ukrainian’, are being routed by joint Russian and Eastern Ukrainian forces. Afraid of facing reality, the delusional West is refusing to negotiate and negotiations have been banned by law by the Ukrainian puppet dictatorship, which tortures those who speak freely, has banned other political parties and democratic elections and plans to ban the Church. It has disguised this refusal to negotiate with the absurd claim that Russia wants to take over Western Europe. This laughable propaganda claim, invented by US and British PR hireling firms in Kiev, has been made in the Ukraine and duly been repeated in the Baltics, Germany, Sweden, the UK and Norway so far. It is the familiar old excuse ever since Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941, who claimed to be saving ‘Western Civilisation’ from the ‘Asiatic barbarian hordes’ of Russia, ‘better dead than red’.

Realists: Hope in South-Eastern Europe

In its current war against ‘the Asiatic hordes’ of Russia, which war the West began in 2014 with its unprovoked, full-scale invasion of the Ukraine, the West has committed suicide several times. Having given eight years to Russia to prepare a Plan B in case it had to fight a full-scale war against the ever-aggressive West, the West imposed thousands of sanctions which have helped destroy its own economies. The present revolts in Western Europe are about the impoverishment resulting from the facts that so much money has been given to the Ukraine, that there are so many Ukrainian ‘refugees’ being paid for nothing and because the USA ended by violence the supplies of cheap gas from Russia. These revolts are not only of farmers in Poland, Romania, Germany and France, but include mass strikes of millions of workers in the Dickensian UK, Germany and France. In all these countries the destitute have been forced to use food banks to survive. In Northern America too, the rulers are extremely unpopular and revolts are ongoing in Canada and in Texas.

Deluded Western leaders have actually believed their own delusions, which they call ‘PR’. Most people no longer believe in those lies, repeated ad infinitum by the State-controlled Western media and nearly all Ukrainian flags have been taken down in Western Europe – only the now panicking very rich still fly them. Many are beginning to understand the great manipulation. Nowhere is this more obvious in Hungary and Slovakia, whose leaders are the only Western leaders not to be US puppets. As the Russian victory becomes obvious, other countries will also free themselves from US/EU tyranny. Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and even perhaps neutral Austria may enter this Union of Free Europe. In other words, the whole geographical entity of South-Eastern Europe may come to link itself with Russia and the other BRICS economies, of which Russia is the closest to them. This is the future path to peace, justice and prosperity, away from the disaster and decadence of the warmongering US-created EU vassal.

Conclusion: The Mystical Presence: North-Western Europe

Some ask: How then do you in North-Western Europe, in England, survive, as you still labour under the tyranny of the Norman-imposed British Establishment and its moral perversions and lies, and now completely under the heel of the corrupted Washington elite? Around us blow hurricanes, however we remain calm. Why? We have a secret. It is because our saints, in our case, those of Eastern England, are with us. Never have we felt the intercession and mystical presence of our saints so strongly as over the last three years, when so-called ‘Orthodox clergy’ began persecuting us. Only this week we were in Ely again and felt the prayers of and experienced a miracle of St Audrey, as we bowed before her right hand, whose fingers are still clasped in the sign of the cross after exactly 1350 years. She responds to real veneration, not to that of the pseudo-Orthodox sectarians who suffer from that selfsame American exceptionalist complex that they are right and all others are wrong, They persecute real Orthodox Christians and their families and try and steal our saints and our churches. Those outside the Church cannot feel the mystical presence of our saints, for their pretended veneration is political and sectarian and in fact is a perverted persecution of the faithful.

But we have felt the presences of St Edmund in Hoxne and Bury St Edmunds, of St Fursey in Burgh Castle, of St Botolph in Iken, of St Felix by the old fortress in Felixstowe, of St Osyth in the woods in Chich, of St Cedd in his still standing church in Bradwell on Sea, of St Eanswythe in her relics in Folkestone, of St Walstan in Bawburgh, of St Withburgh in Dereham, of St John in his holy relics in Beverley, of St Guthlac and St Theodore in Crowland, of St Huna by his hermitage-farm in Chatteris, of St Ivo in St Ives and of St Neot in St Neots. They are all present and have all resisted the great millennial apostasy of the new Western world, whose depth has become so astonishing in its present death-throes. The patience of these saints is unending, calling those who live here back to repentance, waiting for them to return, like the father the prodigal son. Victory is theirs and, because we venerate them and ask them for their protection, victory is ours too. We feel the warmth from their relics. It will not be long now. And the same presences are all over Western Europe as the First Millennium says to the finishing Second Millennium: We told you so, but we are still waiting for you to return. Herein is their witness and herein is our salvation from the devil’s yoke.

Elections or Insurrections? The Future of the European Elite after its Dramatic Defeat in the Ukraine

In the American organised war against Russia in the corrupt Ukraine, they are now running out of troops, with over 1,130,000 dead or seriously injured Ukrainian proxies. The average age of those remaining is 43, and men (and women) are being kidnapped off the streets. The situation is like that in early 1945 in Berlin. Advised by US and British PR companies since 2014 and directed by NATO commanders, the Kiev regime is killing Russian civilians in terrorist attacks. However, Western mercenaries are also being killed, with sixty French soldiers dying in their hotel in Kharkov last week. Meanwhile, Kiev is persecuting the Church and has stolen or wrecked many hundreds of churches, setting up a US-created fake Church of gangsters instead. The bankrupt West has no arms left to give, so the latest Western idea is to steal $300 billion of Russian assets. In Russia, war crimes trials are being prepared for Western leaders, who created and financed this war.

We see videos of priests praying and giving communion to Russian troops in a forest clearing and Ukrainian troops on horseback, as they have no other transport. These are scenes reminiscent of the Second World War and of partisans. Meanwhile, in Kiev, a palace revolt is under way, which could lead to the murder or else exile of President Zelensky and his replacement by a secret policeman. Zelensky had already banned elections due in March, making of himself a dictator, as he had already outlawed all other political parties and opponents have died in the Secret Police prisons or been assassinated. As for Western Europe, both the anti-democratic EU and the UK, it is in recession from its own suicidal sanctions, supposedly made against Russia. NATO is split, with Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia taking anti-American views. As for the USA, it faces internal chaos from political rivalry (not least in Confederate Texas) and a whole series of foreign wars of its own making. Such are the dramatic times we live in.

The European vassals of the NATO-controlled EU and UK are in total panic. However, the void of leadership is not only in Europe, but also in Washington. Those ‘in charge’ do what they are told by ‘donors’, the financial and military interests who are the power behind the senile throne. The elite has at last realised that it will not win in the Ukraine and has recently admitted this in their New York Times rag. However, the tactical victory is massive: enormous profits made from making useless arms; gutting European industry and sovereignty; reducing Europe to the status of a lowly vassal; time to find new proxy warriors against Russia – from Polish and Baltic fanatics to more ISIS fanatics. Nevertheless, as Max Weber wrote over a century ago, although Protestantism was the path for the rise of the West, its death, following the total loss of faith in it and therefore in Western self-belief, is the cause of its disintegration and defeat.

After 700 days of a tragic conflict, only the time-scale of the Russian victory over the US-installed Kiev regime in the Ukraine is uncertain. Nobody who is not deluded thinks that the defeat of the West in the Ukraine is a matter of ‘if’, only of ‘when’. In the first half of 2024 or in the second half? The Western elite has lost the war it created in the Ukraine and paid hundreds of billions of its taxpayers’ money (without consulting them) for it. Once more it has been humiliated: Saigon, Kabul and now Kiev. As for Non-Russian Europe, US-installed leaders there have bet on the wrong horse, whether von der Leyen, Borrell, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, not to mention the crazy puppet-leaders in Eastern Europe, especially in the Baltics, Poland and Bulgaria. The only exceptions are Hungary and now Slovakia, whose leaders are not US-installed, but installed by the people. Will other European countries follow their lead and become free and independent?

Total Russia victory is coming, with the winner dictating no negotiations, no ceasefire, no stalemate, no frozen conflict, but total Western defeat. Now that the Western attempt to take over the Ukraine has been lost, what are European electorates going to do about it? Ideally, the peoples of Europe could at last get rid of the globalist slaves of the US political and banking elite, whom the US has infiltrated into all levels of European governments over the last twenty years, ever since the ‘old’ Europeans opposed the US genocide in Iraq in 2003. If the hoodwinked and brainwashed electorates awoke, they could elect patriots, even if the globalist-owned media accused them of being racists and ‘far-right’. The ultra-liberal Fascist Establishment perverts who support LGBT, State lockdowns, deindustrialisation, climate change extremism, Ukrainian Nazism, the Zionist genocide of Palestinians and uncontrolled immigration, could at last be cast aside.

All depends on the consciousness of the peoples of Europe and their will for freedom. Will they wake up after the decades of decadence of bread and circuses? How many of them actually realise they are being zombified by the State-run media? How many of them realise that there is no real democracy, only a choice between two candidates of a neo-feudal oligarchy, that they have been labouring all these centuries under the yoke of the rich, now the vassals of US dictators, who want globalist dictatorship? The new multipolar world of BRICS, soon to be 20 or even 40, could help Europeans to wake up, but only if those Europeans want to be woken up and throw off the feudal yoke they have suffered from for a thousand years. In 2024 fifteen countries in Europe will hold elections. It is time for their electorates to look forward, not back, and to elect free patriots who are independent of the globalist poison and want sovereignty.

The US elite appears to want a worldwide war, a world war. It started a war against Russia through its Ukrainian Nazi proxies, it arms Israel to carry out genocide in Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank, with US aircraft, bombs, shells and bullets, it is bombing Qatari-backed Yemen which has stood up to protect the Palestinians. Now it is threatening Iran, Iraq, China, India, Africa and Latin America which have not attacked anyone. On top of that, it is putting out the myth that President Putin wants to conquer not only the Ukraine, but also the whole of Europe. In reality, President Putin, the most popular man in Russia, wants Europeans to be responsible for themselves, to start behaving as adults, to treat Russians as human-beings, to throw out their US oppressors. Preferably this would happen through elections. The fear is that the European electorates are so frustrated that they may launch violent uprisings, real revolutions against their Establishment elite.

How is the Western elite trying to head off the risk of the insurrection of its peoples, to ensure that the ‘plebs’ do not revolt against it? Bread and circuses, consumerism and the media, worked for a long time, but eventually people have begun to see through them and are now tiring of being lied to constantly. The Western elite’s policy is Project Fear. In the US this Project was called ‘Russiagate’, a non-existent scandal manufactured by the Democratic Party in order to discredit the Republican President Trump. In Western Europe Project Fear is: ‘The Russians are coming to get you’. In other words, the elite continues to use the Ukraine to maintain control of their Uniparty regime, relying on the old fear of the Communist Soviet Union. This only works among very old people who remember the ‘Communist threat’ and ‘better dead than red’. Russia is still the bogeyman, used by patronising parents to intimidate their too independent children.

There are forces in every European country which are resisting. These forces used to be small minorities, however in several European countries they are becoming larger minorities. People are starting to ask questions. If the electorates continue to be insulted and condescended to, using the irrelevant distraction stories of the State-run media, those minorities will grow. If we take the example of the UK, we can clearly see that the Uniparty Establishment of Conservatives, Labour etc have exactly the same policies, none of which is going to solve the real problems of the UK’s ever more rapid decline, State bankruptcy (massive debt), the refusal to implement Brexit, deindustrialisation, the collapse of infrastructure (the failed health system, potholed roads, useless railways, rip-off and bankrupt privatised utilities such as the Post Office), mass immigration, refusal to confront absurd wokeness and the denial of Kiev Nazism and Israeli genocide.

This situation is mirrored in different and yet strangely similar ways in every European country. Will there be elections or insurrections? As the elite at last grasps that it has lost its absurd attempt to extend its Western dominion to the Non-Western Ukraine (just as they lost to extend it to Non-Western Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), it is in a state of panic. Now it is trying to re-assert its tyrannical control over the parts of the West which it used to control. We shall see in the coming years the misdeeds of the UK and EU dictatorships, themselves merely puppets of the US globalist dictatorship. If the peoples want back their sovereignty and do not want to be absorbed, colonised, manipulated and impoverished by their neo-feudal, oligarchic, globalist, LGBT elites, in one way or another we will reclaim that sovereignty despite them. Revolution is in the air, but it does not have to be violent. It is our hope that the collapse will be peaceful and smooth.

Moscow will win against and finish off not just Nazi Ukraine, but also the much-divided NATO, profiting from the window of opportunity identified by President Putin in early 2022. Then the Ukraine, woken up, will side with Russia against the Western elite who betrayed it. The example of the dezombified Ukraine is to be followed by the peoples of the West, who have also been betrayed by the Western elite. Of course, those who resist the tyrannical elite will be labelled by them and their media hirelings ‘far-right’ or ‘apologists for Putin’. In reality, we have common sense. The elite does not, it has ideologies, fantasies and delusions. We are family people who love our families, we are patriots who love our countries. The elite does not. However, we also have a sense of social justice and compassion for others. The elite does not. Above all, we believe in God. The elite does not. The elite is Europe’s ‘assisted suicide’. We are not.

Our Common Battle for Holy Rus

The Church is a space of love, freedom and Truth in Christ, rather than an administrative, bureaucratic and punitive apparatus.

https://spzh.news/en/zashhita-very/77938-banning-uminsky-as-a-temptation-by-orthodox-papism

 

Moscow and New York: The Dual Tragedy of Modernists and Sectarians

Fr Alexei Uminsky is a well-known liberal-modernist priest in Moscow, typical of many former hippy idealists who were ordained priests in Russia after the fall of the USSR in the 1990s. We have met several of them and first heard about his activities some fifteen years ago. He is a sincere pastor, nobody could doubt his sincerity, though he has some strange views, which are the fruit of his heady intellectualism. A few days ago, the Moscow Diocesan Court agreed that he should be defrocked, though the paper confirming this decision, which seems very harsh to many, has not been signed by the Patriarch. It is our personal belief that Fr Alexei is not a bad man, just a very naïve man, who has let himself be abused over and over again by the enemies of Russia, including the many US-financed agents there.

His latest error is to refuse to pray for the victory of Holy Rus over its enemies. Like the other very naïve disciples of the late Metr Antony Bloom and of other Russian Parisian liberals such as Fr Alexander Schmemann, in Amsterdam, Madrid, Antioch (via Lisbon, where that one called his faithful ‘Orthodox witches’ and was sacked as a result) and elsewhere, who have mainly left the Russian Church and gone to the US-backed Greeks, Fr Alexey does not understand what Holy Rus is. A pacifist, he imagines that Holy Rus means the temporary political entity of the Russian Federation, which is not at all the case. Although conducting an operation to protect Russians who live in the Ukraine from Nazi genocide, the Russian Federation has never declared war on the Ukraine. However, the West did declare war on Russia through the Nazi proxies it installed and armed to the teeth there, and who created the tragedy. The Russian Church hope is that with the uniting of Rus, the ideal of Holy Rus can be reborn.

However, Fr Alexei and others like him are not the only ones who misunderstand Holy Rus. Today, large parts of the New York-based Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia have been taken over by sectarians. These are the spiritual descendants of those of that same fragment of the Church who openly supported the Nazis in World War Two – those selfsame Nazis who took over the Ukraine. Those traitors were known as Vlasovites and the new Vlasovites have the same views as them and so openly express American support for Nazism in the Ukraine. Whether eighty years ago or today, the treachery remains the same. Whether belonging to the Nazi Party or to the CIA (which was largely staffed by ‘former’ Nazis when it was founded in 1947), those who took and take enemy power and money are contaminated by the same disease. These extremists reject Holy Rus, the Orthodoxy of the faithful, and her universal Orthodox practices and traditions. They support only some reactionary, top-down, right-wing sectarianism.

The End of the Old History

Since the fall of the USSR, US leaders appear to have lost their minds. Craziness has taken over from reason with the hubristic desire to divide the whole world through chaos, in order better to rule it and asset strip it. Their chaos, injustice and genocide have been seen in Yugoslavia, the Northern Caucasus, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, the Lebanon, Georgia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Belarus, the Ukraine, Yemen, Iran, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Armenia…the list goes on, throughout the countries of Eurasia and North Africa.

Over the last thirty years Western Europe has in turn chosen to turn its back on Russia and to kow-tow to the craziness of US leaders. As a result, today Russia has turned its back on isolated Western Europe and gone out to the 90% of the world, where it has been warmly greeted, unlike in Western Europe. But what does this mean for ‘indispensable’ Western Europe, especially in the near future when Western Europe realises that the USA does not want it either and that Russia has no interest whatsoever in invading and liberating it? Western Europe is not worth a drop of Russian blood, it is no longer important enough. Russia liberated Paris from Bonaparte in 1814 and Berlin from Hitler in 1945, it will no longer send a single soldier to liberate Western Europe from its American demons. Enough is enough. The local electorates must liberate themselves from those demons by ceasing to vote for war criminals, atheists and perverts, however much their zombifying State media tell them to do so.

The millennial domination and exploitation by the West of the Rest (of the world) is now coming to an end – by Western suicide. The West is killing itself. The Millennium of the West is over. It is hardly surprising that some even maintain that the standard-bearer of the West, the Pope of Rome, will be the last Pope. As for the current ideology of the West, it is not Catholicism or Americanism, it is sexual perversion, apparently in some way now supported by that Pope, though rejected by African and other healthy Catholics. Such is the ignominy which stands at the end of the millennium of Western apostasy. The only way forward is, paradoxically, to return to the time before that disastrous millennium began.

The Beginning of the New History

As Orthodox Christians we have a mystical view of the world, that is, mystical in the sense of real Christian. We believe that outward world affairs are defined by the inward state of human souls. Where there is faith in the existence of the world of the spirit, that is, the real world beyond the veil which underpins everyday life and is the world to come, there are different values from the values of this world.

In the Ukraine President Zelensky is an actor, whose script ran out after last week’s murder in a Ukrainian Secret Police prison of the American journalist, Gonzalo Lira. He was left to die by the US because he was telling the truth. In Russia the fight is on against the fifth column. We remember very well that dark time when the Russian Church was infiltrated by the KGB and how we resisted it. Now it is infiltrated by the CIA – and we resist it equally, before the whole world. The Russian Church, like Russia, is populated by patriots, but also infiltrated by those who have been spiritually colonised by the West, which is led by the CIA. Some there are now at last waking up.  The great cleansing of the Russian Church is under way.

The three Russian objectives in the Ukraine were its Demilitarisation, its Denazification and the Liberation of the Donbass from genocidal Nazism. After foolish Western interference, these three objectives have had to be expanded into something much greater: The Demilitarisation of all NATO through its weapons which have been offered up for destruction in the Ukraine; the Denazification of the Western world by the opposition to it of the 90% of the world which disagrees with Western leaders and is joining the multipolar BRICS; the Liberation of the whole of the Ukraine, and not just the Donbass, from genocidal Nazism.

England: The Victory of the New White Russia

We all want the victory of Holy Rus over Spiritless atheism, indifference, left-wing modernism and the right-wing fifth column of sectarians who have infiltrated the Church. This fifth column is the CIA-backed Americans who are also enemies of Holy Rus and have done their utmost to try and destroy us over the last seven years and utterly failed. We have worked all our lives for the victory of Holy Rus, indeed, we want its extension. As we declared at the Fourth and last Council of the then still free Church Outside Russia in San Francisco in 2006:

‘In Carpatho-Russia an elderly man asked me: ‘Father, where is your parish?’ I answered: ‘In Felixstowe’. He asked me a second question: ‘What province is that in?’ I answered ‘In the English province’. Yes, I rejoice that I serve in the English province of Holy Rus. I believe that you too rejoice, that you serve and pray in the American, Argentinian, Australian, Belgian, Brazilian, Canadian, Danish, French, German, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, Swiss, Ukrainian and Venezuelan provinces of Holy Rus. Whatever language we use, whatever local saints we venerate, we strive to preserve the spirit of Holy Rus, the spirit of Christ, our Orthodox roots’.

(http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/atcouncil.htm)

Holy Rus is challenged by the extremists of left and of right, as it always has been. We have all this time been on the front line, literally on the military road, fighting from the trenches against them all. We pray for the liberation of Holy Rus, in the Russian Federation, in the Ukraine, in Belarus and everywhere, from the US and its vassals, whether liberal LGBTs or sectarian Nazis. We are waiting and praying for the liberation of the Church, infiltrated by money-grubbing oligarchs, perverted homosexuals and self-admiring CIA agents. Moreover, we know that we shall win, for although man proposes, God disposes. God is with us!

 

 

 

A New Booklet: The Force of Simple Orthodoxy

Recent Articles by

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

St John’s Orthodox Church, Colchester, England

‘No Cross, No Crown’

This 65-page spiral-bound booklet The Force of Simple Orthodoxy is available from: frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk for £6 or $12 post-free, payable to Paypal at the above e-mail. The contents are listed below.

The last five years have been catastrophic for the administrative elites of the Orthodox Church. First, we witnessed the trampling down of the most basic canons by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and the falling out of communion with the Russian Church of almost the whole Greek Orthodox administration (not the simple clergy and people – hence the title), under foreign political threats and the financial pressure of vulgar bribes.

Then there followed no less cowardice in the face of the absurd covid manipulation and scare. The incredible and repeated scandals of Eastern Papism involved here, in terms of financial irregularity, moral perversion and the dogmatic compromises of ecumenism, have brought the spiritually weak to abandon the Church. ‘If they behave like that, why should I bother?’ However regrettable, this attitude is quite understandable, given the scandalous conduct of those on high, who were supposed to set us an example.

Then, in 2022, the American elite’s war in and on the Ukraine that had begun overtly in 2014 sucked in the Russian Federation. We witnessed at once the collapse of the once multinational, but tragically centralised Patriarchate of Moscow into authoritarian Papism and nationalism. Having discredited itself, nearly all Non-Russians, a third of the total, left it or were expelled from it. Until it purifies itself and peels off its post-Soviet, Soviet and pre-Soviet deviations of love of oligarchs’ money, fawning love of Sergianist power and love of possession respectively, nothing will change. Still stuck in the museum quagmire of the recent past, the Church administration has yet to become multipolar, as the Russian State has already become.

The Moscow collapse concerns not least its once respected American branch. In the last five years it too sold itself out for post-Soviet money, sovietising itself, then tragically fell into schism, followed by persecution, slander and open lies, and is now on the verge of repeating the Donatist rebaptism heresy. (Heresy always follows schism, just as schism always follows moral iniquity, as sure as night follows day). Many who had been faithful in blood, sweat and tears to the old Russian Church for fifty years and more have been expelled from it. The rest, like its last ever-memorable Metropolitan, are spinning in their graves.

Given the shameful apostasy of Heterodoxy over the last sixty years, what are Orthodox to do in the face of the no less shameful spiritual and so moral collapse of both the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox administrations, supposedly responsible for the majority of the Church? Have we really come to that point when, ‘When the Son of man comes, shall He find faith on the earth? (Lk 18, 8). Indeed, ‘Let them that are in Judea flee into the mountains’ (Matt. 24, 16). This booklet suggests some answers, to be found from the Hebrides to the Carpathians.

Contents

Foreword: Memories are Made of This

  1. The Force of Simple Orthodoxy
  2. The First 250 Years of Orthodox Suffolk
  3. The Fen Thebaid
  4. Who Betrayed the Europeans?
  5. The Struggle for the Inevitable Local Church
  6. How the Orthodox Church Was Restructured
  7. An Interview
  8. Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Afterword: On Edmund the Martyred King

 

The Force of White Orthodoxy

Foreword: Come a Long Way

Ten years ago on a rainy, autumn evening, the deserted, leaf-strewn pavements shining in the streetlight, I arrived at a small hotel in rue Alexandre I in Alencon in Normandy, France. A puzzled Frenchman asked me: ‘Have you come a long way’? To which I replied with a smile: ‘Yes, I have come a very long way…from the other end of history’. I did not add, but could have added: ‘I am a White Orthodox priest. There must come justice and restoration in Russia, after which justice and restoration will come elsewhere, including here in France too.’

Three Russias

In November 1721 we saw the establishment of Imperial Russia with its enslaving westernised aristocracy. In 1922 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of the Soviet Union, Imperialist Marxist Russia with its enslaving centralised nomenklatura. In December 1991 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of post-Soviet, American Russia with its enslaving dollarised oligarchate. On 24 February 2022 this Russia in turn fell, the victim of its internal contradictions, caused by its corruption.

The three versions of Russia had lasted 200 years, 70 years and 30 years respectively. Despite great achievements, all three versions ended badly, either in revolution and tyranny, or else in plunder and despair, or else in bloodshed and tragedy. This was because for 300 years none of them had respected its underlying Orthodox Russian identity and its calling to form a Multinational Civilisation. When you go against your true nature, you suffer. That is why Russia has had to suffer for 300 years.

The End of Post-Soviet Russia

The fall of Post-Soviet American Russia is very painful and very bloody, but also inevitable. Of course, there are those who opposed its end. These were the cosmopolitan westernisers and traitors, who last year ran away from Russia, to Finland, to Georgia, to Turkey, wherever they could go. They wanted their American Russia to continue, even though both sides of the Atlantic had ‘cancelled’ Russia. Some of them already lived in the West, some of them were represented in the Russian Church. Over the last year some of them have begun to return, realising that their flight had been based on lack of faith.

On the other hand, there are also the xenophobic Russian nationalists, the Prigozhinites. They too are ending badly, as they desire the restoration by violence of an Imperialist Russia, not understanding that Russia has moved on from Imperialism and Sovietism. They understand neither Orthodoxy, nor the multinational calling of Russia. They do not understand that they will lose everything if they continue clinging on to the disastrous centralism of the past. The Multipolar Age of BRICS has begun. Unipolarity, whether Russian or Western, is over.

The Fall of the Russian Church

The State-minded nationalists, the centralist controllers and their denouncing minders who accompany them everywhere, are over-represented in the Russian Church. Its fate is now on a knife edge because of their errors. Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have written much about the possible restoration of Sovereign Orthodox Russia, the Eurasian bulwark of worldwide Orthodox Civilisation. Shall I see it before I die? Unfortunately, its heart, the Russian Church, is still not free. True, it is no longer captive to anything so crude or primitive as Communism, but instead is captive to something far worse, far more insidious, to 300 years of the dead, corrupting hand of the State.

Thus, the Russian Church is captive to spiritual captivity, practical atheism, love of power and wealth, dictatorship and bureaucracy, arbitrary rule, cultish sectarianism, its believers are exiled, the corrupt take control, intent on destroying the Church. They are Black Orthodoxy. Their feudal despotism, blatant commercialism, clerical careerism, moral corruption and institutional simony are merely symptoms of the sickness, not causes. Here is why we are still very far from the restoration of Sovereign Russia. If it comes, it can only be after the Russian Church has been cleansed by the present very painful and very bloody events in the Soviet-established Ukraine.

The Fall of the West

Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have also written much about the coming millennial turning-point in world history. At last it has come, the fall of the West after a thousand years of its elite’s domination of the rest of the world through their technology of organised violence. It is time for the West to return to itself, to its roots, to its true nature, which is in its saints and in the culture of the spirit. This is the Truth of the West, as I have been affirming for fifty years.

The Truth of the West is not in power and mammon, as, sadly, even some modern Orthodox bishops, self-appointed ‘princes of the Church’, claim. We live far away from the love of luxury, academic theorising and effeminate worldliness of such nominal bishops. We strive to live in accord with the humble spirit of genuine Orthodoxy, of White Orthodoxy, spread from the Egyptian desert to the Atlantic Hebrides, from the East Anglian coasts to the Fen islands, from Sarov forests to Carpathian hermitages.

Afterword: The Multipolar Church

As for me, I shall continue here where God has put me, in the Kingdom of the East of England. It is where I was born and where I belong. Our task is to complete the noble mission allotted us by the last Christian Emperor, to build up the Church multinationally, accepting all inclusively. We are the Free Church, the White Church. We fight off the ‘protocols’ of the evil and the greedy, the scribes and the pharisees, the sectarians and the schismatics, who would close down all our churches and destroy us all. Those who persecuted us and tried to silence us unleashed an irresistible force, the Force of the Spirit, the Force of White Orthodoxy. God is with us.

St Andrew the Fool for Christ

2/15 October 2023

 

 

The Mystical Meaning of Walsingham

O England, thou hast great cause to make glad.

Thou attainest my grace to stand on a level

To be compared to the promised land of Zion

Through this glorious Lady’s support

And to be called in every realm and region

The holy land, Our Lady’s dowry;

Thus art thou named from old antiquity.

 The Pynson Ballad, Verse 19, in Modern English

 Introduction: Norman Walsingham

An Orthodox visitor to the tiny village of Little Walsingham in Norfolk will discover there a shrine to the Mother of God, which clearly reflects the mentality of High Church Anglicanism, known as Anglo-Catholicism. Recreated as recently as the 1930s, after being destroyed 400 years before at the Reformation, the shrine feels artificial, contrived and even rather alien to Orthodox. The birettas and general imitation of old-fashioned Roman Catholicism by High Church Anglicans seems fake. Orthodox have no desire, or need, to imitate old-fashioned or, for that matter, new-fashioned, Roman Catholicism. On the other hand, no-one can deny that there is a genuine atmosphere of sincere piety, peace and, most significantly, great grace, within the shrine. This must be recognised, whatever the offputting externals, which we must learn to see beyond.

Yet despite this, those with a sense of history will still be put off by the official version of the story of the shrine to be found in the guidebook. This openly states that the shrine originated in 1061 when a ‘Saxon’ (sic!) noblewoman ‘Richeldis de Faverches’ (sic!) had ‘a vision’ of the Mother of God. This is clearly nonsense. ‘Saxon’ noblewomen did not exist in England in 1061, English noblewomen did. Also you will not find any English noblewomen in 1061 with the clearly French Norman name of ‘Richeldis de Faverches’! Either the vision took place in 1061, but was granted to an Englishwoman and not to ‘Richeldis de Faverches’, or else it did not take place in 1061 at all, but during the Norman Occupation following 1066. Either one or else the other. It cannot be otherwise.

After a little research it is not difficult to discover that the name Faverches (then the name of a tiny village near Lisieux in Normandy) does indeed occur in connection with Little Walsingham. A historical document known as ‘The Norfolk Roll’ refers to the foundation of a Priory of ‘Augustinian Friars’ in Little Walsingham in 1130-1131, and precisely by a widow called Richeldis de Faverches, who died in 1145. She left her estate to her son, Geoffrey de Faverches, who took part in the Second Crusade, setting out in 1147. And one of the sponsors of that Crusade was the then Bishop of Lisieux.

Does this simply mean that the date 1061 is nonsense and the whole story belongs to twelfth-century Norman Roman Catholicism, to 1131? Where does the 1061 date come from? This is important for Orthodox. Although after the half-Norman Edward ‘the Confessor’, who promoted the new Roman Catholic religion, became King of England in 1042, a spiritual decline occurred in England, nevertheless until 1066, England was still in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. Thus, a vision of the Mother of God in 1061 has a meaning for Orthodox. Supposing the 1061 date is correct and, quite simply, it was someone else, an Englishwoman, who had a vision of the Mother of God? Clearly, we have to examine the origin of this 1061 date.

Orthodox Walsingham

The 1061 date comes from one particular source, that of the respected Norman-born royal printer and poet Richard Pynson (c. 1449 – c. 1529). Pynson was employed by the Tudor kings Henry VIII and before him Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509). The latter made a three-day pilgrimage to Walsingham in 1487, after which he commissioned Pynson to write a Ballad about its history. Pynson’s Ballad was written at the very latest in 1494, when it was printed, but its lost sources presumably go back centuries before and include ancient oral traditions.

It surely cannot be some invention, as it mentions specifically 1061 and no other date. Indeed, the Ballad specifically states that the vision at the origin of the shrine occurred in the reign of ‘Edward the King’ (= the Confessor), that means before 1066.  Moreover, the 1061 date was later confirmed by the very reliable antiquarian, royal archivist and poet John Leland (1503-1552). And the date is also confirmed by an earlier 14th century manuscript of the Book of Hours in the University Library in Cambridge (Ms. 1i. Vi. 2.Fo. 71r). This too maintains that the chapel in Walsingham was founded in 1061.

Writing in 15th century English, reminiscent of Chaucer, Pynson names the seer as a mysterious ‘Rychold’, the then Lady of the Manor. Now, according to the Domesday Book, the Lord of the Manor of Walsingham in 1061 was none other than Harold Godwinson (or Godwineson), King of England from 6 January 1066, and the Lady of the Manor was his wife Edith. This manor had come to Harold precisely by his marriage to Edith on 23 January 1045 when he was Earl of East Anglia, as recorded by the Little Domesday of Norfolk, compiled in 1088. Edith (c. 1020 – c. 1086) is given several names in the Domesday Book, among them precisely ‘Rychold’, meaning ‘Rich’ or ‘Fair’, and more poetically ‘the Gentle Swan’ (Another title, the ‘Swan-Neck’, comes from the Old English ‘swann hnecca’, probably a corrupted form of swann hnesce, ‘Gentle Swan’). Edith is recorded in the Domesday Book as Edfgifu the Rich, her name latinised as ‘Edeva’.

Edith had inherited Walsingham from her mother Wulfgyth, daughter of the King of England, Ethelred the Unready (+ 1012) and half-sister of King Edward the Confessor. Although Edith’s mother Wulfgyth, also called Wulfhilda, had married Ulfkytel the Brave, who died in battle in October 1016, Edith was almost certainly her daughter by her second husband, Thorkell the Tall, advisor to King Canute (Knut) and Earl of East Anglia until 1021.

Very much a Patroness of East Anglia, the Anglo-Danish Edith was rich and held a great many properties in East Anglia, notably in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Essex, as well as in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, notably in Chesham, and dwellings in Canterbury, as is recorded by The Domesday Book. Her brothers owned property in Norfolk, specifically in Great and Little Walsingham. In 1045 Edith married Harold (c. 1022-1066), son of Godwin (also spelled Godwine) of Sussex. Harold had become Earl of East Anglia and inherited the East Anglian lands of Edith. Only in 1053, on his father’s death, did he inherit the title of Earl of Wessex.  In turn he became King of England on 6 January 1066 on Edward the Confessor’s death.

As a devout noblewoman Edith had received an education and was recorded by the Abbot of ‘Eastholm’ as ‘keen and wise in her understanding’. One of the richest noblewomen in England, she employed a personal goldsmith, called Grimwald. She donated a valuable Gospel to the Monastery at Thorney in Cambridgeshire and was the benefactress of St Benet’s Monastery at Holme in Norfolk in 1046. Both she and her pious husband Harold were spiritual children of the saintly pastor Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester (c. 1008-1095). He was the only English bishop who was allowed to retain his Diocese by the Norman invaders, though he greatly regretted the Norman rebuilding of Cathedrals which favoured quantity (size) over quality (prayer).

Like King Canute (c. 990 – 1035), Edith and Harold were married in the customary way of the age in England by solemn promise, typical of the time all over Northern Europe. This was known as a ‘hand-fast marriage’. A number of dowry bequests were made at the time of Edith’s union to Harold, including Walsingham Manor, making Edith ‘the Lady of the Manor’ before 1061. They had six known children, Godwin (named in honour of Harold’s father), Edmund, Magnus, Gytha (named after Edith’s grandmother), Gunnhild and Ulf (the last four with Danish names; any East Anglian even today has Danish blood, an East Anglian myself, my DNA says that I am 11% Danish).

The importance of these children is indicated by the fact that Gunnhild was abducted after the Battle of Hastings. In 1068 Gytha was taken by her grandmother to Denmark in 1068 and then married the Prince of Smolensk, Vladimir Monomakh. She had some eleven children by him and so brought the bloodline of St Alfred the Great into the Russian royal family. Gytha reposed on 7 May 1107. One of her sons had a double name, the Slav Mstislav, and Harold, in memory of his grandfather.

It is said that Edith identified Harold’s mutilated body after his death at Hastings. It was because of Edith’s identification of Harold’s body that he could be buried, either by the monks of Waltham in Essex, which Harold had founded, or else at his family home in Bosham in Sussex, inside the pre-Conquest church. After the Battle, Edith disappears from the historical record. By 1086, her lands had passed to an invader. Possibly she joined Harold’s mother Gytha in Exeter, from where she may have been exiled after the siege in the winter of 1068. Perhaps she joined her exiled sons in Ireland, or joined Gytha in Denmark, as some suggest, and then Kiev. Others suggest that she may have set out on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, from which she did not return. We wonder if she did not arrive in Nazareth and there repose. After all her vision had been of the house in Nazareth where the Most Holy Virgin had received the Annunciation from the Archangel Gabriel.

Conclusion: The Future of Walsingham

If, as seems very likely, the Walsingham vision of the Mother of God took place in 1061 and was granted to Edith, the wife of Earl and then King Harold Godwinson, then we can now see that the Normans stole Walsingham from England, overlaying it with their anti-English myths. It was all part of their mythology that they had brought Christian civilisation to England and that before them there had been nothing and certainly no vision of the Mother of God to the benighted English. That is why they deleted the enemy King Harold and his Queen Edith from the history of Walsingham, assigning the vision to a later Norman woman, Richeldis de Faverches, who lived nearly three generations later. That is why they disguised Edith with the title ‘Rychold’, in order to confuse her with the much later Richeldis.

Clearly, having killed King Harold, his wife and children were still enemies and threats to the Norman usurpers. Harold had replaced his father Godwin as the focus of patriotic opposition to Norman influence in England under Edward the Confessor, who had spent more than 25 years in exile in Normandy. That is why the Norman clergy slanderously made out that Edith was Harold’s mistress and that the couple were not married, even making out that he married again in 1066, when he had made a political pact with a certain Alditha. Their fully legitimate ‘handfast’ wedding is still part of the Orthodox wedding ceremony today, when the newly-wed couple are led around the central lectern by the priest, their hands placed together on the priest’s stole. That is also why the Lombard Archbishop of Canterbury Lanfranc, appointed by William the Bastard in 1070, railed against the local English saints, who were often royal. It was a purely political and indeed racist move. Anything fine and noble in pre-Norman English culture had to be overlaid, buried and cancelled. Indeed in later times paid, Normanised scholars even gave the strange name ‘Anglo-Saxon’ to the English to try and alienate the English from their very own blood and kin.

As a result of her vision, Edith wished to do something special to honour the Mother of God, who appeared to her in 1061. In that threefold vision Edith was shown the house of the Annunciation in Nazareth, the place of the Incarnation, and was instructed to build a replica of the house in Little Walsingham as a place of pilgrimage where people could honour her. Mary is said to have promised, ‘Whoever seeks my help there will not go empty away’. That is what Edith did. This Annunciation was surely an announcement of consolation to the English before the defeat at Hastings and ensuing Norman Occupation that has lasted to this day, that Christ would always be with us.

Today, the shrine at Little Walsingham does have a tiny staircase chapel big enough only for half a dozen Orthodox. In the village itself there is also a tiny Orthodox chapel in a temporarily rented building, where a liturgy is held once a year, mainly for converts to Orthodoxy from Anglicanism. However, there is no church that is owned by Orthodox and there are very few Orthodox living, that is, who are incarnate, in the area. However, 25 miles away there is the historic port town of Kings Lynn which has strong Orthodox connections. Here there is no Orthodox church building, though there is a community of Orthodox. Could it be that an Orthodox church, dedicated to the Annunciation of the Mother of God, could be established in Little Walsingham, for the service of Orthodox and in memory of the piety of Edith, the last Orthodox Queen of England? From this tiny rural hamlet in Norfolk, the Mother of God reigns over England.

O gracious Lady, glory of Jerusalem,

Cypress of Zion and Joy of Israel,

Rose of Jericho and Star of Bethlehem,

O glorious Lady, reject not our askings

Thou dost excel all women in mercy

Therefore, blessed Lady, grant Thy great grace

To all that devoutly visit this place.

The Pynson Ballad, Verse 21, in Modern English

Notes:

  1. In writing the above, we acknowledge a great debt of gratitude to the late Bill Flint, the author of a most interesting book called Edith the Fair, Visionary of Walsingham, Gracewing 2015. Although there are the mistakes of the amateur historian, this book has great merit.
  2. We are also indebted to the work Harold the Last Anglo-Saxon (sic) King, by Ian W. Walker, The History Press, 2010
  3. In our church in Colchester we have a very beautiful and very iconographic panaghia of the Mother of God of Walsingham. We had this made in the Ukraine three years ago for a worthy bishop. It is soon to be gifted to His Grace Metropolitan Joseph, who so keenly wishes his local Diocese of over 60 parishes to become incarnated into English life and tradition.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

Felixstowe, Suffolk,

1 September 2022