Category Archives: Canonicity

Robert the Devil, the Dismemberment of the US Empire, the Dismantlement of the US Vassal States, and the Dewesternisation of the West, of Russia and of the Church

Foreword: Robert the Devil, the Grandfather of the Anglosphere: 1066-2026

Every year I go past the ruins of the castle of Robert the Devil (Robert le Diable), just outside Rouen in Normandy, France. This Robert is the main character in a medieval legend about a wicked man who was the offspring of Satan and a woman. Most historians identify this mythical figure with a real, evil man – Robert I of Normandy (1000-1035), the father of William the Bastard by his mistress, who was a tanner’s daughter. William (1028-1087) was the Norman mass murderer, who invaded England with some 750 Viking ships in 1066 and has ever since been known as ‘The Conqueror’. It was he who in 1067 transferred his Zionist financial backers from Rouen to his new capital of London, thus founding the City of London. He went on with his barbaric warriors to plunder England (his record is called the Domesday Book – the Book of the Day of Judgement), genociding England and greedily eyeing Wales, Scotland and Ireland for the future.

The 1066 Invasion was not an isolated or disconnected incident. It was only part of the whole process of imposing the new racist ideology of plunder, justified by the Divine superiority of ‘Europe’ or the ’West’, and implemented after the Germanic takeover of the Roman Papacy. There are many dates in this takeover, stretching between 1000 and 1100, marking events which would have been unthinkable in 1000, but which had become normal by 1100. These include the murderous heresy-hunting in the 1020s in France, military campaigns in Spain and Italy from the 1030s, which saw the Popes blessing massacres by their mainly Norman mercenaries, the cutting off of the West from the Church in 1054, the ‘Papal Dictation’ of Hildebrand in 1075, claiming that the Popes are infallible, and the First Crusade in 1095-1096, with its massacres of Jews in the Rhineland and of Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, where both had been living in peace for centuries.

Like the rest of the European elite, the Bastard’s Viking-descended Norman aristocrats, who plundered England and then formed the ‘British’ ruling class together with English traitors, later took part in the looting of the Capital of the Christian Empire, New Rome, in 1204, and then attacked Russia in more ‘crusades’. That looting was to lead to the permanent occupation of New Rome by the Ottomans in 1453. In the nineteenth century, the Norman-founded British (the word ‘British’ marked the revival of pagan Roman Imperialism) Establishment sided with the Ottomans again. This was its full-scale, unprovoked invasion of Russia, known as the Crimean War, which left half a million dead. Later it supported the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Christian Bulgaria. Although, ironically, William the Bastard spoke no English, his father had founded the Anglosphere, whose centre was to go from Venice and Amsterdam to London in 1688 and then from London to Washington in 1941.

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine: 2014-2026

In 2014 the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine in Kiev was toppled by a violent US-organised and EU-backed coup using snipers, which cost the US $5 billion, according to the Europe-hating Nuland. The new regime, composed largely of extremist Neo-Nazis from the far west of the Ukraine, set about genociding the Ukrainians who did not agree with their Fascist ideology, especially in southern and eastern Ukraine, parts of Russia transferred to the Ukraine in 1922 by the sadistic Western-backed monster Lenin. After the peaceful and spontaneous self-transfer of Crimea (95% Russian) which joined Russia, few in the south and east of the Ukraine, terrified and intimidated, accepted their lot. Some rose up and formed peoples’ militias for armed resistance. And over three million fled Kiev’s genocide and oppression to live in freedom in Russia. To the frustration of the genocided Ukrainians, the weak Russian government did nothing, except engage in diplomatic talks.

The resulting diplomatic agreements, called the Minsk Accords, were never implemented by the Western Powers and its proxy in Kiev. Finally, at the end of 2021, huge Kiev forces, NATO-trained, equipped and financed, massed in the east of the Ukraine despite the Minsk Accords and stepped up their genocide. At this, Russia gathered a force of about 120,000 troops to protect the Ukrainians in the far east of the country and also to threaten Kiev from the north in order to pressure the regime into serious negotiations. After only one day, on 25 February 2022, Kiev agreed to talks in Minsk and Istanbul, after eight years of refusing them. However, at the start of April 2022, the regime reneged on its peace agreement under pressure from the Collective West – the US, the EU and the UK, through their emissary Johnson. Unexpectedly the Russians found themselves in a very weak situation. Their forces were too small to liberate even the east of the Ukraine.

Indeed, its main force was composed of the Wagner Group, a private army of mercenaries and ex-convicts, led by a corrupt, power-seeking oligarch, Prigozhin, and local militias. The small Russian Army itself was weakened by corruption and disorganisation. And the lawyer-led Russian political leadership, always acting according to international law, unlike Kiev, did not know what to do. The Russian chaos of the start resembled the same chaos there at the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Moreover, they naively realised that the conflict was not between Russia and the Ukraine, which was a mere proxy, but between Russia and the Collective West, represented by the Nazi-founded NATO. This wanted every last Ukrainian to die for it. The Russians of February 2022 had not at all been prepared for this. And so today the Western-created conflict in the Ukraine is in its fifth year and has left about 2,000,000 dead and wounded soldiers, the vast majority of them Ukrainians, outmatched by the very cautious Russian forces, who have lost about 120,000.

Defeat and Dismemberment: 2026 –

Despite military escalation, caused by hubris, that is, the arrogant overestimation of self and underestimation of rivals, the US Empire, formed in 1941, has now lost free access to the grain corridor of the blockaded Black Sea ports, which has become a Russian Lake. Elsewhere, and for exactly the same reasons in another conflict that it needlessly started, the US is losing free access to the oil corridors of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Through further hubris, it may yet lose free access to the Baltic Sea. The US thought it could defeat Iran in a weekend and so repeated Hitler’s hubris of 1941, when he thought he could defeat the USSR in two months. US forces have already been forced to flee West Asia, where Iran has destroyed US bases as far as the Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq. The US will probably have to flee these and all the feudal puppet Gulf States, as Iranian missiles can reach them, and then quit its Crusader fortress, Zionist-occupied Palestine, where the people are in revolt.

The US also intends to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany. Will this lead to the US abandoning all its European vassals, its NATO and EU puppets, especially the minute Baltic States, occupied and held like an unloaded gun to the head of Russia? Withdrawal from Europe, from Italy, Britain and the rest of Germany? All is possible – the US is bankrupt to the tune of $40 trillion and has few arms left. What will happen to its Asian vassals, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, where many also want an end to the US occupation? As for Latin America, with Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua and Cuba, the US is hated by all there, except by the rich oligarchs and their puppets, corrupt politicians and journalists. The US is going to be left to concentrate on itself. Here, dealing with its bankruptcy and the collapse of its infrastructure, its hopeless public school and health systems, mass poverty, drug-addiction and much else, will keep it busy for decades.

The US-led West has behaved like a bully, whose victims have at last been technologically, militarily and economically strong enough to band together in solidarity because of the bully. Western aggressiveness has achieved the once unthinkable. It has allied the vastly diverse and once divided Russia, Iran and China (RIC), which have weapons far in advance of those of the now backward US. And it has also won them the sympathy of 90% of the oppressed, Non-Western world. After all, this is the third invasion by the Collective West of Non-Western Russia in just over 200 years, Napoleon’s, Hitler’s and NATO’s. Those invasions, although always led by one country, France, Germany or the US, were all multinational and all ended in the same way, catastrophically. This is a racist and imperialist war, for the West was trying to extend the border of its blocked ‘Europe’ to the whole Ukraine and so cut off the ‘racially inferior Asiatics’ in Moscow. 85% of the Ukraine is not Europe’s, but Russia’s.

Dismantlement and Freedom: 2026 –

As for that western end of the North-West peninsula of Asia, called Western Europe, two straitjacket organisations, both centred in Brussels, positioned between the Germanic north and the Latin south, are being dismantled. Both are ruled by nuncios, trained by the successor to the Papacy in Washington. The US-led NATO and the EU, that have held Western Europe together for over 75 years, are splintering. Their European administrative elite is irrationally destroying its own countries, cutting off its nose to spite its face, blowing up Nordstream and even refusing to use Russian aircraft to stop forest fires. The largely Orthodox south-east of Western Europe has had to be repressed by undemocratically-elected Germanic EU leaders, just as it was by the German princelings who were appointed to rule Romania, Greece and Bulgaria in the nineteenth century. All want to leave the EU straitjacket and NATO aggression. This is also visible in Catholic Poland, Hungary and Slovakia – see below.

For many in the ex-Catholic south of Western Europe too, in Frexit France, pro-Russian Italy, anti-Israeli Spain and little Portugal, never at ease with the US-imposed and desacralising Protestantisation of Catholicism in the 1960s, want out. Their peoples want their sovereignty back. This leaves only the largely Germanic and highly Americanised north-west of Western Europe. But even here there are voices, especially on the left, that dissent from US imperialism in Gaza, on the West Bank, in the Lebanon, Iran and the Ukraine. And on the right, many also want their countries back. Sovereignist Parties are taking over, whether they are the AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, or Reform in the UK. Once the parasitic, US-trained and appointed elites of Europe, from London through Scandinavia and Germany to the Baltics, who only ever implement ‘Daddy’s’ policies, are gone, with or without their pay, the people could take over. Goodbye, EU and NATO.

The future is at stake. How new politicians of left and right can co-operate, and they will have to, in Western Europe, remains to be seen. In any case, it seems clear that the old Globalist/Zionist/American ‘centrist’ elite, which bet everything like a crazed gambler on the Zionist US, Ukraine and Israel, is doomed, rejected by left and right alike. It is doomed not only because of the popular opposition to it and its attempts to repress that opposition, but because it has bankrupted its countries. They cannot even afford the elite’s proposed absurd remilitarisation, which the people neither want nor need. New governments will emerge, faced with facing up to the horrific imperialist past of Western Europe. They will be forced to make peace with the first, third and fourth largest economies of the world, those of China, India and Russia, and with their ex-colonies. China for manufactures, India for labour, Russia for energy, and ex-colonies for justice. Here is the future.

Afterword: The Fall of the West, a Dewesternised Russia and a Dewesternised Church

With the defeat in 2026 of the US by technologically advanced Iran and the coming collapse of the US-imposed Kiev regime in the Ukraine and the advance of Russia to the western Ukraine, the delusional dreams of the West are over. Already many even very secular people are talking about ‘The Post-West’, what happens now that 500 years of supremacy based on a mythical racist ideology backed only by a now lost military superiority, are over. In fact, as we said at the beginning of this article, it has been going on not for 500 years, but for 1,000 years, headed by Robert the Devil. The criminal dreams of such as Kaja Kallas to destroy and then fragment Russia, plundering its vast natural resources, are over. The virtual reality of a Crimea occupied by the UK, as in 1854-56, a Belarus and Western Ukraine occupied by Poland as in 1920, a southern Ukraine, Baltic and White Sea, and eastern Siberia occupied by Italians, British, Americans, French, has remained virtual.

It means that Russia can at last free itself from the Western ideology of Communism, imported from German Jewry, and from the Western ideology of the Imperial period that began with Peter I, just over 300 years ago. This meant enslaving the Church under a Protestant Oberprokuror bureaucrat and Anglophile sadistic aristocrats enslaving in blind imitation peasants (as in the Enclosures and Highland Clearances in England and Scotland), as portrayed by Pushkin, Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin and many other 19^th century Russian writers. A Russian Church would surely decentralise, at long last liberated, as it would begin behaving as a pastoral, and not as a political, arrangement. Its politics, whether under the Soviet, post-Soviet or Imperial periods are a 300-year hangover from Westernisation. The Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople has to do the same, ridding itself of its Westernisation, now evident in the fact that its administration is little more than a CIA front.

Although a dying, totally Amercanised and very right-wing sect of the Russian Church in the USA is now desperately clutching on to totalitarian censorship through dictatorial methods, imitating the autocratic Trump, the rest of the Russian Church is freeing itself. Dictatorship will be resisted in the Church in Western countries. Decentralisation after 300 years of Western centralisation means the return of both the Russian Church and of the Greek Patriarchate to Conciliarity. That is, to Catholicity in the Orthodox sense of the world, to the practices of a Church based on Councils, concelebration and the consultation between clergy and people working together in freedom. This Conciliarity is what in the secular world lies behind the developing economic Alliance of BRICS. However, its origin, however forgotten by decadent Westernised bishops, is in the Church. And there are plenty of real Orthodox bishops in the 16 Local Churches who have not forgotten the meaning of Conciliarity.

On Fr Seraphim (Rose)

We are not examining here whether the late Californian monk, Fr Seraphim (Rose), who in the 1960s joined the then Russian Orthodox Church in exile (ROCOR), was a saint or not. That is not our task and we are not qualified to do this. In the 1970s we always found his works logical and obvious, with common sense, opposed to ‘super correct’ fanaticism, but no more. I remember saying at the time that if you did not already know what he was writing, then you could not be a conscious member of one of the Orthodox Churches.

We cannot find proofs for or against his possible holiness. Perhaps God will reveal something and then all will be clear, one way or the other. Our task here is to examine why many members of the American Synod of Bishops, still called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), despite the fact that it has been almost completely Americanised and most of its bishops cannot even speak correct Russian, want to canonise him today. There are clear reasons for this which are to do with the Synod’s historic crisis of identity.

Now, all Local Orthodox Churches in Western countries are primarily composed of immigrants or exiles from Orthodox countries, from Romania, Greece, Russia, the Ukraine, Serbia, Bulgaria, Syria etc. However, unlike all others, ROCOR, founded after the 1917 ‘Russian Revolution’, no longer has a natural constituency. Normal Orthodox Russians, not many of whom live in Western countries, do not join the New York-based ROCOR, if they can join what they prefer, their own Moscow-based Church of present-day Russians.

The latter is nearly 200 times bigger than ROCOR. Some wonder why it bothers with such a small group abroad. The reason is political, as the Russian Patriarch told a Metropolitan-friend. The Moscow Church needs to be represented in the USA, ROCOR is good for that, even though ROCOR has in the last decade become increasingly strange, even to the point of schism. For reasons of State, Moscow has chosen to overlook that. However, behind the shield of Moscow, which alone gives ROCOR official canonicity, ROCOR has an identity crisis.

Originally a part of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, today its third, fourth, fifth and even sixth generations, few in number, hardly speak a word of Russian. Most Russians were assimilated generations ago and lost all interest in Russian Church life. This membership has been much supplemented by converts, who have no Russian origins, with the result that a once Russian Church has largely become an American Church. However, most converts join mainstream Orthodox groups. Why join a historical fragment, ROCOR?

Most American converts to Orthodoxy join their own Church, the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) or other US groups. However, ROCOR in the USA has attracted a niche group, or constituency, often called ‘crazy converts’. These are highly conservative and even pathological converts, apparently quite common in the USA and in California, though there are a few such people especially in other English-speaking countries, who are drawn to what is exclusive and anti-Protestant (ironically, most converts are Protestants).

Today, the American episcopate of ROCOR wants to canonise a convert, which is what Fr Seraphim (Rose) was. He will then be the saint of their converts, a self-justification for their schismatic behaviour and condemnation of all others, a kind of national flag, a unique and exclusive identity, which they hope will attract even more crazy converts. And they are necessary, as the old ROCOR Russian core is today growing ever smaller. However, it is pathological converts who have created the anti-woman and anti-family ethos of today’s ROCOR.

After its long-awaited submission to the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church and so the restoration of full canonicity in 2007, ROCOR had the opportunity to merge with the Moscow-based Church and also contribute positively to the other Orthodox living in Western countries from the mainstream. Tragically, by 2017 ROCOR had turned its back on this God-given opportunity and turned inwards, cutting itself off from others, refusing concelebration and communion, openly supporting Trump’s Republican Party.

In choosing the uncanonical and politically-driven path of the Protestant sect and condemning other Orthodox like pharisees, taking their clergy without letters of leave, the American Synod has isolated itself and discredited itself. Its intention to canonise an American convert, a repentant homosexual, but who did then spend many years with a pedophile, has cast further doubt on it, already compromised by its links with the CIA. In any case, as regards a possible canonisation of Fr Seraphim Rose and after the war in the Ukraine is over, Moscow will have the last word.

On the Third Anniversary of our Freedom from Persecution 2022-2025: The Thirteen Reasons Why We Took Canonical Refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church after Nearly Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Russian Orthodox Church

Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake (Matthew 5,11)

Foreword

Although the statement below concerns the 5,000 of us directly, it could also be used as part of a more general study in order to understand the process of how a Persecuted Church became a Persecuting Church, how an organism for Love became a narrow and judgemental sect which professed Hatred which enjoys trying to close churches. It is a psychiatric tragedy.

Some Recent History

https://roarch.org.uk/parishes-england/

The Romanian Orthodox Church is not much bothered by PR and websites. It updates its website once every ten years. For some reason, this cyberworld information is highly important to newcomers, whereas the well-circulated photographs of our letter of acceptance of 16 February 2022, issued by the Chancellery of our Metropolia on 18 February 2022, and of our antimension, signed by Metropolitan Joseph and issued to our parish on 27 February 2022, and our belonging to the Romanian Orthodox Church, witnessed to by the multinational crowds following the litanies and the Great Entrance at every Divine Liturgy, are not adequate evidence of which Local Church we belong to!

The fact that a certain bishop broke his promise to a Metropolitan that he would issue letters of release and then told people publicly that we had not been received into the Romanian Orthodox Church, when we clearly had been, despite that bishop’s clerical maladministration, is on his conscience, not on ours. Similarly, the mistake of those who believed that ‘error’, without checking to find out the truth, and then supported and repeated that ‘error’, is also on their conscience, not on ours. Shall we be kind and just say that they had been misinformed? This is why we have had so many instances of myrrh-giving icons in our main church since the Feast of the Ascension in 2022, as has been recorded in our monthly newsletters. Our God is the God of Mercy and Justice.

Thus, at one fell swoop, a newcomer to ROCOR hounded out of it one of its largest families, 28 people of four generations, who had devoted their lives to ROCOR. The scandal became international, discrediting ROCOR. Among those expelled was one of the ten speakers of the 2006 Fourth All-Diaspora Council in San Francisco, whose speech had been so warmly greeted then and who had belonged to the Church before that newcomer was even born. However, since the newcomer had not belonged to ROCOR in 2006, but instead was then actively supporting a move by the Russian Church to join Constantinople, he would not know that.

None of this should be a surprise, since the New ROCOR had already excommunicated another of the ten speakers and yet another had left to join the Moscow Patriarchate. Seven to go. Who is next? How many more of the remaining faithful will be expelled by the New ROCOR for the ‘crime’ (that is what they called it) of remaining faithful to the Old ROCOR? They persecuted St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, suspended him and put him on trial. Why not do the same to his spiritual grandchildren as well?

It seems as though the New ROCOR is reneging on our long and hard-fought fight to enter back into canonical communion with the rest of the Russian Church, which culminated in our victory of 2007. With its history of support for Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, support for the Vlasovtsy, those Russians who fought with Hitler against Russia, with its CIA bishops and priests, and now with their support for the CIA-orchestrated Kiev regime, which so persecutes Metr Onufry, should we be surprised? I am sometimes asked if I support Moscow or Kiev in the conflict in the Ukraine. I always answer the same thing: I support Metr Onufry and the Ukrainian and Russian peoples and always have done.

The Thirteen Reasons

The principal reason why we were forced to leave and take refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church, is simply so that we would no longer be in an unthinkable schism from the Russian Church, specifically from the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition, in which we have had so many close family and friends in Paris for many decades. (It is also true that in the Romanian Church, we are no longer in schism with the Greek Churches either. We shall probably never recover from the shock of that bishop’s accusation that Patriarch Bartholomew is ‘possessed by demons’ Was he talking about himself?). His schism from the Russian Church, is exactly what we wanted to escape by taking canonical refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church.

For nearly fifty years we had fought for the unity of the Russian Church, very actively and very successfully and were thanked personally by the Russian Patriarch for doing so. And then we saw it all destroyed by a very young and inexperienced convert newcomer from far away, who, a creator of schism, accused us of being schismatic and then of being senile! We have once more been able to live canonically, following the theological royal way and the canonical golden mean, away from all extremes.

For three years we have been in communion with and concelebrated with all Orthodox, including with the Russian Church, except for the tiny ROCOR, now reduced to a handful of miniscule communities here. Communion is the sign and guarantee that we are inside the Church and not outside the Church, inside some pathological, Protestant-style, convert sect and cult. For some reason this sect has been protected by ‘misinformed’, but still unrepentant and unapologetic individuals above it. That too is on their conscience, not on ours.

In the Romanian Orthodox Church we do not rebaptise other Orthodox, which is a heresy.
The Romanian Orthodox Church does not ‘defrock’ the clergy of other Local Churches.
In the Romanian Orthodox Church we can love everyone, specifically we do not have to hate Greeks, refusing to recognise their saints because they are in ‘the wrong jurisdiction’!, ‘hate’ Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians and ‘half-hate’ Moldovans, as we were strongly recommended, but categorically refused, to do, for we strive to obey the Gospel commandments of Christ and not obey a schismatic.
In the Romanian Orthodox Church over the last three years we have been able to keep all our churches open and serve our multinational parishioners in our missions at our own cost, just as we had done for decades before.
For the last three years we have been allowed to speak and use in services our own childhood English language and do not have to pretend to be Americans in our speech, as we were bullied and pressured, but categorically refused, to do.
For the last three years our websites have no longer been subject to rigid, word-for-word censorship and micromanagement, as we have had the wonderful basic human right to free speech, of which we had been punitively deprived for four months under a Calvinistically jealous dictatorship.
For the last three years we have not had to participate in slandering faithful clergy and laypeople of other Local Churches, which we categorically refused to do.
We have no longer had to deal with one who suffered in his spoilt child syndrome from violent bouts of temper and jealousy and wanted to divide and destroy solid families, setting generation against generation and hating women and children, upsetting many women with his ugly remarks.
We have no longer had to pay 10% of our income and be subjected to fits of rage, shouting that we must pay even more and also hear slanders that we are thieves, all so that someone could live like a mini-oligarch. Membership of our self-governing Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe and its local Archdiocese is free.
We have no longer belonged to a small, out-of-control group, which is faced with having to pay millions of dollars in court cases which it is losing to individuals whom it has slandered, and which is also sundered by multiple scandals concerning rebaptism of other Orthodox, ‘defrocking’ clergy of other Local Churches, lack of financial transparency, the use of electronic signatures without authorisation, alcoholism and homosexuality.
We have no longer had to live under an oppressive system where priestly awards are deliberately withheld from the most senior clergy for many, many years, for reasons of sadistic hatred and bullying jealousy, as though we were donkeys who wanted to follow decorative carrots.
We have been allowed to be Christians, free to keep our integrity and obey our conscience. We have been able to act according to our Orthodox Christian principles, as for nearly fifty years before, in the old and noble Western European ROCOR Tradition of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, which they have all but destroyed, except inside the Romanian Orthodox Church, where we faithfully conserve it. This freedom comes from the fact that our Romanian bishops are, like us, also Christians, and do not punish or persecute us.

Why to the Romanian Orthodox Church?

Some people ask us, all the 15 clergy and 5,000 people in our six parishes who left ROCOR because it refused to listen to us about its schism, punished us for telling them the truth about it, and refused to listen to us who endured this shameful betrayal of the best friends that the Russian Church has ever had, why we joined the Romanian Church specifically. The answer to this is simple:

The Greek Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople was for us not an option, despite some wonderful clergy and people there, not least on Mt Athos, as certain members of its episcopate had compromised themselves through their uncanonical actions in the Ukraine and through their ecumenism. Joining the Greek Church would therefore have been very divisive among our flock. As for the Serbian Church, we greatly respect it, as we do all other Local Churches, but we did not think of joining any of them, as we could have done, because we do not have any direct connections with their bishops, only with their priests.

There was only one obvious solution, the Romanian Church. We have always valued our contacts with the Romanian Tradition of Life via Fr Raphael Noica and others. Since 2001 we have had Romanian parishioners and these have increased in number since. As a result, we had a Romanian parishioner ordained priest and a Moldovan parishioner ordained deacon some years ago. We are pastors, not nationalists, and are here to serve the Orthodox people, whatever their nationality, English, Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Romanian or other.

We do not conduct passport checks at the door. Perhaps that is why the number of our parishioners of all nationalities has doubled in the last three years since we left ROCOR. Nor are we capitalists, who sell vastly overpriced candles, icons, prayer books and other Church items to their own, often poor, people. We run the cheapest Church shop in the country. It is a service, not a source of excessive profit. We do not exploit the Orthodox people.

In the last 12 years 1 million Romanians have come to live in this country. Today at least 70% of all Orthodox in this country are Romanians. Go to any church in this country and the children are almost certain to be Romanian. Children are our future. And young priests have been temporarily loaned by the Romanian Church to the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Antioch, which are both desperately short of young clergy.

Moreover, the Romanian bishops have a clear pastoral sense of how important it is to keep the children in the Church and are very happy to use the local languages to do so. All our bishops speak Western European languages fluently – unlike most Russian bishops. Clearly, if we believe in a future Local Church, as we always have done, it makes sense to be part of by far the largest group of Orthodox, as long as it is politically free, which was the case of very few Local Churches 35 years ago, but which is no longer the case today, except for two of them.

It also makes sense to belong to a Local Church which allows us to conserve the Tradition and calendar of the Old Western European ROCOR, as we are able. The view of the late Metr Kallistos (Ware) ten years ago was quite rightly that ROCOR’s ascetic and liturgical heritage should be valued. Sadly, it has been ignored by them and taken over by ritualism and the pharisaical condemnation of others, turning this heritage into an opportunity for even further spiritual pride and censoriousness. As for us, we keep to the saints of the Old ROCOR of the Confessors, like St John of Shanghai, whom they now condemn, as he did not dress in expensive clothing and footwear and did not live in an elite apartment.

In 2022 we left the Russian Church to its nationalism, where the earthly kingdom is higher than the heavenly kingdom and Caesar’s is tragically confused with God’s. It has indeed renounced the multinational ethos which it had in the past. Too bad for it. We pray that Moscow, like Constantinople, will recover. Providentially we were integrated into the Romanian Orthodox Church exactly eight days before the longstanding Ukrainian-Russian conflict reached a new level of militancy on 24 February 2022. Thus, we avoided the Russian-Ukrainian division and so were able to answer all the threats of violence and hatred that were sent to us after that date, as well as the unnecessary offer of police protection, as well as invitations to support the Nazis in Kiev, by simply answering that we in the Romanian Orthodox Church have nothing to do with internal conflicts and politics inside the Russian Church.

With the result that our many Russian and Ukrainian parishioners can and do pray for one another side by side. Precisely from within the Romanian Orthodox Church, the second largest Local Church and which speaks a Latin language and uses the Latin alphabet, we can perhaps play a role in healing the schism between Russians and Greeks, which stems from the fact that neither is politically free. We are neutral. For we are pastors, not politicians.

We recall how the Greeks started the schism in the Ukraine by opening churches on Russian canonical territory. Then the Russians made it worse, firstly by cutting off communion, a very radical act which made the Russian Church look schismatic, then by poaching churches, priests and people from the Greek jurisdiction without letters of release, and then, in revenge, by opening churches on Greek canonical territory in Africa. This is like two little boys fighting. When will this end?

Afterword

Can we, in concert with the other politically free Local Churches, be intermediaries and help to bring sense and peace, in the spirit of the catholicity of the whole Orthodox Church? We pray so, through the prayers of all the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian and Greek Lands and of all the Lands of the Earth.

16 February 2025

From Recent Correspondence: The Secret is Out!

Dear Father Andrew,

It’s been a long time since we last spoke or saw each other. I was engrossed in my own journey that requires a face-to-face meeting to share.

In these strange and challenging times, I currently work between Moscow, X, and (to a lesser extent) London. I planned to reach out to you when I am next in the UK.

Throughout this time, the memories of our few meetings and your work in the Orthodox Church have remained cherished treasures in my heart. I often revisit your Orthodox England website, sharing the link with those I believe might be interested.

Yesterday, I intended to browse through your ‘Orthodox England’ book online. On searching for you on Google, I came across the news three years ago of your departure from the “jurisdiction.” This development didn’t come as a surprise, given the current state of affairs within the Church and the world…..

Dear Z,

We are all very well.

Our Orthodox England site is very active and still very popular. The book, The Orthodox Faith and the English Tradition, is now fully online, under Resources on the website: http://www.orthodoxengland.org.uk/oe4/e-books/. Our story is quite simple, though quite shocking, as it concerns corruption in high places inside the Russian Church.

In 2017, exactly ten years after the now American, but once Russian émigré, group entered into canonical communion with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007, it was infiltrated by the CIA. This was not surprising to me, as it had already been infiltrated by the CIA as far back as the 1960s, under the then Fr George (later Bp Gregory) Grabbe. However, after the fall of the USSR in 1991, the CIA abandoned it, as it had no more interest in it, and the CIA stopped giving money to it. ‘Mission accomplished’ for them, as they said at that time. However, by 2017 the time to infiltrate again had begun.

When I spoke at the émigré Church Council in San Francisco in May 2006, it was attended by the former US ambassador to Kiev, the notorious neocon John Herbst, who lost his job in Kiev on 26 May 2006. I overheard him saying to one bishop in Russian (he thought I could not understand him), that ‘they would have to do something about the ROCOR decision to rejoin Moscow’, taken at the 2006 Council. The CIA duly subsidised a crazy man who lives in Odessa and calls himself Metropolitan Agafangel (not the canonical and real Metr Agafangel). But that was only the start.

It all went much further than that. In 2017 the CIA infiltrated the now American group in the hope of destroying it and so harming the whole Russian Church. So, in 2017 they tasked someone with destroying the Church here. He did this by creating a schism with Moscow.

Now we had been working successfully for Russian Church unity for nearly 50 years, so his schism went against the work of a lifetime, so they had to persecute us and try and close all our churches. So we went to try and join the local Moscow bishop. To our astonishment, he refused to take any of us, 15 clergy, 6 parishes and 5,000 people. Now he is a nice man and he let us know that his refusal was on orders from Moscow. So we think that the Church in Moscow itself has been infiltrated by the CIA. After all, there are people there who will do anything for money. The recent scandal with that Metropolitan proves it.

Today the now American group is beset by scandals which it created, not only here, but also in the USA. Worse still, under CIA pressure, after 2022 it openly took the Western side in the US-Russia proxy war in the so deeply tragic Ukraine. In that way it lost a lot of its Russian base. Russians were understandably scandalised by the new anti-Russian, pro-American standpoint, and without attracting any Ukrainians, who go to their own churches and do not want anything to do with Russians. As the American group is dying out as a consequence of its not merging into the structures of the Russian Church, it is now desperately trying to recruit converts. However, as it is a schismatic and sectarian group, it has problems attracting normal people, but quite often extremists or fanatics with pathological problems, for instance, unstable young men who dislike women or homosexuals.

In any case, three years ago, before the SMO, we joined the Romanian Orthodox Church, who have been wonderful to us. Here we continue exactly as before, only without corruption, without schism and without the CIA. We are getting to the point here, where there are more Russian Orthodox outside the Russian Church than inside it, because of the corruption inside it.