Category Archives: Constantinople

The Irrelevant Meeting of 30 November 2026?

Patriarch Bartholomew has disclosed that he has invited the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem to his Constantinople for a ‘brotherly Synaxis’ on 30 November 2026. The All-Greek meeting of these four tiny old Patriarchates is that of the unelected leaders of 3% of the world’s 200 million Orthodox. Is such a meeting is therefore irrelevant? So why will they meet? We suspect that they will meet to discuss the consequences of Constantinople’s disastrous decision to set up a fake Church in the Ukraine in 2018.

Now that the CIA regime in Kiev, which has viciously persecuted the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, is collapsing under the weight of Russian arms. A new democratic government will be established in the post-War Ukraine, so that fake Church is heading for the dustbin of history. However, this in turn means that the CIA-sponsored Patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria will have to start resuming normal relations with the 97% of the other Local Churches, notably with the Russian, to which 70% of Orthodox belong.

Perhaps the Arab Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem will be able to mediate between those two and the Russian Church? And what of the other eleven Local Churches? Not only does the Patriarchate of Constantinople have to renounce the thugs of its fake Church in the fake Ukraine, but it also has to renounce its fake churches in Estonia and elsewhere. On the other hand, the Russian Church will at last have to sort out its deep infiltration by the CIA and the mess it has made outside Russia, notably in the Ukraine and in Africa.

Africa has been claimed for nearly 100 years to be the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. That is disputed. Who is capable of taking responsibility for the Evangelisation of the African Continent? It is our suggestion that it is Orthodox Africans themselves who should do this and not outsiders, neither Russians, nor Greeks, though their financial support and infrastructure could be welcome. Once that has been done, perhaps all sixteen Local Churches could talk about the real problems of Church life.

These consist of the fact that some 50 million of the world’s Orthodox, represented by some 250 bishops, do not have their own Churches, but have to rely on someone else’s Churches. This would not matter if ‘someone else’s Churches’ were politically free. They are not. This concerns the Orthodox who live on the vast territories of the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, Belarus, Central Asia, the whole of Africa, Western Europe, North, Central and South America and Oceania. There is a need for new and politically free Local Churches here.

Perhaps initially these would be Autonomous, perhaps later they could become Autocephalous. Here is the real problem. Invading other Local Churches’ territories is not where it is at. The real problem is the lack of Evangelisation, the lack of pastoral care and the lack of political freedom for Orthodox and those who wish to join the Orthodox Church. Let us have a real meeting between all the Local Orthodox Churches. Who knows, if there is a free and non-political agenda, maybe that could evolve into a Church Council?

 

Political Ideologies, or the Orthodox Christian Faith?

The gates of hell shall not prevail.

All around treason and cowardice and deceit.

Tsar Nicholas II after being overthrown

Introduction: The Judgement of the Nations

The world lies in evil, says St John the Theologian. This is why the world always refuses God’s Truth. But as we Christians are called on to live in the world, to which we do not belong, we have to know what spirit directs the world and how to remain faithful to God’s Truth despite it. Thus, although it is natural for Orthodox to defend our countries as patriots, we know that Christ stands above patriotism. Therefore, we clearly recognise that wars against or even between Orthodox Christian countries happen only because Orthodox Christian countries put nationalism above Christ. Such wars are the Judgement of God on apostasy. Such was the war between Serbs and Bulgarians in 1912-1913, such is the war between Russians and Ukrainians. God does not force Himself on others. Leave God and He leaves you. Those who do not live with God choose to live with the devil, the father of lies. Such is the choice possible with human freedom.

Political Ideologies Against the Faith

Wars of the Collective West against Russia, whether Hot or Cold, have never ended. Though they began earlier, they began in earnest after the Russian defeat of Napoleon’s multinational invasion in 1812, when it became clear that Russia had become a Great Power. Since then, the tide of War has only ebbed or flowed. It flowed with Napoleon in 1812, again with the Anglo-French-Muslim invasion of Russia from 1853 to 1856, again with the Western-financed Japanese attack on Russia in 1904, part of the Imperial British ‘Great Game’. Then it flowed with the German invasion of Russia in 1914, with the British-rigged overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, with the Collective Western invasion of Russia between 1919 and 1922, and with the German-led invasion of 1941. It ebbed at times, recently after 1991 until the NATO proxy Georgian invasion of Russian-protected Ossetia in 2008, and flowed again in the Ukraine after 2014.

The situation is usually presented as follows. There are only two choices in this world: either to be for Russia and for all the propaganda in favour of Russian nationalism, for instance, for the nationalist Tsar Ivan IV (admittedly much less harmful than his dreadful contemporary Henry VIII), for Tsars, especially for Peter I and the German Catherine II, who introduced feudal serfdom, for Lenin, who created the Ukraine, for Stalin, who murdered hundreds of thousands, and for xenophobia against anything Western. Or else it is possible to be for the West and for all the racist Russophobic propaganda against Russia and Russian culture, playing on the inferiority complex of pseudo-Western Russian liberals, for anything in favour of the US substitute Patriarchate of Constantinople, for LGBT, or for the CIA-run ROCOR, and for spreading Russia-hating myths like ‘Russian roulette’, which was only ever an American invention.

In other words, the situation is all about a choice between alternative nationalist political ideologies, but not at all about the Christian Faith, it is all about viewing the Church through the lens of nationalist politics. And yet it should be about Faith. What about Christ and His Church? Have they forgotten? There are in fact 16 Local Orthodox Churches. 14, nearly 90%, of them, are not Constantinopolitan or Muscovite (even if those two have some 50% of the Orthodox people between them – once you subtract all the Non-Russians under Moscow, not least the Ukrainians). And in any case, the vast majority of Churches people and educated clergy even in these two Local Churches of Moscow and Constantinople are for Christ and have no truck with nationalist ideologies. Only their leadership is contaminated by the anti-pastoral, Papist spirit of politics, power, money and prestige. Some wonder if such even believe in God.

The Fruit of Replacing the Christian Faith by Nationalist Ideologies.

The bureaucratic elite of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, to be exact the tiny minority of Phanariots, are well-known for their love of money, prestige and power, which is why they worship and imitate the Vatican and present themselves as ‘Eastern Papists’, ‘first without equals’. They form a Dictatorship without Catholicity. Sadly, as none of them is married, this also leads to perversions, just as in their favourite Vatican. And so their political ideology is Ecumenism yesterday, the Green Patriarch today, LGBT tomorrow, and the day after the next fad from the Western woke bandwagon. But nothing changes, it all remains exclusivist Greek nationalism, phyletism, called ‘Hellenism’. The Archpastors have been replaced by Archpoliticians and, sometimes, Archbandits. And the bureaucratic and careerist elite of the Patriarchate of Moscow, where there was once great potential, similarly fell from freedom and grace.

Copying Greek nationalist Phanariots, in recent years they invented their exclusivist and racist ideology, ‘the Russian world’ – the same Dictatorship without Catholicity. However, unlike the secularist Greeks, they marketed themselves as having ‘traditional values’. Sadly, Lenin’s mummy is still revered in the centre of Moscow, the capital of abortion, and Russia is full of statues and the names of Stalin and his henchmen like Sverdlov. Traditional? And some bishops are sexual deviants or mini-oligarchs. Masculine? Well, have you seen the videos of Russian metropolitans with boyfriends and bishops? Masculine? Orthodox Christianity is about family life and that is definitely not anti-woman and anti-children. The Moscow Patriarchate will even support the new ROCOR heresy of rebaptism, as long as clericalist ritual is observed and the Patriarch’s name is heard. All others in the other 15 Local Churches are schismatics or heretics.

This is because, according to the nationalists, the schism and heresy of all the others is not to commemorate the Russian Patriarch, even though that is forbidden by the local State and ROCOR did not do it for eighty years. Certain of the senior bishops are mini-oligarchs who rule their dioceses under harsh, totalitarian regimes, as the new, all-American ROCOR has copied. One metropolitan in Russia has recently bankrupted his large metropolia. Some priests are very poor because their bishops take their money with threats, like mafiosi. As a result, you have many scandals, like those in the Skopin Diocese, in Kolomna, Rostov on Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Tatarstan, Kazan (among several others) and that here in England. And then there is the viper’s nest of careerist homosexuals who attack seminarians and honest priests. Where is the Russian Church of the Saints, of the New Martyrs and Confessors, part of the whole Church of Catholicity of All the Saints?

Conclusion: The Victory of Christ

And where is the glorious Church of Constantinople, led by the Antiochian St John Chrysostom, followed by a host of saintly patriarchs, persecuted monks and faithful? Archpoliticians and Archbandits instead of Archpastors. And it is the same problem everywhere. When bishops stopped being real monks, then it all went wrong, beginning with Rome in the late eighth century. Regardless of where human-beings live, in Moscow, Constantinople, or anywhere else, regardless of when they live, yesterday, today, or tomorrow, human nature remains the same and the temptations are the same. There is one acid test, the one that Christ gave us and lived for us in his Life on earth: By their fruits you shall know them, and, A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

On Athos, in Diveyevo, Optina and Pochaev, Putna and Prislop, and in all the other bastions of Orthodoxy, we are praying for the freedom of the Church. Away with luxury cars and yachts, private railways carriages, silken cassocks and gold! The Diveyevo Brotherhood is coming for the Great Cleansing of the corrupt in the Church. St Sergius of Radonezh, St Xenia of Petersburg, St Seraphim of Sarov, St Matrona of Moscow, Elder Nikolai Guryanov all lived in poverty. And so will you!

 

 

 

The Sins of Love of Power and Money Motivating Those Who Oppose the Missionary Work of Founding New Local Churches

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.

But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all people, let us pray to the Lord.

Foreword: Church Unity and the Anti-Autocephaly Argument.

Although they are not Roman Catholics, there are those who love and admire Papism. They are mainly Patriarchs of Moscow and Constantinople. They love anti-missionary centralisation, keeping all power and money in their own hands, and are opposed to granting any autocephaly. They argue that unity is strength, division is weakness. Arguing for Papism, they forget that the Popes were the toys of medieval kings, more recently of Napoleon, Hitler and of the CIA, which appointed its political Polish Pope. Moreover, they forget that masses of Christians are not Roman Catholics and never will be, for they see in it just another centralist bureaucratic organisation, as tyrannical as any State.

New Local Churches and the Sin of Centralism

Since 2022 a series of clerics in the Russian Church, under threat of being defrocked by their hierarchy for not agreeing with the war in the Ukraine, refusing to pray for Russian victory, and so compromising themselves spiritually, have left it for another Local Church, the Patriarchate of Constantinople. The problem here is that they have, perhaps not realising it, passed from one extreme to the other. They remain spiritually compromised, for the hierarchy of the Patriarchate of Constantinople has for nearly eighty years been run as a sub-department of the hideously anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox US government, with its Protestant-style LGBT and all the rest.

There is only one reason why people leave the Church – because they have lost their Faith and no longer agree with the teachings of the Church. On the other hand, people can leave a part of the Church which is infected by nationalist politics because people belong to another nationality, have another language and live in a different State, which the nationalistic part does not accept. In this case, people are obliged to move to another part of the Church, which accepts them as they are, with their nationality, customs, language and government. They have not left the Church at all and, if anything, their movement is missionary, as they are in fact spreading Orthodox Christianity.

If a large number of people find themselves in this situation and are not accepted by their Mother Church because of their nationality, language or situation in another State, and have no other part of the Church to go to, then it is the duty of the Mother Church to establish a new Local Church for them. If it does not do so, then those in the Mother Church behave as a stepmother and commit the sin of centralism, which is simply the sin of love of power and money, which they cling on to. Administrative separation is not lack of unity, division of Faith or change of dogmas. The Faith remains the same. Let us explain this through some examples from ancient and modern history.

Three Examples of Centralism

Rome was the first to fall into the sin of centralism through its Germanic Popes in the eleventh century. They refused to establish or even recognise independent, ‘autocephalous’ Local Churches in different nations. They even imposed their Latin language, which few understood outside their clerical caste of scholars and bishops, ‘the princes of the Church’. This was anti-missionary. The Popes also launched bloody wars of persecution, Crusades and Inquisitions against dissidents and declared that those who massacred them would go straight to heaven. These acts of aggression created dissidents, logically called Protestants, who rejected the Popes and their Latin language.

Just like Rome, the Imperial Capital of Constantinople also fell into the sin of centralism. At first, Non-Greeks in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria and Armenia left it. Then came the departure of Rome, which was also accompanied by Greek ethnic xenophobia. Understanding that it would lose all Non-Greeks, the Greeks later allowed other peoples to have their own Local Churches. Thus, the Serbian, Russian, Greek, Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian Churches appeared. However, recently, it has threatened to take back their Church independence, called ‘autocephaly’, granted centuries ago, and to become ‘first without equals’. This is pure Papism, racist centralisation.

Just like Rome, Moscow also fell into the sin of centralism, a consequence of its centralising State. As a result, there appeared protesting Russian sects: Judaisers, Old Ritualists and then Dukhobors, Stundists, Baptists. Over thirty-five years after the dissolution of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Moscow Patriarchate was finally forced to grant Church independence to Orthodox in Poland, Czechoslovakia and then to those North America, and grant partial independence to Orthodox in Japan and China. Today, over thirty-five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1991, Orthodox in the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltics also want their independence in the same way.

Autocephaly, Not Nationalism

However, those in the Ukraine who want Church independence, ‘autocephaly’, are termed by those contaminated by nationalist hatred as ‘uncanonical’ or even ‘schismatic’. Ironically, those who call pious Orthodox such names are generally Soviet nationalists who wave the Soviet flag and appear to worship Stalin. However, support for autocephaly, granted as a result of the decentralisation of former centralised empires, whether those of Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, does not mean that we approve of the other extreme, of hateful nationalism and racist xenophobia. Patriotism unites and creates sympathy with other peoples, but nationalism always divides in hatred.

Local Churches need autocephaly in order to speak in the local language of their peoples, to respect their customs and for them to adapt to local political conditions. Thus, even Greeks and Greek Cypriots have their own separate  Churches – this is because they need to deal with their local ‘ceasars’ on different territories, having political independence, always strictly following the words of Christ: ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’. This is not nationalism, because nationalism puts the nation above Christ. That is as in the German anthem: ‘Deutschland ueber alles’ – Germany above everything – including above Christ and man.

All nationalists follow the same German example and as xenophobic racists put their nation above Christ. And yet He made us all, whatever our language and nationality. Our wish to see the autocephaly of Churches in countries which are politically independent from the country of the Mother Church is based on the example of the Local Churches, to Whom the Apostle Paul addressed his individual letters almost 2,000 years ago. There is nothing new then in such an ‘ecclesiology’, the incarnational theology of the Church. The persecution of those who work for future Local Churches and abuse them is proof that we are expressing a Gospel truth, which this world detests and rejects.

The Struggle for Autocephaly and the Catholicity of the Church

We have recently seen the example of the newly-founded Macedonian Orthodox Church, whose autocephaly was finally granted to it by its Serbian Mother-Church after decades of waiting, accusations and strife. The granting of Church independence, ‘autocephaly’, the founding of new Churches by Mother-Churches, is not a question of dogma. This is why the centralists’ accusations like ‘uncanonical’ and ‘schismatic’ applied to those who work as missionaries towards founding new Local Churches are absurd and vain. They go against the Catholicity of the Church, the third sign of the Church, which states that the Church is One, no matter where it is or what language it uses.

Similarly absurd and vain is the persecution of us who have always worked specifically for a new Local Church of Western Europe, which we have been proposing in concrete terms since 1988, though we have been opposed by centralising and racist Greeks and Russians. Both extremists on the fringes of the Church, these centralisers who refuse to establish new Local Churches because they are greedy to cling onto power and money, and also the sectarian schismatics, who want to maintain their power over their tiny ghetto-churches and condemn all other nationalities, have opposed us. We may not live to see it, but our children and grandchildren may live to see a Local Church.

Obtaining autocephaly has always been a struggle. Recently the Macedonian Church received autocephaly, but only after nearly sixty years, actually less than the length of struggle of the Bulgarian Church for autocephaly, which was especially bitter. As for the ancient Georgian Church, it had its autocephaly uncanonically suppressed for nearly 200 years by the Russian Church, itself then suppressed by Imperial and then Soviet control. Conversely, we do not hold with racist and politically-motivated Ukrainians who do not know the words of ‘Our Father’ and throw out icons of Russian saints from churches because they are Russian. That is just Nazi racism, the other extreme.

Afterword

Many think that today’s Russian Church leadership is just as subservient to the Russian State as the State-appointed hierarchies of the Protestant Churches, the Churches of England, Finland, Sweden, Norway etc, are towards their States. That was indeed the case of the Russian Church before the Revolution under the Protestant ‘Spiritual Regulation’ of Peter I. Under the Soviet regime, it was far worse, for bishops faced death for disobedience to the State. It seems that today’s Russian bishops are so psychologically traumatised by that period that they voluntarily do what they imagine the State wants. The State does not want such subservience, it is, amazingly, self-imposed.

 

A Call to Repentance: On Overcoming the Imperialism that is Alien and Divisive to the Church

Foreword: Superiority versus Humility

Ever since Cain and Abel the world has been divided into strong and weak, between those who consider that Might is Right and those who believe in justice and righteousness. The real revolution in world history here was the coming of Christ and His giving of the Beatitudes, which turned Cain’s law of the jungle upside down. However, for a thousand years now, the elite of one Civilisation, the Western, has proclaimed its superiority over all others and implemented its belief through multiple acts of violence, both locally and globally. This obsession with superiority is clearly in contradiction with the Christian Gospel of love for our neighbour and humility, despite their claims.

Introduction: Fukuyama versus Huntingdon

After the economic and then political collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, two schools of US geopolitical thought emerged. Firstly, there was Francis Fukuyama, who proclaimed that the Soviet collapse was ‘the end of history’ – the Triumph of the West, since the whole world would now apparently adopt the ‘superior’ Western ways, ‘the West is Best’ and ‘the Rest’ would have to slavishly follow. On the other hand, the conservative academic Samuel Huntingdon pessimistically declared that now there would be a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ and that the West would have to reinvigorate its decadent self in the new world, if it were to survive.

Fukuyama’s thesis was clearly wrong, but was Huntingdon’s civilisational clash inevitable? Clearly, it was unnecessary, but sadly, and credit is due to the prophetic Huntingdon here, clashes caused by the hubristic and therefore unreinvigorated West are what have happened. At present, there is a first armed clash between the West and Russia in the Ukraine and a second armed clash between the West and Iran. And apart from that, there are tensions between the West and China in Taiwan, between the West and Latin America in Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela, and between the West and Africa, especially in former French colonies like Mali and Niger.

Two Local Orthodox Churches Contaminated by Geopolitics

It is as a result of this geopolitical background that the life of the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches has also been contaminated and overshadowed by the aggressive conflict between two of them, which are now in schism with one another. This conflict is the result of extremist clerical tendencies and the vain, but divisive attempts to try and dominate the other fourteen Churches on the part of both de facto schismatic groups. The two warring Local Churches at the heart of this problem are the Russian Patriarchate of Moscow and the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople. What are possible solutions for their future healing? Surely this schism cannot last much longer?

First of all, we must understand that the problems in both Local Churches are symptomatic of the wider problems in both their secular societies, which sadly have been reflected in their Church life. Both sets of problems were caused specifically by the former Russian and Greek Empires and their spirit of Imperialism which tried to dominate other races and which made the words, ‘Soviet’ and ‘Hellenism’, into dirty words among Non-Russians and Non-Greeks. Thus, the problems of Russian society are largely caused by Soviet imperialism, though that problem originated in the 200-year Imperial enslavement of the Church, even before Sovietisation under Stalin.

Similarly, the problems of Greek society, in Constantinople, Greece, corrupt Greek Cyprus and in the Greek Diaspora, are the result of intensive American Imperialism. Thus, all Greek Patriarchs since 1948 and all Greek politicians since the 1950s, and not only the Fascist Colonels of the 1960s, have been puppets of the US Deep State. This is also true of NATO Greek Cyprus, 40% of whose land was invaded by NATO Turkey, without the US lifting a finger to protect it. (Some say that the UK is at fault here; indeed, it was originally at fault, but now its two military bases in Cyprus are slavishly operated only for the US to bomb Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies).

The Patriarchate of Moscow desperately needs destalinisation, of which it is the last museum, that is, it needs liberating from its Russian nationalist centralisation, with its catastrophic failure to grant autocephaly to Non-Russian Churches. This has made Moscow detested in the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics and in the Diaspora. Moscow’s militaristic (Stalinist?) and anti-lay clericalism, ritualism, episcopal taxes and bureaucracy are detested. Only by ridding itself of these Non-Christian attitudes can the Russian Orthodox Church be restored, as it was before it was made into a mere department of State, both of the Imperial State and then of the Soviet State.

As part of official delegations to the Russian Church in 2007 and then in 2012, I was shocked to see the potential degeneration in just five years then. In 2007 all was still possible. After the fall of the USSR, freedom had come and the faithful enthusiastically took up building and rebuilding churches, learning to sing. This was the People’s Church. By 2012, all had been put under central control and censorship, professionalised and clericalised. The old enthusiasm was going. People gave up trying: they could not fight against Church officialdom, who made them cry. Archpastors had been replaced by Archpoliticians. This was no longer the Church of the People.

The very term ‘Patriarchate of Moscow’ is a Soviet, or rather Stalinist, term. Therefore it has negative connotations among all Non-Russian peoples, in the Ukraine, the Baltics, Moldova and among lifelong Orthodox faithful in the Diaspora, who experience Moscow as a Persecuting Church. Let it be replaced as the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’, its headquarters transferring to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. All parts of the Russian Church, including its Lutheran-style New York Synod, should return to canonical communion with all the Local Churches, to the catholicity of the Church, as an equal, thus overcoming nationalist domination, schism and the sect.

In the same way, the Patriarchate of Constantinople desperately needs deamericanising, that is, it needs liberating from its absurd hegemonic Papist ambitions, ecumenist secularism and indifference to the Church Tradition of the Holy Spirit. These have been reflected in it and imposed on it by its love for transatlantic dollars. Let Constantinople at last be reunited with the Greek Orthodox Church and transfer its administration to Greek Thessaloniki, near the benign influence of Mt Athos, returning to canonical communion with all the Local Churches, to the catholicity of the Church, as an equal, thus overcoming nationalist domination, schism and sectarianism.

Conclusion: Towards the New BRICS World

The New World of BRICS is all about building a worldwide Community of Nations, everything that the United Nations, with its inbuilt bias of three out of five nations on the Security Council being Western warmakers, never has been and never can be. This is also what the sixteen Local Orthodox Churches should also be – a Community. However, when Constantinople invaded Russian territory and Moscow cut off communion with it in 2018, that was hardly Communion. That the two Patriarchs refuse to take Communion together is their affair, but why involve all the bishops, let alone ordinary Greek and Russian pious priests and pious faithful, who have been scandalised?

All this is against the background of the collapsing US hegemon. The latter has refused to recognise the reality of its downfall, incompetence and inability to win any war, against the peasants of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, let alone against the advanced military technologies of Russia and Iran. Once it was ‘The West is Best against the Rest’. But today the Rest is grouping as BRICS, with ten full members and six partner countries, many who want to join, and three central members, the RIC: Russia, Iran and China – no longer India, which fell to Zionism and has now put itself on the fringes of BRICS, leaving Iran as the new moral leader of the Global South.

Afterword: A World Without the American and Soviet Empires

In other words, the Greek Orthodox world, just like the present Kiev puppet regime and its proxy soldiers, is losing America and American support. But equally today’s Russia is no longer Stalinist, despite the nostalgia of the elderly, including many bishops, as it is just one of many in BRICS. In other words, both the Soviet and the American imperialist mentalities belong to the past, and although not dead, they are dying. Ecclesiastical administrations, whether in Moscow or Constantinople, are to heed the fools for Christ, whose prophetic role is to call to repentance the rich and powerful, including rich, powerful bishops, who sinfully imagine that they are ‘princes of the Church’.

Unless you want your souls to die, let repentance begin!

 

Q and A Spring 2026

We do not want to go to Rome, Constantinople or Moscow, we want to go to Heaven! We want Archpastors, not Archpoliticians!

The Nature of the Church and its Governance

Q: With the schism between Greeks and Russians, some say that the Orthodox Church does not exist. What would you say?

A: Of course, it does not exist and never has done. But this is nothing to do with the current political dispute, created by the CIA. The words ‘the Orthodox Church’ are abstract, but the principle of the Church is concrete, it is the Incarnation. The Church it is not an abstract idea, as in the minds of Protestants, it is real in places. Concretely, we think of the real Local Orthodox Churches, of Orthodox Christianity, of the Orthodox Faith. Such was the situation in the New Testament, with the Local Churches in Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, Philippi, Galatia, Thessaloniki, Rome. Today there are sixteen Local Churches, double the number 150 years ago. In 150 years’ time, that number may well double again to 32 Local Churches, in any case reaching at least 24. What is One and creates Unity is the Orthodox Faith, shared by all the Local Churches.

Q: Can the Church be corrupt?

A: If you see ‘The Church’ as a group of upper middle-class Anglican bishops appointed by an atheist or Hindu Prime Minister, as I think you do, then it is corrupt. However, that is not the Church, that is a mere human organisation, founded by a corrupt and evil King out of lust and some of whose properties were ‘privatised’ and handed out to his cronies, and which is run by accountants. In reality, the Church is the Body of Christ (in the words of the Apostle Paul), and it is run by the Holy Spirit. This can be seen clearly in the case of the Church in heaven.

As for the Church on earth, I think it can be likened to a huge Ship, carrying to Paradise those who sail in it, the captain, the navigator, the senior officers, mechanics, cooks, waiters, cleaners, plumbers, doctors, as well as the very many passengers, who are baptised. Some of these help the crew greatly, some do not, in fact they hinder. Sometimes some passengers decide to leave the Ship on lifeboats, which get lost or sink, others follow in the wake for a time and some from them get back on. Some passengers jump off, others come in new boats and climb on board. If the latest captain is bad, so what? Sooner or later the Owner of the Ship will come and change course, appointing a new captain. In the end, all are only passengers, who follow the Owner.

Q: Is the Church hierarchical or congregational?

A: If you are Roman Catholic, especially a traditionalist, then it is hierarchical. If you are Protestant, then it is congregational. If you are a normal Orthodox Christian, it is both. However, if you are some sort of old calendarist / ROCOR convert and you dream of dressing in clerical or monastic garments and hats and having a long beard or, if a woman, of dressing as a nun, then it is hierarchical. And if you are a liberal modernist, then it is congregational and you ignore and despise bishops.

Q: What happens in a Church if there is a shortage of suitable candidates for the episcopate?

A: We recently had the visit of a Romanian bishop. He told us how he and the Metropolitan are the only bishops in the Metropolia of Iasi of over 1,200 parishes. The Metropolia is in fact run by 15 deans, married priests. This system of delegation works very well. And that is in a Local Church which has a lot of active monasteries.

I remember in Moscow in 2007 being told that the Russian Church had 2,000 candidates to be bishops. This was quite untrue. They had in reality 2,000 single men who had an interest in a career in the Church. In fact, over 300 of the 2,000 became bishops. The results have been catastrophic and many have already had to be defrocked; many others will be. Single men with an interest in the Church do not make bishops! When will this common sense fact be understood in Moscow and Constantinople?

If there is a shortage of good bishops, then delegate! Thus, in the Russian Church exhausted bishops rush around at the end of Lent and in Holy Week doing long unction services, whereas in the Romanian Church priests can do unction services every month, if they wish. Such things are delegated. Only ordinations are not delegated.

Q: What sorts of bishop are there in your experience?

A: There are the real bishops, who are shepherds and love their flock, who loves them: St Spyridon, St Nicholas, St Nectarios, St John of Shanghai. The rest are lovers of themselves – administrators, narcissists, intellectuals, careerists, thieves, sadists, bullies, sexually disturbed homosexuals, pedophiles and psychopaths.

Q: What is more important, frequent confession or frequent communion?

A: Both. There should be frequent communion and confession, together with frequent prayer, the prayer of the heart and prayer from the prayerbook. This is different from the heterodox world, which has only frequent communion.

Q: Ever since the incidents in Amsterdam in 2022, the Russian Church has been known as ‘the Persecuting Church’ and lost most of its credit. How did a Persecuted Church become a Persecuting Church?

A: Persecution certainly was not present until 2008, when Patriarch Alexis was there. Then tens of millions of newly baptised and sometimes very zealous people and clergy worked enthusiastically hand in hand to rebuild the Church. The change came afterwards, with the spirit of centralisation (an old Soviet hangover), Papalisation (all those visits to the Vatican were a sign of this), bureaucratisation (the paperwork which was suddenly demanded by the Centre and detested by the priests), the military-style clericalisation (literal uniformity in dress, but also in political opinions), the closeness to the State and the Armed Forces, ‘blessing’ tanks, bombs and guns, and the insistence on rigid discipline, ritualisation and the use of archaic and little understood Slavonic.

All I can say is that the Persecuting Church developed in a process between 2008 and 2022. Let us take the mid-point of 2015 as a symbolic date for its appearance. And the essential reason for all this is that by then State politics, raison d’etat, had been put above pastoral love and above the support for Orthodox teaching. Schism followed. Schism always follows politics, that is why we speak of party (part) politics.

Q: Has your parish ever produced a monk?

A: Yes, we had one. However, he went to a monastery in the USA, where he was ‘touched up’ by a monk. He fled and came to complain to the bishop here, who had already turned down the offer of a free monastery, which had involved me in a lot of hard, but wasted, work. That bishop in turn made homosexual advances to the monk. The result was that the monk fled from him too. Later, others fled.

Q: Where do you think ROCOR is heading today?

A: In 2007 it had the opportunity of bringing its liturgical and ascetic heritage to help in renewing the life of the ex-Soviet Russian Church and the Local Churches in the Diaspora, as the late Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) insightfully urged. Instead of making a positive contribution, however, ROCOR gradually began developing into a negative exclusive sect and cult, especially after 2017.

Having only a very small ethnic flock, it began recruiting crazies. The rest, as they say, is history. Therefore, today its American Synod is already in schism from most Local Churches, for which it has expressed hatred, not love. After its recent meeting at its former US church in Munich, donated to it by the CIA, I fear it may turn altogether into a Californian homosexual and pedophile sect. See: https://www.bing.com/search?q=pokrovtruth+fr+seraphim&FORM=PVSBDF&PC=PV02

The Undivided World and the Zionist World

Q: How did the Western world come to dominate the rest of the world until quite recently?

A: This is the question raised, but only vaguely answered, by the great Roman Catholic cultural historian and philosopher, Christopher Dawson (+ 1970), the English Berdyayev, in such books as Religion and the Rise of Western Culture. Here he writes that Western supremacy comes from a restless spirit, a spiritual energy, ‘a spirit that strives to change the world’. In Orthodoxy, we know what that spirit is; as a Catholic, he did not.

Before the eleventh century there was a multipolar world, as the Pentarchy of five Patriarchates was, which was not dominated by any one centre. We can see this in the life of the saintly English King Alfred the Great, who visited Europe, sent alms to Jerusalem, which he never, quite unthinkably, tried to seize from the Muslims. He also sent alms to India and despatched a mission to explore the countries around the White Sea.

Multipolarity is a sign of diversity and of unity in diversity, the sign of the Holy Trinity. The late historian Robert Moore describes in detail how from the early eleventh century on, any diversity was persecuted, in his The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250.

Multipolarity was gradually destroyed by what we can call Zionism or Universalism. The First West, the West of the first millennium, was pre-Zionist, that is, diverse. The symbol and reality of this Zionism is the filioque. That heresy, adopted in the late eighth century as an imperial ideology in what is now western Germany and spread slowly until it was promulgated in Rome in 1014, is anti-Trinitarian. It dePersonalises the Trinity, making the Father and the Son into One and the Holy Spirit the mere link between them (as portrayed in many a heretical icon). This is why the Church insists on the Holy Trinity.

To the Vatican it was rather irrelevant, as the Unitarian Head of their ‘Church’ is the Pope of Rome, whom all must obey. Protestant Unitarians are like freemasons, who believe in One Architect-God. Thus, Western Europe moved away from the ascetic and grace-filled towards the legal and the moral, as seen, for instance, in Roman Catholic ‘days of obligation’ and Protestant puritanism.

Q: What is Zionism, in theological terms?

A: Zionism means universalism that is, globalism, the movement towards One World Dictatorship, homogeneity, unity without diversity, overseen by oligarchs. These think they are infallible, superior to those whom they consider to be lesser human-beings. Trotskyism is a classic example. Today’s extraterrestrial (or is that demonic?) ‘Muskism’ is another. Zionism can only exist outside the Holy Trinity, which is the principle of unity in diversity.

Here it is important to state that Zionism is by no means necessarily Jewish. By far the majority of Zionists are not Jews. Indeed, a great many Jews are anti-Zionists. For example, the last Non-Zionist US presidents were Eisenhower and Kennedy, that is, over sixty years ago. Since then, all US presidents have been Zionists, whether Democrat or Republican, but none has been a Jew. One of the greatest British Zionists was the psychopathic Churchill – he had no Jewish blood, despite what absurd conspiracy theories claim. His ancestor John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, was also a Zionist. Other British Zionists include Cromwell, Rhodes, Thatcher and Blair, among many others.

Moreover, even among Jewish Zionists, there is huge variety of individuals, of left and right and nothing at all, for example, Rothschild and Marx, Trotsky and Zuckerberg, Freud and Spielberg, Sarkozy and Zelensky, in the UK Maxwell, Mandelson, Starmer (by his wife), Straw, the Milibands and Polanski, Milei in Argentina, or in the USA, Epstein, Witkoff, Kushner and Cohen (Trump’s mentor and friends).

Some homosexual politicians are also Zionists, for example, Mandelson (and many other Blairites such as N. Brown and Streeting), Lord Ali, the Dutch Rutte, several in the US-run Baltic States, and the US Bessent, Graham and many others.

Some pedophiles are also Zionists and are very active in the media, for example in the gagging-ordered, heavily censored (‘editorially controlled’) BBC. This perhaps should be called the ABCC (the Anti-British Broadcasting Corporation), as it appears to be controlled by Zionist journalists and pedophiles too numerous to name here, for Savile, Harris and Edwards are only the tip of the iceberg.

Today parts of the USA appear to be ruled by Zionist oligarchs and perverts, the so-called Epstein class, the majority of whom are not Jewish, but who are globalists. They run the banks, the oil corporations, Silicon Valley, the nuclear-armed military, Wall Street, Hollywood, the PR industry, the legacy media, the social media and pseudo-academia. They operate by sanctions and tariffs, instead of by encouragement and development. To drain the US swamp and not to be sucked into it must be very difficult.

Contemporary Wars

Q: Would you say that the wars in the Ukraine and Iran form one single World War?

A: Yes, but it must be understood that this World War is not only a military War and that it began decades ago. Indeed, for 35 years, since 1991, the West has been embarked on a war against the world, which has been composed of a series of campaigns to promote a ‘forever’ war in several phases, both military and social. This began in Iraq and Serbia, spread to Afghanistan, created the chaos in Libya and Syria, included the campaign against the anti-globalist Brexit, the social engineering attempts to enforce the manmade climate change and net zero myths and to poison the weak and elderly with manmade covid, and then the new phases of this one single war, in the Ukraine and Iran.

Is Today’s Rome Washington or Moscow?

Q: The US Secretary for War, Hegseth, has on his chest a tattoo in the form of a red cross, surrounded by four smaller crosses. It looks Orthodox. Is it?

A: No. This US Secretary for War wears the crusader cross. He has, after all, like the crusaders, tried to destroyed to invade West Asia and Eastern Europe. These crusades have since 1096 become worldwide. Thus, President Bush also launched a ‘crusade’ against Iraq, as he publicly declared, and that is why the current US Secretary of War wears a crusader cross tattoo. He follows a very long history.

It is all logical. Just as the Papacy used excommunications and indulgences, so his successors, the US President in his Capitol and the EU Commissars, use sanctions and tariffs. However, those ‘infallible’ and ‘exceptional’ Fascist crusaders, who are above the law, not only cannot win in the Ukraine against a Superpower like Russia, they cannot even win against a regional power like Iran. Washington is not Rome.

Q: Is Moscow the Third Rome?

A: When Archbishop Nikitas was at last appointed Archbishop of the Greek Thyateira Archdiocese in Great Britain in 2019, in order to save a Greek ethnic group from rapidly dying out, he gave a radio interview to the Spectator. In this he stated that the Moscow the Third Rome idea is absurd, that there is no Third Rome, only a First and Second Rome! In other words, he was only a mouthpiece for Phanariot ideology. As one very senior and outspoken (in private) Greek cleric from the Patriarchate of Constantinople said to me of his own Patriarch last year: ‘We are waiting for the toilet to flush’. His words, not mine.

Rome, First, Second or Third, are all an absurd and fatal distraction, worse still, a delusion and those who believe in it are delusional, whether in Washington or Moscow. We want Jerusalem, not Rome. Romes are the downfall of the Church. We do not want to go to some Rome, we want to go to Heaven. We want Archpastors, not Archpoliticians. The so-called First, Second and Third Romes are irrelevant in Church life, as they all fell, in 1054, 1453 and 1917 respectively. Why keep harping on about the fallen and disappeared past? Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople, nor Rome are of any importance or help now, as we face, potentially, the end of the world.

Hatred of Russia

Q: Why do so many politicians hate Russia, but not other Orthodox countries like Romania, Greece, Bulgaria? King Charles, for example, loves Romania, and owns properties there, tourists love Greece, yet many hate Russia.

A: The elite of the Western world hates Russia and not other Orthodox countries, because the latter are small, poor and weak, unlike Russia, which is vast, rich and powerful. In other words, it is all about jealousy and greed for resources.

The British elite especially hates Russia, because in October 1917 Russian-language, Marxist ideologues overthrew the masonic MI6 regime imposed on Russia by the British between December 1916 and October 1917. This is why they made up the Litvinenko, Salisbury and now El Money cases as cheap propaganda. In the same way, the American elite hates Cuba and Iran, because they are the only ones who successfully overthrew CIA-imposed regimes.

As regards British Russophobia, see in greater detail: The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain from 1815 to 1841: A Study of the Interaction of Policy and Opinion by John Howes Gleason, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, London Oxford University Press 1950.

President Putin

Q: President Putin seems to be very cold. Do you think he is?

A: I have only been able to observe him one in real life, in 2007, but I think his apparent coldness is because he is probably autistic, that is, he is someone who is brilliant at systems, but perhaps lacks people skills. He is an ultra-cautious diplomat and lawyer, who does everything by the book. He has an excellent memory and is brilliant at chess and German, but he presents a very blurred image of Russia.

Nobody quite knows where he stands. He used to be a devout Westerner, a protégé of Yeltsin, who wanted to join NATO. He has acknowledged publicly his many mistakes of naivety after 2014. Many blame him for the Ukrainian situation and not acting then, which would have been far less destructive of life and property. His present indecisive diplomacy is frustrating to some and makes him seem weak and naïve. As a result, he has led Russia into full-blown nationalism. Neither his previous Westernism, nor his present nationalism are Orthodox. We are still obliged to wait for Russia to move out of both these deviations, Westernism and nationalism, towards Christ.

Q: Who could replace Putin in this year’s Russian elections?

A: The elections in Russia next September are Parliamentary elections, not Presidential. President Putin will stay. But the influence of the former Westerner and now strong Russian nationalist Medvedev may become a lot stronger. Rightly or wrongly, he is seen as strong and decisive. Others have unflattering views about him. We shall see.

Personal

Q: Do you hope to live a long life?

A: I hope so, as there is still so much to do, or so it seems to me, but what I hope is completely irrelevant. God decides. Perhaps tomorrow I will be gone! As Chaucer wrote: The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

 

 

Half a Century in the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (1)

Introduction: Nothing New Under the Sun

Apart from one year in Greece and several months in the Soviet Union, and then in Russia and the Ukraine, with brief visits to Orthodox in Moldova, Romania, Belarus, Czechia, Slovakia, Finland, Serbia and Bulgaria, I have spent 51 years as an Orthodox Christian in Western Europe, 41 of them as an Orthodox clergyman in Western Europe, in France, Portugal and England, but with liturgical celebrations in Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Germany. My conclusions?

First of all, there is nothing new under the sun. This is because human nature does not change. Anyone who reads the Acts of the Apostles or the writings of the Church Fathers from the first centuries knows that all the difficulties and scandals of today have already occurred in the past. Of 80,000 Orthodox priests, I have perhaps met perhaps 1,000 and of the 1,000 Orthodox bishops, I have met about 100. I have never seen anything new compared to the past.

Seven Local Churches exist in the Western European Diaspora today: the Romanian, the Greek (Constantinople), the Russian (divided into three parts, one of which refuses to be in communion with another, so is in fact in schism, as well as the 100 new but independent parishes of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church), the Serbian, and then the three very small groups under the Churches of Antioch, Bulgaria and Georgia. Only the three first big Churches carry any weight in terms of the Diaspora Church as a whole.

The Three Big Churches in 1976

Fifty years ago, there were two Russian bishops in this country. As they were both Russian, they were, naturally, at daggers drawn and out of communion with one another. One was an anthroposophist (look it up), a great eccentric who believed in Atlantis. The other one was a notorious womaniser. A few English people were allowed to join the two Russian groups, usually provided that they learned some Russian. This was because both groups were rapidly dying out (1917, after which most of the still living but elderly Russians had come here, was nearly sixty years before 1976). Priests, very few of them lived outside London and they were also elderly, spent much of their time doing funerals.

Fifty years ago, the Patriarchate of Constantinople in this country was dominated by Greek Cypriots, whose lives were largely devoted to Hellenism. Most had arrived here between 1950 and 1974. A homosexual archbishop preferred to ordain his boyfriends and one of his vicar-bishops was a pedophile, who at that time got away with it. Of course, there was at least one bishop who was excellent and many very virtuous priests and pious people. However, the opening to non-Greeks was all but non-existent. From the archbishop down, English people were told to go away, at best being told to join the Church of England or else to learn Greek, ‘if you want to become a Greek’, at worst being told to ‘go away’ by one Cypriot priest, only in the most vulgar way possible in the English language.

Fifty years ago, the Romanian Church was more or less inexistent, as the whole country was controlled by the Romanian Secret Police.

The Three Big Churches in 2026

Today, the Russians remain in small groups here, small because they have all failed to pass on the Faith to locally-born children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on. No Russian group has learned how to cope with assimilation. Today, the larger (still small) group is 100% attached to the Russian Federation, politically and in all other ways, and is much compromised by scandals. The smaller group, dominated by American Trumpians, just encourages the crazies and so spawns old calendarists, just as the Russian Church inside Russia once spawned old ritualists, and is much compromised by appalling scandals. Another even smaller group just hangs on. All three groups are dying out – for all have survived largely because of immigration from Moldova. By far the saddest thing about the Russian Church is that it did not learn from history and so it has condemned itself to repeat the same mistakes as before the Revolution. Today, inside the ex-Soviet Union, the Russian Church strangely resembles the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, with the same politicisation, the same militarisation, the same empty ritualism, the same inhuman rigidity, the same pharisaic and blind repetition that only they are ‘canonical’, the same blind obedience to the hierarchy and the State, regardless of Christ and His teaching.

Today, the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople in this country, although still dominated by Greek Cypriots whose lives are largely devoted to Hellenism, has a very dynamic archbishop, whose English is better than his Greek, and who is desperately trying to save his archdiocese from self-extinction despite his elderly flock. As he said to us a few months ago, he has one hundred priests who are so old that they are likely to die within the next five years and three candidates to replace them. For forty years the previous administration ignored all the warnings that this would happen. The saddest thing about the Greek Church is that they did not learn from the suicide of the Russian Church, so they are condemned to repeat the same suicide and also die out.

The Romanian Patriarchate is today by far the largest Church as a result of the immigration of four to five million Romanians and Moldovans here over the last 20 years. Overall, our two Autonomous Romanian Orthodox Metropolias in Western Europe have 10 bishops, 1,283 churches and 30 monasteries, which makes them by far the largest Local Church in Western Europe. We are about four times larger than the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople in Western Europe, five times larger than the Russian Church in Western Europe (most of which is composed of Romanian-speaking Moldovans) and incomparably larger than the tiny ROCOR and Antiochian dioceses, both with less than 100, mainly tiny (between 10 and 50 people), communities.

Conclusion: The Challenge for the Romanian Church

Between 1917 and 1962 by far the largest Diaspora Church in Western Europe, albeit divided into three warring groups, was the Russian Church. Between 1962 and 2007 by far the largest was the Patriarchate of Constantinople. But they both lost their dominating positions and indeed the respect of others, the Russians through their isolationist totalitarian politics, which excludes Non-Russians, and their lack of communion with others, the Greeks through their sheer racism. Today some 85% of Orthodox here are Romanian or Moldovan. Can the Romanians, now by far the biggest group, keep their position and the respect of others?

The Romanian Church has many devout clergy and people. It has the Carpathian spirit of solidarity. We are together in the Romanian Church, this is the People’s Church, with a sense of community, family and friendship. The Romanian language is a Latin language, written in the Latin alphabet. There is neither the politics, nor the military-style rigidity of the Russians, nor the racism of the Greeks. Moreover, and most importantly, the Romanian Church alone is in communion with everyone, in schism with no-one. However, the Romanian Church still faces two great challenges.

The first weakness of the Romanian Church, at least in Romania, is the temptation of money. Any Romanian layperson will tell you of a bad experience in Romania with a member of the clergy who demanded money from them. This is why some Romanians have become Protestants. I have not seen this temptation in the Romanian Diaspora, but we cannot be complacent. The second weakness of the Romanian Church is the potential lack of openness to others, in other words, the weakness of nationalism. To found a new Local Church in the Diaspora means to be open to others, to warring Greeks and Russians in particular, to be able to co-operate with others in a common language, accepting different languages, calendars and customs, and not imposing one’s own. Is this possible? Will it too fail to learn from history and repeat the errors of the Russians, repeated by the Greeks? We await the inevitable verdict of the history of the future.

 

 

Keeping to the Golden Mean: Avoiding both New Calendarism and Old Calendarism

Last week the Greek Patriarch once again compromised himself with the Pope of Rome, this time in Muslim Turkey. Many have been shocked by his ecumenism. It seems strange, since this Greek Patriarch has been doing such things for decades. And he is not the first Greek Patriarch to do such things. Many fail to understand that he has once again compromised only himself, not the Church. The Church is not some member of the clergy, a mere individual, whatever his title. Our salvation comes only through Divine Mercy following our repentance for our own sins, not through trying to save someone else. Only Christ saves.

Just because one of the Twelve was called Judas Iscariot, we do not reject the Eleven. Christ did not do so. Just because one of the apples in the basket is bad, we do not throw away all the others. To do so is puritanism, phariseeism, the heresy of the Donatists. As I remarked to a parishioner, at the Dread Last Judgement we shall have to answer for our own sins, not for the personal sins of someone else’s Patriarch. And even if he were our Patriarch, his personal sins would engage only himself, not us.

Here is the error of those who are scandalised by the deeds of such a Patriarch and join the old calendarists. Through not wishing to be in theoretical communion with such a Patriarch, they then put themselves out of actual communion with the whole Church! The old calendarists are not Orthodox, as they claim to be, since they are not in communion with the Orthodox Church, but only with a tiny sect, made up mostly of neophytes who are not rooted and grounded in the Faith.

Once again, the old calendarist group in question consists of members of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlTaXUfyL6U&ntb=1&msockid=c33b6ec0ce1e11f0b05ac565ade6baa5).

That small group which has been spawning and feeding multiple old calendarist groups ever since 1986. In 2007 the campaign, in which we played an active part, to reunite ROCOR, especially in the USA, with the Mother-Church in Moscow, so that it would never again entertain the temptation of falling away from the Orthodox mainstream, seemed to be successful. All went well for the first ten years after 2007 until about 2017. Then sectarian elements in the USA, basically Russian old calendarists, took over ROCOR.

Then ROCOR soon began to fall out of communion from the rest of the Church, most notably in December 2021 under pressure from a former old calendarist priest, from another part of the Russian Orthodox Church! To quote the Book of Proverbs and the Second Epistle of the Apostle Peter, the dog returned to its vomit. When this became known, six parishes, twelve clergy and some 5,000 people, well over half of the ROCOR Diocese in England, warned the governing body of ROCOR in New York. However, that body, the American Synod, backed the schism. Thus we left the newly schismatic ROCOR, so that we would be able to remain in communion with the mainstream, the Church of God.

The only confusing matter here is that the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow itself did not take any action against the uncanonical and schismatic actions of ROCOR. For ROCOR, by the Act of Canonical Communion signed by ROCOR in 2007 (I was present), was supposed to be in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. This was why in 2006 my friend, Fr Alexander Lebedev, had visited the tiny old calendarist groups in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania to make it clear to them that no part of ROCOR was any longer in communion with them (our Western European part of ROCOR had never been in communion with them anyway).

It has been suggested that the inconsistent policy of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow in this matter was connected with political affairs connected with the Ukraine. Once the military operations in the Ukraine have been concluded, we can only hope that Moscow will discipline ROCOR and bring it to obey the canons. However, much of ROCOR will refuse to do this and break away from the Church into full-blown old calendarist schism.

 

How Will the Greco-Russian Church Civil War End?

All wars end in peace. Sometimes peace comes through compromises and ceasefires (the Korean War), sometimes through the total victory of one side and the unconditional surrender of the other (the Vietnam War). The present Civil War between Constantinople and Moscow, the rivalry between the ‘Second Rome’ and the ‘Third Rome’ for control of the Church, began long ago. This rivalry is purely political, as no part of the Church controls the whole. The Church consists of diverse parts and has never been controlled by one local part.

True, the First Rome, in what is now called Italy and which inherited from the pagan Roman Empire the obsessive desire to dominate all others, tried to control all. This only ended up in the self-justifying filioque heresy, which claimed that the Pope of Rome, and not Christ, is the Head of the Church and he has total control of the Holy Spirit. This heresy came to be called Roman Catholicism. Originally it affected only a small and backward part of Christendom, mainly newly-converted, post-Roman peoples and Germanic and Celtic tribes.

The First Rome, with its militarily conquered subject peoples, from Sicily to England, finally separated itself from the Church in the eleventh century. The First Rome was already notorious for carrying out bloody wars, conquests, persecutions, indulgences, tortures and inquisitions in its attempts to impose itself. Later, however, in the sixteenth century, it itself split into many parts, with most of the Germanic peoples revolting against its Latin Yoke. The Latin Roman Catholics became far more numerous only through the crimes of the Western colonisation of Latin America, Black Africa and parts of Asia like the Philippines much later.

It was this same will to dominate that had already tormented the Second Rome and in part led to the fifth-century nationalistic splits from it of Nestorians and Miaphysites, the latter group existing to this day in Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Armenia and parts of Syria. As for the Third Rome, its will to dominate resulted in the disastrous, seventeenth-century ‘Old Ritualist’ schism, created by the enforcement of new rituals by the Russian State. As a result, the Russian word for schism (‘raskol’) came to have the purely political connotations of treason to the State.

Both those in the Second and the Third Rome who want to dominate the rest of the Church today have been much influenced by the millennial example of the First Rome, which they often visit. The temptations to obtain more power and more wealth are very great among some. This will for centralisation, whether of the First, Second or Third Romes, is purely secular. What is the Church perspective? The Church view is made clear from the New Testament. This is of independent Local Churches in different places, which share the same Faith.

Thus, at that time none of the seven Local Churches of Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, Philippi, Galatia, Thessaloniki and Rome ever tried to dominate any other or even tried to impose something on another. This continues to be the overall situation in the (Orthodox) Church, where 16 Local Churches, now not covering cities, but countries or peoples, continue to exist. They are tied together by the same Faith; the current separation of a few of the sixteen is only because of political rivalry. This unity of Faith, in all places and at all times, is known as ‘Catholicity’.

Catholicity is quite different from ‘Catholicism’. The latter, by definition an ‘ism’ or ideology, denotes the attempt by one to dominate all others. Once Constantinople and Moscow are depoliticised and they rid themselves of their Imperialist pretensions (= the will to dominate and impose), that is, once they have been ‘dePapalised’, then Catholicity will return through the gathering of all at an inclusive, politically free Church Council, which will be free to set its own agenda. For Church Councils are where Catholicity, the Unity of the Faith in Diversity, is expressed.

In concrete terms, this means that Constantinople must give up its claims to traditional Russian Church territory (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, the Ukraine etc) and that in turn Moscow must give up its claim to traditional Greek Church territory (Africa). In order to avoid humiliation for both, the clear way forward is to grant these territories Autocephaly, tcreating new and neutral Autocephalous Churches. Only then can serious discussions begin on joint Autocephaly being granted to areas where mixed Orthodox have lived in numbers for generations.

This means new Autocephalous Churches in Western Europe, Northern America (95% English-speaking), Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania. These Churches can only be formed by all the Autocephalous Churches which have populations there, not simply the Greek and Russian, whose populations in those Continents are often only a small minority. In Western Europe, the majority belongs to the Romanian Church, in Northern America and Oceania perhaps to Constantinople, in Latin America and the Caribbean probably to Antioch.

 

The People’s Orthodoxy, Church Freedom and the End of the War

So-called ‘Western Civilisation’ is composed of a fatal mixture of Roman paganism and Germanic barbarism. Thus, Western Europe gradually renounced its heritage from the first millennium, real Christianity, and became subject to pagan and barbarian practices. That mixture began to claim supremacy over the rest of the world, now known as ‘Globalism’. To support this claim, the Western world used its form of Christianity to justify itself, and so justified the devil through its reductionist and secularist forms of ‘Christianity’, ‘the white god’.

This ‘Western Civilisation’ began to collapse after the fall of the Western European empires in the First and Second World Wars. These had in fact both begun as purely European Wars, which Western Europe had spread worldwide, but used the USA to rescue it from its two attempted suicides. As a result of their Wars, the European elites failed to keep their empires. Therefore, ever since the Second War they have used and manipulated the Western European-founded USA to maintain at least the remnants of their power and prestige.

No Western European empire was more manipulative than the most successful Western Empire, the British, which used the English language and culture to gaslight the USA. This is the meaning of NATO, whose purpose was, in the words of its first (British) Secretary General, ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’. This was in the interests of the American people or in the interests of the peoples of Europe, but it was in the interests of the Euro-American elites, their high finance and military-industrial complex.

The reductionist and secularist forms of Christianity of the Western world differ from real Christianity, which is the Faith of the Orthodox Church. However, there are those ‘Orthodox representatives’ who also use our real Christianity to imitate that of the West, that is, the blend of pagan Roman paganism and Germanic barbarism. They suffer from a ‘Rome syndrome’, which is why such ‘representatives’ continually send their envoys to ingratiate themselves with the Pope of Rome. There is too much Rome and lust for riches and power.

Wherever there are Empires, real Orthodox Christianity has been abused. Most clearly this was the case with the First Rome in the West, but this has also been clear in the case of its imitators, in the Second Rome, Constantinople, and in the Third Rome, Moscow. Outside those two Imperial centres, Constantinople and Moscow, in the provinces, as in the fourteen other Local Orthodox Churches, we follow the People’s Orthodox Christian Faith, not a tightly-controlled, top-down, clericalist and ritualist, nationalised and centralised, State Religion.

Today, Greek leaders have dared to follow the oligarchic, Capitalist interests of the Americans and their vassals. On the other hand, Russian leaders have dared to continue with the Soviet-style, centralised interests of Russian nationalism. In both cases the interests are at root ideological, and tell those who are not of their nationality to ‘go away’, but other Local Churches welcome those who are told to go away. Chauvinism is not why the Lord granted any people the Orthodox Christian Faith. It was given to welcome people, not to dismiss them.

The following of Imperial, nationalist-political, ideological interests comes from a lack of repentance. And when there is no repentance, then enemies come. Thus, the Greeks had to fight the Persians, the Turks, the French, the British and the Americans. As for the Russians, they had to fight against attacks led by the Mongol-Tartars, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, the British, the Germans and today the Americans. As Russia is huge, each attack was combined, composed of several nationalities, as in the Ukraine, where they face the whole West.

Enemies are like the passions. They only attack us when there is no repentance, that is, no defence. This can be seen most clearly in that tragic situation today in the Ukraine. Both peoples are supposedly Orthodox Christian, but they are not, otherwise they would not be fighting. Every attack and every enemy is in fact a call to repentance. As long as there is no repentance, there can be no peace. This is why wars drag on, when they could end very quickly. Such is the case in the Ukraine, even now with a million killed and many more wounded.

The restoration of Orthodox Christianity throughout the Orthodox Church, and so outside Her in missionary work, will come only when Orthodox Christian leaders return to the People’s Orthodoxy and abandon Imperial, nationalist-political, interests. Those secular interests are wholly responsible for the present schism between Russians and Greeks. We confess the Faith, not some rigid, militaristic, and politically-inspired, centralised religion, designed to intimidate priests and imitate States. We refuse your Caesar and, instead, we follow our Christ.