Category Archives: Constantinople

What Will Happen to the Orthodox Church After the Fall of Washington?

The powers of this world have throughout history tried to abuse religious belief by making it into their own nationalist and ritualist institutions. This has been to camouflage and justify their nationalism, that is, their attachment to this world, their worldliness. Chinese, Indians, Jews, Greeks, Japanese, Copts, Syrians, Armenians, Arabs, Latins, Germans, Greeks, Spanish, Russians, French, British, Americans, they have all done it. These are just facts from Church history. How do Christians remain outside and resist an ideology which puts national and worldly issues above Christ, all for the sake of amassing more power and money? There are only two ways of resisting:

Either you are a Confessor, or else you are a Martyr. Thus, St Stephen the First Martyr was stoned to death by the Jews because he upset their nationalism. He was only following the prophets and St John the Baptist, who had told the nationalist King Herod the truth, and Christ Himself, Whom they crucified. Then came such Confessors as St Basil the Great and St John Chrysostom. And in the twentieth-century there were the hundreds of thousands of Martyrs all over Eastern Europe, as well as Confessors like St Nectarios of Aegina, St Luke of the Crimea, St John of Shanghai or St Paisios the Athonite. There is nothing new under the sun. The saints are always the best witnesses.

In recent centuries the Church in the Middle East and the Balkans was oppressed by Ottomans, Poles and Austro-Hungarians. Meanwhile the Russian Church was oppressed by Westernising rulers, even more so after 1917. In the nineteenth century and even before, the main Patriarchate outside Russia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, was used as a plaything by the British and French ambassadors. The Western Powers also appointed German kinglets to rule the newly-liberated Balkan countries in their name.

Since the second half of the twentieth century, the Patriarchate of Constantinople has in the same way become the plaything of US ambassadors there. Meanwhile the Patriarchate of Moscow was being used as a plaything by the Soviet State. Neither the US State of the Soviet State was Christian. Both were, whatever the theory, in practice atheist. This situation has continued by centuries of inertia even after the end of the first so-called Cold War in 1991, but in ways even more terrible than before.

Thus, in Moscow, Stalinist centralisation has continued, repelling all Non-Russians from the Church, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova openly described in his recent letter to Patriarch Kyrill. For fifty years we too were treated as second-class citizens by the same Russian Church. None of this is because this mentality has been forced on the Church by the State, but because it has become a bad reflex inside the Church. It is nothing to do with the State. For example, a fragment of Moscow, the New York ROCOR has done this too, completely discrediting itself, mistreating Non-Russians. (As one of its bishops said to me recently, ROCOR is ‘a train wreck’).  The mentality to repel all, including many Russians, has been imposed internally. The only real slavery comes from ourselves, not from others.

We can see the same mentality also in the uncanonical, US-orchestrated actions of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the Ukraine and elsewhere since 2018. Sadly, Constantinople fell to Greek racist hatred and jealousy of Russians.  It could simply have refused to do any of its horrors. But the $25 million bribe was irresistible to the weak. Since then a second Cold War has begun, with US proxy forces trying to weaken and destroy Russia from the Ukraine. It means that the heavy burden of steering the ship of the Church has fallen to those less politicised, more free, to the now 14 other Local Churches. Their role has been dependent on the political freedom which they have.

Thus, under Communism in Eastern Europe and under the US control of the Greek Churches, the Serbian Church stood out as a beacon of relative freedom and theology. Today, in this respect the Albanian Church seems to have taken the lead as the voice of freedom, though the long-overdue visit of Metropolitan Tikhon of the Orthodox Church in America to the persecuted Ukrainian Church is also a miracle. The remaining 14 Local Churches are not all united because they do not enjoy the same measure of freedom. They are only relatively free compared to Constantinople and Moscow. For instance, the actions of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople have brought some of the other Local Churches into a state of internal schism.

Specifically, the Cypriot and Bulgarian Churches are now in a state of internal schism as a direct result of the US interference in Constantinople, both direct and indirect. Equally, the US-controlled Patriarchate of Alexandria and Moscow are in schism because of the latter’s interference in Africa. Other Local Churches, like the Romanian and the Georgian, which have a strong national identity, take an independent line, ignoring uncanonical Greek and uncanonical Russian alike. This is despite the attempts by the local US ambassadors, who behave like the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, to interfere in the choice of Patriarchs and policies. This independence is the only way to go. It is freedom.

However, our question is what will happen after the US stops interfering in internal Church affairs. It is our hope that, once political pressure eases, the Greek Churches in particular can take the lead and get out of political distortions and contortions, abandoning imperialist fantasies, recognising new autocephalies, notably that of the Macedonian Orthodox Church and its Diaspora. However, the Russian Church also has to give up its Soviet-style centralisation, which is its imperialist fantasy. It has to grant autocephaly to parts of the Church in now independent countries.

The shadow of the old Imperialism, Russian or Soviet, just like Greek and Latin imperialism, has cast a long shadow on Church life. Its time is up. For the Church does not consist of one Local Church ruling imperially over all the others, but of their entirety, their catholicity – all the Local Churches together. Once political meddling is over, all the Local Churches must hold a Council together. A free and canonically ordered Council, not the 2016 robber-Council farce in Crete. Then the very many long-outstanding issues between the Local Churches can at last be resolved. In freedom. May God’s Will be done!

 

 

Who Will Create a Multinational Local Orthodox Church in Western Europe?

Introduction

Millions of Orthodox Christians live in Western Europe and are under some thirty bishops. And yet we have no Local Church of our own, unlike the far fewer in any of the twelve Local Churches in Bulgaria, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia, Albania, the OCA or for that matter in the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem. Why?

Constantinople?

For a very brief period in the mid-1980s, we hoped that the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople might create a united Local Orthodox Church for the then hundreds of thousands of Orthodox, 99% immigrants or descendants of immigrants, in the countries of Western Europe. Given the political paralysis of the far more numerous Russians and the purely political ideological division between the three warring Russian immigrant groups, ultimately caused by the Soviet atheist regime and the oppression of a hostage-Church inside the USSR, as well as personal passions, the Greek solution seemed possible. The Greeks had a whole network of bishops in Europe and unity. All was possible.

Sadly, the Greeks were largely only interested in playing politics and Greek nationalism, known as ‘Hellenism’, implemented by bishop-bureaucrats. ‘God only understands Greek’, as they used to say and still say, when they told Non-Greeks to ‘go away’. In 1989 Constantinople consecrated an ambitious Non-Greek bishop, but he had to pay a $20,000 bribe out of his pocket for the privilege. It all ended up very badly and he was soon suspended in a scandal. And now it is happening again: an ambitious young convert-careerist, though not in the same Patriarchate, has messed up and created a scandal. We have seen it all before. It is tiresome when a young know it all does not learn from the mistakes of others.

Moscow?

After our long-awaited victory with the reconciliation of the largest part of the Russian emigres with the Church inside Russia in May 2007, for which unity we had worked tirelessly for over two decades, we had new hopes. Sectarianism had at last been suppressed. From 2007 to 2017 we hoped against hope that the reunited and reconciled Russians would use their God-given opportunity to create a new Local Church in Western Europe. This would naturally have meant not repeating the error which the Moscow Patriarchate had made with the ‘OCA’ in the USA, that is, it would have to encourage and involve the co-operation of all the Local Churches with Diasporas in Western Europe, not least the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This would require diplomacy, bringing all on side, not isolationism and exclusivist political and racial ideologies.

Sadly, the Russians responsible messed up big time and chose the wrong way. For example, the main Moscow bishops appointed in Paris went from bad to worse. One was openly homosexual, the next openly lived with his wife and child and was alcoholic, and the next was a ruthless political careerist who backed a schism. Then came Russian isolationism after the schismatic US Greek project in the Ukraine and, among the emigres, full-blooded schism and sectarianism. Russian nationalist ghettoes, increasingly more extreme, more pathological and therefore ever smaller and crazier, were formed. The new level of conflict in the Ukraine and associated persecutions and defrockings of clergy, who have a different political opinion from the official hierarchy. All this, amid the hypocritical silence of the emigres, has made the situation dire.

Bucharest?

Politically-inspired Greek and Russian infighting in Church matters in Western Europe seems petty and irrelevant in the face of the massive Romanian/Moldovan Orthodox immigration to Western Europe of the last 15 years. This now numbers well over 4 million on official statistics (1), in nearly 1,000 parishes, soon with 12 bishops. Unlike Russians and Greeks, of whom only about 2% at most ever set foot in church, Romanians and Moldovans massively practise their faith. Moreover, Romanians speak a Latin language written in a Latin alphabet, they are generally very open, welcoming and want English in their services for their children. And children there are. As one Greek bishop told me: ‘When you go into a Greek church in London and see children, you know that they are Romanians’. They are some of the children of the 200,000 Romanians who live in London alone (there are nearly 600,000 Romanians and Moldovans who officially live in the UK, no doubt more unofficially).

All other Orthodox are outnumbered by them by perhaps five to one. The mantle has then passed to the Romanians, as both Greeks and Russians have failed to meet the challenge of setting up a new Local Church. The Romanian Church is by far the largest Church in Western Europe, bigger than all the others put together, but although autonomous, as the newest it is also the poorest, with the weakest infrastructure. With such numbers there is an opportunity. However, the same mistakes can still be made all over again. In other words, the Church can be made into a nationalist organisation, which will be irrelevant to the UK-born children of Romanian and Moldovan immigrants. We who belong to the Moldovan part of the Church, meaning that we have Russian liturgical customs and the old calendar, are especially conscious of this. Let us not repeat the errors of the Russians, who have mistreated Moldovans as second-class citizens for so long, just as they mistreated us English Orthodox in exactly the same way for so long.

Conclusion: The People’s Orthodoxy and Leadership

What is certain from what we have seen over the last fifty years is that there will never be a Local Orthodox Church in former Roman Catholic and Protestant Western Europe until ideologies cease. It does not matter whether these ideologies are racial (not to say racist), or political (Russian right-wing or Greek left-wing). All ideologies are divisive. Only the grassroots People’s Orthodoxy can defeat such top-down ideologies, but for this they also need leadership. The absence of a Local Church is the result of this failure.

Note 1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_diaspora#:~:text=Therefore%2C%20the%20number%20of%20all,countries%20where%20they%20are%20indigenous.

A New World and Church Order

Kill them all

Words of one of the leaders of the Catholic Crusade which massacred some 10,000 people at Beziers, France, on 22 July 1209

Kill them all

Words of another new Herod, US Congressman A. Ogles, speaking of Palestinian children, 21 February 2024

Introduction: The Real World  

In order to understand the conflict in the Ukraine which the USA began in 2014 at a cost of $5 billion to its taxpayers, we have to understand the background to it. Only then can we appreciate its huge significance for the future, for the result of this American war against the Ukraine and so Russia and so China is a New World Order. This is a millennial turning-point, the first since the ‘revolution’ or ‘transformation’ of the mid-eleventh century, which marked the rise of the West. This is not like the historic changes that took place in, for example, 1096, 1135, 1215, 1378, 1492, 1517, 1688, 1789, 1815, 1919, 1945 or 1991. Although these were all highly important, despite the rhetoric around them, none of them led to a New World Order, but to just further extensions of exactly the same old Western World Order. However, it is this conflict in the Ukraine, the last straw that has broken the camel’s back, that is leading to a New World Order following on from the post-Imperial West. Let us explain this by describing the World Order as it is today, with its division into two, the isolated, minority West versus the Global Majority, North, South and East.

The International Chessboard

On the one hand, in today’s world there are the globalist, amoral-liberal oligarchies, known as ‘the West’. These represent only 12% of the world population of eight billion human-beings. Although just a small minority, this West includes vast territories (especially the largely empty and uninhabitable spaces of Canada and Australia) and many of the richest and most powerful individuals in the world – the capitalist oligarchs of transnational corporations and their bankster politician servants. These elites are renowned for promoting Godless, anti-national and anti-family ideologies: Atheism (as the oligarchs are atheists, they replace God and play at Him), Globalism (= the control of the Globe by oligarchs) and LGBTQ (the oligarchs’ favoured forms of depravity).

On the other hand, in today’s world there are also the sovereignist, national-authoritarian democracies, known as ‘the Rest’. They are democracies, albeit quite militarised but not autocracies, as their elected leaders’ priority is to represent the broad national interests and identities of their peoples, not of the rich and their banks, transnational corporations and decadent liberals. These sovereignist democracies represent 88% of the world population of eight billion human-beings. Although the overwhelming majority, they include most of the disinherited and powerless in the world. However, they are growing less poor and less powerless, as the teeming millions of Asia, Africa and Latin America are brought together by their common values of belief in God and universal moral values, patriotic respect for the Nation, and the importance of the Family, amid the common search for peace, justice and prosperity for all.

Thus, on the black side of the international chessboard, there is the King that is Israel, the Queen that is the USA, with rooks represented by Japan and Germany, bishops by the UK and France, knights by Canada and Italy. The pawns are represented by US-run countries or groups of countries like Kiev regime Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States, most of the rest of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Spain, Taiwan and South Korea.

On the white side of the international chessboard, there is the King that is China, the Queen that is Russia, with rooks represented by India and Brazil, bishops by South Africa and Belarus, knights by Iran and Saudi Arabia. The pawns are represented by countries like the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, North Korea, Hungary, Serbia, Venezuela and Cuba.

The Deluded Narrative of the West in the Ukraine

The elite of the West lives in a state of delusion, so profound that it actually believes in its own virtual world delirium of propaganda myths or ‘narratives’, as it calls them. For example:

  1. The Western elite believed that it could enforce its own illegal sanctions against Russia. Its sanctions failed miserably, indeed backfired, and have helped isolate and bankrupt European economies, making them into failing States. They did not realise that Russia has autarchy, that it is independent, and is itself a huge source of oil, gas, fertilisers, chemicals and foodstuffs, especially wheat, on all of which the Western world depends. By its boycotts of vital Russian goods, the West has wrecked its own economies, forcing many staples to double in price, so undoing itself. Russia has not attacked it; it has done it all to itself. It believed in its own delusional propaganda, that Russia is just ‘a gas station with nukes’, ‘with the GDP of Spain’ (!), and not a sovereign country and a great diplomatic and military power, already the most powerful economy in Europe, and is supported by most of the world. Thus, the self-destructive sanctions of the West only strengthened Russian sovereignty. Indeed, economists forecast that the Russian economy will overtake the US economy during the present century, to become the world’s third largest, after those of its allies, China and India.
  2. The elite believed that it could enforce regime-change in Russia. In fact, its scheming only made the very popular President Putin, a national representative and sincere patriot, more loved, and made itself even more loathed. Despite the lies (narrative/PR/psyops/propaganda/spin) of the West, which is all it has, President Putin is not dying of cancer, dementia or anything else, unlike the openly senile President Biden.
  3. The elite believed that it could apply the offensive military technology which it had used against Iraq twenty and thirty years before, against Russia, this time using Kiev regime cannon-fodder as its proxies. The elite believed that its ‘game-changing’ weapons, tactics and training were superior to the far advanced Russian, when in fact they were either obsolete or else over-engineered because of its own profit-obsessed, oligarch-driven and suicidal deindustrialisation and decadence. The obsolete or unsuitable weapons and munitions from NATO cannot be replaced because of the deindustrialisation of the West. However, increasingly militarised Russia has a huge military base, with a million well-trained volunteer troops drawn from four times the Ukrainian population, and cannot run out of weapons, missiles, tanks, ammunition, men etc. This is unlike the US colony of the Ukraine, which is running out of all of them, even of ill-trained conscripts abducted by force off the streets. Up to 500,000 Kiev troops (Ukrainians and NATO ‘advisers’ and mercenaries) have died so far and at least another 700,000 have been wounded. On the Russian side the anti-Russian, BBC-sponsored Mediazona project reports the deaths of over 45,000 troops and an unknown number of wounded Ukrainians, Chechens, Russians and Ghurkas, all of whom are fighting for the liberation of the Ukraine from the Kiev dictatorship. The ratio is 1:10. The West has failed miserably, thus falling into the Russian trap, facing yet another humiliating defeat in 2024. It has learned nothing from its previous routs in Saigon and Kabul, still cultivating the seeds of its own destruction.

Restoring the Real Ukraine 

The Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Ukraine was never against the Ukraine, still less was it ‘a war’ against the Ukraine, it was intended to end the war begun by the US against the real Ukraine in 2014. It was never about occupying or destroying the Ukraine, it was only ever about overthrowing the US-installed dictatorship in Kiev and liberating the peoples of the Ukraine, undoing the artificial, centralised, Sovietised Kiev State, as it had been created by Communist tyrants like Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchov, and as supported by pro-Nazi Western elites. Russia had no interest in war, only in applying pressure to begin talks about security, which the Kiev regime and its Western patrons had rejected for eight years.

This is why only a small number of Russian-trained troops, about 10% of its armed forces, many of them Eastern Ukrainians, began fighting in the Ukraine in February 2022, facing huge odds. This was a small-scale operation that had been provoked by the anti-Ukrainian Kiev regime’s genocide of Eastern Ukrainians for eight long years. In this way, after 24 February 2022, the Russians pre-empted the proposed full-scale Kiev invasion of the Donbass by a few days, destroying anti-Slav US biolabs in the Ukraine and gradually grinding down the huge NATO fortifications which had been prepared over the previous eight years. The West forced larger-scale military action on Russia by its aggressiveness, forbidding Kiev to make peace, arming the South American-style terrorist junta and the dread secret police in Kiev, for whom Hollywood, literally, wrote the scripts. It supplied the junta with huge amounts of NATO equipment, munitions and tactics, which were all stuck in the time-warp of the deserts of Iraq of the 1990s.

This ensured the rout of the so-called ‘counteroffensive’ of the Kiev forces in 2023. However, the ‘permanent war’ dreamed up by the West also meant that Russia’s first aim of freeing the Donbass (and protecting the Crimeans, whom Kiev next also threatened) would have to be extended to liberating all the Russian east and south of the Ukraine. Apart from this liberation of the eastern and southern half of the Ukraine, there remained two other vital aims – the demilitarisation and denazification of the rest of the Ukraine. Demilitarisation is now three-quarters done. It has taken much longer than it would have because since 2022 there has been so much extra military equipment from NATO countries to destroy. Now we come to the third and most complex aim – denazification.

Denazification means the removal by the Ukrainian people themselves of the Nazi junta. It is not something that Russia will do directly, it does not go in for US-style regime change manipulations. It will wait until the consciousness of Ukrainian people awakens and they themselves overthrow the US-imposed junta that has been murdering their menfolk in their hundreds of thousands. Signs of this new consciousness are becoming apparent, with an open political split into factions in Kiev. Its removal is necessary because under Washington orders, the junta in Kiev outlawed negotiations with Russia in April 2022. For peace talk to begin, the Russian aim all along, that junta must first therefore be removed. Russia cannot begin peace talks with US-controlled European puppets or the American puppeteers, as they refuse to talk. Talks will be possible only with Free Ukrainians, those who have understood that the West wants to kill them ‘to the last Ukrainian’ for the sake of the West. The West has no love at all for Ukrainians; it prefers Israelis. Peace talks are impossible with the present US-imposed Kiev elite.

The Consequences of the Western Defeat

A Free Ukraine will be established within its new borders. This will be after those who choose by self-determination to belong to Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania (certain people are already gathering like vultures around the corpse of the Ukraine) have returned with their territories to their ancestral homelands. What will happen to the for now forty countries of the north-western peninsula of Asia, which calls itself Non-Russian Europe? Abandoned by their ex-globalist, turned nationalist, puppet-masters in the US, its former European satellites will have to sort out their own national affairs, just as Eastern Europe had to, once it was abandoned by the USSR. What of the twenty-one countries of North-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe? Russia will have a border with Hungary, which in turn has a border with Russia’s past and future ally, Serbia. The way will be open for all the at present sixteen countries of South-Eastern Europe to form an Alliance, helped by the multipolar BRICS Alliance, Chinese investment and Russian energy. This Austro-Hungarian-Ottoman Alliance could stretch from Hungary to Greece, Austria to Cyprus, from Czechia to Croatia, Albania to Moldova (perhaps minus Russian Transdnistria and Gagauzia), Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim, doing away with the old local petty nationalisms and primitive racism, working towards a Confederation for the peace and prosperity of all. However, these are not the only local consequences. There are the local consequences for the five countries of North-Eastern European, which border Russia and Belarus, that is, Finland, the three Baltic States and Poland (whose farmers are at present blockading the border with the Ukraine – for Poles resent Ukrainians and their sense of entitlement). The consequences there will be just as significant, once their US-imposed elites have been removed and popular governments elected.

As for the other for now nineteen European countries, those of Western Europe – and we know what Washington via Victoria Nuland thinks of Europe – they will at last be free to throw off their old Uniparty Russophobic elites, who have between only 10% and 20% of approval, and start all over again, in face of the new reality. The European puppets are now arguing with each other, finger-pointing, like children when the (American) parents have left the room, as they are incapable of doing anything except taking orders. The days of the pygmy von der Leyen, pretending, with others who also had Nazi grandfathers like Baerbok, to be Charlemagne, of the bankrupt pygmies Johnson and Sunak pretending to be Churchill, but with nuclear submarines held together by superglue and aircraft-carriers whose propellors do not work, of the megalomaniac pygmy Macron pretending to be Napoleon and in charge of NATO, but with French farmers pouring manure onto his buildings, and of the pygmy Scholz pretending to be Hitler, are over. And NATO, which does not exist to protect Europe, but to control it, will be over with them, as will the EU with its unelected Commissars. The new reality will be the Union State of the Russian Federation, Belarus and the New Ukraine and, beyond that, the BRICS Alliance. The Alliance has already replaced the old unipolar West as the new, multipolar, economic, political, diplomatic and military centre of the world. Western Europe has yet to catch up with this and reintegrate the Asian landmass, of which Russia is the hub.

Beyond this, there are the consequences for the USA. Since 1945 it has been the leader of the West, with all its decadence, exploitation of others and above all hubris. It inherited the privateering piracy of the failed oligarchy of the global British Empire, with its plundering of others’ raw materials, usury, financial speculation, slave-trading, drug-trafficking and permanent war. The American Empire, which cannot even defeat the Houthis, who do not even have a Navy and Air Force, has failed for all the same reasons. The future President Trump is not going to allow the conflict in the Ukraine to continue until his election in November 2024, though President Biden desperately wants it to continue after he imagines that he will be re-elected. Trump wants to ensure that the USA’s second humiliation in four years, from Kabul to Kiev, will also take place under the Democrats. The American Empire is now collapsing under its senile leader, who symbolises its disgraceful decline, and losing control of its feudal vassals in Europe, Oceania, Asia and Latin America.

And then the USA, shorn of its bankrupting overseas burdens like its NATO vassals and its coastal protectorates, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel, will be governed by an American Nationalist (ex-Republican) Party. This will have to sort out the huge mess of abortion, corruption, crime, debt, drugs, deprivation and injustice which its elite has allowed to develop within its own borders. In order to do this and so avoid yet another Civil War, it may have to split up into its constituent parts, returning the south to Mexico, the north-east and north-west to a reformed Canada, making California independent, and returning Alaska to the Russian Federation. The overseas US protectorates, including Australia and New Zealand, will be left to find their own way, making peace with their neighbours and integrating the real world.

The Orthodox Church after the Western Defeat

The leaders of Roman Catholic and Protestant religious institutions were at the root of the Western ideology of racial and religious superiority, that is of Western pride. Outside Western Europe, the clergy of the Orthodox Church have suffered many distortions and much corruption in the second Christian millennium (1033-2033). This is especially where they found themselves in political centres and so became victims of the then much more powerful Western Europe, geographically next door to it. The corrupt forgot the people of the Church, who are soon going to have self-determination. However, today’s reality is that the two most important Local Orthodox Churches, 75% of the whole Church, are in a state of schism and are even trying to drag the other fourteen Local Churches into their schism, and with some success.

For this reason, for instance, the Greek Orthodox episcopate in particular has been subject to the political manipulations of the Western Powers. For example, those who were at the centre of the then Ottoman Empire in Istanbul (Constantinople) found their episcopal posts being traded by the Ottomans and sold to French and British ambassadors who then appointed their puppets. Since 1948 they have in the same way been controlled by the Americans. They have not been politically free, as is evidenced by the lives of St Nectarius of Pentapolis in Egypt or Patriarch Maximos V of Constantinople in the last century. Currently, the political grip of the US secularists on its episcopate seems to be ever tighter.

In the Russian Church, there was no Patriarch between 1700 and 1917 and the Church was governed by laymen, several of whom were either atheists or else enemies of the Church, yet they made appointments to the episcopate and persecuted monasticism. Then, between 1917 and 1991, the episcopate of the Russian Church was under the intense scrutiny and control of the Soviet atheist regime, which appointed many corrupt individuals to it and persecuted those who were not corrupt. The Church was Sovietised and so centralised. After 1991 the episcopate did not de-Sovietise and decentralise and was also subject to all manner of financial and political pressures. This led to many immoral and corrupt actions, which discredited many parts of that episcopate and scandalised the faithful, with the result that fewer and fewer Russian Orthodox attend their churches. The onion-domes, regilded by corrupt oligarchs, may gleam, but the people do not want clergy who live corrupt lives, they want living examples of faith. As regards the Russian Orthodox Church outside the Russian Federation, it is now in a state of self-destruction, under attack not only from the CIA, but also from ‘One True Churchism’, or rather from ‘One True Jurisdictionalism’. Missionary work from the Russian Church is now virtually impossible outside Russia. They seem to have lost it, after wasting their huge opportunities over the last thirty years.

The Church itself, whether in Constantinople, Russia or in the many other parts of the world where it exists, has always survived thanks to bishops who live by the Holy Spirit, monastics who actually live the monastic life inside monasteries and convents, incorruptible and unbribable parish clergy, and the little people. We are those who refuse to sell our souls for money and worldly honours. From here have always come the fearless martyrs and confessors, by whom the Church has always lived despite corrupt bishops and clergy. The latter proclaim the lie that all owe obedience to them, even though they are financially and morally corrupt, undermined by their lusts for power, money or depravity, and create sectarian schisms and even heresies. To gangsters we owe no obedience, for we owe obedience to Christ, who precisely overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple. Let the corrupt bishops be warned even now: We have always won and we always will win. The episcopate of the Church is going to be cleansed. The Great Cleansing is coming, not least in Russia, where the State is being cleansed and the Church is the next on the list.

 Conclusion: The New Church Order

 Once freed from the political pressures of the old Western powerbrokers of this world, from whom the episcopate of the Orthodox Church has suffered so many manipulations and temptations down the centuries, today’s unnecessary internal tensions and disagreements between Local Churches can be resolved. These have been thrust on the Church by those selfsame powerbrokers. On the one hand, there can be decentralisation, with the Church no longer being a plaything of the centralising, imperialist ideologies, which make some in two Patriarchates use the canons for politics, to the scandal of all. Such seem to consider that the Church belongs to them, and not to Christ. On the other hand, there can be a strengthening of the spirit of the Catholicity of the Church, creating a much deeper conciliarity. Then all the Local Churches, whose number could swiftly rise to perhaps twenty-four with new Diaspora Churches, could meet regularly in Councils to resolve disagreements because they will at last be politically free to do so. The opportunities for a New Church Order are here. But will they be taken?

The End of a World

Politics

Catastrophic predictions and apocalyptic undertones are here. Even the name of a place in the Holy Land, Armageddon, is on some people’s lips. The US elite is threatening to invade Chinese Taiwan ‘in order to protect it from China’. In the US-backed ‘democratic’ Ukraine, that ‘bastion of Western ‘Civilisation’’ the most corrupt country in the world, which is now banning Christianity, 20,000 untrained and poorly-equipped Ukrainian conscripts are dying every month for the sake of dependence on the US, thousands more are shot in the back by the Ukrainian secret police for retreating, or else are deserting or surrendering. The Ukrainian birthrate has plummeted to 0.7 per woman and the population is now under 20 million, whereas just over thirty years ago it was 52 million.

Then there is the Holy Land, where Israeli colonists, 100% backed by US and Western European financial, and therefore political and media elites, but not by their peoples, are planning to genocide two million native Palestinians. Men, women and children are being murdered or dismembered by US bombs, dropped by US aircraft with Israeli insignia. The whole once disunited and warring Muslim world, from Morocco to Pakistan, from Iran to Turkey, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, from Yemen to Syria, is united against the Israeli military machine and its Western sponsors. Mass demonstrations in support of the genocided Palestinians, largely unreported by Western State media, are taking place all over the world, including in Western countries. The US is isolated, faced down by the Global Majority, from Brazil to South Africa. Heads of countries even refuse to speak to the senile President Biden. It has sent aircraft carriers, but China has sent warships, as Russia also. Iran is threatening isolated Israel and its corrupt political leaders with destruction, if Israel invades Gaza. In Syria, part of which is illegally occupied by the US Army, which is pumping out stolen oil, Russian forces, present at the invitation of the Syrian government, are threatened by the US. They will react.

The problem is ‘Gentile Zionism’. This is the Non-Jewish, Western fantasy that all political decisions taken by Western countries are infallibly correct and that the superior Western ‘liberal’ world, as ‘an exceptional civilisation’ with ‘a manifest destiny’, must rule the planet as the unique model for all. All Non-Westerners are as nothing, just folklore to look at in a Disneyland zoo. The Global Majority, seven billion out of eight billion, do not agree with this Nazism and is at this moment preparing to intervene in the Holy Land to bring about a ceasefire. There has only ever been one way out of this, ‘the two-state solution’: one homeland for Jews and one homeland for Palestinians, as was agreed by Resolution 181 of the UN in 1947, but which has ever since been vetoed by the US.

Christianity

The largest nominal religion in the world, though still covering only a minority of the world, is Christianity. Two forms of it used to predominate in the Western world. The first, Roman Catholicism, invented a thousand years ago, has been undermined by unending scandals involving papal and episcopal corruption, clerical pedophilia and crime, misogyny and racism. Few Roman Catholic laypeople actually believe in or observe its controversial ideology. The second form, Protestantism, invented 500 years ago after dissatisfaction with Roman Catholicism, has nearly completely dissolved into the anti-Christian Secularism which both spawned. Protestant leaders widely predict that their own religion will die out by 2050. Who believes in the Western form of Protestantism any more? Most Protestant churches in the Western world are empty and many have been sold or are for sale.

As for the Non-Western, Orthodox Church, some of its main leaders are only politicians and not pastors, whose only concern seems to be power and money. Thus, the Greek Patriarch, out of communion with the Russian Church, set up an uncanonical Church in the Ukraine for a $25 million bribe from the US and his Patriarchate has been undermined by incessant sexual and financial scandals. Meanwhile, the Russian Patriarch, out of communion with the Greek Patriarch, thanks St Seraphim of Sarov for nuclear weapons! (1). His once multinational and united Church, undermined by centralisation and Russian nationalism, is utterly divided. It suffers from constant moral and financial scandals with bishops, divisions or schisms everywhere outside Russia, in Estonia, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova (2). Tomorrow divisions may well begin in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Moreover, the Russian Church’s small, sectarian American branch has been in schism from its even smaller French branch for nearly three years. Nothing has been done about this schism except to encourage it, despite the appeals of its clergy to its now wealthy bishops to return from schism, the consequent collapse of the American branch in one country and the open persecution of theologically-educated and conscientious Orthodox. One of the American bishops scandalously and openly rebaptises, not just Non-Orthodox, but even other Orthodox (!). This is a sect, not part of the Church. Yet, apparently, the leaders of the Russian Church find this arrogant Americanisation and ‘One True Church’ sectarianisation normal.

We have seen it all before. Those who have not seen it all before can read about it in the history books. Although all may become a lot worse, we do not believe the apocalyptic hype. In the Holy Land the Global Majority (miscalled by some the ‘Global South’), Russia, China, India, Africa, Latin America, can still make peace between the two warring sides in the Holy Land. If US dollars were to be withdrawn from troubled places, Taiwan would peacefully return to China, the Ukraine would peacefully return to Russia, and the south and west of Israel would peacefully return to Palestine. There are solutions.

As for Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, these were only ever temporary, politically-shaped Western deviations of Christianity, with some very strange traits. Having served their time, they can now disappear and be replaced, perhaps even by historic Christianity and the historic Church. Their roots from the first millennium are still present. As for the Orthodox Church, we have also seen all the polarised divisions and sectarianism before (3). Leaders come and go. The head of the Church is Christ, not men. When men refuse to deal with the problems they have created, Christ will step in. All racism, schisms and sects can be overcome and dissolved by new, Christ-appointed leaders. We do not believe that this is the end of the world. However, it is the end of a world. We are surely present at the remaking of the world, at its reconfiguration, not at its end.

 

Notes:

  1. In French: https://orthodoxie.com/le-patriarche-cyrille-les-armes-nucleaires-par-linexprimable-providence-de-dieu-ont-ete-creees-sous-la-protection-de-saint-seraphin-de-sarov/
  2. Summarised in Romanian in: https://tv8.md/2023/20/10/dornici-sa-invete-limba-romana-6500-de-persoane-s-au-inscris-la-cursurile-organizate-de-stat-din-ce-domenii-vin-participantii/242307.

The full version of the still unanswered letter from 5 September, which is in fact an urgent appeal for autocephaly, with its clear emphasis on continuing Russian racism towards Moldovans, is available in Romanian-style Russian (Metr Vladimir’s native language is Romanian) on Facebook. If the Russian Patriarch ignores the appeal, the whole Moldovan Church may well join the Romanian Church. The absurd and uncanonical ‘defrockings’ of Moldovan (and other) priests who have already joined the Romanian Church will be rescinded – as they always are when they are purely political.

  1. For example, there was the scandal of the rebaptism of Orthodox by the selfsame Americanised branch of Russian Orthodoxy of neophytes in Guildford, England in 1976. The remnants of that Guildford group of pseudo-Orthodox are still rebaptising Orthodox today. Just another story of primitive neophytism, openly encouraged by its bishops, of whom some are themselves neophytes, despite the canons against the consecration of neophyte bishops. But the heretical rebaptism of Orthodox is itself only a repeat of the age-old phariseeism of the sectarian heresy of Donatism from the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. There is nothing new under the sun. What is disgraceful that the leadership of the once theologically respectable Russian Church countenances such a heresy in its midst and the persecution and slandering of those who oppose it. Those who start receiving Non-Orthodox Christians by baptism end up receiving Orthodox by baptism too!

2. Practical Consequences of No Local Church: The Pastoral Situation in England

As one Serbian priest in France put it to me 30 years ago, living in Western culture for Orthodox Christians is like entering an acid bath. In other words, you face spiritual death through assimilation, unless you keep your identity – that is, the Orthodox Faith. And that is virtually impossible to do unless you have a normal parish church with services at least twice a week and which is accessible. Here I will speak of England because I have known the situation here for fifty years, seen them all come and go, and here is where I know today’s situation best. Here most churches are either dying out or have already died out.

1) ROCOR

ROCOR in England had completely died out after three generations (1917-1992). The faith had not been passed on at all. Typically, children, grandchildren and, even more, great-grandchildren abandoned Orthodoxy, the process sped up with intermarriage (with such tiny numbers, there was literally ‘no-one to marry’ inside the Church). With basically only one permanent church to go to in west London and living outside London, people lost a Church, which appeared to give them no pastoral care outside London. Some of the first generation, like the late Professor Nikolai Andreyev in Cambridge, themselves actually had their children baptised in the Church of England from the outset: ‘We are in England now’, he said.

Others changed their surnames to English surnames, Volkoff to Wolcough, Kalinsky to Kay, for instance. Some strove to eliminate any sign of an English accent in their speech. The old ROCOR priest in Bradford refused to baptise any Russian children and sent them to the Church of England for ‘christening’. He told his parishioners: ‘There’s no point. They won’t replace me, so the church will close down after me’. Of course, he was actually right. He died and that was it. His church disappeared many years ago. Most children said that Orthodoxy was only for old people: ‘It’s nothing to do with me, I’m English’ and ‘I don’t understand what it’s all about’. Two years ago, already tiny ROCOR lost by far its biggest parish, six other parishes and over half its clergy, half its jurisdiction, because of its now schismatic foreign nature and its arrogant refusal to listen to the local people. People and clergy voted with their feet and left.

ROCOR only continues to exist today because it ‘restocked’ over the last thirty years from the ex-Soviet Union (though Ukrainians have now left that aggressively Russian institution) and from a few American-style crazy converts with their sectarian views. I know only six of the old generation, whose Russian grandparents immigrated here. Three are atheists, one is Church of England, and one became a Jew by being circumcised when in his twenties. Only one, now in her eighties, remains Orthodox (though her children and grandchildren are all Church of England). However, she does not go to church, even though she lives only 30 minutes away from London, because of the sectarian nature of the new ROCOR regime.

Constantinople

The Patriarchate of Constantinople used to have by far the largest jurisdiction in England. It expanded greatly between the 1950s and 1970s through the mass immigration of Cypriots. At one time it had six bishops. Its new Archbishop has told me that he now has 100 priests who are very elderly, but only three candidates to replace them. Churches that were attended by 500-1,000 forty years ago now get congregations of 20-30 elderly. Many smaller seaside town parishes will probably close. Whenever children appear in them, you know that they are Romanians. There are also embarrassing rifts between Cypriots, Greeks and Cretans. The worst case by far was in Brighton, but it is not easy elsewhere, with Greeks looking down on Cypriots as provincials who cannot even speak Greek properly. There are large numbers of Anglican vicars of Greek descent, whose parents had immigrated here. I have come across over twenty of them (and one who is Russian). Why? Because they never understood a word of Greek services. On top of that, considering themselves to be English, they could get a well-paid job and a free house in the Church of England. Nothing like that in the Orthodox Church!

The Greeks have a reputation for the flag waving of extreme nationalism. It is probably unfair. Russians can be extremely racist. And others. However, I have to say that all the worst experiences I have come across over the last fifty years have been with Greeks, but perhaps simply because they were so numerous. I have met several English people who visited Greek churches and were told literally: ‘Go away’. (Also in far less polite language). One Greek priest told one Englishman: ‘Join the Church of England, you are English, you can’t join us, wrong nationality’. (The man in question later joined the Russian Church and became a priest there). Another case: ‘You can’t come here, you’re not dark enough’. It is a sad fact that most Greek churches (but in fairness, not only Greek ones) are merely ethnic clubs.

As a prison chaplain, I regularly see middle-aged Cypriots in prison. They are the children and grandchildren of the original immigrants. They do not speak a word of Greek and have not the least idea of Orthodoxy. One of them told me that when his grandmother had told him that he was ‘Orthodox’, he had thought that he was a Jew. The only bright spots are the convent/monastery in Tolleshunt Knights in Essex, now with 25 Romanian nuns, and at last building a larger church, and Bp Rafael, the new Greek bishop (and the only Orthodox bishop) in Scotland. Tolleshunt Knights has welcomed all nationalities. Bp Rafael has done the same, welcoming all nationalities and calendars and is in effect the Bishop of Scotland. Only he has the authority and openness. (A pity for us that he is not in England!). In both cases, there is real hope. Why? Because both put Christ first and not their nationality.

The Others

Leaving aside the post-1945 Belarussians, Latvians and Poles who all died out, also the tiny numbers of very inward-looking but still churched Georgians and Bulgarians, and the Paris Russians (ROCOR virtually killed them off with aid from the Moscow Patriarchate), we come to the Serbs, the Patriarchal Russians, the Antiochians, the Ukrainians and the Romanians. The Serbs have faced the same problems as the others and the wave of post-1945 immigrants died out; one of the last of them I buried in a Suffolk village a few years ago. He had not been to church since the 1950s. Few kept the Faith. Some changed their surnames, one Serbian priest I knew dressed like an Anglican minister also baptised like an Anglican minister, by splashing water on foreheads of babies, telling me that: ‘We are not in the Balkans now’.

The Patriarchal Russians, once Bloomites, have also largely died out, but have restocked from the ex-Soviet Union. Today their Church sometimes gives the impression (which may or may not be the case) of being an aggressively nationalistic ghetto, an extension of the Embassy, with all the faults that can be found in churches in post-Soviet Russia, all about money and ritualism. However, possibly things will improve after the conflict in the Ukraine ends. The Antiochians appear to be a group for dissatisfied Anglicans and elderly ex-vicars, who do not know how to celebrate the services, but perhaps if they get enough laypeople of other nationalities, something may come of it. Some of the converts are rather extreme Evangelicals, who have little idea of Orthodoxy. That is worrying, however, some of its clergy behave as real pastors. The Ukrainians are very divided into pre-2022 Ukrainians (under Constantinople, extremely nationalistic, elderly, dying out) and the refugees since the tragedy of 2022. The latter are very small in number for now (most of the refugees were atheists, schismatics or else Uniats) and live under the disputed jurisdiction of Kiev.

Finally, we come to the masses of Romanians (and Moldovans). Nearly all have come here recently and in huge numbers, over 400,000, perhaps 500,000 or even more, forming the vast majority of Orthodox in this country. However, although there are very big parishes, with hundreds coming every Sunday, there are still fewer than 40 priests, still no resident bishop and a small monastery under construction near Luton. This is a jurisdiction that is being formed, but with a chronic lack of infrastructure because all is new. However, it is very young and dynamic. One Romanian priest I know does nearly 1,000 baptisms a year, usually about 20 at a time, every week. This is the youth. Speaking a Latin language and with a surprisingly open mentality, Romanian parishes are generally by far the most welcoming and the most open to English. Hope is here, providing that we learn from the mistakes of the Greeks and Russians who went before us. The three-generation rule seems to be implacable: if you manage to transmit the Faith to the third generation, a new Local Church can be born. If not, you will die out.

 

 

Papism or Multipolarity: The Fake Church or the Real Church

Introduction: Conformism to the World

In the 1960s and 1970s, parts of the Orthodox Church outside the Communist bloc were affected by a creeping Protestantisation and sectarianisation. Here I am referring to the ecumenism, liberalism and modernism of that period. It was just another example of how some in the Church are willing to conform to the ways of the world, to swim with the tide. But what happens when the tide changes?

Since then the tide has indeed changed, ‘ecumenism’ has become a strangely old-fashioned and even largely unknown word. And even the word ‘modern’ is now also old-fashioned, replaced by ‘post-modern’. However, another secularising movement to imitate, this time perhaps even more dangerous, has appeared since then. This is the movement towards sectarian authoritarianism, that is, to Papism, on the part of a few Orthodox Patriarchates and even a few ordinary bishops.

The Church Leader is the Emperor

After an accumulation of occasional conflicts and disagreements that had begun with Charlemagne in 800, in 1054 the authorities of the Church in the West reached an end-point and broke off communion with the rest of the Church. Papism, the claim to universal domination, had appeared. Thus, Roman Catholicism was born and would develop step by step, taking on tentacular dimensions. Roman Catholicism, with its universalist pretensions, was an authoritarian attempt to take control not only of the Western world and all its emperors and kings, but also of the whole Church of God everywhere, in the west, east, south and north.

The new Papist or Roman Catholic ideology stated that the Pope of Rome is de facto Caesar, the supreme authority, the World Emperor, Pontifex Maximus, the successor to the pagan Roman Emperors. This ideology came to be called ‘Papocaesarism’, meaning the total, indeed totalitarian, Western control of the whole world by the Patriarch (Pope) of a single Local Church. It led almost immediately to the reactions of disagreement and persecution, which caused the Papal schism from the Orthodox Church in the eleventh century. It also gradually led to the political and ecclesiastical break-up of Western Europe itself in the 16th century and its permanent division into Roman Catholic and Protestant.

At first it meant continual wars and invasions in the name of the Popes of Rome, papal armies or papally-blessed armies massacring Jews and Muslims in Spain and Italy, invading and genociding Christian England in 1066 and later genociding Christian Ireland. Then came the so-called Crusades, the massacres of the Albigensians in France, the sack of the Christian Capital in Constantinople in 1204, the Teutonic Knights in Prussia and finally the so-called ‘Reformation’. Millions of dead. Papism also meant colossal centralisation, as described, for example, in such a basic historical account as Richard Southern’s ‘Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages’. Paperwork, protocols, legal niceties and bureaucracy took over.

Sadly, it is this Papist ideology which in recent generations has become an admired model for certain Orthodox Patriarchs and bishops. Those who admire the Vatican repeat its errors and indeed its heresy. Both the Patriarchates of Constantinople (‘Eastern Papism’) and of Moscow, as well as some others, have been tempted by Vatican-style power. Indeed, whenever a Patriarchate (or ordinary bishop) draws near to Rome, the result is that they are tempted by secular power. It is a spiritual disease, an infection of the soul. The Patriarchates of Moscow and of Constantinople could not survive, if they were to continue. However, we believe that this is not a ‘sickness unto death’, but only a temporary infection. Healthy forces in both Patriarchates will fight back and even now are fighting back. They always do. The Church belongs to Christ, not to Patriarchs or bishops, whatever their thunderous titles and pretensions may be.

Orthodox Being Orthodox Christians

We have long stated that all the problems in Church life come about when Orthodox stop living as Orthodox Christians. There are so many clerical careerists, ‘professionals’, who demand that the faithful first make appointments with secretaries in order to see them, who call their flock ‘the mob’, who do not give confessions, as reality would disturb their delusions. These are the ones who have big black cars and properties, the monocle-wearers, who appear to be aware only of their own imaginary self-importance and their Papist ‘right’ to humiliate and condemn to hell those who disagree with them. Like the pharisees, who they are, they are obsessed with gold, their dress, formality, rites and rules. This is precisely what destroyed the Russian Church in 1917, when the Russian masses rejected such clericalism and self-importance.

As the New Martyrs and Confessors are forgotten by some in Russia, the bad spirit is coming back and being rejected again. Just as real Orthodoxy is not a religion and ritual, but faith in the Living God, so real Orthodox priests are not clerics, but pastors. They are shepherds of the flock and so are unmercenary, not interested in wallets, but in souls. They build communities, from which spring miracles and saints. ‘By their fruits, you shall know them’. Carpathian saints like Elder Cleopa do not demand that people make appointments with their secretaries to see them. They do not have any secretaries. Nor in the past did the Optina Elders, St Seraphim of Sarov or the Transvolgan hermits like St Nil of Sora. Nor in the distant past did St Cuthbert and St Chad or did the Irish saints in their island hermitages.

They had no possessions. In the Church of the Russian emigration, where I was brought up and spent fifty years, there was no such Papist nonsense, with all its paperwork, protocols, legal niceties and bureaucracy. For instance, Fr George Sheremetiev (+ 1971), Count Sheremetiev, from one of the richest families in Russia, lived in poverty in a tiny room in London, all his possessions were contained in one small suitcase. Why? He said that he lived so, because he had to repent, as his class had created the Revolution, since they had lived in luxury, while the masses had lived in poverty, on top of which his class had betrayed the Tsar and created catastrophe for all.

Archbishop George (Tarasov) in Paris lived in the same way as Fr George. Remember Archbishop Alipy of Erie in the USA? He made his own mitre, photocopying icons to stick on it, using lots of gold paper and cardboard. Remember Fr (Baron) Alexander Rehbinder? Several of his children slept in drawers. He had no beds for them. Most Orthodox emigres were like this. Most emigre churches were small and cosy, prayerful and simple – and poor. That is my Church. Think of St John of Shanghai giving away his shoes to beggars, not because his shoes were uncomfortable (as the papists will tell you), but because he had compassion. Renounce his way, and you renounce the way of all the saints.

A Centralised Church and a Multipolar Church

Ever since I returned to the Russian Federation in 2007 after an absence of forty-one years, I have said that the situation there was fragile, on a knife-edge. It could go one way or the other. Restoration was by no means guaranteed. And I also said from the beginning that what it had taken three generations to destroy between December 1916 and December 1991 would take three generations to restore. The Russia I saw in 2007, and have seen again several times since then, was not yet a Russian world, it was a post-Soviet world. Post-Soviet golden domes do not make a Church and saints.

And without saints, there will be no Church, just a post-Soviet religious-coloured national institution. And whoever says post-Soviet, says centralised and nationalist. For important parts of the post-Soviet Church are still centralised, nationalist and therefore saintless. And yet in our New World Order of 2023, the world of BRICS, we do not have centralism, but ‘multipolarity’, that is, polycentrism. Where did multipolarity come from? Multipolarity is precisely the Orthodox Christian structure on which the Confederation or Family of Local Orthodox Churches is founded.

A centralised and nationalist (and so anti-missionary) post-Soviet Church can have no place in Orthodoxy. Centralism, that is, unipolarity, is exactly the opposite of our Orthodox view of the world. Centralism, unipolarity, is the definition of Papist Roman Catholicism, not of Orthodoxy. And even though Papist Roman Catholicism has gone, its cultural reflexes have been inherited by the USA, today’s Uniparty Hegemon. Its ideology is Unipolarity, belief in a single totalitarian system all over the world, which they call Globalism. This tries to impose itself by intimidation, violence and regime change all over the world, Americanising by force and threat, as we who were in ROCOR in England know by heart. But we have resisted it and won.

Their ideology is that one size fits all, like a MacDonald’s franchise, in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and the Ukraine, in fact all over the world. Millions of dead. In other words, the US elite is a de facto Caesar, the supreme authority, the World Emperor, Pontifex Maximus, the POTUS, the successor to the pagan Roman Emperors, Papism, meaning the total, indeed totalitarian control of the whole world by the single leader of a single Nation. This is Neo-Papism.

Conclusion: Awaiting Resurrection

The above is not our Orthodox Christian spiritual and cultural inheritance. Our inheritance is the Holy Trinity, unity in diversity, the origin of multipolarity. We who were brought up in the real Russian, not Sovietised, Church await the Resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate. As also faithful Greeks await the Resurrection of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. For the moment, however, we are closer to the stern prophecies of St Lavrentij of Chernigov (+ 1950), who warned us what to avoid:

‘Not long before Antichrist is enthroned, even those churches that have been closed will be repaired and restored — not only their exteriors, but their interiors, as well. They will gild the cupolas of bell-towers and cathedrals, alike…We will have unprecedented splendour’, Elder Lavrentii would say. ‘Do you see how craftily and insidiously all this is being prepared?… I repeat yet again that one must not attend those cathedrals; there will be no grace in them!’

 

News from the Orthodox World (2)

As a prison chaplain and clergyman of nearly forty years, I can confidently assert that all the worst individuals I have come across in this world were bishops. On the other hand, I can equally confidently assert that some of the saintliest individuals I have come across in this world were also bishops, including my own bishop. Thank God.

I lived through the Cold War, the 70s and the 80s. Spiritually, it was an awful period – there was no spiritually independent Orthodox Church to belong to. The episcopate of Moscow was subject to the KGB and they often made use of corrupt bishops, on whom they held ‘the dirt’, ‘compromising materials, (‘kompromat’). However, Constantinople was clearly run by the Americans and its episcopate were corrupt or homosexuals, often ecumenists (there was money in that and freemasons (there was money in that too). They are all dead now.

I remember one Constantinople metropolitan who used to celebrate the liturgy by his watch – 45 minutes was enough for him. Another future metropolitan, the late John Zizioulas, was thrown out of Edinburgh Theology Department for his open homosexuality and was forced to teach in Glasgow, where they were not particular. After all, ‘theology’ is just an academic discipline, like any other. Personal morality has nothing to do with academic disciplines. The Russians were no better. One Russian metropolitan had a string of mistresses. Then there was Bishop Gury in Paris who had a love affair with one of his equally homosexual priests. After ten years or so the scandal became so great that he was sacked and sent, literally, to Siberia, becoming the Bishop of Magadan, the equivalent of Australia for dud Anglican bishops in the past.

Talking to two Russian priests recently, one told me that all except one of the four bishops in his Metropolia is homosexual and the other told me that in his Metropolia, two bishops out of the five are utterly corrupt (‘business’ and women, their vices) and one is openly homosexual. There is a well-known pedophile metropolitan in the Ukrainian Church (MP) and another in the Russian Church (MP). The problem with the homosexuals is their hatred for normal married clergy and persecution of them through their jealousy, which causes them to try and destroy the clergy, their parishes and as a result utterly alienates the people, many of whom desert the Church in disgust. Such bishops’ constant demands for money make them especially unloved.

The Russian Church is supposed to be anti-LGBT. This is almost a joke, given some of its episcopate, who rule over a country, whose abortion rate is twice that of Western European countries. Since so many of its bishops are notorious homosexuals and even pedophiles, little wonder that so many of their golden-domed churches are empty. We really have come to the end times, which were prophesied by St Seraphim of Sarov. Churches will be open, but you will not be able to go there.

Little wonder that so many churches of the canonical Church in the Ukraine have been and are being closed down by Nazi thugs, openly backed by the Zelensky regime. Buildings in the Kiev Caves Monastery, where so many saints rest, are continually being occupied and stolen by such thugs who come from the dreaded Secret Police, the SBU, which is trained by MI6 and the CIA. (Indeed, many say that Zelensky is actually an MI6 agent).

Democracy in the Ukraine? Other political parties are outlawed and if you promote freedom for them, you may well find yourself dead in a back street in Kiev. Such is the regime supported by the West. Worse still, it is the Patriarchate of Constantinople that stands behind that ecclesiastical department of the Zelensky regime.

And that regime only has months to go before it collapses in its Kiev bunker beneath the weight of the most advanced armed forces of in the world. They belong to Russia, the most powerful economy in Europe, No 5 in the world, according to the World Bank, and not far behind Japan at No 4. This will be followed by the unconditional capitulation of the Kiev regime and the victory of nationalist Russia, which wants to achieve freedom for and unity with the Russian population in the Ukraine. (Nothing else interests it, despite the propaganda nonsense parroted by demented US and UK politicians about Russia wanting to reconstitute the Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe).

So the Church choice today is no longer the Cold War, but Greek nationalism or Russian nationalism. No choice at all. During the Cold War we chose to belong to a still spiritual part of the Russian Church, where it was still possible to venerate the Saints and Martyrs freely, even if by no means all did so). At that time, that possibility still existed. Now it too has gone, having been taken over by the same types. Corruption, ‘business’, sexual perversion and persecution of the parish clergy are the order of the day. The choice today appears to be Greek nationalism/corruption/perversion or Russian nationalism/corruption/ perversion.

That is also a false choice. There is the third way, the mystical way of the saints, not the way of all those pharisees, of whom Christ said (Jn 8, 44): You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

 

The Murk Lifts as the Saints Come in Victory

Four years ago now we were informed by a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) that Fr Alexander Belya had been selected as a bishop by a majority of the old ROCOR Synod in New York. All had legitimately been signed off and sent to the Moscow for the final approval. Indeed, Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) had earlier personally spoken to us about Fr Alexander with great enthusiasm. However, the objections of a minority in the Synod were so strong that they launched what was in effect a coup d’etat, taking advantage of the late Metropolitan Hilarion’s dementia and cancer, creating a new ROCOR and beginning a campaign to discredit Fr Alexander’s candidacy. All manner of accusations were made, for which no proof has ever been offered.

Accusing someone of forgery and then spending two and a half years in the highest courts in the USA trying to avoid having to respond to evidence to the contrary does seem very strange. In any case, after losing its very expensive court cases against Fr Alexander Belya and awaiting the new one for defamation, the new ROCOR has lost yet another battle.  It can no longer resist the consecration of Fr Alexander Belya, already signed off by the old ROCOR under Metr Hilarion (Kapral). However, given the purging of the old canonical ROCOR by the dominant new ROCOR, the consecration will go ahead under the very unpopular and highly controversial Archbishop Elpidiphoros of the Church of Constantinople in North America. He has now called the bluff of very naïve, objecting bishops of other jurisdictions in Northern America and will proceed with the long-awaited consecration.

It is a great pity that few can trust Archbishop Elpidiphoros personally, but no doubt there was no other choice for Fr Alexander in the highly politicised American context. And so the vital forces of the Russian Church in Northern America are going under the Church of Constantinople, as the elderly who know the Tradition die out. We can only imagine the dissatisfaction with ROCOR in Moscow. A candidate for the episcopate and yet another set of good clergy and prosperous parishes lost by ROCOR and this time forced, however reluctantly, to join the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Moscow’s great rival. (Where part of the OCA also wants to go). The living elements of the old ROCOR, are fleeing its new marginality, in Northern America quite logically joining the largest jurisdiction there (the Patriarchate of Constantinople) and in Western Europe quite logically joining the largest jurisdiction there (the Patriarchate of Romania). In both cases all keep the old calendar and all other Russian liturgical customs.

All had been possible, but, according to some, on account of jealousy (Fr Alexander speaks and writes fluent Russian and Ukrainian, unlike those who oppose him), slander and sham ‘defrockings’, those who oppose him have lost nearly everything. First there came notoriety for receiving clergy without letters of release from canonical (= non-schismatic) Local Churches. (Letters of release are necessary to check on the moral conduct of clergy, not if the only objections to the clergy leaving are because they refuse schism, because of political disagreements or if they concern coveting of parishioners’ property on the part of those who do not wish them to leave.

The refusal to issue letters of release for purely political purposes or to try and obtain property illegally is not canonical. And there is no such thing as an oath of obedience to a schismatic bishop!). One Russian priest in London called ROCOR’s uncanonical suspensions ‘null and void’. And as another Russian priest said: ‘If there is no canonical crime, then it means that canon law is simply used as a mechanism of political repression’. (https://uk.yahoo.com/news/russian-orthodox-priests-face-persecution-062625884.html).

Thus, the clergy who left Constantinople for ROCOR were suspended by the Church of Constantinople. This is normal practice, as you do not ‘defrock’ clergy, if they are acting in integrity according to their conscience. Unless, that is, you are some sort of punitive, gaslighting, right-wing sect. Why did so many leave the new ROCOR elsewhere? The ROCOR schism from the Moscow Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church (to which ROCOR supposedly belongs!) in Western Europe took its toll. This was because the Moscow group in Western Europe receives Catholic clergy in the same way as the rest of the Moscow Patriarchate and the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, that is, not by rebaptism, like Greek Old Calendarists. This suicidal act of Russian old calendarism on the part of ROCOR cost it sixteen clergy and half of its Diocese in Great Britain. All refused to obey neophyte schismatics – see Canon XV of the First and Second Council. Now ROCOR in Great Britain will never be anything more than an irrelevant, tiny, closed marginal sect.

Then there was the use of electronic signatures, used in utterly vain attempts to bully, gaslight and intimidate. With these acts many have indeed discredited and isolated themselves from canonical Orthodoxy. How long will Moscow tolerate these losses and scandals? At a time like this, the already very isolated Moscow needs allies, not scandals. It has already suffered scandals in the tragic situations in Kiev, Riga, Amsterdam, Madrid, Vilnius and those that are rapidly developing elsewhere. There will come a point when Moscow, with its many parishes which use the new calendar, simply will not accept the threats made to it by the old calendarist American Synod. These threats involve boycotting the workings of the Moscow Patriarchate and are made by the New York Synod because it believes that it has Moscow over a barrel and can get away with anything. It is a dangerous game, because one day after the Ukraine is over Moscow will call its bluff and pull the plugs.

All this is a result of the ROCOR identity crisis. This began after its formal unity with Moscow in 2007, when it at last found universally recognised canonical status, for which we had battled for so long. However, instead of choosing to use this God-given opportunity to contribute to the positive and mainstream construction of new Local Churches in the Diaspora and show political independence from the secular Russian State, it chose negative and censorious self-isolation in an extreme right-wing ghetto and political co-operation with the secular Russian State. So it lost its Ukrainians – and many other normal families, purged by the alt right, long-bearded crazy converts it is introducing. It means that the only Russian Orthodox input into the inevitable new Local Churches in Northern America and Western Europe will come from the free Russian Orthodox, who belong to other Local Churches. Fringe groups with their extremism such as ROCOR will have no involvement. Just like all old calendarist groups, they have nothing to contribute.

Unless, that is, the few remaining Orthodox in ROCOR can at the last moment take back control of the Church from those who usurped power from the saintly, but very weak Metropolitan Hilarion (+ 2022) during the years of his dementia and cancer. This now seems very unlikely, unless the largely convert mini-Synod which took full control of ROCOR through its internal coup can be ousted. At present the new ROCOR is carrying out a purge of all its senior clergy of the St John tradition, all those who belonged to the old ROCOR and are being replaced by ‘Orthobros’ and incels.  Distracted by its loss of the Ukraine, Latvia etc and its desperate search for support in the Diaspora for the Russian State’s political and military battle against the USA in the Ukraine, the Moscow Patriarchate authorities have let things slide in the Diaspora. So badly indeed that the return of ROCOR to canonicity now seems virtually impossible. And that severely compromises Moscow’s own non-ROCOR existence outside Russia only more.

Interestingly, the news of Fr Alexander’s coming consecration was reported by the notoriously biased, American-run but Moscow-based, website ‘orthochristian.com’. This site is well-known for being backed by and publishing the works of very conservative ex-Evangelicals in Northern America. Some have even said that that website has been infiltrated by murky CIA/NATO assets, who started establishing themselves in ROCOR, Vlasovite and Russian-language publishing and broadcasting circles in the Diaspora in the 1960s. In any case that website never prints articles and comments that are critical of the practices of the MP and ROCOR or show up their hypocrisy and disrespect for human rights. It is surely being protected by someone important in the hierarchy in Russia, who knows the emigres well. According to some, he may himself, perhaps by naivety, have been turned and been involved in those murky dealings.

This is possible. After all, we should recall that the US Establishment is now divided between the conservative nationalist patriots of the CIA and the woke cosmopolitan neocons of the Washington State Department. And this situation is strangely very similar to that in the Soviet Union just before its dissolution in 1991. Then that was divided between pro-American liberal Euro-Atlanticists, who overnight transformed themselves from Communists into Capitalist oligarchs, and the patriots/nationalists, centred in the Soviet equivalent to the CIA, which was then called the KGB. And one of the latter was the present Russian nationalist President Putin, at that time a lowly KGB operative in provincial East Germany.

We should not forget that the former US President George Bush Senior (his son was not bright enough) was head of the CIA before himself being elected. Does a parallel between today’s patriotic CIA and the then patriotic KGB exist? Does the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 indicate the coming collapse of the American Empire? We remember how in the 1970s and then the 1980s, the right-wing Washington ROCOR, of which some were CIA assets (once an asset, always an asset, as the late Fr Mikhail Artsimovich commented to me in 1992), was warmly welcomed into the Reagan White House and the coffers of the CIA generously opened to it. Now it is payback time, return on investment. We gave you then, now you will obey us. You cannot escape the murk, once you have joined it, you are signed up for life. You have sold your soul.

What is clear is that the new ROCOR is collapsing. It is not for families. We have often asked ourselves what the righteous people, priests and bishops of the old ROCOR, so many of whom we knew well, would have done. What would the ever-memorable St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, Fr Seraphim (Rose), Archbishop Antony of Geneva (who never defrocked anyone) and Metr Laurus (Shkurla) have done, given the present convert sectarianisation? Their Church has now been taken over by the descendants of those who suspended and put St John on trial in 1964, who persecuted Fr Seraphim in the 1970s and Archbishop Antony in the 1980s and 1990s and ourselves since 2007.

Surely, if they had still been alive in the years following 2007 and saw they risked losing control of the New York Synod to the murky mini-Synod, which had already begun forming as long ago as 2001 after the Metr Vitaly fiasco, they would have closed down the separate Synod in New York. Then, seeing the convert immaturity and uncanonical actions, Moscow would have taken ROCOR under its direct control. Moscow then would surely have proceeded towards the regionalisation and Metropolitanisation of ROCOR, as so many of us and the Patriarch Kyrill of the time had so much wanted, as he told us quite clearly in the Danilov Monastery in Moscow in May 2012.

This would have helped towards founding the coming foundation of the four Diaspora Local Churches, in Western Europe, Northern America, Latin America and Oceania. In this way the New York Synod could never have been diverted from its Christian path by insecure ‘One True Church’ converts and the other psychologically troubled with their murky connections. It is probably too late for this, for the Persecuted Church has become the Persecuting Church and the way back seems impossible. It is too late for any ‘Make ROCOR Great Again’. This is what happens when the spiritual is supplanted by the political and the financial. In history such people were ruled by a Sanhedrin and they were called pharisees.

However, we should not doubt in Divine Providence. The saints came to rescue us from the ROCOR schism and even now they are gathering together with St John of Shanghai. We shall see great changes in the near future, as the Holy Spirit takes over from evil men, their hearts full of hatred. Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

 

 

A Glimmer of Hope?

https://spzh.news/en/zashhita-very/75099-auditor-is-going-to-kyiv-on-the-arrival-of-phanar-delegation-to-ukraine

 

Five years ago, in December 2018, under US political and financial pressure, the once prestigious Patriarchate of Constantinople set out on a disastrous course of setting up a tiny new ‘Church’ of its own in the Ukraine. It called this the OCU. At once it created a schism with the Russian Church, to whom that territory had belonged for some 340 years, though until then it had been under Constantinople. There were no more concelebrations between the two and an extremist part of the Russian Church in the Diaspora began taking clergy and parishes from Constantinople without letters of release. (That extremist part then, in December 2019, created a schism with another part of the Russian Church, creating an internal schism, which problem has still not been dealt with by Moscow, but which has led to clergy leaving the schismatic part, in accordance with Canon XV of the First and Second Council). On top of this, in December 2021 the Russian Church then set up a Church on the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, allied to Constantinople, in Africa.

The spiral was out of control and now the only way of overcoming all these problems between Greeks and Russians is for Constantinople to repent for its initial action, which created the spiral in the first place. Today, having realised that the ‘Church’ that it set up in the Ukraine consists of villains, gangsters, men of violence and defrocked perverts, Constantinople has realised that it must do something. Metropolitan Savva of the Church of Poland, as well as all leaders of the other Local Churches which are politically free, has informed the Patriarch of Constantinople in conversations about this. Now comes the news that Metropolitan Emmanuel of Constantinople and a delegation of others are to visit the Ukraine to investigate the behaviour of those whom it has there promoted as the OCU. There is now a glimmer of light. If Metropolitan Emmanuel, who issued the ‘tomos’, the document that created its fake Church in the first place, were to rescind it, as is urgently and obviously required, the existence of this scandalous, fake American ‘Church’ would be over.

If, in a second phase, the Patriarch of Constantinople then reissued the ‘tomos’ and granted it to the authentic Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) under Metropolitan Onufry, that would solve all the problems. Metropolitan Onufry and his Church are canonical, they are not defrocked gangsters and perverts, they do not concelebrate with Roman Catholics and they observe the traditional Orthodox fixed calendar and not the Roman Catholic/Protestant calendar, as enthusiastically imposed on the fake OCU Church by US bureaucrats. Moreover, the UOC should have received autocephaly (independence) decades ago, and only because of Moscow’s Soviet-style imperialist centralism it did not. If Constantinople were to grant the UOC autocephaly, as it could do, other Local Churches would at once recognise it. Eventually, after all the others, Moscow would in turn be forced to recognise it as well. Thus, the machinations of both Washington and Moscow would fail. Furthermore, Constantinople would regain at least some of its lost prestige and Moscow would eventually have to end its schism with Constantinople.

Is it possible that this could happen? Does Constantinople have the courage to defy Washington? Does Constantinople have the courage to admit that it was deceived by the villains in the Ukraine in 2018 and made mistakes? We do not know, but what we do know is that man proposes, but God disposes.

 

 

The Spiritual Significance of the American-Inspired Conflict in the Ukraine

Introduction: Two Civilisations

The tragic Moscow-Washington war which is currently starting to come to an end after nine years on the battlefields of the Ukraine, where very many Ukrainian men are dying in futility, will continue for another year. The Western arming of the Kiev regime which has prolonged the war by years is the result of the attempt by the Western world to expand eastwards in yet another ‘Drang nach Osten’. Once more the West crossed over the civilisational line which runs through the far west of what is at present called the Ukraine, more exactly Galicia, formerly part of south-eastern Poland, formerly part of the ill-fated Habsburg Empire, centred in Lemberg/Lviv/Lvov. That line separates Western Secularist Civilisation from Orthodox Christian Civilisation. It is a civilisational line which should not be crossed. When France and its allies crossed it by invading what was then the Russian Empire in 1812, it led straight to the downfall of Napoleon. When Austro-Hungary crossed it by invading Serbia in 1914, it caused World War I and, ultimately, the tragedy of 1917, when a Western atheist ideology was imposed by Non-Russians on the former Russian Empire and killed tens of millions.

When Nazi Germany crossed that line by invading what was then the USSR in 1941, it led it to its suicidal downfall, the destruction of Berlin, and to lose World War II. After Washington crossed that same line by overthrowing the democratically-elected Ukrainian government in 2014, Washington suicidally signed the death-warrant of its own US-run, dollar-driven, unipolar Western world. For the centre of Western Secularism is today the American Empire elite  in Washington (however much it disguises itself with euphemisms like the EU, NATO, the G7, the ‘free world’, the ‘international community’, the ‘rules-based order’ etc). And the centre of Orthodox Christian Civilisation (however far it has fallen, lapsed and been deformed and divided) is still in Moscow. Whenever Western Secularism, as ever inspired by the Pagan Roman example, has tried to expand eastwards in order to steal land and exploit resources, whether it was under Charlemagne, the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler or Biden, it has failed. Such is the case again today. Some people never learn.

The Double Tragedy

Nevertheless, however much we reject Western Secularism, that does not mean that today’s post-Soviet Orthodox Christian world or post-American Orthodox Christian world are to be accepted. Far from it. They are both deeply compromised and flawed, politically dependent on Non-Orthodox Christian mentalities. For a long time those in the Western world who found their spiritual home in Orthodox Christianity and wished to join the Orthodox Church would join one of two Local Churches, either the Russian, whose centre is the Patriarchate of Moscow, or else the Greek, whose centre is the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Neither is very attractive today because neither is free of a secular mentality.

The tragedy of today’s Patriarchate of Moscow is that it has voluntarily become politically dependent on the post-Soviet mentality. Although much of what it does is Orthodox in intention, it still operates in a Soviet way. Hence the strange mixture. Thus, it has gone from being a multinational Church in a multinational country (the USSR) to becoming a multinational but also nationalist Church? That inherent contradiction is killing it. It is less and less attractive to all Non-Russians. The tragedy of today’s Patriarchate of Constantinople is that its leadership has gone from being an Imperial Church to becoming over the last three generations a subsection of the US State Department mentality. Whatever that orders, the politicised Patriarchate in Istanbul agrees with. It is less and less attractive to Non-Greeks.

The Fall Into National Politics

Politicians were put in charge of the Church on earth. Not Churchmen. As a result, several of the Local Orthodox Churches are today riven by territorial, = political and national, disputes. However, the main dispute is that between precisely the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Patriarchate of Constantinople and concerns the territory of the Ukraine. Sadly, the two Patriarchates are not arguing about a territory where successful new missions have been working, they are arguing about a traditionally Orthodox, but today largely lapsed, territory. Sadly, neither are they arguing about who will restore to the Faith the largely lapsed people of that territory, but about to whom ecclesiastical jurisdiction over that largely lapsed people belongs. Meanwhile the actual Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry, to which the faithful belong, is crushed by both sides.

That territory is also claimed by two different forms of Roman Catholicism, Greek and Latin, and a variety of Protestant sects. Little wonder that those two Patriarchates, that of the Russian Federation and that of Constantinople, are engaged in a conflict on Ukrainian territory. This Russo-American proxy war has been allowed by God as a punishment. All are unworthy of the Faith, so there is war, not peace. The conflict is meant to bring both sides, Ukrainian and Russian, back to their senses, for both sides suffer from the same disease of centralisation. This has infected these lands since the 17th century, when the Russian State began persecuting the Old Ritualists in order to impose conformity even to the point of tiny ritual detail. This disease worsened greatly during the Soviet period and since then both the post-Soviet Russian State and the post-Soviet Ukrainian State (the Ukrainian State is a purely Soviet invention) have persecuted minorities.

Nationalism

Today this centralisation essentially results in extreme nationalism. Thus, the Ukrainian State has as its slogan ‘Glory to the Ukraine’, not ‘Glory to God’. And the new nationalism of the Russian Orthodox Church, so far from the old multinational Russian Church of the Tsar’s age in which we were brought up, seems to be intent, consciously or unconsciously, on expelling from itself Non-Russians, and is even proud of such actions. Orthodox Russia has not been restored since the fall of the USSR. There is only post-Soviet Russia. The great tragedy is that the Russian Church, free from State interference, appears to want to take on itself the persecution of those who see a multinational future for the Church. However, a persecuting Church repels, whereas a persecuted Church attracts.

For example, one well-known Metropolitan of the Russian Church openly mocks the Ukrainian language as ‘a dialect’. As a result of such attitudes, even if the Russian State conquered the whole of the Ukraine (which it does not wish to do in any case), Ukrainians would still not attend churches where the name of the Patriarch of the Russian Federation, which is what he has become, is commemorated. Church-going is voluntary. No Non-Russian in the Ukraine is voluntarily going to attend a Russian church any longer, especially if his country has been at war with Russia and his compatriots, however misled, have been killed. In Latvia that Patriarch is already no longer commemorated – by order of the State. In Lithuania several priests have left the Moscow Patriarchate, as in Estonia nearly thirty years ago. How long before Western countries also ban churches which commemorate the Patriarch of Moscow?

Decentralisation

https://spzh.news/en/news/73915-cypriot-hierarch-moscow-should-have-granted-autocephaly-to-uoc-long-ago

Centralisation is voluntary; the Russian State did not force the Church administration to centralise. The two main parts of the Russian Church both had the freedom to proposed a decentralised and multinational future, both in the former USSR and outside it, and openly rejected it, choosing a sectarian future. What we have said also applies equally to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose stifling centralism caused so many divisions in history and already in ancient times was in part responsible for the departure of the Copts and the Armenians, as well as the peoples of Western Europe, from the Church. The Church is not a centralised State, but a Family or Confederation of Churches. The Apostle Paul wrote not to a Centralised Church, but to different local Churches, in Corinth, Thessalonica, Philippi, Ephesus, Rome etc. This follows the principle of the Incarnation, that the Church is incarnate locally.

Indeed, several Local Churches have been or still are involved in disputes about the territories they control. These territories include all the former Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe, except for Poland, but including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. However, these territories also include the Ukraine, Moldova, possibly still North Macedonia and potentially Belarus. Here we do not mention Africa, the Americas, Oceania, as well as Asia, outside the Russian Federation, Georgia and the territories of the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, which are also in dispute. Essentially, none of these disputes are about geographical problems, but spiritual problems. In reality, those who have spiritual food to give to the people will control any territory in question, not those who pretentiously claim and bully.

Conclusion: The Holy Trinity

In this month, when the post-Soviet Russian State has at long last handed back the Icon of the Holy Trinity, painted by St Andrei (Rubliov), to the Church, surely it is time to begin implementing the unity in diversity, which is the Holy Trinity, into Church life. We await the liberation of the Church from narrow nationalism, in order to lead the whole Orthodox Christian world into freedom, cleansing and deposing unworthy clerics – money-minded businessmen, protocolish bureaucrats, embittered homosexuals and convert schismatics, and rejecting their purely political decisions, which they cloak in their purely political interpretations of the canons

The latter appear for the moment to have taken over the administration of these two Local Churches of Moscow and Constantinople because there has been no-one, no international Synod and no Council, to keep the order of Catholicity. This is apocalyptic, for if this situation continues and no-one brings order on earth because we continue to be unworthy of it, then Christ Himself will come down again from heaven, just as He promised, and end it all. Then there will be a new heaven and a new earth, because of the best efforts of Satan to close churches and destroy mankind, which are so apparent just now. But our God is great because He works miracles.