Category Archives: Apostasy

The Tragedy of the Archbishop of Canterbury

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has stated in an interview with The Independent newspaper, well-known for its agnostic liberal-democrat stance, that he sometimes doubts in the existence of God because of the injustices in the world. ‘The other day I was praying over something as I was running and I ended up saying to God, Look this is all very well but isn’t it about time you did something – if you’re there’. Earlier in the interview, when asked if he had moments of doubt, Archbishop Welby replied: Yes. I do, in lots of different ways’. ‘There are moments, sure, when you think is there a God, where is God?’ (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/archbishop-of-canterbury-admits-doubts-about-existence-of-god-9740965.html). The scandalizing interview has today met with the characteristically Orthodox comments of a well-known St Petersburg priest, Archimandrite Nectarius (Golovkin). He has said (http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2014/09/24/dyavolskij_krik_dushi_glavy_anglikanskoj_cerkvi/):

‘Western Catholicism gave birth to Protestantism, which entailed rationalism and atheism. Here is the spiritual chain of Catholicism. The grace of God leaves those who fall away from the living and rooted system of Orthodoxy. The soul of one who has fallen away from God is not in contact with the miracles of grace, but is subject to the invasion of false and demonic signs. This unfortunate man, the head of the church of England, has not been found worthy to witness a single miracle in his life. In the Orthodox Church every priest is repeatedly in contact with Divine miracles in his ministry. I can enumerate an incalculable number of miracles in my thirty years of pastoral ministry. There have been miracles ranging from the sending of rain through the prayers of Orthodox Christians to amazing and incomprehensible signs from God. I can only feel sorry for this Anglican because he belongs to a so-called church which is sterile. There is no grace in it, no sense of standing before God’.

‘The head of the church of England belongs to a withered branch that has fallen away. Anglicanism has abandoned the living power of Orthodoxy, the rooted system fed by the grace of the Holy Spirit. We have not spilled and squandered apostolic teaching, we have kept it with great care, we have cared for the chalice of the grace of God in the bosom of the Orthodox Church’.

‘The statement by this Anglican is indicative of the state of a soul which is outside the grace of the Orthodox Church….It is not by chance that it is said: ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble’. The pride which engendered the fall from Orthodoxy has produced Divine resistance. All sects and heresies arose from pride. When some reformer or other states his teaching, he opposes himself to the Church, to the Universal Councils. When someone leaves the Church, it is a sign of pride, which allies him with the devil’.

For our part, we wonder why the former oil executive, Justin Welby, has not the honesty to give up his large salary and prestigious home and hand over his office to someone who actually believes in and knows Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Why Does the Western Elite Want to Destroy Russia?

The Western elite began setting up an ideologically-driven, Non-Orthodox (in fact anti-Orthodox) Empire in north-western Continental Europe at the end of the eighth century by reviving Roman paganism and Old Testament iconoclasm. Ever since then, in order to justify itself, it has aggressively expanded, attacking all centres of Christian Faith outside itself. This first became apparent when the elite’s Emperor Charlemagne had the ‘Libri Carolini’ written in c. 790 and declared Christians (‘the Greeks’) to be heretics because they remained faithful to the Christian Church and Creed of the Seven Universal Councils. As soon as the Western elite was strong enough, in fact during the eleventh century, it took over Rome, founding its own semi-pagan ‘Church’ and attacking Christendom not only in words but also in deeds, its crusaders finally sacking and looting the Christian Capital in New Rome in 1204.

Having during the eleventh century founded its centralized papist Superstate, of which today’s EU is a re-creation, merely replacing semi-pagan Catholicism with the pagan ideology of bread and circuses, post-Christian Europe expanded with blood. Beginning in southern Italy and Sicily, it had already taken genocide to England (‘1066 and all that’) and then to the Celtic Lands before it took it to New Rome in 1204. Massacre by crusade and inquisition was similarly employed in its expansion to the Iberian Peninsula, the south-west of France and Eastern Europe. Later the same genocide would take place in the Americas, Latin and North, by the British in Ireland (1 million dead in famines), India (15 million dead in famines), Tasmania, South Africa and Kenya, and now the same genocide of the ‘natives’ is committed by Israel in Gaza and by CIA-directed Uniats in the Ukraine.

The 1204 Western attack on the European Capital of New Rome weakened it and led to its fall to the Muslim invaders of Europe in 1453. The West has always used Islam as a proxy for its evil purposes. If the Church were to survive, it would therefore need to move to another centre. This was Russia. Indeed, even before this transfer took place, the Western elite had already begun attacking Russia, notably in the thirteenth century its Teutonic crusaders launching vicious attacks against it, effectively stabbing it in the back from the west while it was being attacked by the Mongols and Tartars from the east. In the early seventeenth century Poles and Lithuanians invaded Russia, which ended in the invaders’ defeat in 1612. In 1812 ‘Twelve Western Tribes’ under the anti-Christian Emperor Napoleon invaded Russia and suffered a terrible defeat. But Western invasions were not to end there.

Thus, in 1854 Britain and France, again allied with Muslims, again invaded Russia, preventing it from liberating Christians in the Balkans from Ottoman oppression and from protecting Christians from Islam in the Middle East. And this was to be repeated again and again, invaded by Germany in 1914, when Russia was betrayed by its so-called allies, Britain and France and its own fifth column of aristocrats, and invaded again by Germany in 1941. And today invasion is being attempted yet again in western Russia (now called the eastern Ukraine), as the combined Western elite of the USA and its EU colony, back the Western proxy puppet regime in Kiev. Why have there been six Western European invasions of Russia over the last 400 years and not a single Russian invasion of Western Europe, excepting that of Eastern Europe entailed by the need to defeat Nazi Germany in Berlin?

First of all, Christian Russia must be destroyed by the Western elite, as its mere existence proves that the ideology of Western ‘Christianity’ is a deformation. The elite can brook no rivals. Although there are other parts of the Orthodox Christian world, in Romania, Greece, the Balkans and elsewhere, they are small and can be dismissed as mononational folklore by the West. However, the multinational Russian Church is different. It is three-quarters of the whole Church, covers one sixth of the planet and 62 countries, carrying on its shoulders the rest of the Orthodox Christian world. This was why the Satanic powers of the Western elite tried to destroy Russian Christianity in 1917, exporting to Russia its materialist ideology of greed based on bloodshed. This is why the Satanic powers of the West are again trying to destroy Russia’s reviving Christianity in 2014 by destroying the Ukraine.

Russian Christian Civilization, called Holy Rus, is based on original Christianity, unlike the West, which is based on the paganism of manmade materialism with a ‘justifying’ superstructure of judaising deformations of Christianity. Hence the millennial confrontation of the two Civilizations, Christianity and the West, Holiness and Unholiness, Faith and Materialism. This was why the West exported its materialist greed and love of profit to Russia, first contaminating its elite and then, once that elite had betrayed its sacral monarchy, contaminating with blood the rest of the country. This contamination by a failed materialism resulted in the final treachery by the pro-Western Gorbachev. Despite this, Russian Christian Civilization is still alive at the core of the Church. The West attacks Russian Civilization, Holy Rus, precisely because of its universal character, which the West mocks as ‘messianic’.

The Western elite mocks this universal character because Holy Rus is the only serious rival to that elite’s own ‘messianism’, which it calls ‘globalization’. This claims that the ‘West is best’, a ‘chosen people’ ideology that appeals to all that is basest in humanity. This is why the unprincipled careerists of the Western (and, outside the West, Westernized) elite tries to reduce the universal character of Russian Orthodoxy to mere folklore, as it has largely done to Greek Orthodoxy. Holy Rus has taken the main thrust of Western invasions because the Western elite knew that Holy Rus, stretching from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean, is the only spiritual force that stands in its way to global control, the only spiritual impediment to its materialist expansion, that is, the only force that stands in the way of world evil, and has saved innumerable peoples from desecration by the Western elite throughout history.

Most recently we have seen this in Syria, but most strikingly we have seen it in Siberia where the native peoples, unlike their relatives, the native peoples of North America, were not massacred by Western genocide and herded into concentration camp reserves, but survived and flourished under Russia. Holy Rus resisted the basis of Western materialism, greed and bloodshed, and replaced it with the desire for the collective good. Having defeated Western materialism in its genocidal Communist form, Holy Rus seeks the restoration of its Faith, its sacral monarchy and its peoples; only in this restoration can it again become the Third Rome and so resist the elite’s New World Order. This special worldwide mission of Russian Christian Civilization opposes the West, showing the way out of the suicidal Western culture of death, the dead end which has led the world to its present apocalyptic situation.

On the Spiritual Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

Introduction

The living beliefs of St John of Shanghai swim against the tide of the world and are remarkable examples to all of us for the three following reasons. First of all, although he lived outside Russia he expressed faithfulness to Holy Rus, which for him, as shown in his sermon on the 950th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus, is a living reality, not a dream or myth, as it is for unbelieving modernists a la Schmemann. This faithfulness to Holy Rus, even though it was enslaved beneath the Soviet atheist yoke, entailed his constant prayers for the Patriarch of the Russian Church (shown by his words to the then Fr Vladimir Rodzianko) despite the Patriarch’s political enslavement and so separation from free Russians. It also entailed St John’s opposition to those who fought against Russia, under the tragic and misguided illusion that that they were fighting against the Soviet Union.

Secondly, St John was faithful to the Tsar, already in the 1930s enjoining his canonization against those of both left and right who opposed it. Thirdly, he believed in the Russian Church not as a national ghetto, but as an organism with the worldwide calling to convert to Orthodoxy, as he clearly expressed at the Second All-Diaspora Council in 1938. These three virtues, faithfulness to Holy Rus, faithfulness to the Orthodox Monarchy and faithfulness to the Russian Church’s calling to preach to the heterodox and unbaptized world, are matched by three opposing temptations. These can be found among the still unChurched (and this includes clergy and laity), among those on the fringes of the Church and those outside the Church. These three temptations of spiritual impurity are liberalism instead of faithfulness, conservatism instead of faithfulness and heterodoxy instead of faithfulness.

Liberalism instead of Faithfulness to Holy Rus

This is the temptation from the left, with its renovationism, modernism, new calendarism, liberalism, ecumenism and freemasonry. We have met its spirit in ‘Orthodox’ freemasons in Paris, in cultish, Hindu-style gurus with a name-worship mantra or psychic hypnosis and even occultism, inspired by Blavatsky and Steiner, in those who cannot stop speaking of ‘hypostasis’ and ‘theosis’, rather than living the commandments of the Gospel, in ‘cowboy’ copies of liberal Protestantism and liberal Catholicism camouflaged by long Greek ‘theological’ words, in the elderly or now dead renovationism of the old KGB-selected Moscow Patriarchal representatives from before the fall of atheism, in well-read converts who reject new immigrants from Eastern Europe because they are not liberal intellectuals like themselves, and in ideologies driven by personalities, not by spiritual realities.

Conservatism instead of Faithfulness to the Orthodox Monarchy

This is the temptation from the right, with its phyletism, nationalism, naïve idealization, old calendarism, right-wing emigres and converts who support and accept money from the CIA or MI5, the cultivation of the museum ethos. We have met its spirit in Greeks who tell Non-Greeks to go away, in those who ban the use of languages other than their own, in nationalist Ukrainians who have nothing to do with the Church because they are driven by politics, not by Christ, in those who fall into schism on account of minor errors rather than the general correctness in the Church, in those who schismatically divide the Church, falling into the temptation of the Church’s enemies who want to divide and so rule Her, in converts from conservative heterodox who bring prejudices into the Church, in those who self-justifyingly confuse psychology with theology, serving self and not the general good of the Church.

Heterodoxy instead of Faithfulness to Missionary Work

Authentic missionary work is about conforming the world to the Church, and not as some compromised people have suggested, supporting the errors of those outside the Church through their own syncretism (‘all religions are the same’), founded on indifference. Also, if heterodox are prematurely received into the Church, they may bring spiritual impurities, either in the form of agendas for ‘reform’ or else of reactions to their heterodox past. Thus, there may be ex-Anglicans still with their Protestant mentality who want a ‘refomed’ Orthodoxy in their own image, since they, received prematurely and not yet ready for the Orthodox Church, are unable to cast off their own personal, cultural and spiritual prejudices. Either such will mature, or else they will lapse. Unable to cast off their Establishment class views, whether of left or right, they will never become Orthodox, however well-read.

Conclusion

The title of this essay is formed by the words of the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus (+ 2008), said to me in May 2006, on the need to conserve the integrity of the Holy Orthodox Faith. However, his words were in the same line as those of three generations of Russian bishops of the Diaspora before him, of Archbishop Antony of Geneva (+ 1994), of St John of Shanghai (+ 1966) and of Metropolitan Antony of Kiev (+ 1936), the first First Hierarch of the Church Outside Russia. They all agree, in words as in deeds, that any immixture of spiritual impurity in the Faith is a dead end precisely because it is unspiritual and what is unspiritual by definition brings death. It is for us to follow with care their words, deeds and lives, so that we do nor err from the Tradition of the Church through impure influences from outside Her. And this we can do through faithfulness.

The Suicide of a Civilization

Пусть кто-то от Общей-Европы,
А я – от Всея Руси!

Нина Карташева, Порфира и Виссон

There may be some from a Common Europe,
But I am from All Rus!

Nina Kartasheva, the contemporary Russian poetess

Some speak of the contemporary crisis in Western countries as ‘the death of a culture’. It is worse than this; it is the suicide of a civilization. I have personally lived through the last 50 years in England and seen this tragedy with my own eyes and the eyes of my parents, grandparents and whole family, lived it and deeply felt it. My grandparents’ generation, born in Victorian times and dying between the 1960s and 1980s, was able to tell me of the first phase of the suicide in the First European and then World War; my parents’ generation, born just after that War and dying over the last 25 years, was able to tell me of the second phase of the suicide in the Second European and then World War. Both those wars were phases of the suicide, the killing not of a mere culture, but of the Christian roots of that culture, that is, of Western civilization.

However, the third and final phase of the suicide, which made it ‘successful’, has come in the last 50 years, without a World War, but with a spiritual war, resulting in the massive loss of Faith in the West since the 1960s. This began with the apostasy of Catholic and Protestant clergy, who publicly declared that they had lost their faith in the Holy Trinity, in the Divinity and Resurrection of Christ, in the Ever-Virgin, in the Saints and in the moral commandments of the Scriptures, which they saw as a mere literary work. And, worst of all, they justified this loss of Faith, replacing the Divine with the belief that fallen humanity should have the ‘sacred’ freedom to mutilate and destroy the image of God in itself and mutilate and destroy the world around it. Having destroyed the Fatherhood of God, they destroyed the Brotherhood of mankind. Having rejected Christian belief, which is at the root of Western civilization, they killed that civilization and so committed suicide.

What remains today of Western civilization is ‘sights’, monuments for tourists, museums, a ‘heritage industry’; what was vibrant and living has gone from this huge cemetery of Western civilization, which the curious flock to see from all over the world as a historical theme park. With the Christian faith that underpinned that civilization gone, the centre has gone and two tendencies have come to dominate Western countries in the last two generations. These are tasteless vulgarity and boorishness, with the suicidal obesity and mutilating tattoos that go with them, or else the love of money and mammonism, with the futile vanity and snobbish pride that go with them. These two tendencies can be seen everywhere in the Western world, from North America to Western Europe to Australia. Little wonder that a Christian world leader, perhaps the only one left, Vladimir Putin, has said that ‘the West has replaced God with Satan’.

Some point to contemporary Russia, the rejection of militant atheism there and the return to the Faith and ask: ‘Why could the same return to the Faith not happen in the West?’ It could not happen in the West, because in Russia there was vicious persecution of the Faith by an alien ideology, whereas in the West there has been no persecution, only voluntary self-liquidation by a home-grown ideology. An attempt to kill a civilization, as happened under the foreign ideology of militant atheism, imported from Switzerland (Lenin) and the USA (Trotsky) and financed from overseas, is not at all the same thing as a voluntary suicide. Suicide was sooner or later inevitable in the West, as the seeds of destruction were all along contained in the compromised Halfodoxy of the Catholic/Protestant mindset. This long ago began adapting and reducing the original Orthodoxy of the first Christianity to a mere humanistic ideology, centred first in Rome and then in a multitude of places all over the Western world.

As Orthodox in the West, it has always been our task to go in the opposite direction to the contemporary West and its chosen path of spiritual catastrophe. Instead of rejecting the roots of Western civilization in the original Christian Faith, preached and lived by the first martyrs and saints of the Western Lands in the first millennium, it has been our task to be radical, to call the West back to those roots. In other words, it has been our task to call for the restoration of Orthodoxy, the return in repentance to Orthodoxy, to the original Christian Faith at the roots of the West in the first millennium, which is identical in spirit to the Orthodoxy of Holy Rus. It has been our task to try and save what is valid in Western civilization, the precious fragments and vestiges which have survived in the remoter parts of the West and which relate to its Christian roots. This is a struggle against all the odds, a struggle for the Orthodox Faith against the prince of this world.

Unlike in the West, whenever there have been temptations to renounce the Faith in Russia, there have always come outsiders to call back to repentance. No matter whether it was the Tartars and the Teutonic Knights, the Poles and the Lithuanians, Napoleon and Hitler, or now the American elite and their European puppets in their futile attempt to take over the Ukraine. This latter attempt has only served to strengthen the peoples of Rus against the temptations of the corrupt, Western-sponsored oligarchs and the other contemporary Westernisers. The peoples of Rus have not lost the fear of God – unlike in the West, where they are even preparing to legalize incest, the marriage of father and daughter, mother and son, to die in self-inflicted deformity, sterility, dementia and euthanasia. In the West the old paganism has been reborn as the new paganism, as all the old demons come back from hell.

The difference between the peoples of Rus and the West is that no-one in Rus justifies atheist apostasy, whereas the West not only does justify it, but also aggressively tries to foist it onto the rest of the world, denying any other civilization the right to exist. We are reminded of the words of the philosopher: ‘He whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes mad’. Only this can explain the insanity and self-destruction of the contemporary Western world. As for us, we shall continue regardless, in faithfulness to the Church of All Rus and the commandments of the saints and martyrs new and old. It may be that the present Western apostasy, which is now proceeding at breakneck speed, can be halted for a time. But it may be that we shall come to be persecuted by the atheist Western authorities, which will first stop us from baptizing. Then the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa will come true and ships of people will sail to St Petersburg to be baptized. And then we shall either face martyrdom in the West or refuge in Russia. In any case we shall be ready, for we have no illusions.

The Footprints in the Western Desert are Satan’s

The news that US-armed and CIA-organized neo-Nazis have raised a swastika-like flag in a town in the eastern Ukraine comes as no surprise. It means that the government in Kiev, voted in by only 25% of hoodwinked Ukrainians, and which barely received 5% of the vote anywhere in the south and east of the Ukraine, is illegitimate. It means that it will never receive the popular assent of the people of the Ukraine and that in the south, east and in the Transcarpathian south-west, it faces implacable resistance from partisans and freedom-fighters, however many billions of dollars Washington foolishly pumps its way.

The present anti-Russian sanctions are already rebounding on the West and threaten a new, self-imposed recession in Europe. The Chinese are delighted – it has given them a new market at no cost to themselves, handed to them on a plate by Western stupidity in its eastern imperialism. Come the winter and the inability of the junta to pay for heating will lead to popular revolt. And the news that a community of Satanists, just as we predicted, has been registered by the new pro-EU junta in Kiev, proves our point: the footprints in the Western desert are indeed Satan’s.

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

A Decisive Moment in History

In order to wipe out the Russians, we must not only destroy their army, wreck their towns and liquidate their State, but it is also vital to kill their culture, deprive them of moral direction, belittle their heroes and force them to forget all their achievements. Only then can this people finally be defeated.

Josef Goebbels

If people lose faith in God, it is a tragedy, and if they do not repent, they die and disappear off the face of the earth. Many peoples have disappeared, but Russia exists and will continue to exist. Pray, entreat and repent! Then the Lord will not leave you; He will save the whole Earth!

Blessed Matrona of Moscow

We live at a decisive moment in history, at an exceptional time, when prophecies are taking flesh before our very eyes. When the Washington puppeteers sent their junta on its blitzkrieg against the people of the eastern Ukraine, it thought that if it used carpet bombing against an intimidated population and destroyed their infrastructure, then they would rise up against the ‘separatists and terrorists’.

This plan did not work. Poroshenko’s (Waltzman’s) American advisors grossly miscalculated when they thought that they knew his subjects’ psychology – they thought that the people would settle for the mess of pottage of comfortable consumerism, for bread and circuses, like Western people. They will not. Like the Mongols, the Swedes, the Poles, Napoleon and Hitler before them, the CIA are wrong again.

Every day the war in the Ukraine takes the lives of civilians, including children. Spilled blood is marking out the future borders. However, although the régime continues to massacre the people in its occupied territories, it has failed to stamp out resistance. In captured Slavyansk and Kramatorsk they have staged mass shootings of residents and of the mothers of Home Guardsmen. Already the angel of vengeance has erased the names of the executioners from the Book of Life.

From a spiritual perspective, a pathological hatred of Russia is understandable. Stating a commitment to ‘traditional values’, in fact to Orthodoxy and Christ, Russia has made Satan gnash his teeth. For more than twenty years he believed that Russia was his. Then, after nearly a generation, at the State level we have seen spiritually informed decisions. Satan wanted Orthodox to continue to bow down before his golden calf, to have no other god but it. He decided to punish Russia with sanctions until it changed its mind.

In the eastern Ukraine we are seeing the Resurrection of Orthodox Rus, a new social system, that which the Tsar-Martyr had tried to introduce before the Revolution, that is, before the Western-organized coup d’etat of February 1917. As then the aristocrats resisted that social system, so today the oligarchs resist it. The oligarchs now face a new generation brought up on the Orthodox White Idea – and that generation is the future Orthodox political élite of Russia. People in the Ukraine long endured economic slavery under the oligarchs without a murmur, but they rebelled against spiritual slavery, against the bloodthirsty Nazi idol erected on the independence of the Ukrainian nation. For idols collapse onto the heads of their devotees.

The thesis of the Russian Orthodox thinker and prophet Ivan Ilyin was that after the collapse of the USSR twenty quasi-states would exist on the sacred sites of Holy Rus, but then ‘a new Russian union would implement a policy based on religious contemplation and spiritual freedom, on justice and fraternal patriotic feelings, and on the dignity of the government, on its power, strength, and universal trust’. He was right. The plans of the global hegemonists are coming to naught.

The Nazi bandits sent by Washington through Kiev are only victims of their own ignorance; the time will come when they will realize who and what drew them to the slaughter. The world’s grandmasters calculated that President Putin would play by the rules of this world. He has not. According to the law of Russian Orthodoxy, when the country is in danger, God chooses to bring the things of this world to naught, the commoner trumps the powerbroker, and those who calculate according to the rules of digital culture the consequences of disobeying the golden calf are proved wrong.

The Poles and the French walked around the Kremlin, then, the fickleness of fate struck them – they had to eat horse-feed. When Napoleon sat in the Kremlin, the French desecrated the holy places, ravaged Russia, but the scales on the eyes of the Russian elite, the allure of the West, fell away. In 1941, the Germans admired the Kremlin through their binoculars. In 1942, Ivan Ilyin wrote the article ‘Why We Believe in Russia’. In 1943, anyone could have written it, but in 1942, in defeat, only Ilyin did. That is, faith saves.

Orthodoxy is not only a gift; it is also a cross. Some people drink the cup of suffering in the name of Russian Orthodox faith, while at the same time others blithely lead carefree lives, wasting their time, not knowing why they are Orthodox. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? (Lk. 13, 4). The Lord warns us. God judges people. His Judgement comes about at the time of our actions, but He does not execute His sentence immediately, God gives people time to repent.

Political frontiers reflect human truths, but often they do not coincide with the frontiers of spiritual civilization. Between Galicia and the rest of the Ukraine there is a frontier, it is a spiritual frontier, that between apostasy and faith. Satan deceives nations with the spirit of national pride. This is symbolized by the Ukrainian Army, most of which refuses to fight or simply joins those whom it is supposed to be fighting. Another 300 have now joined the side of freedom against their CIA paymasters. The worst thing for the hopelessly provincialist nationalist Uniat Galicians is that they still do not realize that they have been judged by God.

War often gives a nation a painful shock. Such a painful shock stopped the Vietnam War. When burial crosses dot the Western and Central Ukraine, serving to subsequent generations as a reminder of how dear the cost of the Nazi hallucination was to the people, then, the mothers of the dead and maimed soldiers will stop the war. Hubris and blind hatred led them to reject federalism, which alone would have allowed people to live within a shared common frontier, as heirs of Kievan Rus.

Feelings overrode reason. Hatred destroys, and only love can create. Thus, Nero hated the Christians, he wanted to immortalize himself in grand architectural monuments and wipe Christians off the face of the Earth, but the persecution only strengthened Christianity in a phenomenal way, while there is nothing left of Nero’s grandiose buildings. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous: but the way of the wicked will perish (Psalm 1, 6).

Adapted from an article by Sergey Moiseev.

Western Peoples, Awake!

We see crucifixions in Syria and decapitations in Iraq, where the Iraqi-Syrian caliphate has been created by Western meddling – for the only ever weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were those taken there by the genocidal Western forces sent by Bush and Blair. In Israel the US-subsidized genocide of the Palestinians – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – continues, only Nazi-style, with 100 eyes for one eye, 100 teeth for one tooth.
Then there is the Taliban restoration in Afghanistan, made inevitable by the departure of Soviet forces a generation ago, then there are the murderous Islamist fanatics in Nigeria, the bombing of ancient Nubian Christians in Sudan, the Western-sponsored caliphates in Libya and Saudi Arabia and the persecution of Christians in Malaysia and Indonesia….

All these events are little reported and even deliberately ignored by the Western media and the sodomized Western world as a whole. For they have nothing but contempt for Christians and are in any case too frightened of their self-created Islamic minorities, 5%-10% of Western Europe now, and of their oil-rich paymasters in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

However, even less reported and indeed deliberately ignored by the Western media, is the use of poison gas and phosphorus bombs in the Ukraine, as criminals are released from prisons and employed by the CIA-installed Nazi junta in Kiev to murder their own civilian population during and since their recent pseudo-ceasefire.

Armed and financed by the US and Galician Uniats, the criminals sent from Kiev, together with Western mercenaries and Western ‘Special Forces’ (i.e. trained killers) have slaughtered thousands, creating the worst refugee problem in Europe since 1945. And all this in order to implement the ‘plan’ of the Californian ‘think tank’ RAND Corporation for the destruction and then colonization of the third-worldized Ukraine, sowing it with GM crops and using it as a dumping-ground for Western nuclear waste and unwanted immigrants.

Above all, what the Western world does not want to admit is that all the present troubles are the beginning of Armageddon, of World War III, and that this War, just like the previous two World Wars, has been started by the sheer imperialist greed of the Western world. Only this time, unlike the previous two times, the whole of the West is united, not divided as before, against Christian civilization, and is fighting on the side of Antichrist.

100 years ago it was the Germanic world that began the First World War and again 75 years ago it was that same world. But today it is the whole Western world that has joined the Nazis. Some will say that peace-loving Russia is at fault. If in the 1990s it had stood up to the Western invasion and genocide in Yugoslavia, then today there would have been peace in a Non-Yugoslavized Ukraine. But in the 1990s decadent Russia was under the jackboot of a pro-Western regime and not free.

The time may be coming when we, the last Christians in the West, all of us Orthodox, whatever our nationality, will have to make plans to take refuge in our only earthly spiritual homeland, in Orthodox Russia, from the Western Antichrist. We now ask the Russian authorities to prepare to issue us with Russian passports. Only the prayers of us, the people of God, for our own repentance and for the restoration of Russia as the Orthodox Sovereign Power, the last bastion of Christianity left in the world, can now delay the coming of Antichrist, Who is so eagerly supported by all the Western elites. Western peoples, awake – it is now or never!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Holy Apostles Peter and Paul 2014

Thousands Die in the Ukraine as ‘Europe Sets a Concrete Example of Life Without Christ’

The Western media report only what its leaders want them to report, for example, the strife which the West has caused in Iraq, where, also unreported by the Western media, Christians are being obliterated, as in Syria. However, in Europe, censored by European media, the genocide continues in the Ukraine. A few days ago a junta aeroplane with 49 foreign (EU and US nationals) mercenaries, paid for by corrupt oligarchs, was shot down by Ukrainian freedom-fighters, most of them Christian patriots. In the war, directed from training camps in Poland which is run as a colony by NATO, whose armed masses and fleet now threaten Russia, three days ago 250 died, two days ago 49 and today more than 100.

Orthodox priests are fleeing the Ukraine for Russia as heterodox and schismatics, their clerical leaders included, openly threaten to kill them and destroy their churches. This reminds us that the present borders of the Ukraine have existed for less than a generation and it basically consists of south-eastern Poland joined to south-western Russia. It is then an artificial construct (like EU Europe), created by the monstrous atheist dictators Lenin and Stalin, who were imposed on Christian Russia by the West in 1917 by overthrowing the Tsar. Today, 19 June, Metropolitan Onufry, the Locum Tenens of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, has called for peace and spoken against the atheist EU, which caused all the problems in the Ukraine.

In an interview with the Interfax news agency the Metropolitan spoke of the Ukraine as a ‘buffer zone’ between the Christian world and the Western world. He spoke of current morality in Europe which ‘would bring no good to the Ukraine’. ‘Europe sets us a concrete example of life without Christ. It pays no attention to the Lord’s commandments and what He forbade. On the contrary, it promotes permissiveness, according to which life is guided by human desires and not the Law of God. This is the wrong path… not all human desires are holy…Today the world is basically divided into two camps: one camp consists of people who strive to keep in force and reality moral laws, given to humanity by God for its benefit’.

He continued: ‘However, the second camp tramples down those laws. For example God blessed man and woman, Adam and Eve, in marriage. Not two Adams, not two Eves’. The Metropolitan, who only a few years ago visited us in London, also pointed to the legalization in Europe of single-sex marriage, euthanasia, which he called ‘the legalization of the sin of suicide’, and abortion. ‘If nobody is left on earth to keep the Divine order of life, then human life is doomed and humanity is headed for self-destruction. The laws, which the new European world offers us today, are not acceptable. We cannot collaborate with and join this world. We should keep our unity with those who adhere to Divine law.’

19 June 2014. My grandfather’s 120th birthday. He, born on 19 June, possessed both morality and common sense. As a soldier he took part in the liberation of Baghdad and Jerusalem. Reader, please pray for the repose of Henry.

Déjà Vu

After the flight (‘the exit strategy’) of defeated Western forces from Iraq, they left behind them a weak and bickering sectarian puppet regime. This had only limited control of the centre of the country around Baghdad and everywhere else the invasion left chaos, bitterness and the desire for revenge. Now that that regime looks like falling to Sunni forces, some in the West must be repenting. Just as the CIA founded Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, so the West, through its puppet allies in utterly corrupt Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has trained and armed Sunni forces in Libya, Egypt and Syria. And now look what is happening.

Western-trained Sunni forces have spread to Iraq and look like seizing power. The Western elite has swiftly dropped all its propaganda rhetoric about an ‘Arab spring’. Its ‘freedom and democracy’ mantra has unleashed a Pandora’s box from Afghanistan to Tunisia, via Libya, Yemen, Bahrein, Syria and Iraq – just as many Middle East experts precisely predicted before the genocidal Bush-Blair 2003 invasion of Iraq. It looks as though the West may now have to ally itself with Iran and the Assad Syrian government in order to defeat the Sunni terrorists, which it itself trained and armed on American bases in Qatar, Turkey and Afghanistan.

In Iraq we now also see exactly what will happen next year in Afghanistan once the humiliated Western forces have fled from there too and when its puppet regime, which even now controls less than one tenth of the country, falls to the people. They will in turn take their revenge on the local, English-speaking, CIA-installed traitors. Just as with a host of CIA puppet-regimes over the last 65 years, in Latin America, South-East Asia, Greece and Italy, it too will fall quite quickly. The same is already happening to the CIA-installed junta in the Ukraine, which it is also trying to turn into yet another banana republic.

Having in the Ukraine found an unprincipled and power-mad English-speaking bandit, who made his money from drug-dealing, prostitution rackets and arms sales (rather like the corrupt rulers the CIA backed in Saigon half a century ago), it backed him. Telling the ignorant and hoodwinked Western public that he had made his billions from ‘chocolate’ (!), the US administration had him elected President with fewer than 25% of the votes, despite a massive US-style PR campaign and strict media censorship. However, he has already slaughtered hundreds in the civil war that he has undertaken and now he faces bankruptcy.

This is because his corrupt regime cannot even pay the foreign, US-trained mercenaries whom it has had to engage to massacre the Ukrainian people – mercenaries are necessary because most of the Ukrainian forces themselves will not kill their own people, as he will. What the West has overlooked in the wars that it created first in Georgia, then in Syria and now in the Ukraine, is that all these countries, unlike Afghanistan and even Iraq, have a large population which has great veneration for the Mother of God. It is She Who has apanages in both Georgia and the Ukraine and a great shrine in Orthodox Syria.

Just as the US failed in its promotion of the tinpot Georgian dictator and torturer, the English-speaking, US-trained Mikhail Sakaashvili, so too it is failing in Syria and the Ukraine. The Russian Crimea, given to the Ukraine by an atheist dictator sixty years ago against the will of the people, did not want to become a US naval base. Now the south and east of the Ukraine, called by history Novorossiya (New Russia), given to the Ukraine by an atheist dictator ninety years ago against the will of its people, does not want to become a US missile base. The US policy of destabilization and genocide is not working in the Ukraine and will not work – as long as its people pray to the Mother of God.