Category Archives: Catholicism

The Tortuous Path of Western Religion in the Global World

This April’s canonization of two twentieth-century Popes of Rome has only served to underline the gulf between the Church and Roman Catholicism as regards the criteria for sainthood. The first pope to be canonized, a jocular Italian peasant, and the second, a highly politicised Polish nationalist philosopher, were both enemies of the Orthodox Church. The first took part in anti-Orthodox activities in Bulgaria, the second in Yugoslavia and the Ukraine. This is no surprise, since both have been canonized by a Jesuit pope, who is a form backer of Galician Uniats and last weekend received the self-appointed Premier of the Ukraine, the scientologist and promoter of anti-Ukrainian terrorism Arseniy Yatsenyuk.

The present Pope’s support for the disintegration of the Ukraine probably comes under US orders, following President Obama’s recent visit to Rome, just as John Paul II made himself available to the US to help bring down the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. It was under the latter’s pontificate in particular that Catholicism was penetrated by pedophile priests, whose activities were camouflaged by Rome. Naturally, the double canonization in Rome was attended by a bishop from the Patriarchate of Constantinople, who sat with the other Uniats, not with the Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans). In this way that Patriarchate can see what its fate will be if it does entirely join Rome – it will become just another Roman Catholic colonial subculture.

These papal canonizations, like that to follow later this year, illustrate the confusion of the Vatican of the last fifty years. It is not exact to say that Catholicism has lost the way; rather it has found a multitude of false ways. As they say: when you stop believing in something, you will believe in anything. The gap between official Vatican proclamations and what ordinary Catholics actually believe has grown and grown. However, the overall trend of the last fifty years has been towards a Catholicism that is ever more secularized, protestantized, politicized, turned away from God, symbolized by their priests who now turn their backs to God during their services and face the world instead. The Catholic merger with the world is also symbolized by the ‘modern’ ‘design’ of its church buildings, furnishings and vestments. And the modern designs of the 60s and 70s look very old-fashioned in today’s post-modern world.

Overall, Catholicism has shown a loss of the sense of the sacred, of Divinity, of holiness, a movement towards protestantization and so secularization. In the face of that, many of the most devout Catholics – as well as many ordinary Catholics – have abandoned Catholicism, since they have felt abandoned by their own hierarchy. Catholicism has lost the Western world. Its reality today is in Latin America, Africa and Asia, though here too there are losses, for example Brazil, where 40% of the population is said to have joined Protestant sects. Of the future it is hard to speak. The sectarian Muslim world and Hindu India remain mysteries, though it is said that by 2030 China will be the largest Christian nation on earth. And there, as everywhere else, the spiritually sensitive and the historically-minded will see through Western mythology and find their way to the Orthodox Church.

As a result of the collapse of Catholicism in the Western world, over the last two generations right-wing Catholics have joined the Catholic traditionalists; as for the moderate and the younger generation, faced with the spiritual desert of the West, they have been drawn into any number of sects and cults. There they seek a sense of belonging. The degeneration of modern Catholic worship, characterised by infantilism, the entertainment mentality, and the lack of spiritual understanding are reflections. They are reflections of the modern consumer mentality. This has conditioned and shaped modern Catholicism, like modern Protestantism, making it into a ‘cafeteria religion’, a ‘pick and mix’ consumerist supermarket. Today Western religion faces a civilizational dead end; the thread of its manmade life has been unwound. If the West wants to continue as a spiritually-based entity, and so a morally-based entity, it will have to look outside its apostatic self for sustenance.

Geopolitical War in the Ukraine

The word ‘ukraine’ means borderland. In other words, ‘ukraine’ is not a country, but a region. In fact historically, it is a separatist term for Galicia, which was invented for anti-Russian political reasons by Austria-Hungary only some 120 years ago with strong Vatican approval. In reality, all of what is called the Ukraine today is not part of that borderland, but part of the Rus homeland of Orthodoxy, called Little Russia.

Therefore, what is happening today in Kiev and the far western Ukraine (Galicia) is not so much a civil war, but more part of a continuing divisive and imperialistic geopolitical war. This is a war against Eurasian Christian Civilization, an attempted coup d’etat financed and orchestrated by meddling Western atheist secularism, which already tried to annihilate the Sovereignty of the former in 1917, exporting its atheist materialist ideology there. Long before this Western secularism had, under various camouflaged names, already produced the Europewide massacres of Karl the Tall, the Crusades, the Inquisition and Wars of ‘Religion’, and then the worldwide genocides of slavery, Imperialism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinism, Marxism, Nazism, an utterly corrupt EU whose ‘breathtaking’ corruption costs 100 billion euros a year (according to the February 2014 report of EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem), and exploitative Globalism.

Twenty years ago we saw the first part of this geopolitical war in Yugoslavia, also a borderland area, which the EU, led by the Vatican, wanted to divide and rule, snatching it too away from the cradle of Eurasian Christian Civilization. The US-backed EU has not yet been successful in this and has to supply troops to keep the newly parts of this area even under relative control. These troops, and the threat of bombing and economic blockade of Serbia, have not been able even to begin to prepare this region for European Union control and exploitation by Berlin (except for Slovenia and Croatia). However, today, a similar process is beginning in the Ukraine, where the much-practised Western terrorist techniques of the Arab ‘Spring’, including the use of social networks by the terrorists and snipers, are being tested yet again against the democratically-elected government.

Armouries have been seized in the three former Polish provinces in the west of the Ukraine (Ukraine proper) and semi-professional terrorists, well-trained and orchestrated, have flung themselves against police in Kiev, murdering nine of them in the last 24 hours. These Fascist bandits have left swastikas behind them and one of their leaders, the anti-semite Tyagnibok, has been called a Nazi even by the Calvinistic Angela Merkel in Berlin. However, there are other leaders from the far west, Yatsenyuk, and the favourite German-American puppet Klichko (he speaks English), so beloved of the foul-mouthed US politician Victoria Newland. The present war in Kiev and the far west of the Ukraine is an attempt to yugoslavise the Ukraine.

This attempt is unlikely to succeed, for unlike Serbia, the Ukraine has a border with Russia. As soon as the Olympic Games are over (and the present troubles have clearly been orchestrated by Washington and Berlin to time with them), it is likely that Russia will move to protect its people, the majority of the so-called ‘Ukrainians’. It has no desire to see the Libyanisation and Syrianisation of the Ukraine, or to see it turned into a Polish colomy or German colony, as it was in World War II. Moreover, US dollars and Brussels euros are in short supply nowadays; the US embassy in Kiev has been subsidising the terrorists to the tune of $20 million per week and privding ‘instructors’; the absorption into the US-designed European Union of the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus has all been much too expensive.

Yesterday one of the US warships sent to Sochi two weeks ago to intimidate Russia got stuck on a sandbank in the Black Sea. It may be a symbol of all attempts by Western politicians and media, whether they are Obama or Ashton, to intimidate in the Ukraine. The threat to send NATO troops from Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Romania to occupy the Ukraine in the latest anti-Christian Western Crusade is only a threat. If the ‘Ukraine’ returns to its pre-1939 borders and the former Polish and before that former Austrian Uniat far west breaks away completely and becomes yet another bankrupt Fourth Reich EU colony, the rest of the Ukraine (85%) will only heave a sigh of relief and say ‘good riddance’.

A Time to Lose the Last Soviet Delusions

Introduction:

The CWN News Agency reports that the head of the ‘Ukrainian’ Uniats, Archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk, has called on Western European countries and the USA to interfere in Ukrainian political life by supporting the rioters and terrorists on the Maidan Square in Kiev against the democratically elected government. The Greek Catholic prelate said that ‘the future of democracy in Europe, Eastern Europe and even Russia depends on this’. Naively failing to notice that the West had already started a new cold war against the lands of the former Russian Empire in 2000, he added that if ‘the USA and Europe abandon the ‘Ukraine’ or do not take pre-emptive action, humanity may find itself on the brink of a new cold war’.

Source: sedmitza.ru 11/02/14

Commentary:

The above statements come only a day after the US Vice-President Joe Biden met Ukrainian schismatic leaders, a Uniat and the Soviet-period married head, now 85 years old, of the tiny so-called ‘Kiev Patriarchate’. As an English proverb says, ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good’. For the events in Kiev, heavily orchestrated from Warsaw, Brussels and Washington and timed to coincide with the Winter Olympics, make it crystal clear who the enemies of the Orthosphere are: Washington, closely followed by its poodles in colonial London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, the Vatican, the Phanar and all other ecumenists, including the naïvely deluded who still exist in former Soviet Russia.

However, these events also make clear that the closest friends and patriots of the Orthosphere outside the Orthodox homelands are those not engaged in the heresy of ecumenism, among them us in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. As Metropolitan Hilarion has said of his ancestral homeland, called by its real name, Kievan Rus:

“As faithful children of the Russian Orthodox Church, we cannot remain indifferent to the troubles plaguing Her cradle – the Mother of Russian Cities, Kiev. We call on all the faithful of the Russian Church Outside Russia around the world to pray for an end to all violence, that God might prevent all bloodshed and speedily restore brotherly love and understanding.”

“Again we pray Thee, O Almighty Lord, that Thou mightest grant peace to Kiev, the Mother of Russian cities which is shaken by civil strife, and the entire country of Kievan Rus’, and by the power of the grace of Thy Holy Spirit extinguish all enmity and violence therein; O Source of goodness and Abyss of love for mankind, swiftly hearken and have mercy.”

The Euro-American Revenge against International Orthodoxy

We must create a Slavic State in Central Europe on a strictly Catholic basis so that it can become a bulwark against Orthodox Russia.

Adolf Hitler

The present violent disturbances in Kiev and certain formerly Polish, Galician towns in the Ukrainian wild west come after the refusal of the Ukrainian government to cede to the wishes of the violent pro-Western minority and so make the Ukraine into the next bankrupt EU colony. It is crystal clear that the present carefully-orchestrated riots are the ethnocentric, Western revenge for the choice of freedom of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government and people.

After several carefully-timed ‘visits’ in support of the terrorists (many of them known violent criminals) since last November of various high-ranking EU commissars and US Republican politicians, like so many pagan Roman generals and senators 2,000 years ago, after threats from the US administration and from their puppet EU (the EU was ever a post-1945 US creation) to impose sanctions against the Ukrainian government and in support of the few thousand terrorists (many of them said to be Polish nationals and rumoured to be paid a small fortune (for them) of 30 euros a day by the US administration), after invasion threats to the territorial integrity of the admittedly artificial state of the Ukraine by forces in EU Poland, Hungary and Romania, it is clear that the Ukraine may not survive.

The Ukrainian government itself is desperate to keep the territorial integrity of the mere generation-old Ukraine. It has a softly-softly approach with the terrorists in Kiev and elsewhere, even though their tactics are carefully orchestrated and many of them have been professionally trained and equipped, as can be seen in their techniques of kidnapping women and children. If this were Belfast, Washington or Paris, clearly the riot police and soldiers would by now have shot dozens of them. But even with this approach, it may not be possible for the government to preserve the unity of the fledgling State. Just as other colonial states, like Iraq, Syria and virtually all of Africa, have not been able to survive civil wars ultimately caused by bureaucrats in London or Paris who drew up their straight-lined borders on backs of envelopes decades ago, so too the Ukraine, a Stalinist and Khrushchevite colonial formation, may not survive the present civil strife.

Notably, it now seems almost certain that the Russian centre, the Russian south (called ‘New Russia’), including the already autonomous Russian Crimea, and almost all the purely Russian east will no longer tolerate the activities of eastern Catholics and other schismatics from Galicia. It is quite notable that Catholic priests have been prominent in encouraging the riots in Kiev, and even the Cardinal of New York, Timothy Dolan, has been encouraging them. Many already say that ‘it is all Stalin’s fault’. He should, they say, have left the three pro-Nazi provinces in the far west, known as Galicia, to Poland, as before 1939. These people, Galicians, form the backbone of the ‘Ukrainian’ (actually Polish) emigration in the Western world and many of their descendants now advise the ethnocentric and utterly prejudiced US government. Their departure would leave the other 21 provinces of the Ukraine to freedom outside the pro-German EU – for the jealousy of freedom-loving Greeks, Cypriots, Bulgarians, Romanians, Latvians, Italians, Frenchmen, Irishmen, Britons and many others.

If the six million or so Galicians wish to leave the Ukraine for the bankrupt US-sponsored EU, then this would be much better for the rest. Then the rest of the Ukraine, 85% of it, by far the richest part, would be free to enjoy the benefits of multinational Orthodoxy and the Eurasian Union. As for the small Orthodox minority, they could simply become part of the Russian Orthodox Diaspora, either under the care of the Polish Orthodox Church or else directly under the care of Moscow. The only question would be what to do with Orthodox Transcarpathia, the south-westernmost province of the Ukraine, which has been so persecuted by Ukrainian nationalism since it was detached from Czechoslovakia in 1945, when it was still called Subcarpathian Rus.

It might wish to become an independent country, to be called Ruthenia or Carpatho-Russia, and join the Eurasian Union. It certainly needs protection from present EU and Hungarian imperialism, from which latter it suffered so bitterly before 1919. Its Church, with 600 parishes and a multitude of monasteries, quite big enough to be independent, could easily become a new Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Certainly, this would be in the Trinitarian unity in diversity model of Russian Orthodoxy which founds new Local Churches (unlike the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has never freely allowed any Church to receive autocephaly and does not share this vision of unity in diversity, but only crushing centralism, like the EU or its predecessor the SU).

It is no coincidence that at the same time as these carefully organised events have been unfolding in limited parts of the Ukraine, persecution has been unfolding against Tartar Orthodox in Tartarstan. Churches have been burned down and the 250,000 Tartar Orthodox are being threatened by organised Islamists, trained and financed abroad, mainly financed from the Western allies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. (How well we all remember how President George Bush protected the Saudi Bin Laden family after the Saudi terrorist attacks of 9/11). Thus, both in East and West, the enemies of Christ are attempting to destroy multinational Orthodoxy (the Church of Russia has 62 different nationalities). What the enemies of Christ want to create – and have in many places already created – by their old technique of dividing and ruling, is a disunited, nationalistic Orthodox world, a series of little, balkanised, mononational churches, which would become mere toothless departments of assorted toothless EU states, for consumers of individualistic pietism and folklore, on the disincarnate, Western Protestant model.

It is clear that in 2014 we are facing a turning point on the road of world history. On the one hand, we have the four nations of the newly-formed Eurasian Union (The Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia) with its originally Orthodox Christian unity in diversity basis and ideal of symphony of Church and State, which is in the forefront of the Spiritual Resistance Movement; on the other hand, we have the anti-Christian US/EU, much imitated by the rest of the world, largely made up of former EU and present-day US colonies, although several decades behind their colonial masters. Therefore, there are today only two choices. What is uncertain is whether this is the end or just the last shock before restoration of the Orthosphere and Orthodox government which is the only thing that now stands between Christ and Antichrist, between the Orthodox Church and her faithful and the militantly atheist Western world. Time will show which way we are going to go.

See: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/01/24/347411/west-targets-russia-by-ukraine-unrest/

Cardinal Koch and the Vatican’s current anti-Orthodox Crusade

‘I am the Patriarch of all the Russias. I am not the Patriarch of the Russian Federation, nor the Patriarch of the Ukraine, nor of Moldova…and for me there is no difference between a citizen of the Russian Federation, a citizen of Moldova or any other. The Russian Church exists in 62 different countries’.

His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, Moldova, 2013

Cardinal Koch, Chairman of the Papal Council for ‘Christian Unity’, has today met Patriarch Daniel of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Bucharest. Speaking of this meeting on Radio Vatican, he once more expressed the hope that Roman Catholics may one day be allowed to take the Body and Blood of Christ in the Orthodox Church (the concept that any Churched Orthodox would wish to accept Roman Catholic hosts is so alien as to be absurd).

For this to happen, as Cardinal Koch still does not understand, though he has been told many times already, Roman Catholics will first have to renounce the heresies of Roman Catholicism – something that happens regularly, though on an individual basis. The main Roman Catholic heresy is their renunciation of the Holy Trinity through their filioque heresy, followed by its result, the centralising ecclesiological heresy of papism. However, the implications of these heresies are enormous and we need no look no further than the streets of Kiev today to see them.

The Western Powers, with full Vatican, German and Polish government support, are at present intent on attempting to snatch the Ukrainian people from the Orthodox Church, to which they have belonged for 1,025 years. This attempt to steal the ‘Ukraine’, as it is now called, the birthplace of Russia, by setting up there a US-funded, anti-Christian junta, is directly parallel to the played-out rehearsal by the Western Powers (the USA with its pawn the colonialist EU) to steal Kosovo, the birthplace of Serbia, by setting up there an Islamist cartel of people-traffickers, gun-runners and drug-dealers. Thus, Uniat and schismatic Ukrainian nationalist demonstrators have been bused in to Kiev from Poland and the borderlands around L’viv by their highly-organised, paramilitary EU backers to demonstrate against history.

It may now be after over 20 years of tension that the Ukraine is going to split apart; the Galician-based western 20% of the ‘Ukraine’, the only actual borderlands (‘ukraina’ in the Slav languages), will rejoin Poland, which their people seem to want. So much the better. They can then integrate their atheist European Union, that is, they will see their young people flee to German and Polish factories for low-paid drudgery, their sovereignty lost and their government bankrupted, as in Greece, Cyprus, the Baltic States and countless other countries that so naively fell for the EU bait. In their spiritual suicide they will also see their anti-Orthodox Uniat and schismatic churches empty and close down one by one, as Eurosodom destroys them, as is happening to Catholic and Protestant all over the EU.

The Orthodox minority in this new Polish colony will then be able to join the Polish Orthodox Church and continue as a minority, as elsewhere in Poland and throughout the geriatric EU, defying the EU tide of secularism by surviving and witnessing to Christ. The rest, the 80% of the country that will remain free, probably reverting to its historic native name of Little Russia, will be able to get on with its inevitable and prosperous destiny in the Eurasian Union, thus joining authentic (i.e. non-EU) Europe and Asia.

What is the connection with Cardinal Koch? Like Uniatism, the Ukraine was an anti-Orthodox invention of the Vatican. In 1900 virtually no-one had heard the word applied with its new nationalistic meaning. The Galician far west of the Ukraine is precisely the place where in the last two decades Orthodox have been viciously persecuted (some have been martyred) by Uniats. Their property has been massively stolen by fanatical, Vatican-supported, Ukrainian nationalists, our priests and faithful beaten up by racist, anti-Semitic thugs, whose grandfathers fought in the SS.

The present attack on our Russian Orthodox Church, on our international ideal of Holy Rus and on the Orthodox people of the Ukraine, as it is now called, is nothing new. The Vatican has throughout history mounted crusade after crusade against the Church of God. Today’s Vatican attack, exploiting violent nationalism (‘the aim justifies the ends’, as the Jesuits say) is only just another repeat of the Vatican’s 13th century crusade against the Church of Christ, when the Vatican was defeated by St Alexander Nevsky, or that of their Polish 17th century crusade, of that of the secularised Catholic Napoleon in the 19th century and the paganised Catholic Hitler in the 20th century, which were all against Moscow and which all failed.

This is the real reason why, Cardinal Koch, you cannot take the Body and Blood of Christ in the Orthodox Church; because you have not repented for your inherently secularist sins against Christ’s Church. Only when you have repented for your crimes and anti-Christian crusades, will your eyes be opened, will your spiritual blindness be overcome and your heresies fall away from you, as the millennial delusions that they are. If you, like the hopelessly divided Ukrainian Uniats, with all their nationalistic schisms and renunciation of their historic heritage and identity, wish to support the bankrupt Eurosodom rabble against United, Multinational, Worldwide Holy Russia, to support the materialistic against the spiritual, that is your choice. But do not say that you were not warned.

Lourdes and Fatima: True or False?

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun…

Rev. 12, 1

We will not dispute the miraculous character of the original appearance of the Mother of God (in Fatima), as we will not cast suspicion on the authenticity of some similar if less striking appearances…

Archimandrite Konstantin Zaytsev (1)

Introduction

Visions of the Mother of God granted to individuals are characteristic of recent, especially eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century, Roman Catholic piety. Some of these visions can be doubted as spiritual delusion, hallucinations, and others as money-making frauds. Thus, the controversial ‘apparition’ in Knock in 1879 in Ireland seems strange, and the more recent and highly profitable ‘apparitions’ in Medjugorje since 1981 in ex-Yugoslavia are dismissed by the local Roman Catholic authorities as fraudulent. However, to dismiss all such visions seems not only uncharitable in relation to genuinely-felt piety, but also simply wrong.

The fact is that genuine heavenly visions do commonly take place outside the Church to Non-Orthodox. We know this, for example, from the vision of the Jewish rabbi Saul (later the Apostle Paul) on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). Some 900 years later, the pagan envoys of Vladimir of Kiev had a vision of heaven on earth in New Rome. Some 900 years after this we read how the future preaching of St Innocent of Alaska had been foretold to local pagan Alaskans through a vision of the Archangel Michael. How was all this possible? Because though outside the Church, all these people were touched by grace, for ‘the Spirit bloweth where it listeth’ (Jn 3, 8). The Church has all the generosity of the Sun, giving out rays of light and warmth to the outside world.

Lourdes

As regards appearances of the Mother of God inside the Church, the Russian Church calendar commemorates over 600 of her wonderworking icons, many of which first appeared to individuals in visions. As for the Roman Catholic world, there are the famous visions of the Mother of God to a peasant girl in Lourdes in south-western France in 1858. As we have written elsewhere over the decades, there are four reasons why these visions may have been real. Firstly, they happened to an innocent and pious peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous (1844-1879), who had no clerical axe to grind. Secondly, when Bernadette was asked about the exact outward appearance of the Mother of God and was shown a catalogue of images, she innocently but truthfully at once chose not the resemblance of a Roman Catholic statue, but that of an Orthodox icon.

Thirdly, there are the well-documented and numerous miraculous healings in Lourdes, which cannot be explained by modern medicine. Finally, and most importantly of all, as the French-based Patriarchal Russian Orthodox religious writer, A. Merzlyukin described in 1960 (2), at a time when the Vatican machine was intent on finding support for its unOrthodox dogma of the Immaculate Conception of 1854, the message received by Bernadette was fully Orthodox. The words she allegedly heard from the mouth of the Mother of God were, ‘I am the Immaculate Conception’, not, ‘I was born by an immaculate conception’. This plainly contradicted the novel and recent Vatican dogma. It is precisely the Conception of Christ by the Mother of God which is ‘Immaculate’, that is, Most Pure, which is why we call her ‘Most Pure’. This is the age-old belief of the Church – not a nineteenth-century invention.

Orthodoxy has nothing to do with the unfortunate exploitation of this statement by the Vatican to support its novel dogma. By this, I refer to the authorities’ deliberate deformation of the message of Lourdes to make out that it was the conception of the Virgin Herself that was ‘Immaculate’. This myth-making has taken place to such an extent that many simple Roman Catholics today actually believe that the Virgin was conceived not by Sts Joachim and Anna, as Orthodox are reminded at every great dismissal, but in the same way as Christ – through the Holy Spirit and a virgin-mother.

This popular belief is not the official belief of Roman Catholicism. This is that the Virgin was conceived by human agency but with a special dispensation, relieving her of what it calls ‘original sin’. All of this is connected with ‘Augustinian’ doctrines, developed by medieval Scholasticism out of philosophical speculations in the writings of Blessed Augustine. These doctrines, ‘Augustinianism’, suggest predestination, a God Who does not love mankind, and are thus alien to the Orthodox Church and Her theology that loves mankind.

Fatima

Another example of deformation of visions comes in the case of Fatima. Here, unlike some, we believe that these original visions may also have been genuine (3). We first heard of Fatima in 1976, strangely enough from a Russian samizdat source, received by us from the late Archpriest Lev Lebedev from Kursk (4). The Catacomb belief expressed in this source was clearly that Fatima was authentic. We also tend to believe in the Fatima visions, for the seven following reasons:

1. They were granted to innocent and pious peasant children. The eldest of these, Lucia, whose name means ‘light’, is said to have spoken to the Mother of God and received messages from her. These small, illiterate children had no axe to grind, unlike the institutionalised Vatican machine. Indeed, most Portuguese clergy of the period of the visions did not believe in their authenticity and were even hostile to Lucia.

2. The visions concerned future events in Russia – a Non-Catholic country of which the Portuguese children had never heard. Again there was no axe to grind here, all the more so as it was precisely the Western world which had organised, financed and greeted the pro-Western Russian Revolution of early 1917. We must remember that all the events at the other end of Europe in distant Fatima took place months before the atheist Bolsheviks usurped power in their turn. This was long before Russophobic right-wing groups were able to take over Fatima for militant Roman Catholic and anti-Communist Cold War purposes, creating, for example, ‘the Blue Army’.

3. The events of Fatima all happened after the Russian Revolution, during the months of anarchic misrule of the pro-Western Provisional Government, in other words, neither in 1916, nor in 1918, nor in some other year, but in mid-1917. This was at the most fateful turning point in Russian history. This was just before Russian forces would most probably have been victorious in the War, freeing Vienna and Berlin and the peoples oppressed by them, and before atheist Communist persecution began.

We recall that the Mother of God had already intervened in Russian history at this time through her Reigning Icon, the appearance of which took place immediately after the so-called abdication of the future Tsar-Martyr on 15 March 1917 according to the secular calendar. (We write ‘so-called abdication’ since the documents involved have now all been shown by the Russian historian Piotr Multatuli to have been forged; the Tsar never abdicated).

4. The visions all took place on dates significant in the Orthodox calendar – then universally adhered to. This is quite overlooked by Roman Catholic authors. Thus:
The first vision was on 13 May. In the Orthodox calendar in 1917 this was the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman. This was surely a clear call to the West to repent of the Revolution that it had carried out in Russia, which would lead to the bloodiest persecution of the Church ever seen in human history. In simple terms, this vision was a call to the spiritual Samaritans to repent for their crime against the Second Jerusalem of Moscow.

The second vision was on 13 June, the eve of the feast of St Justin the Philosopher of Rome, who came from Palestine to preach the Orthodox Christian way of life, the only true Philosophy, to the Rome.

The third vision was on 13 July, the Feast of the Twelve Apostles, who had converted the then known world to Orthodoxy. This is symbolic of the universal significance of Fatima.

The fourth vision was on Sunday 19 August (not on 13 August, since the three children were then being held prisoner and threatened by a prominent local freemason who had political power). 19 August is of course the Feast of the Transfiguration, the Transfiguration to which the Mother of God was calling the Western world, which was then embroiled in the slaughter of its own youth and the youth of countries of Eastern Europe, of Russia and of distant colonies.

The fifth vision was on 13 September, the eve of the Orthodox New Year. Surely the Mother of God was calling the Western Powers to a new beginning, a new year of peace.

The sixth and so far final vision was on 13 October, the eve of the Feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God. In this vision, Lucia was told that ‘the war is going to end and the troops will come home soon’. This was indeed the case since, as a result of elections held the very next day, on 14 October, the Feast of the Protecting Veil, the 40,000 Portuguese troops who had first entered into action in France on precisely 13 May 1917, the date of the first vision, were brought home to Portugal early, in April 1918.

5. The essence of the words of the Mother of God was each time a call to prayer and repentance. These were the very words which Western Europe needed at a time when it was engaged in a suicidal war, which because of modern technology was by far the bloodiest in the history of mankind. The fact that the visions occurred in Portugal, rather than in a country that had originally or directly been involved in the War, showed neutrality. Indeed, the socialistic Portuguese government did not exploit the visions for propaganda purposes, as governments with large Roman Catholic populations, like France, Germany, Austro-Hungary and Italy, would certainly have done.

6. The events at Fatima, always coming down from the sky from east to west, always included several inexplicable atmospheric phenomena which were witnessed by many. These phenomena were witnessed by dozens, then thousands, and on 13 October, by tens of thousands of people, among them atheists and freemasons. This last vision, already foretold by the Mother of God on 19 August and 13 September, included the famous ‘dance of the sun’, witnessed by some 70,000 people. It is very difficult to reject the fact of this event, explaining it away in a facile manner as a ‘mass hallucination’, as atheists (and two Orthodox converts) have unconvincingly tried to do. Here is a key difference with other visions – at Fatima they were accompanied by inexplicable phenomena witnessed by crowds.

7. The message of the Mother of God was couched in a way that small Roman Catholic children could understand, but which is not necessarily in contradiction with Orthodox teaching. This especially concerns the details of the vision of 13 July.

For instance, the Mother of God did not mention souls in Purgatory on 13 July – that version of the message was based on a clear mistranslation, which was later corrected. As regards the mention of Purgatory in the part of the vision on 13 May regarding the soul of a peasant girl called Amelia, we would suggest that this is only a reflection of Lucia’s Roman Catholic conditioning. The Mother of God may well have said that the girl needed prayers, but this would have been interpreted by the child Lucia as meaning that her soul was in Purgatory.

On 13 July, the Mother of God foretold chastisement, ‘by means of war, famine and persecutions against the Church and the Holy Father’. There is no reason why this should be taken to refer to a pope of Rome; it surely refers to St Tikhon of Moscow, the Holy Father installed as Patriarch in November 1917. He reposed in 1925 after the terrible civil war, probably martyred by poisoning, after which there was artificial famine in the Soviet Union and the terrible persecutions of the 1930s. Roman Catholicism was not persecuted at this time – the Spanish Civil War came later. Rather it was Roman Catholicism that from the 1920s on persecuted, whether in Ireland and especially on territory occupied by Poland, or later in Nazi Slovakia and Vichy France.

Similarly, the prophecy on 13 July that a worse war would break out under Pope Pius XI (1922 – February 1939) after the appearance of ‘an unknown light’ in the sky, surely cannot refer to the Second World War, which began in September 1939 for most European countries. Nor need it refer to the aurora borealis of January 1938. The aurora (northern lights) occurs every eleven years and it was after the appearance in 1927 that the atheist war against Orthodoxy in Russia that worsened considerably.

In the vision of June 1917, the Mother of God referred to ‘My Most Pure Heart’ which, seen ‘surrounded by thorns’, ‘will be your refuge’. In the vision of July 1917, the Mother of God spoke of ‘sins against the Most Pure Heart of Mary’, she said that ‘to save sinners’ God wanted ‘to establish devotion to my Most Pure Heart’, she demanded ‘the consecration of Russia to my Most Pure Heart’ and she said that ‘in the end’ her Most Pure Heart would ‘triumph’.

These references to the heart, typical of rather sentimental ‘Sacred Heart’ Roman Catholic pietism, are alien to Orthodox teaching. Some Orthodox therefore dismiss the vision out of hand. However, the Mother of God was speaking to Roman Catholic children, to whom such language was familiar. From an Orthodox viewpoint, could such phrases mean something? Is there an Orthodox interpretation of such references to her heart?

Since the Church is the Body of Christ, why can we not take the Roman Catholic expression ‘the Sacred Heart of Jesus’ and translate it into Orthodox terminology as meaning ‘the essence of the Orthodox Church’? Similarly, since the Mother of God is the Mother of the Church, why can we not take the Fatima expression ‘the Most Pure Heart of Mary’ to mean ‘the essential teachings of the Church’, i.e. the purity of Holy Orthodoxy? What else would be in the heart of the Mother of God, if not the purity of Holy Orthodoxy? Surely, after all, Holy Orthodoxy is our ‘refuge’, the establishment of devotion to Holy Orthodoxy will ‘save sinners’, Russia must be ‘consecrated to’ Holy Orthodoxy and ‘in the end’ Holy Orthodoxy will ‘triumph’? Is this not what we all believe?

It was precisely sins against the Orthodox Church and Holy Orthodoxy that had been caused by anti-Orthodox Western attitudes towards them, most clearly at the Russian Revolution. This event was greeted with enthusiasm by the Papacy. It would then co-operate with atheist Bolshevism throughout the 1920s under the Roman Catholic ‘missionary’ D’Herbigny in a futile and treacherous attempt to convert Russia to Roman Catholicism. And all this during the vicious persecution of the indigenous Church, whose lot the Vatican did nothing to ease.

These anti-Orthodox attitudes had been present in Western Europe ever since the time of the judaising iconoclasm and anti-Trinitarian heresy of the mass murderer Charlemagne (768-814 – called ‘Blessed Charlemagne’ by the Vatican). This was the very set of attitudes which dissented from and then took over the Church in Western Europe. By a process of despiritualisation, they evolved into Roman Catholicism in the eleventh century, into Protestantism in the sixteenth century and finally into modern secularism.

This latter is based on essentially atheistic nineteenth and twentieth century ideologies, of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud etc. These thinkers did not in fact write about mankind, but only about their own spiritual emptiness, that is, their loss of faith and non-belief in the existence of the human soul, thus reducing human beings to animals. In this way, their ideologies dehumanised human beings through ‘class warfare’, ‘the survival of the fittest’ and ‘eugenics’ into ‘intelligent animals’, ‘naked apes’, in fact, pieces of meat. In turn, these resulted in World Wars – surplus men reduced to cannon fodder, in the abortion holocaust –surplus babies reduced to incinerator fodder, and in modern global consumerism – surplus human-beings worldwide reduced to debt fodder.

On 13 July and other occasions, the Mother of God referred to the rosary, as well as peace and the end of the war through prayer. The rosary is a vestige of Orthodox prayer-knots or beads, inherited by Roman Catholicism from the Orthodox West of the first millennium. Although the details of the contemporary Roman Catholic practice of the rosary are at variance with Orthodox practice, there is nothing unOrthodox about the use of prayer-beads in itself. Sincere prayer is always answered.

On 13 July the Mother of God said that the errors of Russia would spread worldwide, if the Western world did not listen to her. The errors of Russia were to adopt Western materialism (at the time of Fatima not in its Communist form, but in its bourgeois Capitalist form). It is indeed precisely this materialism, exported to Russia in 1917, that was since spread worldwide throughout the twentieth century, not so much in its inefficient and failed Communist form, but in its highly efficient Capitalist form.

On 13 July the Mother of God said that ‘the Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and it will be converted’ and then will follow ‘a time of peace’. Is this not exactly what happened in 2000 when the Russian Patriarch at last confirmed the glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands and since when conversion has been hastened?

Thus, we can see from the above interpretations of the visions of Fatima that there is nothing in contradiction with Orthodox teaching in them. In this light, these visions can be seen in an Orthodox spirit. The simple people of Western Europe are not to be blamed for the heresy of Roman Catholicism. A fish rots from the head, not from the tail. A heretic is by definition one who is consciously opposed to the Church. Portuguese peasant children one hundred years ago who knew nothing of Orthodoxy cannot be accused of being heretics. Only those who consciously reject Orthodoxy and teach heresy can be accused of heresy. This is clearly visible in pastoral practice today, where Non-Orthodox come to the Church for the first time, discover Orthodoxy, and say, ‘This is what I have always believed’, never having accepted the teachings their formal denomination.

Neither is there anything in the ‘third secret of Fatima’, revealed to Lucia in July 1917 and allegedly made public by the Vatican in June 2000, which contradicts Orthodoxy (5). Although it is possible that full details of the third secret have not been revealed, for lack of proof we must leave this possibility to conspiracy theorists. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that in the first appearance on 13 May, the Mother of God said that she would appear six times and then, ‘after six times, I will come back here a seventh time’. Is it possible that the Mother of God will again appear in Fatima, for a seventh time, and that another revelation will take place concerning the West’s present and future relation to Russia and Russian Orthodoxy?

Conclusion

Between 1992 and 1997 I was parish priest of the first Russian Orthodox parish in Portugal which we founded in February 1992. We dedicated it to the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, whose feast falls on 14 October in the secular reckoning, the day after the last and sixth appearance at Fatima, the dance of the sun, exactly 75 years before. At that time it was suggested that I celebrate a liturgy in the Uniat church at the Roman Catholic shrine at Fatima. I categorically rejected this suggestion, as I did not wish then, and do not wish now, to lend credence to that later, superimposed interpretation of the Fatima events. However, I do believe that there is an Orthodox interpretation of the events of Fatima.

I believe that those events may well concern a Russia that is at this moment in the process of being converted. This process began when the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors began to destroy atheism after their glorification by the free Church Outside Russia in New York in 1981. This was most significant, since, according to the historian Piotr Multatuli, great-grandson of one of the martyrs, it was precisely from New York that the order to martyr the Royal Martyrs went forth in 1918. This 1981 glorification, which reversed the 1918 condemnation, was finally confirmed and upheld in the freed Church inside Russia by Patriarch Alexis II in Moscow in 2000. It is now for the increasingly atheistic Western world to heed the urgent and highly relevant message of post-atheist Russia to it, which is that atheism does not work, but that devotion to Orthodoxy does work.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Colchester, England

Notes:

1. Pastoral Theology, Part II, P.41, Jordanville, 1961

2. See Merzlyukin A., On the Catholic Dogma of 1854. (In Russian, 1960, in French, 1961).

3. Naturally, if an official Synodal statement were issued against the authenticity of Lourdes or Fatima, we would obey it and retract any of the above observations and tentative views that contradicted it. Our thoughts are only tentative suggestions which we hope will provoke thought and prayer on the subject. They are certainly not some kind of opinionated, dogmatic statement. The above suggestions seem to the author to be true, but we remain open to new and contradictory ideas on the subject.

However, we cannot help noticing that older Russians like Metr Evlogy (Georgievsky), as well as those whose Orthodoxy was beyond reproach, believed in Lourdes and Fatima (see A. Merzlyukin, also in his Russian book ‘The Star Who Gave Birth to the Sun’ (Paris, 1967), and Fr Konstantin Zaytsev above on Pp. 38-42). The only two sources known to us in recent decades suggesting that the Mother of God cannot appear to Non-Orthodox and categorically denying both Lourdes and Fatima, belonged to converts from heterodoxy. Through the extreme of an excess of zeal, zeal not according to knowledge, a desire to be ‘more Orthodox than the Orthodox’, they are now part of groups which are outside the Orthodox Church. Thus, we see how one extreme, ‘Super-Orthodoxy’, leads to the opposite extreme, being outside the Church.

4. In the mid-1980s we sent the samizdat source in question to Bishop (now Metr) Hilarion (Kapral). Fr Lev was then a priest of the Patriarchal part of the Church. Like many Patriarchal priests inside Russia he was also involved with Catacomb Christians, as I realised on meeting him in 1976. It is a modern myth that the two parts of the Church inside Russia in the Soviet period, the vast Patriarchal part and the minute Catacomb part, were completely separate.

5. See Orthodox England Vol 4 No 2 (December 2000)

The Chance of Redemption for Western Europeans

One thousand years of error and injustice will be made right. There will be a new Tsar in Russia and a new repentant culture in Europe, as it rediscovers its forgotten soul which it had busied itself burying for a thousand years beneath the ingenious but unnecessary.

Foreword: Faith on Earth

In 1914, nigh on one hundred years ago, Western Europe destroyed itself and all those whom it dragged into its great suicidal war. This was the fruit of the evils which its elites had wrought among their exploited peasantry, working classes and colonies. Little wonder that the country which suffered most in the Great War was Belgium, whose king had wrought so much evil in Central Africa, where perhaps 10,000,000 had perished. However, Great Britain everywhere, especially in the Indian subcontinent and in South Africa, France in Northern Africa and Indo-China, Austro-Hungary (Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud all lived in Vienna at the same time) in Central and Eastern Europe and Germany wherever it could, were all guilty. The catastrophe of 1914 had been heralded by the rebirth of European paganism, in Music by Stravinsky in the pagan dissonances of his Firebird and The Rite of Spring, in Art by the Futurists, as well as in Theatre by Strindberg, in Sculpture and Literature.

Indeed, it was ultimately in Alexander Blok’s poem ‘The Twelve’, in which the author saw Antichrist, pretending to be Christ, leading the Russian Revolution, that Europe could have seen its fate for non-repentance. Although the Great War would have left a great scar, the flower of much of its youth dead, it could have been reversed. Russia tried to reverse it, taking the brunt of the attacks in the East. However, it stopped being reversible in 1918 with the permanent installation in the Russian Empire, encouraged by the Western Powers, of a Western-inspired materialist regime and the martyrdom of the Russian Royal Family. The War could have ended in 1917, with Russian troops peacefully triumphant in Berlin and Vienna led by Tsar Nicholas II, as they had been by Tsar Alexander I in Paris in 1814, freeing Central and Eastern Europe from tyranny and restoring Poland and Finland. Instead of this, the War dragged on for another eighteen months and countless more young men died.

And as a result of this apostasy, today we ask the question: When the Saviour returns, will He find faith on earth? Fifty years ago, we thought this impossible – then there was still faith. Today this is not so, for over the last fifty years yet another chapter of the Book of Revelation has been enacted. At the present time we see the gradual development of a global surveillance society, controlled by what is becoming a world mafia-state, the fruit of the intolerance of the new Puritanism. On various false pretexts, freedom in the post-Protestant West is fast vanishing. With miniature cameras, drones, Google Glass, debit cards without which food cannot be bought, that world is fast heading for spiritual endarkenment. And yet over the last fifty years the Russian Church has offered spiritual enlightenment to the souls of this post-Protestant world, especially in the USA and the UK. At first slowly and cautiously and then more openly, Her witness to salvation in the Church of God has become ever more apparent.

Enlightening the Endarkened Post-Protestant World

Although this post-Protestant world is on the very fringes of Church consciousness, of authentic Christianity, the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, then still captive to Communism, did witness here, showing great patience. Thinking that in its spiritual weakness the post-Protestant world, especially ex-Protestants, would find it difficult to adopt the Orthodox calendar, She allowed it by generosity, that is, by economy, the secular calendar; thinking that because of its Western political prejudices and lack of understanding the post-Protestant world might not be able to venerate the Tsar and the other Royal Martyrs, by generous economy She did not insist on this; thinking that in its narrowness, the post-Protestant world might suffer from phyletist nationalism, She translated the Orthodox services wholly into its languages. Over the last fifty years what was once inaccessible has become accessible – there are no more excuses.

It must be said that success has been limited, especially among those who had been practising Protestants, less among those who were blank sheets, starting from nothing. Even among those who have accepted the invitation, there are those who refuse to enter the Arena, and do not become integrated Orthodox, even after fifty years. Also, some ex-Protestants, having joined the Church, then abandoned Her to go off and found their own sectarian ‘churches’, chapels, ‘sketes’ or even deaneries, whether to the left extreme or to the right extreme. Both in the post-Protestant cultures of North America and the United Kingdom, the Church inside Russia suffered many setbacks in its missions, until quite recently politically unable to heed the local experience of the Church Outside Russia. Using less economy, the latter has sometimes had more success (though with disappointments also), because of its local understanding of the ex-Protestant culture.

Here, there are those who have agreed to enter the Arena even after only a few months and so become grounded Orthodox. There is even one Archbishop of the Church Outside Russia who is from such a background, not to mention many other clergy and laity. Why have the spiritually sensitive been able to do this, whereas others have brought first moral scandal and then Protestant-style schism, as in England, or else first moral and financial scandal and then Protestant-style modernism, as in North America? The reason is to be found in psychological motivation. Those who join the Church from a self-serving need, even pathology, do not bear fruit and leave for self-made sects and cults, according to their ‘old man’, their old Protestant culture. However, those who enter the Church because they wish to save their souls and so serve others, do bear fruit. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’. Therefore, ‘Wretched are the impure in heart for they shall not see God’.

Enlightening the Endarkened Post-Roman Catholic World

Today, having reached the limits of what is possible in enlightening the post-Protestant world, the now reunited Russian Orthodox Church is turning to the far vaster post-Roman Catholic world. This world had long been closed to the Church because of its illusion that it is itself the Church, so cultivated by its purposeful deformation of the call to the West to repent made by the Mother of God to Portuguese children at Fatima in 1917. However, its recent wave of moral and financial scandals has revealed the corruption that has existed inside it for centuries and brought at least some to humility. Now the Russian Orthodox Church must battle for the souls of this post-Roman Catholic world. Fifty years ago that world began to fall into the desacralisation and infantilism of secularist Protestantisation and yet, traditionally it had conserved from Orthodoxy the sense of the Mother of God, the communion of the saints and the sacramental sense. There is cause for hope somewhere here.

Unfortunately, Roman Catholicism in the Western world has almost wholly lost its way. According to the design of evil forces, which had long planned its ultimate downfall, and the horror and scandal of its rejected faithful, since the Second Vatican Council two generations ago it has adopted the desacralised sentimentalism of secularist Protestantisation. Whether in North America, the UK, France, the Netherlands or in the Germanic and Scandinavian world, Protestantised Roman Catholicism is in a state of almost total apostasy, its liturgical heritage dumbed down, infantilised and all but destroyed. Western Europe has largely kept only the relics of the Faith. Quite literally, the relics. Western Europe resembles a huge treasure chest of relics, to which modernist Roman Catholicism has thrown away the key. However, a new key is being rehammered and reforged on the anvil of Tradition by the smiths of Orthodoxy. This is the key to the best of the West, the literal relics of its former piety.

Fortunately, there is hope of redemption among the simple faithful, often Orthodox in all but name, in Black Africa, in Latin America, in remoter parts of Southern Europe, in Eastern Europe, in Poland, Slovakia and Hungary and elsewhere, where piety and the veneration of icons have survived and not all are very aged. Here interest in Orthodoxy comes from the faithful of the mainstream, not from extremes, whether of left or right. It is this mainstream that has been rejected by its clerical elite. Thus, pro-Protestant modernists in Poland who seek self-destruction, have no interest in authentic Orthodoxy, at best only in a fake and sanitised Orthodoxy; nor do Roman Catholics in the extreme west of the Ukraine who have joined the Lefevrist group, unable to accept the Second Vatican Council’s Protestant-style, clericalist modernism. However, their extreme right-wing politics, Russophobic and pro-Hitler, prevents them like the rest of the Lefevrist movement from joining the Orthodox Church.

Today it is little wonder that various refugees from the spiritual desert of the Western world, whether post-Protestant or post-Roman Catholic, from the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden to the French actor Gerard Depardieu, look, consciously or unconsciously, to Russia for hope. Since the glorification of the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981, confirmed in 2000, the Church has been renewed, a process which continues as more New Martyrs are canonised. Only a few weeks ago in Paris thousands of demonstrators at mass rallies against ‘homosexual marriage’ and the adoption of children by same-sex couples, chanted ‘Russia, save us’, knowing that such perversions are forbidden here. For fifty years and more the Russian Church has tried to redeem the post-Protestant world, suffering with limited success. It is now our turn to try to redeem the post-Roman Catholic world, a more serious proposition, revealing to it, to its astonishment, its long forgotten roots in Orthodoxy.

Afterword: Redemption by Suffering

In 1917 the West was warned of the evil it was exporting to Russia by the Revelation of the Mother of God in Fatima. ‘Until you stop spreading the evil that you are spreading to Russia and consecrate yourself to Orthodoxy, the Holy Father (the Patriarch) will suffer and all will go worse’. It refused to listen and deformed the message of the Mother of God into self-justification. Then, in 1919, as prophesied, it guaranteed a Second Great War by afflicting the German and Austrian peoples, and not their elites, with an unjust peace. Thus, Russian troops would be triumphant in Berlin and Vienna – but only in 1945 and after the most barbaric of wars, with its camps and genocides, the greatest of which was that of 30 million Slavs, imposed by racist Germany. And even after all this Western Europe still refused to repent and so has gone on with its abortion holocaust beginning in 1964, and in 1989 its destruction of an unfree Eastern Europe, which it had itself created in 1917 and 1945.

However, God gives many opportunities for repentance, up unto seventy times seven. Every generation has its chance. The chances were refused in August 1914, in September 1939, in October 1964 and in November 1989. In December 2014 there is coming yet another chance. Four horrible scars will be left, but there is still time. Since 1914 the old Protestant culture has fallen, its decadence becoming apparent after two generations in the 1960s. Since 1964 the old Roman Catholic culture has fallen, its decadence becoming apparent after two generations today. Once blinded by arrogant hubris, its delusion of self-belief, the old Protestant culture has over the last fifty years disintegrated. It is now the turn of the old Roman Catholic culture. If it understands its error of hubris, it will have the chance to listen to the real message of Fatima, the call to the West to repent of its pride and its poisonous materialist ideology and accept the restoration of Church Orthodoxy in its integrity.

It is by no means certain that this will happen. The post-Protestant world is still offered Orthodoxy, but few accept it. It may be the same with the post-Roman Catholic world. It may be that no restoration of Orthodoxy in the Western world, however partial, will be possible until there is the example of full restoration in Russia. It may be that until the House of Romanov, through the son of a Romanov mother, is restored, even until another War, the fallen Western world will not be ready to listen, understanding at last that its own propaganda about Russia before the Revolution was merely lies. It may be that the Merciful Mother of God must yet appear again, as She did in her Myrrh-Giving Iviron Icon in the 1980s, again witnessing to the New Martyrs and Confessors and confirming her words of Fatima. Only then will the Western world start to repent of the materialist ideology which it has spread and return to the clean Gospel of Christ and His Holy Church in the purity of Orthodoxy.

The Main Ecclesiological Problem of Roman Catholics is their Tendency to Nationalism

In reply to Cardinal Koch and his provocation, not his first, made at the Ukrainian Catholic University in L’viv, as reported by the CWN news agency on 11 June, it can be said that the main problem of Roman Catholicism is its nationalism.

Its schism from the Orthodox Church, justified by the filioque heresy, was based on pure Western nationalism, centred in pagan Rome and implemented by Germanic popes. The fact that Roman Catholicism has constantly tried for centuries to undermine and destroy the Russian Orthodox Church, the centre of the Orthodox Christian world, proves this nationalism. The fact that Roman Catholicism has constantly encouraged politically-inspired nationalism to enter into the Local Orthodox Churches, also proves its nationalistic spirit. The fact that its Ukrainian Uniat (Greek Catholic) branch, centred in L’viv, is a pit of nationalism only reinforces the evidence.

Cardinal Koch’s statement is the most anti-ecumenical and aggressive attack made on the Church of God for several years. We should thank God for it. It may be that his provocation will lead deluded Orthodox on the fringes of the Church – who actually believed in ecumenism! – back to their senses.