Category Archives: Convertitis
Their Name is Spiritual Death: Unconverted Converts as Clergy of the Orthodox Church
The (administrators of the) Church would sooner renounce nine tenths of its teachings than one tenth of its property.
Karl Marx
Foreword
Today’s Western world lives without Faith. Its last variant, Protestantism, was discredited for its spiritual emptiness and delusions. Devoid of spirituality, it was left only with sectarian moralism, which was focused on sexual puritanism, never getting to the source of sin, and making it rejected by hundreds of millions. As for Roman Catholicism, it survived longer, but has also been discredited by its State ideology, absurd dogma of Papal infallibility and pedophilia. ‘Are any of its clergy normal’?, as one Irish Roman Catholic asked me. This leaves only the Orthodox Church. However, the devil is doing his best here to wreck our presence and mission by inspiring certain Orthodox clergy to behave like Popes of Rome and certain others to behave like moralising Protestant sectarians, who have only hatred for real Orthodox.
Introduction: False Conversion
Protestants have been joining the Orthodox Church for well over sixty years, especially in the USA. The last thirty years have seen relatively large numbers, especially in the USA. And many of them have come from strict, ultra-conservative Evangelical backgrounds, especially in the USA. And quite a few of them have become members of the clergy, especially in the USA. Here they have been joining two small jurisdictions in particular: the small Antioch and ROCOR, which both desperately lack clergy. (Those from moderate backgrounds have joined the much bigger Greek Archdiocese, OCA and Serbs. They generally do become Orthodox). The problem here is that those from such ultra-conservative Lutheran/Calvinist backgrounds are tainted by them.
Such extreme Protestantism hardly exists in any Western country outside the USA. After all, the extremist Puritans emigrated to the USA precisely because of their intolerance of others and there they started witch-hunts. It is this intolerance which they also bring with them when they ‘join the Orthodox Church’ – notice we do not say that they ‘become Orthodox’ in their case. These are the individuals who believe that being as conservative and fundamentalist as possible is somehow Orthodox. So far are they from the truth, for they clearly have no idea whatever of the realities of the Orthodox Church and Faith. This trend had already become apparent among converts, especially in California, in the 1970s, in their ‘supercorrectness’.
However, today, in this rootless, internet age, this fake Orthodoxy has become a veritable epidemic. What are the symptoms of this sick pseudo-Orthodoxy, which began in the USA, especially among the oddballs of California, though it has affected a few others, especially from a Protestant background, especially in English-speaking countries? Such converts may enter the Orthodox Church sacramentally; but if left unhealed by obedience to Tradition and the mind of the Church, the Evangelical imagination simply reappears under icons, cassocks, mispronounced Russian or Greek titles, and misunderstood and distorted quotations of the canons, instead of from the Gospels. Below are twelve characteristics of these unconverted converts:
Twelve Characteristics
- These individuals have never lived for any time in any Orthodox country or spent years in an ‘ethnic’ Orthodox monastery or parish. Such they despise. This is why they do not speak or read any Orthodox language with any fluency and do not wish to. Indeed, they scorn Orthodox languages and immigrants. Everything must be in American, including in England!
- The life of ancient, suffering and often very poor peoples, who have preserved the faith through centuries of prayer, liturgy, exile and martyrdom and handed it down through the generations, remain foreign to them. Indeed, they despise and even hate them. They do not turn to the ancient, deeply rooted Orthodox countries. The historical ethnic Churches have preserved an unbroken heritage, born of centuries of profound sacrifice, exile, and martyrdom and have handed down the faith rooted in their ancestral soil of humility. But the unconverted converts want an abstract (the Protestant manner) Anglo-American product, stripped of memory, language and people, constructed as a Neo-Protestant revisionism. They want the Disney fake.
- They demand total loyalty and cult-like obedience in an ultra-rigid, high-demand environment. This is marked by intense expectations of personal compliance in a high-control system of psychological pressure and discipline. This is the suffocating pressure of guru-style control freakery and emphasis on purification (they are after all Puritans) in their tightly-governed religious ghetto.
- They speak with ‘authority’ and confidence about tradition, obedience, order, and duty. This message is especially used to manipulate and prey on insecure and lonely young men, who are disoriented and confused by the modern world. Such young men may never have had a father, may suffer from autism, may be awkward with girls, may be victims of the covid period and seek certainty of any sort.
- Imbued with Old Testament phariseeism, domination and conservatism (which is quite different from the living Tradition of the Holy Spirit), they know nothing of Orthodox spiritual fatherhood, self-sacrificial love, patience, gentleness and the bearing of shame for the sake of the sinner. In Orthodoxy, spiritual fathers are called to take up the Cross first, to protect and repent for others. They do not place the burden of shame on spiritual children. Orthodox spiritual fathers bear the burdens of their flock with tears, patience and unconditional love. Imported Protestant administrators impose only bullying and threats. Clinging to the works of the law divorced from mercy, they remain under the curse of the very law they mistake for righteousness, substituting self-sacrificial love with rigid, self-righteous pharisaic control. Intoxicated by self-righteousness, they never cease to fashion weapons out of holy things. The whole Church, Scripture and Tradition are cudgels for them. For the betrayal of Judas does not always come with a kiss. Sometimes it comes through ‘protocols’, calculation and signatures, and above all through intense jealousy of real Orthodox and through taking money and ‘subscriptions’ off the naïve and deluded.
- Ascetic life, fasting and abstention are viewed by them as parts of a punitive authoritarian regime of control freakery and abusive discipline, and not as the free offering of the heart to God for the acquisition of mercy.
- All who quickly see through their fakery and hypocrisy and whistle blow are put under intense pressure, fear of permanent exclusion and swift retaliation, as their ‘authority’ has been challenged by those who actually know the Tradition. All this comes from their harsh and punitive Lutheran/Calvinist mentality. Those who resist these bullies and do not give them obedience and personal loyalty (and their cash) will disappear as ‘non-people’ – they never existed.
- Any objection to their fake Orthodoxy is for them a source of hurt pride, wounded reputation, embarrassment, emotional distress (which causes them to turn to drink, among other things), business harm, loss of professional standing and of future economic advantage. They are money-obsessed narcissists.
- Such unconverted Protestants justify their pride by referring to the ‘Ancient Faith’, which is selectively borrowed and deployed to create an artificial authority, which is in fact only Neo-Evangelical fundamentalism, not the ascetic, eucharistic, conciliar Orthodox Faith. Orthodoxy for them is just an excuse for personal spiritual reinvention, renewed fakery and a very profitable personality cult. How they love raking in the dollars, just like any Protestant tele-evangelist!
- Their theatricality does not stop with legalistic honorifics and borrowed academic or ecclesiastical titles. They teach themselves to speak with a foreign cadence, stylised, Old World delivery, ‘an Oxford accent’ (which is in fact nothing of the sort, but could sound like one in crazy California), or Eastern European vocal inflections. These are all simply part of their brand: an artificial pose intended to project frowning severity, antiquity and the pseudo-exotic spiritual authority of the guru. Their deliberate adoption of affected speech patterns and foreign cadences to command an audience is not the sound of Tradition, it is the fake theatrical vanity of the preening narcissist. When the theatre of their legalism replaces the Church, the letter is weaponised against the Spirit and a fake juridical process is mistaken for the life of the Church. This only works among naïve and uneducated American neophytes, who know no better. It does not export. We saw through him in five minutes, but then we have been around for a long time, since before any of them were born.
- Tradition and the canons are not respected with humility and prayer. They are selectively ‘harvested’, weaponised and then discarded. They are only observed when they appear to justify their crazy punishments. Orthodoxy is kept only to elevate personal status, command obedience and play at being Orthodox, in order to increase their beloved income, power and prestige. The Orthodox ethos, accountability before the Tradition, spiritual fatherhood, humility and compassionate love for the sinner are discarded. Orthodox symbols on the outside, Evangelical content on the inside. Patristic language on the surface, legalistic and bullying control beneath. Tradition for them is mere conservatism a la Trump, not the Holy Spirit and repentance. For them it is all just a clerical costume, an exotic credential, a borrowed title and weaponised obedience for income for their guru selves.
- These unconverted converts make of the Orthodox Church a platform for their own pseudo-charismatic self-construction. They build a personality cult, used as authority, it is the Evangelical will-to-rule in outward Orthodox forms, the Protestant fundamentalist world of misogynistic patriarchal authority (how they hate women!), puritanism and punitive control. Orthodoxy is merely symbolic, it is only there to provide them with self-justification for their proud egomania and narcissism, it is only the personality-driven religious performance of Evangelical show.
Conclusion: Bringing Spiritual Death
When the Protestant cultural framework is not healed and transfigured by repentance and the sacraments, it survives. Byzantine furniture is only added to their extremist Protestantism. Their literalism (The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life, 2 Corinthians 3, 6) and Puritanical instinct to ‘purify’ (‘drain the swamp’) and witch-hunt survives. Those of Protestant background can become Orthodox. However, the old Protestant mentality, severity, control and legalism to repress what they see as impurity by enforced discipline, loyalty and ‘spiritualised’ obedience to their personality cult may remain. If so, this means spiritual abuse, exclusion and erasure, demands for submission, rigidity and a carefully curated image of self-righteousness, which also fool uninformed American bishops in the USA.
Reception into Orthodoxy requires more than changing outward jurisdiction, vocabulary, ancestry and dress. It requires inward repentance, the death of the religious ego, humility and not pride. It requires obedience to the Catholicity of the Church, not the conquest of the Church by the inherited bad habits of domination and personal ambition a la tele-evangelist. Like all Protestants, these individuals are possessed by Judeo-Christianism, a term invented only a hundred years ago. It is not in the language of the liturgy, in the Philokalia, in the Fathers, saints and ascetics. It is only in the Old Testament political language of American conservatism and Protestant fundamentalism, part of the legalistic, punitive, authoritarian, Evangelical heresy of Christian Zionism.
This is why their missionary endeavours always fail. They understand nothing of the people they are trying to convert and have no compassion for them. They are spiritually suffocating, which is why they are sooner or later thrown off. Their emphasis is not on repentance, mercy, joy, healing, the gentle restoration of sinners, but on the arrogance of puritanical moralising and hate-filled condemnation. This is why so many such bullies end up in old calendarist sects a la Boston. Bostonitis does not need theology, it needs psychiatry, for it is a pathology. Their faces express disapproval, but that is all theatre. Subjugation to them is ‘spiritualised’. Resistance to their heresy is framed as ‘rebellion’. Disclosure is disloyalty and betrayal. They kill the Church. Their name is spiritual death.
Acknowledgement: We thank Fr Emmanuel Lemelson for bringing this pathology, unique to the USA, to our attention in his blog. He deserves many more readers and much support for denouncing the systematic secularisation by ‘Orthodox’ Evangelical Zionists of parts of the Orthodox world in the USA and the obvious Deep State financial backing for it as part of its process of extreme right-wing ideologisation.
On Fr Seraphim (Rose)
We are not examining here whether the late Californian monk, Fr Seraphim (Rose), who in the 1960s joined the then Russian Orthodox Church in exile (ROCOR), was a saint or not. That is not our task and we are not qualified to do this. In the 1970s we always found his works logical and obvious, with common sense, opposed to ‘super correct’ fanaticism, but no more. I remember saying at the time that if you did not already know what he was writing, then you could not be a conscious member of one of the Orthodox Churches.
We cannot find proofs for or against his possible holiness. Perhaps God will reveal something and then all will be clear, one way or the other. Our task here is to examine why many members of the American Synod of Bishops, still called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), despite the fact that it has been almost completely Americanised and most of its bishops cannot even speak correct Russian, want to canonise him today. There are clear reasons for this which are to do with the Synod’s historic crisis of identity.
Now, all Local Orthodox Churches in Western countries are primarily composed of immigrants or exiles from Orthodox countries, from Romania, Greece, Russia, the Ukraine, Serbia, Bulgaria, Syria etc. However, unlike all others, ROCOR, founded after the 1917 ‘Russian Revolution’, no longer has a natural constituency. Normal Orthodox Russians, not many of whom live in Western countries, do not join the New York-based ROCOR, if they can join what they prefer, their own Moscow-based Church of present-day Russians.
The latter is nearly 200 times bigger than ROCOR. Some wonder why it bothers with such a small group abroad. The reason is political, as the Russian Patriarch told a Metropolitan-friend. The Moscow Church needs to be represented in the USA, ROCOR is good for that, even though ROCOR has in the last decade become increasingly strange, even to the point of schism. For reasons of State, Moscow has chosen to overlook that. However, behind the shield of Moscow, which alone gives ROCOR official canonicity, ROCOR has an identity crisis.
Originally a part of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Church, today its third, fourth, fifth and even sixth generations, few in number, hardly speak a word of Russian. Most Russians were assimilated generations ago and lost all interest in Russian Church life. This membership has been much supplemented by converts, who have no Russian origins, with the result that a once Russian Church has largely become an American Church. However, most converts join mainstream Orthodox groups. Why join a historical fragment, ROCOR?
Most American converts to Orthodoxy join their own Church, the OCA (Orthodox Church in America) or other US groups. However, ROCOR in the USA has attracted a niche group, or constituency, often called ‘crazy converts’. These are highly conservative and even pathological converts, apparently quite common in the USA and in California, though there are a few such people especially in other English-speaking countries, who are drawn to what is exclusive and anti-Protestant (ironically, most converts are Protestants).
Today, the American episcopate of ROCOR wants to canonise a convert, which is what Fr Seraphim (Rose) was. He will then be the saint of their converts, a self-justification for their schismatic behaviour and condemnation of all others, a kind of national flag, a unique and exclusive identity, which they hope will attract even more crazy converts. And they are necessary, as the old ROCOR Russian core is today growing ever smaller. However, it is pathological converts who have created the anti-woman and anti-family ethos of today’s ROCOR.
After its long-awaited submission to the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church and so the restoration of full canonicity in 2007, ROCOR had the opportunity to merge with the Moscow-based Church and also contribute positively to the other Orthodox living in Western countries from the mainstream. Tragically, by 2017 ROCOR had turned its back on this God-given opportunity and turned inwards, cutting itself off from others, refusing concelebration and communion, openly supporting Trump’s Republican Party.
In choosing the uncanonical and politically-driven path of the Protestant sect and condemning other Orthodox like pharisees, taking their clergy without letters of leave, the American Synod has isolated itself and discredited itself. Its intention to canonise an American convert, a repentant homosexual, but who did then spend many years with a pedophile, has cast further doubt on it, already compromised by its links with the CIA. In any case, as regards a possible canonisation of Fr Seraphim Rose and after the war in the Ukraine is over, Moscow will have the last word.
The Fall of the West and the Path to Orthodoxy
For thirty long years, from 1992 to 2022, the ruling class of the Western Empire was able to act with impunity, it had a monopoly of power, for it lived in a multipolar world, without opposition. Those members of the ‘liberal’ Establishment could do whatever they wanted at that time and that is what they did: from asset-stripping the ‘Third World’, to buggering one another (having made that legal), to harvesting the organs of Kosovan Albanians, to pimping hungry and immoral Ukrainian girls (‘Russian brides’) (Epstein), or using them for surrogacy, and sodomising Ukrainian boys (a Prime Minister). After all, they believed in ‘liberalism’, meaning do whatever you want, rape and plunder others, both literally and metaphorically.
And inevitably, at the same time, as a result of its amoral liberal free for all, the all-powerful Western Establishment began to collapse. Having asset-stripped other countries under the name of ‘foreign investments’, they asset-stripped at home, under the name of ‘modernisation’ and ‘privatisation’. The collapse started with the revelations about Roman Catholic pedophilia, which soon led to the exposure of Anglicans and later spread to the American Synod, on the fringes of the Russian Church. Then, in general, to the political, royal, business and media elite. In other words, to all the parasites, as per Epstein. The barbarians were not at the gates, they were running the show, as they always had.
Their unipolar monopoly was destroyed by the rising again of Crucified Russia from 2000 on, once the Russian Church had begun canonising its New Martyrs and Confessors. That is why the Western elite hates Putin. He did not agree to the destruction of Russia through its disintegration and its asset-stripping and, moreover, he does not accept sexual perversions. The destruction of Russia was Hitler’s idea, repeated by Thatcher, with the genocide of Russians, sending the remaining forty million Russians to live beyond the Volga, thus sending back ‘the Asiastics’. This is why they invested in the anti-Russian Ukraine, whose ‘rare earths’ they want, and whose people would die for them ‘to the last Ukrainian.’
Amidst this moral chaos, there are those who search for some kind of morality and found, from the internet, the Orthodox Church. However, the vast majority of those do not want to come to Orthodoxy with an open heart, they are merely running away from the chaos of the West and its Baal worship: ‘Any port in a storm’ and to their imaginary ‘Warhammer’ Russia, for example. They are by mentality zealot Protestants who adopt an outward appearance of Orthodoxy, buying icons, incense and rosaries from online ‘souvenir shops’, growing long hair and beards, or in the few cases of women, putting on long skirts and wearing what look like tablecloths on their heads. Very few of them wish to become real Orthodox Christians.
Most of those who want the uniform, but not the battle, do not come to the canonical Orthodox Church, they go to fringe convert groups which promote extremist ideologies and persecute canonical Orthodox. There they find weird convert priests and bishops. These are often closet homosexuals and dislike families, women and children, not to mention the canons. That suits them and their phariseeism, which denies the Love and Truth of the Church. And that is good for us. We can continue our witness, uncontaminated by those who do not love us and the Church, but want to come to us only because they hate others. Such we do not need. We only accept the repentant into the Church. For nothing can be built on hatred.
What We Left Behind: How Did a Persecuted Church Become a Persecuting Church?
History
In the course of the fourth century the Church which had been bitterly persecuted at the start of that century by Pagan Rome was adopted by the Roman Empire. And as the Roman Empire began persecuting dissidents, so individuals representing the Church, specifically bishops, allied themselves to the persecuting Roman State, which demanded obedience from all. Thus, a State Church was born and the once Persecuted Church became a Persecuting Church. To counter this enslavement and proclaim spiritual freedom, the monastic movement boomed, ’the desert became a city’, Egypt and Palestine filled with monks. The pious in the parishes followed them, not the persecuting bishops.
Such ‘State Church’ compromises have patterned the whole history of the Church, most notably in Western Europe, a former part of the empire of Pagan Rome. Here a new ideology, with its self-justifying filioque and Papist ideology, which came to be called ‘Roman Catholicism’, was based not on certain bishops of the Church allying themselves with the State, but on the Church actually becoming the State. In fact, it became a ‘Superstate’, like the modern EU, which imitates the medieval Papacy in every way. This saw the Roman Pope, the head of the new Roman Catholicism, leave the Church and in 1054 become independent from the Church and even condemn the Church as ‘schismatic’!
From that moment on, the Popes of Rome, heirs to and imitators of the pagan emperors, could lead armies, persecute and murder dissidents, bless invasions, order so-called ‘crusades’ and implement inquisitions against all who disagreed with their imperialist cult of absolute claims to power and wealth. Inevitably, from the eleventh century on that spawned many Protest movements, which further discredited them and divided the totalitarian religion that they led. And so the Church that canonised the Martyrs and Confessors, despite the worldly-minded, became the Persecuting Church, instead of love, showing hatred, and then refusing to repent in self-justification. This went down in history.
An Example in the Present
In case some think that this is simply a polemic against Roman Catholicism, let us make the truth clear. Plenty of Orthodox have followed suit, becoming ‘Philopapists’. For example, in recent times, the New York Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) did the same. And so a Church that had canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands in 1981, despite all the worldly-minded who criticised and mocked it, became in 2021 the Persecuting Church, instead of love, showing hatred and then refusing to repent in self-justification. This too went down in history. Like the Papacy, it preferred money and power to the Holy Spirit, to the Martyrs and Confessors.
But when did this decadence begin? This spirit was certainly absent in 1981 from the unworldly Metr Philaret, who at last canonised the New Martyrs and Confessors. The turning-point was perhaps in 2001, when his successor as leader of ROCOR, Metr Vitaly (Ustinov), by then very elderly and quite ill, was usurped. The Metropolitan who had opposed the CIA Grabbe faction was replaced by those sympathetic to that faction. Those who seized power replaced him with a series of pious, but very weak, metropolitans, and so continued to exercise power from behind their thrones. Their first act was to begin to fill the episcopate with their candidates in order to consolidate their power.
Therefore, in 2003, despite a threefold opposition from one Archbishop, they proposed one of that group’s episcopal candidates, a well-known homosexual (I had been shown his compromising photo as long ago as 1995). During the ceremony, one in the crowd, an acquaintance of mine, shouted out ‘anaxios’, ‘unworthy’, meaning that he opposed the consecration of that candidate. My acquaintance was taken aside by the wealthy brothers of the bishop and duly beaten up. And they call themselves Christians, and even call themselves ‘Orthodox’ Christians! The inevitable alcohol-fuelled scandals duly followed, ending up with the notorious property grab in Missouri. As had been foretold.
One of the techniques that has always been used by such groups is slander, that which was done in the Old Testament against St Job. It was in use already before the Revolution with regard to Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their Family and all those who supported them. Murder started then. As the media have developed, we have seen it in the Greek Church with ‘the slandered saint’, St Nectarios of Aegina (+ 1920), in ROCOR with St John of Shanghai (+ 1966), who was suspended and faced ‘defrocking’ by the CIA faction in the American Synod, which he defeated, and in the Romanian Church with the great saint, St Arsenie of Prislop (1989), who was so hated by the atheists. Such is our destiny also.
Those ‘Philopapists’ are then always opposed to the saints and slander them. In the case of St John of Shanghai, they will claim that he did not give his shoes away to the poor because he had compassion on them, but because he did not like wearing shoes! They also claim that St John was very much a bureaucrat because he had studied law! They, of course, like wearing expensive leather shoes and love issuing decrees and ‘protocols’. In other words, they slander St John in order to justify their own Anti-Gospel behaviour. They always divert attention from whatever in the saints contradicts their perversions and accuse the saints of exactly their own weaknesses by psychological transfer.
The ROCOR ’gang’ behind the 2003 consecration then continued their activities in order to consolidate their power further. The main aim for themselves and their candidates was to amass as much wealth, property and power as possible, usurping any who opposed them and replace them with their candidates. This was exactly what they had done with the bishop who had vigorously opposed their 2003 candidate. In the decades following 2003, more homosexuals and further CIA/NATO candidates took over in various places, with the Mother-Church in Moscow naively looking on, but never opposing the pro-CIA American Synod, as if paralysed, stunned by the cowboy behaviour of the Americans.
Indeed, even when ROCOR shockingly opposed the Russian campaign against the CIA/NATO takeover of the Ukraine from February 2022 on, Moscow remained paralysed, as if hypnotised. Had it too been infiltrated by the CIA and the Hitlerite spirit of Vlasov? A still unanswered question. Here we must not confuse the dogmatic with the pastoral. For example, although one of their bishops was very greedy for money, we paid him what he wanted, even though he constantly insulted us, jealously demanding ever more, tried to steal our church buildings like a common criminal, and slandered us, saying that we had stolen money from him! We stayed, as this was a pastoral, not a dogmatic, issue.
The Pastoral and the Dogmatic
Indeed, we only left him after he had publicly gone into schism with the Church by breaking communion with Her and had then begun rebaptising Orthodox. These were dogmatic issues, as he had gone against the Creed: I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. This is an attack on the Church, for which we are prepared to die and we will win because our slanderers are not prepared to die for their greed and schism. Those who confuse the pastoral and the dogmatic would have left him before. For example, there are those who create a schism around the calendar. However, the true calendar is the one which your bishop blesses you to celebrate on. Disobedience is the only error here.
The old ROCOR never had any problem with the calendar. We had many Romanian and Bulgarian new calendar refugee parishes with us, when the atheists were in power in Romania and Bulgaria and were persecuting those Local Churches. When freedom came, those parishes quite naturally returned to their Mother-Churches. Similarly, hundreds of Russian parishes in Africa use the new calendar, as do their parishes in Vienna, Sofia and elsewhere. And today the Romanian Church has received several hundred refugee parishes which use the old calendar. Our situation is similar to that of St Paisy (Velichkovsky), who before us also had to take refuge in the Romanian Church from the Russian.
However, those who deny the dogmas of the Church and change the Creed, whether in words with the filioque, or else, all the while hypocritically retaining the words of the Creed, in deeds, put themselves outside communion with the Church. They become schismatic sects of pharisees, failing to understand that communion is the visible, external sacramental sign of the internal catholicity of the Church. To be in communion means to be part of the Church, inherently and organically connected with the whole Body of Christ, members of Him. This is not about administrative bureaucracy and protocols, but about the life in Christ through the Holy Spirit. This is real Orthodoxy, the Church of the Holy Spirit.
Questions and Answers August 2025
Church Unity
Q: How can we arrive at Church Unity, when all sixteen Local Churches are at last in communion with one another?
A: I can answer this on the basis of the achievement of Russian Church unity (2007-2021), in which I helped a little. This was achieved by the compromises made by all sides, which got rid of the extremes of the three Russian jurisdictions. The MP had to renounce, at least for a time, Sergianist Sovietism, ROCOR had to renounce, at least for a time, Russian Fascism, and Rue Daru had to renounce Western Liberalism. It will be the same in the question of the unity of the whole Church. Greek, Russian and other nationalisms (Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian and others) are responsible for the present divisions. Who will have the courage to renounce such nationalism?
A word of warning, however. Since 2021 when Russian Church unity was achieved, some powerful elements have renounced their compromises and gone back to their extremes, so unity has been lost. Thus, the fanatical and schismatic US convert elements in ROCOR broke communion with Rue Daru and centralising MP nationalists are pushing the Church back towards Stalinist Sovietism. Through nationalist fanaticism and schism the Persecuted Church has become once more the Persecuting Church, the Church of the Pharisees, thus scandalously renouncing the legacy of the New Martyrs and Confessors. And so regained internal Church unity has been lost, even inside the Russian Church.
Conversion to Orthodoxy and the Non-Orthodox World
Q: Why have so few Western Europeans joined and remained faithful to the Orthodox Church? I mean at most it can only be a few tens of thousands out of over 470 million.
A: In order to become a real and not a superficial Orthodox Christian, it is no good admiring ‘mystical’ monks, ‘pretty’ icons, ‘lovely’ singing, or the ‘traditional’ liturgy. That is all emotional, superficial. You have to renounce, spiritually, the anti-Christian historical and contemporary acts committed by your national elites in acts of repentance. This means renouncing blind nationalism, for we are called to be not of this world – blind nationalism, the attachment to artificial States and elites, cannot be part of our Faith. This is true for all nationalities.
For example, if you are an Orthodox Russian, you venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors who were persecuted by Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet regime, which you therefore renounce, as well as renouncing the anti-Church acts of the pre-Revolutionary governments which go back to the seventeenth century and the resulting Old Ritualist schism of that time. Then you renounce the serfdom copied and introduced by the Western-style Russian aristocracy, which led to the anti-aristocrat Pugachov revolt, suppressed by the German Empress Catherine II, and later to the 1917 revolt. This is renouncing parts of your ‘national tradition’ also.
If you are from Western Europe, you have to go back much further, rejecting not just the atheistic secularist woke modernism of contemporary post-Protestantism or post-Catholicism, but also the imperialism and colonialism of the nineteenth century, the iconoclasm of the Protestants, the Popish heresy of the filioque, which claimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Bishop of Rome, introduced feudalism with its castle and knight protection rackets and the barbarian plundering and massacring of the Crusades with their ideology of racial superiority over others. The vast majority of Western Europeans are unable to do this, consciously or, far more often, unconsciously. Yet, such repentance for a culture gone wrong is at the heart of conversion to Orthodoxy.
Q: You appear to be opposed to converts. Is that so?
A: Not at all! I am opposed only to crazy converts, the pathological types, as they are called in French, especially when they are made priests, or, horror of horrors, bishops! The downfall of ROCOR was not because of convert clergy, but crazy convert clergy.
Q: Where do moralism and intellectualism come from?
A: They are both deviations which come from a lack of spirituality, from those who have ‘quenched the Spirit’. Moralism generally produces conservatism and then phariseeism. Intellectualism generally produces liberalism and then homosexuality.
Q: Why should the Church be opposed to tithing when there was a Church of the Tithes in Kiev?
A: ‘Desyatinnaja Tserkov’, ‘the Church of the Tithes’, is a well-known church in Kiev in the history of Ancient Rus, precisely because it was unique, built by tithes imposed on rich people. No other examples of an Orthodox church built by tithes are recorded. It is always quoted by US converts from Protestantism in order to justify the tithes they want to impose on Orthodoxy. Tithes are a practice of the Old Testament, beloved by Protestant sects, and are not part of the practice of the Orthodox Church, except in exceptional missionary circumstances, and only then when they can be enforced on the rich by the secular authorities, as they were in Kiev. In other words, the Church is not opposed to tithes as such, it is opposed to them being made compulsory.
Q: If the Pope were found to be a homosexual or a pedophile, there would be an existential crisis in the Roman Catholic world. When we know that some leaders of Orthodox Churches are such, why is there not some huge crisis inside them?
A: The short answer is because we are not clericalists. In other words, the Head of our Church is Christ, not some man, who by some sort of magic, has inherited his title from St Peter. The sins of others, including of Patriarchs, are their affair for their personal repentance. The Church goes on without them. The Church belongs to all, not to some mere clerical elite. They are here today, gone tomorrow.
Q: Are you shocked by the election of a new Protestant Archbishop of Wales who is a lesbian?
A: Stop the hypocrisy! That is none of our Orthodox business, it is theirs. Our business is that there are so many effeminate, homosexual Orthodox bishops, notorious for persecuting happily married parish priests, for their contempt for women and children, for their spiritually empty intellectualism and for their avarice. One small part of the Russian Church is increasingly looking like a Church of pedophiles and perverts, who ‘defrock’ all whistleblowers.
All these vices have the same origin – in their faithless lack of love. If Orthodox complain, then in the future, all Non-Orthodox engaged in ecumenical relations with Orthodox should demand to speak only to Orthodox clerics who are heterosexuals. The clericalist mafia always justifies itself. But the people know and they massively followed the ‘defrocked’ clergy, who before being ‘defrocked’ had transferred to a canonical, non-schismatic Local Church, where they concelebrate with all other Local Churches.
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you compass sea and land to make one convert, and when he is made, you make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves (Matt: 23:15)
It would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble (Lk: 17:2)
Q: What is the attitude of the Orthodox Church towards black people?
A: The same as its attitude to white people, or people of any other colour. All people were created in God’s image. In any case, Christ in His human nature was olive-skinned, not white. Look at any icon.
The only case of racism I have every come across was a white American convert bishop who said when George Floyd was murdered by a white policeman in the USA in 2020 that, ‘it does not matter because he was only a black’. Moreover, he said this in front of a mixed-race young woman, who never had anything to do with him again and when we left him, she was elated. And yet such a hateful bishop claimed to be canonical. It was one of the last straws, as he also publicly proclaimed that he disliked Greeks and Romanians and only half-liked Moldovans. That was in front of representatives of all those nationalities, to their faces. It really is time for those who consecrate new bishops to make sure that they are Christians first.
Q: How do you feel about no longer being in the Russian Church?
A: The only important thing for me is to belong to the Orthodox Church. The fact that a Russophobic agent, inspired by NATO, chased me and thousands of others out of the Russian Church and into another Local Church, in my own case after 47 years of faithfulness, is not on my conscience, but on the conscience of the authorities of the Russian Church who allowed this to happen for purely political reasons. This will go down in history. And I am quoting a Russian bishop who said precisely this to me.
Q: How can you belong to a Church that uses the new calendar when you use the old calendar?
A: Probably because I have always belonged to such a Church!
I distinguish between the dogmatic and the pastoral. I belong to a Local Church, just like the Russian Church also, that allows both calendars, according to pastoral need – as the old, pre-crazy convert, ROCOR also used to allow both. So many schisms and sects have been founded by confusions between issues that are dogmatic and issues that are merely pastoral, between primary issues and secondary issues. We reject that confusion.
Q: As you are an English nationalist, what do you think of illegal immigration?
A: I am not an English nationalist. Nationalism is an ugly thing, as we can see from inhuman nationalist demonstrations, which create fear among poor refugees who have been chased out of their countries by Western-created wars. Nationalists are Little Englanders; Globalists are Great Britishers. I am a Great Englander. A patriot. I am English, more exactly East Anglian, and above all I am an Orthodox (not a heterodox) Christian.
In other words, I am a patriot of England, the real England of the saints and poets, of the spiritually sensitive. I am also a patriot of the real France before that horrible atheism began in 1789, and I am a patriot of the real Russia before corrupt aristocrats seized power and introduced serfdom and then when power was seized by atheists, Leninists and Stalinists. I have nothing in common with Masonic Russia, Fascist Russia or Stalinist Russia.
As for illegal immigration, I think it is illegal.
Q: Is it normal for Orthodox to write ‘the unworthy’ in front of your name?
A: Not at all. This is the false piety of pride of some converts. We are all unworthy and we know it. There is no need to display it. Stay modest, do not become proud, even of your unworthiness. Stop boasting!
The Russian Church
Q: Since only 1-3% of the Orthodox population go to church in Russia, how can it be called ‘Orthodox Russia’?
A: This way of thinking, that going to a building on a Sunday makes you a Christian, is purely Protestant, moralising and abstract. Orthodox Christianity is our way of life, our culture, our values, our self-identification and nothing else.
Q: Where in your view did the Russian Church go wrong?
A: In 2003 His Holiness Patriarch Alexiy II, whom I met in 2007, proposed to open a multinational Exarchate and Metropolia in Western Europe, centred in Paris, that would be the foundation of a future Autocephalous Western European Orthodox Church. Who here could not go along with that? We all did. However, in recent years that idea has been abolished in favour of a nationalist Russian Metropolia, on paper centred in Paris, but in reality in Moscow. It increasingly excludes all Non-Russians, including Ukrainians and Moldovans, let alone native Western Europeans, from itself.
This is exactly the same mistake, made decades ago, as that of the Greek nationalist Patriarchate of Constantinople. It seems that some people never learn! This is not only the complete renunciation of the apostolic call and promise of Christ in the last chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel, and also of Patriarch Alexiy II and of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. When the Russian Church renounces its saints on account of the same nationalism, bureaucracy, militaristic rigidity as the Greeks suffer from, then we know that we have to go elsewhere to live Church life.
Where did it all go wrong? Since the repose of Patriarch Alexiy II, especially from about 2016 on. Orthodox England rejoices in the Orthodoxy of Russia, but not in the rest.
Illustrations of this new political and anti-pastoral mentality include charging 100 roubles for holy water (as now in one Siberian Metropolia) or the recent Russian Church scandal in a former Soviet Republic. Here a youngish hieromonk, the secretary of the local bishop (who is a well-known active homosexual), asked to be defrocked in order to get married. He was granted his request. Some time later the defrocked man went to church with his wife, only to find a priest who, looking directly at him, said to all ‘some people here will not be saved’. This is sadly typical of the pure phariseeism that has become the norm in a few parts of the Russian Church in recent years. It has nothing to do with the Russian Church of the Emigration and of the New Martyrs and Confessors.
Q: Why do we not hear about Sergianism in the Russian Church any more?
A: I think we do hear about it, only much less. This is because it was always a purely political, anti-Communist, accusation from the Cold War, promoted by the CIA as a ‘heresy’. It was never a heresy, just a sin that come about from human weakness and cowardice, resisted by the vast majority of Russian Orthodox, and affecting only a few at the administrative head of the Russian Church.
The nature of this sin is to say in words, and sometimes in actions, that whatever the State, Communist or not Communist, proclaims, is true. This is known as erastianism and all the national Protestant Churches in Northern Europe have always suffered from it. However, we find it in the leadership of the Russian Church because since the age of Peter I, they have been protestantised in this respect. It could be said that the Russian Church reflects the error of the Church of England, whose bishops are all appointed by the Prime Minister of Great Britain and dare not contradict the Establishment, from which they profit and draw prestige.
Q: Why is the Russian Church sometimes very rigid, with many rules and regulations?
A: Firstly, the Russian State Church mentality, above all today with its militarisation, means that sometimes people give the impression that the Russian Church is an Army, not a Church. Secondly, neophytes/converts like to reduce everything to lists of rules on dress and outward conduct. This is not the Church, but a convert fantasy. Comparisons with other Local Churches immediately indicate how some are going astray from the mainstream. Moreover, the authentic émigré traditions of the Russian Church were of the mainstream.
Q: The life of St Antony the Roman states that he sailed from Italy to Novgorod on a stone. Do you really believe this?
A: I believe that he sailed from Italy to Novgorod on a merchant’s ship and at night he slept in a stone coffin, which he took with him. Many monks at that time slept in coffins, either wooden or, especially in the south of Europe, stone.
The Ukraine
Q: What do you think the war between Russia and the Ukraine is really about?
A: This conflict is not a war between Russia and the Ukraine. It is a proxy war between Russia and the Western world (the US and its Western European NATO vassals), which is taking place on a small part of the territory of the Soviet Ukraine and on all the other post-Soviet territories, where the US is trying to encircle Russia. In other words, it is a war between two different ideologies, between Globalism, the Western Oligarchic System of the 10%, and Nationalism, the National Systems of the Peoples of the 90%. The racist and Nazi West could not care less about the Ukrainians themselves, in fact, as they openly proclaim, they can ‘die to the last Ukrainian’ in defence of Western economic interests. As a result, the Russians are slowly going to demilitarise and denazify NATO, and not just the Ukraine.
This means conflict between the unipolar world of the West-centric woke ideology, led by the atheistic USA against the multipolar world of traditional cultures (cultures based on spiritual and moral values), led by Russia. The latter founded BRICS, an alliance for the co-operation of the multipolar world of sovereign countries, which all respect faith or morality (traditional forms of Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism). After military victory, the immediate task of Russia will be to refound and restore a Sovereign country with its own identity within its natural (= Non-Soviet, historical) borders, centred around Kiev, without its oligarchs. Only then will there be peace.
Q: Do you think the CIA is paying ROCOR for its anti-Russian stance on the conflict in the Ukraine?
A: I don’t know.
As you know, the ultra-right-wing Grabbe faction received large amounts of cash for ROCOR from the CIA from the 1960s right up until 1991, when it was abruptly cut off, as the Soviet Union had been dissolved. Today the ROCOR Synod in New York is dominated by Americans, one of whom has a father, who held a senior position in the CIA and NATO, and is a great lover of Tony Blair. The CIA loves to have dirt on such bishops.
Among the others, who all speak fluent American, are those who have received support from the American administration (even a Cathedral and other properties in former West Germany), which is why it is known as the American Synod. Since for many in the US administration the Russian Federation is Public Enemy No 1, maybe in a few years’ time your speculation about the virulently anti-Russian statements of most of its bishops will be shown to be correct. However, of this there is no proof at the present time, all is circumstantial, so you may be wrong.
Q: You have been criticised for being political. What would you answer?
A: I have often spoken about politics, but not about party politics, probably because I support no political party. We have to speak about politics, when one Greek nationalist Patriarch is installed by the CIA and another Patriarch refuses to say anything which counters Russian nationalist politics. Both are examples of those who put local nationalism above Christ. We are not of the world, but we do live in the world, and like the Church Fathers we have to show that we understand who is who in this world, who we can support and who not. We refuse, as ever, to work for the CIA (or for its branches in the Brussels Politburo and MI6) or for the FSB. Naivety and cowardice are not solutions! We have to be aware, wise but gentle, as Christ instructed His disciples. The fact is that all divisions from the Church are caused by politics, nationalist or left and right, CIA or KGB.
Convert or Converted? The Psychodrama of the Unconverted
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long, and is kind; love envies not; love vaunts not itself, is not puffed up.
1 Cor 13, 1-4
Religious psychosis, my ‘magical Orthodox thinking’, inspired by my obsession with listening to pseudo-elders on the internet, destroyed my life…I was living in fantasies that allowed me to escape reality and totally neglect my real responsibilities because I was setting myself an impossibly high standard of Christian probity and constantly failing.
Letter from a convert in the USA
Foreword
The worst case of a convert I have come across was in 1997, a young woman who had spent twelve years as a nun living in a cave in a Greek Old Calendarist sect in Greece and had come to realise that she had wasted her life. The only parallel I know of is that of that scandalous convent in the Urals led by the now fortunately defrocked Sergei Romanov, and which I visited in 2018. Time and again I return to the same conclusion: Keep to the mainstream, where there are families and children and flee from those who boast that they are not in communion with others. The Orthodox Church is the Catholic Church, that is the Church of Catholicity, of Conciliarity, and not of a lack of communion and so sectarianism, where there is no Church, only psychological manipulation.
Converts and Converted
The Apostles were all converts. How Christ gathered them together is recalled in the Gospels, for example the callings of Andrew and Peter the fishermen and Matthew the tax-collector. Then in the Acts of the Apostles we read about Saul the Persecutor who became Paul the Apostle on the Road to Damascus. However, we never think of the Apostles as ‘converts.’ Why? For the simple reason that they were converted and so their status as ‘converts’ ceased – they had become Orthodox Christians, like the rest of us. Although we were all once ‘converts’, even when we were children, we were then converted. For to remain a ‘convert’ means to remain in an infantile state. Those who think of themselves as converts need to grow up, to become adults and cease the things of children.
Pathology and the Convert
And now we come to the tragedy of ‘converts’ in contemporary Orthodox Christian life, and not only in the Diaspora, understanding that there is no theology here, only psychology, and often pathology, the manipulation of the vulnerable. For many of them do not want to know about the reality of Orthodox life and the services in Orthodox parishes and Orthodox families and how we live. Having listened to various fantasists and misguided idealists on the internet, often they straightaway want to become monks, which is impossible because to be a monk, obedience is essential. But Orthodoxy as monastic life is not accessible to them. For that would be to run before learning to walk. And that means falling. We have to start at the beginning, not to start at the end.
Pride at the Root
This is pride and it is pride that always goes before the fall. The problem with such converts is that they have entirely missed the point. They may join the Church, but this is not the same as ‘becoming Orthodox’, that is, being converted. To ‘become Orthodox’ does not mean keeping certain external monastic observances, such as growing long hair and (if a man) a long beard, (if a woman, wearing floor-length skirts and covering her hair with what looks like a table-cloth), dressing in black or talking with exotic words and incessantly and very boringly about the Typicon, ritual regulations, the canons, ‘the Fathers,’ or individual clerics. All this is irrelevant and ordinary Orthodox parishioners do not do such things, it is boring. Just look at them! Love is the sign of Orthodoxy.
Love at the Root
The essence of Orthodox Christianity is to acquire love for God, for others as for oneself. All external observances and long and boring issues about clerical personalities are irrelevant. Otherwise. it is all ‘sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’, because they have no love, as the Apostle Paul wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. And tragically there are ‘converts’ who even after fifty and sixty years have remained ‘converts.’ This is because they have no love, for love is the fruit of maturity, which is what they do not have, precisely because they have remained ‘converts’, infantiles, for they have never become Orthodox Christians. As Fr Seraphim (Rose) quoted an elderly Russian woman saying about a ’convert’ some fifty years ago: ‘He is certainly Orthodox, but is he a Christian?’
Afterword
Indeed, this disease of ‘convertitis’ has nothing to do with Christianity. It is always characterised by negativity, hypercriticism and interference in the lives of others. This dissatisfaction with others (real Orthodox are dissatisfied only with themselves and are generous and indulgent towards others) always results in the abandonment of Orthodoxy and schism, even if it takes them 50 or 60 years. There have been many contemporary examples, in the Old Calendarist schisms, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian and Russian (ROCOR). The convert disease of ‘illusionment’ always ends up in disillusionment, which, by definition, can only come from ‘illusionment’, which is called in Greek ‘plani’, in Russian ‘prelest’, in Romanian ‘inselare’, and in Latin ‘illusio’. Such a waste of life.
Chanting not Singing: Nationalist Convert Pathology versus Mainstream Orthodox Christianity
‘Faith without love is fanaticism’.
From a Russian Prayerbook
‘The Greek Patriarch is possessed by demons, as for the Romanians, I don’t like them, the Moldovans I only half like and the Russians annoy me’.
A ROCOR bishop, 2021
Speaking as a politician, yesterday President Putin made some very generous comments about the late Pope Francis of Rome. Who is shocked by that? Certainly not mainstream Orthodox with our broad acceptance of other human-beings, even if we do not agree with their views. Non-sectarian Orthodoxy is that of all who accept the Orthodox Creed. Outside sects and cults, we in the mainstream respect others with their different experiences of life. We do not practise intolerance or dogmatise personal opinions about, for example, the late Pope of Rome, who, frankly, is nothing to do with us, though he was of interest to Roman Catholics and politicians. However, the extremists, who love the sect and the cult, who ‘chant, but do not sing’, are shocked. These are the people who for all practical purposes are out of communion with the mainstream, out of communion with the Orthodox Church, who, in reality, are not practising members of the Orthodox Church.
Centred in the USA, they spread their poison to lonely young men, ‘Orthobros’ and ‘incels’, via internet podcasts of such personalities as Jordan Peterson and Jay Dyer. These are the ‘Youtube Orthodox’, the theoretical Orthodox, who have never been inside an Orthodox church, but want to ‘become Orthodox’. I am contacted by several of them every month. They never appear. I never see them, because I tell them that they first have to come to church in order to join the Orthodox Church, let alone ‘become Orthodox’. The only exception was a very strange-looking young man, with a long beard and hair, dressed in black, with prayer beads around his wrist (the usual convert uniform), who informed me that he was so Orthodox that he ate glass. Literally. Apparently, he thought this was ‘ascetic’. After I told him to stop it, he never appeared again. In any case, he did not like our church, as it is full of families and children – definitely not for incels – and they all dressed normally and the men did not have beards.
The converts persecute those whose culture does not use American English, as they live in a US sociological ghetto or greenhouse, with an intolerant sectarian ideology. They dogmatise extreme opinions to the point of bigotry and the pharisaic condemnation of others. Visitors to their tiny churches and chapels are interrogated, betraying the innate Calvinism and Lutheranism of the converts. They promote the Victorian English of Hapgood, as they are more English than the English. We are reminded that the ancestors of these people were so intolerant that they had to leave England, and, arriving in the future USA, slaughtered the natives and witch-hunted each other. We do not want them back here in Europe, thank you! US Fascist colonialism and persecution, which says that we must change our language and culture. They, people, clergy and at least one narcissistic bishop among them, are in reality white supremacists, with profound hatred for real Orthodox, Russian, Greek, Romanian or any others.
On the Third Anniversary of our Freedom from Persecution 2022-2025: The Thirteen Reasons Why We Took Canonical Refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church after Nearly Fifty Years of Faithfulness to the Russian Orthodox Church
Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake (Matthew 5,11)
Foreword
Although the statement below concerns the 5,000 of us directly, it could also be used as part of a more general study in order to understand the process of how a Persecuted Church became a Persecuting Church, how an organism for Love became a narrow and judgemental sect which professed Hatred which enjoys trying to close churches. It is a psychiatric tragedy.
Some Recent History
https://roarch.org.uk/parishes-england/
The Romanian Orthodox Church is not much bothered by PR and websites. It updates its website once every ten years. For some reason, this cyberworld information is highly important to newcomers, whereas the well-circulated photographs of our letter of acceptance of 16 February 2022, issued by the Chancellery of our Metropolia on 18 February 2022, and of our antimension, signed by Metropolitan Joseph and issued to our parish on 27 February 2022, and our belonging to the Romanian Orthodox Church, witnessed to by the multinational crowds following the litanies and the Great Entrance at every Divine Liturgy, are not adequate evidence of which Local Church we belong to!
The fact that a certain bishop broke his promise to a Metropolitan that he would issue letters of release and then told people publicly that we had not been received into the Romanian Orthodox Church, when we clearly had been, despite that bishop’s clerical maladministration, is on his conscience, not on ours. Similarly, the mistake of those who believed that ‘error’, without checking to find out the truth, and then supported and repeated that ‘error’, is also on their conscience, not on ours. Shall we be kind and just say that they had been misinformed? This is why we have had so many instances of myrrh-giving icons in our main church since the Feast of the Ascension in 2022, as has been recorded in our monthly newsletters. Our God is the God of Mercy and Justice.
Thus, at one fell swoop, a newcomer to ROCOR hounded out of it one of its largest families, 28 people of four generations, who had devoted their lives to ROCOR. The scandal became international, discrediting ROCOR. Among those expelled was one of the ten speakers of the 2006 Fourth All-Diaspora Council in San Francisco, whose speech had been so warmly greeted then and who had belonged to the Church before that newcomer was even born. However, since the newcomer had not belonged to ROCOR in 2006, but instead was then actively supporting a move by the Russian Church to join Constantinople, he would not know that.
None of this should be a surprise, since the New ROCOR had already excommunicated another of the ten speakers and yet another had left to join the Moscow Patriarchate. Seven to go. Who is next? How many more of the remaining faithful will be expelled by the New ROCOR for the ‘crime’ (that is what they called it) of remaining faithful to the Old ROCOR? They persecuted St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, suspended him and put him on trial. Why not do the same to his spiritual grandchildren as well?
It seems as though the New ROCOR is reneging on our long and hard-fought fight to enter back into canonical communion with the rest of the Russian Church, which culminated in our victory of 2007. With its history of support for Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, support for the Vlasovtsy, those Russians who fought with Hitler against Russia, with its CIA bishops and priests, and now with their support for the CIA-orchestrated Kiev regime, which so persecutes Metr Onufry, should we be surprised? I am sometimes asked if I support Moscow or Kiev in the conflict in the Ukraine. I always answer the same thing: I support Metr Onufry and the Ukrainian and Russian peoples and always have done.
The Thirteen Reasons
- The principal reason why we were forced to leave and take refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church, is simply so that we would no longer be in an unthinkable schism from the Russian Church, specifically from the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition, in which we have had so many close family and friends in Paris for many decades. (It is also true that in the Romanian Church, we are no longer in schism with the Greek Churches either. We shall probably never recover from the shock of that bishop’s accusation that Patriarch Bartholomew is ‘possessed by demons’ Was he talking about himself?). His schism from the Russian Church, is exactly what we wanted to escape by taking canonical refuge in the Romanian Orthodox Church.
For nearly fifty years we had fought for the unity of the Russian Church, very actively and very successfully and were thanked personally by the Russian Patriarch for doing so. And then we saw it all destroyed by a very young and inexperienced convert newcomer from far away, who, a creator of schism, accused us of being schismatic and then of being senile! We have once more been able to live canonically, following the theological royal way and the canonical golden mean, away from all extremes.
For three years we have been in communion with and concelebrated with all Orthodox, including with the Russian Church, except for the tiny ROCOR, now reduced to a handful of miniscule communities here. Communion is the sign and guarantee that we are inside the Church and not outside the Church, inside some pathological, Protestant-style, convert sect and cult. For some reason this sect has been protected by ‘misinformed’, but still unrepentant and unapologetic individuals above it. That too is on their conscience, not on ours.
- In the Romanian Orthodox Church we do not rebaptise other Orthodox, which is a heresy.
- The Romanian Orthodox Church does not ‘defrock’ the clergy of other Local Churches.
- In the Romanian Orthodox Church we can love everyone, specifically we do not have to hate Greeks, refusing to recognise their saints because they are in ‘the wrong jurisdiction’!, ‘hate’ Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians and ‘half-hate’ Moldovans, as we were strongly recommended, but categorically refused, to do, for we strive to obey the Gospel commandments of Christ and not obey a schismatic.
- In the Romanian Orthodox Church over the last three years we have been able to keep all our churches open and serve our multinational parishioners in our missions at our own cost, just as we had done for decades before.
- For the last three years we have been allowed to speak and use in services our own childhood English language and do not have to pretend to be Americans in our speech, as we were bullied and pressured, but categorically refused, to do.
- For the last three years our websites have no longer been subject to rigid, word-for-word censorship and micromanagement, as we have had the wonderful basic human right to free speech, of which we had been punitively deprived for four months under a Calvinistically jealous dictatorship.
- For the last three years we have not had to participate in slandering faithful clergy and laypeople of other Local Churches, which we categorically refused to do.
- We have no longer had to deal with one who suffered in his spoilt child syndrome from violent bouts of temper and jealousy and wanted to divide and destroy solid families, setting generation against generation and hating women and children, upsetting many women with his ugly remarks.
- We have no longer had to pay 10% of our income and be subjected to fits of rage, shouting that we must pay even more and also hear slanders that we are thieves, all so that someone could live like a mini-oligarch. Membership of our self-governing Romanian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe and its local Archdiocese is free.
- We have no longer belonged to a small, out-of-control group, which is faced with having to pay millions of dollars in court cases which it is losing to individuals whom it has slandered, and which is also sundered by multiple scandals concerning rebaptism of other Orthodox, ‘defrocking’ clergy of other Local Churches, lack of financial transparency, the use of electronic signatures without authorisation, alcoholism and homosexuality.
- We have no longer had to live under an oppressive system where priestly awards are deliberately withheld from the most senior clergy for many, many years, for reasons of sadistic hatred and bullying jealousy, as though we were donkeys who wanted to follow decorative carrots.
- We have been allowed to be Christians, free to keep our integrity and obey our conscience. We have been able to act according to our Orthodox Christian principles, as for nearly fifty years before, in the old and noble Western European ROCOR Tradition of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, which they have all but destroyed, except inside the Romanian Orthodox Church, where we faithfully conserve it. This freedom comes from the fact that our Romanian bishops are, like us, also Christians, and do not punish or persecute us.
Why to the Romanian Orthodox Church?
Some people ask us, all the 15 clergy and 5,000 people in our six parishes who left ROCOR because it refused to listen to us about its schism, punished us for telling them the truth about it, and refused to listen to us who endured this shameful betrayal of the best friends that the Russian Church has ever had, why we joined the Romanian Church specifically. The answer to this is simple:
The Greek Church of the Patriarchate of Constantinople was for us not an option, despite some wonderful clergy and people there, not least on Mt Athos, as certain members of its episcopate had compromised themselves through their uncanonical actions in the Ukraine and through their ecumenism. Joining the Greek Church would therefore have been very divisive among our flock. As for the Serbian Church, we greatly respect it, as we do all other Local Churches, but we did not think of joining any of them, as we could have done, because we do not have any direct connections with their bishops, only with their priests.
There was only one obvious solution, the Romanian Church. We have always valued our contacts with the Romanian Tradition of Life via Fr Raphael Noica and others. Since 2001 we have had Romanian parishioners and these have increased in number since. As a result, we had a Romanian parishioner ordained priest and a Moldovan parishioner ordained deacon some years ago. We are pastors, not nationalists, and are here to serve the Orthodox people, whatever their nationality, English, Russian, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Romanian or other.
We do not conduct passport checks at the door. Perhaps that is why the number of our parishioners of all nationalities has doubled in the last three years since we left ROCOR. Nor are we capitalists, who sell vastly overpriced candles, icons, prayer books and other Church items to their own, often poor, people. We run the cheapest Church shop in the country. It is a service, not a source of excessive profit. We do not exploit the Orthodox people.
In the last 12 years 1 million Romanians have come to live in this country. Today at least 70% of all Orthodox in this country are Romanians. Go to any church in this country and the children are almost certain to be Romanian. Children are our future. And young priests have been temporarily loaned by the Romanian Church to the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Antioch, which are both desperately short of young clergy.
Moreover, the Romanian bishops have a clear pastoral sense of how important it is to keep the children in the Church and are very happy to use the local languages to do so. All our bishops speak Western European languages fluently – unlike most Russian bishops. Clearly, if we believe in a future Local Church, as we always have done, it makes sense to be part of by far the largest group of Orthodox, as long as it is politically free, which was the case of very few Local Churches 35 years ago, but which is no longer the case today, except for two of them.
It also makes sense to belong to a Local Church which allows us to conserve the Tradition and calendar of the Old Western European ROCOR, as we are able. The view of the late Metr Kallistos (Ware) ten years ago was quite rightly that ROCOR’s ascetic and liturgical heritage should be valued. Sadly, it has been ignored by them and taken over by ritualism and the pharisaical condemnation of others, turning this heritage into an opportunity for even further spiritual pride and censoriousness. As for us, we keep to the saints of the Old ROCOR of the Confessors, like St John of Shanghai, whom they now condemn, as he did not dress in expensive clothing and footwear and did not live in an elite apartment.
In 2022 we left the Russian Church to its nationalism, where the earthly kingdom is higher than the heavenly kingdom and Caesar’s is tragically confused with God’s. It has indeed renounced the multinational ethos which it had in the past. Too bad for it. We pray that Moscow, like Constantinople, will recover. Providentially we were integrated into the Romanian Orthodox Church exactly eight days before the longstanding Ukrainian-Russian conflict reached a new level of militancy on 24 February 2022. Thus, we avoided the Russian-Ukrainian division and so were able to answer all the threats of violence and hatred that were sent to us after that date, as well as the unnecessary offer of police protection, as well as invitations to support the Nazis in Kiev, by simply answering that we in the Romanian Orthodox Church have nothing to do with internal conflicts and politics inside the Russian Church.
With the result that our many Russian and Ukrainian parishioners can and do pray for one another side by side. Precisely from within the Romanian Orthodox Church, the second largest Local Church and which speaks a Latin language and uses the Latin alphabet, we can perhaps play a role in healing the schism between Russians and Greeks, which stems from the fact that neither is politically free. We are neutral. For we are pastors, not politicians.
We recall how the Greeks started the schism in the Ukraine by opening churches on Russian canonical territory. Then the Russians made it worse, firstly by cutting off communion, a very radical act which made the Russian Church look schismatic, then by poaching churches, priests and people from the Greek jurisdiction without letters of release, and then, in revenge, by opening churches on Greek canonical territory in Africa. This is like two little boys fighting. When will this end?
Afterword
Can we, in concert with the other politically free Local Churches, be intermediaries and help to bring sense and peace, in the spirit of the catholicity of the whole Orthodox Church? We pray so, through the prayers of all the New Martyrs and Confessors, of the Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian and Greek Lands and of all the Lands of the Earth.
16 February 2025
Rebaptism and Pathology
Fifty Years of Recent History
Nearly fifty years ago, in 1976, a scandal took place in the Orthodox Church in Guildford, England. A very young, poorly educated and inexperienced Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) priest, married off to the first woman come so he could be ordained at the uncanonical age of 22, rebaptised a group of recent converts. The converts had previously been received from the Church of England into the Moscow Patriarchate in the usual Orthodox way by chrismation. Here they had been receiving the sacraments for some time until they had been told by a rather fanatical priest that they needed to be rebaptised! The local Moscow Patriarchate bishop, supported by all other canonical Orthodox, complained.
His petition went to the then still Orthodox ROCOR Synod in New York. Its leader, Metropolitan Philaret, whom no-one would ever suspect of liberalism, commented that this rebaptism was a form of Neo-Donatism. The priest was rebuked – later he divorced the woman that he had been ordered to marry and left the priesthood and the Church. Sadly, the bishop who had had him ordained and had preached the ‘theology of rebaptism’ to him was not rebuked. However, some years later that bishop also ended up outside the Church and then died. An extreme right-winger, he had first created several more scandals, including consecrating as bishop a pedophile in Russia, outside his canonical territory.
Two years later, in 1978, there took place the rebaptism of the late French Catholic monk Fr Placide (Deseille) in the sea at the foot of the Athonite Monastery of Simonopetra. Fr Placide was very well-known in Roman Catholic France and had great respect as a scholar. Later I met him. However, he had already transferred to the so-called ‘Byzantine rite’, as the Roman Catholic rite had been deformed after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Fr (now St) Sophrony the Athonite, whom I knew very well, was very upset. For him this rebaptism was not only quite unnecessary, but also a provocation. He expressed the Orthodox theology of the sacraments, as practised by our 1,000 bishops.
This is that there are no sacraments outside the (Orthodox) Church, but there are sacramental forms or rites. The grace that is missing from them is made up for, completed, by contact with the Church and Her life. Thus, a rite of baptism with water (triple immersion is not compulsory – for Orthodox emergency baptisms are conducted without this) in the Name of the Holy Trinity outside the Church is acceptable as a valid sacramental form. The grace that is clearly missing from it to make it into a sacrament is communicated by reception into the Church. To repeat the sacramental baptismal rite is a type of fundamentalism, formalist literalism, which is actually typical of Protestantism.
Pathology
Today we are seeing again this same Protestant ‘Will I be saved?’ neurosis among some converts from Protestantism to the Orthodox Church. In this there is always the sectarian desire to condemn others, which is why Protestantism consists of a myriad of warring sects. This ‘OneTrueChurchism’ is a typically Protestant reflex. It is pathological because, like all pathologies, it is based not on Christian love, but on hatred for others, not on theology, but on pathology.
There are those who want to prey on the insecurity of neophytes in order to make such new converts doubt in their own Orthodoxy, using jurisdictions just as Protestants use denominations. But why do they want to prey on their insecurity? Simply because they want neophytes to become dependent on them. Creation of dependency is again typical of sectarianism, which is always associated with cults, that is, on guruism, personality cults, lust for power.
There is also a need among these cult leaders or gurus to recruit others. With very small flocks and so lacking money – given their anti-pastoral fanaticism, that is understandable – they are desperate to fill their near-empty churches. Without ethnic groups to attend their ‘temples’ (as they call churches), their only audience is naïve, young people, including the lonely, incels, closet homosexuals and others with problems. They make easy prey for the spiritual vultures.
Thus, one young Englishman I know is on his third rebaptism now. He lasted three years in a parish of 200 in the canonical Church, then went off to a tiny ROCOR community (nowadays they are always tiny) for about one year. However, that group of ten individuals was not good enough for him, so he went off to another tiny old calendarist group, which rebaptised him. He stayed with them for only about one year but they were not exclusive enough for him!
Six months ago he was rebaptised in a group, numbering six worldwide! The latest news is that he is dissastisfied with them, for they too are not strict enough for him. Here is the map of his way out of the Church, because that is how it will end – and it always does end in that way, outside the Church. This ‘anabaptism’ (Greek for rebaptism) is typical of Protestantism, whose underlying mentality and reflex is clear from the outset. It is not Orthodox, for it is not Love.