Category Archives: Destiny

Beyond the Three Romes: The People’s Orthodoxy

Part One: The Three Temptations of Roman Imperialism

The Temptation of the First Rome

Seeing the oppression of the Church by barbarian chiefs in Old Rome and by unworthy Emperors in New Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, which was later called Constantinople, in the 11th century the leaders of Old Rome took a decision. This was to make their part of the Church, in what is now called Western Europe, into a State. The leader of their part, or Patriarchate, of the Church, called the Pope of Rome, would be placed above all leaders and dubbed ‘the Head of the Church’ and ‘the Vicar of Christ’. Their new filioque ideology would claim that the Holy Spirit, the source of all truth, authority and spirituality in the Church, proceeds from their Popes.

In other words, the solution to the problem of State oppression as proposed by Roman Catholicism is that the Church becomes greater than any State. It becomes a worldwide Super-State, inherently secularising and centralising, more secular than the secular. This was, put simply, a power grab. This ‘easy way out’ was, is and always will be, a spiritual suicide. Christ did not call on legions of angels to protect Him when He was under arrest (Matt. 26). He accepted His Cross and said: ‘Put away your sword’. And that is what He still says to all those who attempt to impose the outward ways of the Church by intimidation and violence.

Naturally, in the 11th century, the remaining Orthodox Christians, at that time, the vast majority of Christendom, at once rejected this novel ‘theology’, or rather ideology. The latter became known, contradictorily, as ‘Roman Catholicism’ – for you cannot be Roman and Catholic (universal). Today Roman Catholicism remains a ‘Church-State’, an example of papoceasarism, a very secular form of Christianity, and has split into a myriad of sects protesting against the centralism which the hundreds of millions of sectarians condemn as ‘Papism’. However, those sects, now dying out through secularisation, are also subject to the ways of the world and even more deeply than Roman Catholicism, which they have rejected for the last 500 years.

The Temptation of the Second Rome

The problem of State interference in Church life remained for the rest of the Church. This is clear from the later history of New, or the Second, Rome, Constantinople, which finally fell in 1453. The elite of Emperors and State-appointed bishops was always ready to sign away their souls, and those of their flocks, in exchange for military aid from Roman Catholic Western Europe. The history of the Council of Florence and the resistance to the imposition of the Western ideology by such Christian heroes as St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) and his spiritual successor St Mark of Ephesus (c. 1392-1444), by the monasteries and unmercenary parish priest-pastors and the faithful, demonstrates our principled opposition to the corruption of the elite, always ready to compromise the Faith of Christ.

In more recent times, several Constantinople Patriarchs have appeared to want to imitate the centralist Popes of Rome, envying and admiring their power, riches and prestige, and so their policies are sometimes called ‘Eastern Papism’. As a result, a whole series of Local Churches, protesting against Constantinople centralism, has been born, in Serbia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Macedonia in what is literally a Balkanisation of the Church of Constantinople. However, unlike the saintless Protestant sects which rejected the First Rome and justified their separations by changing the teachings of the Church, these Local Churches have in no way changed or compromised the teachings of the Church and have kept the Faith, as proved by their many saints.

However, like the National Protestant Churches, these new Local Churches have been oppressed by the national, or rather nationalist, ideologies of the States which they represent. They have accepted the Cross of Christ. Today, the Second Rome in what is now Istanbul remains, but as a shadow of its former self, for the last three generations as a tiny, compromised and highly politicised puppet of the US State Department. Its leaders have been highly engaged in unionist talks with Old Rome. No surprise here: birds of a feather flock together. Most recently, its subjection to US politics has been used to foment a violent Church schism in the Ukraine. This is the fruit of Constantinople Papism.

The Temptation of the Third Rome

This story has been repeated in the Third Rome, Moscow, which after persecution by Emperors and Empresses, especially in the 18th century, fell in 1917. And then the Third Rome became the Third International and the Gospel of Christ was exchanged for the Gospel of Soviet atheism – ‘the easy way’ to establish paradise on earth. Only the promised paradise was more like hell on earth because that ‘paradise’ was without and against Christ. The Third Rome, in Moscow, remains very large on paper, but it has a stubbornly nominal flock, who resist and resent the exploitative business model of the Church proposed in post-Soviet times.  As its righteous, like Matushka Alypia, prophesied: ‘Their golden domes will shine, but it will not be possible to worship in those churches’.

Just like Constantinople, Moscow to appears to want to imitate the centralist Pope of Rome, envying and admiring his power, riches and prestige. Its leaders have been highly engaged in unionist talks with Old Rome. No surprise here: birds of a feather flock together. This Muscovite Papism first appeared under Metropolitan, and later Patriarch, Sergius of Moscow (1867-1944), who considered that any compromises with the atheist State were justified because he had to ‘save the Church’, that is, to preserve its material assets, whatever the cost. This error became known as ‘Sergianism’ and was condemned, since it appeared to deny that Christ is the Saviour and that the Church does not need saving, only people need saving – and by the Church. This Sergianist Papism is still the model admired there today.

As a result, a whole series of National Churches, protesting against Muscovite centralism, has been born, in Poland, Czechoslovakia and today, being born in agony, in the Ukraine and in many other countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and very probably elsewhere. For the Russian Church too is compromised, but this time by the post-Soviet (and often purely Soviet) mentality, that is, the Church is compromised by the not very Orthodox State heir to both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. In other words, the spectre of the centralist Roman Empire haunts both centres of the Orthodox Church. And until there is repentance everywhere, the return to Orthodoxy everywhere, there is little hope of seeing a properly functioning Orthodox Christian world in either the Second or Third Romes, let alone in the First Rome, which wandered off from the Holy Spirit 1,000 years ago.

Part Two: The People’s Orthodoxy

The Third Way

What remains? Is there an alternative? Where is there authentic Orthodox Christianity? Is there another way? Of course, there is, and none of the Roman Imperialism of the Second and Third Romes, let alone of the First Rome, is necessary. There is the other way, beyond the superficiality and pomp of the Three Romes, the path of the People’s Orthodoxy, of authentic monasteries, parish pastors and simple faithful, the way between and beyond the Imperialisms of Constantinople and Moscow. We can call this the way of the Orthodox Commonwealth, or of ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy, of ‘Carpathian’ spirituality, though this simply means the Orthodox Christian way, the royal way. We can use this expression because the Orthodox of the Carpathian mountain range live in Carpatho-Russia (currently mostly in south-western Ukraine and miscalled ‘Transcarpathia’), south-eastern Poland, eastern Slovakia, south-western Ukraine and northern Romania and ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’ spills over easily into Serbia, Moldova, Bulgaria and northern Greece to Mt Athos.

As examples, two contemporary righteous Churchmen come out of this Carpathia, the Carpatho-Russian-speaking Metr Laurus (Shkurla) (1928-2008) and the Romanian-speaking Metr Onufry (Berezovsky) (1944- ) of Kiev. They are heirs of the Orthodox Renaissance of hesychasm (unceasing prayer), our Christian reply to the neo-pagan Western Renaissance. Hesychasm was spread into this huge area by a very international group of fathers from the Holy Mountain of Athos by St Gregory of Sinai (c. 1260-1346), a contemporary of St Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), and his many followers, such as St Kallistos the Patriarch (+ 1363) in what is now Greece, St Roman of Tarnovo (c.1310-1363) and St Theodosius of Tarnovo (1310-1370) in Bulgaria, St Romil of Ravannitsa (+ 1376), St Athanasius of Meteora (1305-1383), St Sisoes the Sinaite (+ c. 1400), St Gregory of Gornjak (c.1300-1406) and others in Serbia, St Sergius of Radonezh (1314-1392) and his Thebaid of followers in Russia, and St Nicodemus of Tismana (1320-1406) in Romania. In the 18th century, this ‘Carpathian’ spirituality gave birth to the Ukrainian-Moldavian St Paisius (Velichkovsky) of Neamt in Romania, in the last century to St Alexis of Carpatho-Russia (1877-1947) and in our own times to St Job of Ugol (1902-1985), Fr Cleopa (Ilie) (1912-1998) and the Romanian elders of Moldavia in the living tradition.

There is nothing new in this Real Orthodoxy beyond the Romes, which could be termed ‘Carpathian Orthodoxy’. It began with St John the Baptist in the Palestinian desert, it blossomed in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries, was taken to both Constantinople and then northwards to the Balkans and then to the forests of Russia and Siberia, but also to Gaul and then to the wild coasts of Ireland and the Hebrides in the 6th and 7th centuries, from where it was taken to both England and Iceland. It is also this spirit of Orthodoxy that was once so alive in the Russian emigration, though now all but dead in the dead hands of the State mentality and the property-thirsty princes of this world. Carpathian Orthodoxy is simply Christianity in life, the uncompromised Christian way of life, Orthodox spirituality. Carpathian Orthodoxy is not Constantinopolitan or Muscovite, not Imperial, but ours, the people’s, that of families, guided by spiritual fathers, by our monasteries and hermits.

The Attack on ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy by the Sergianism of the Russian Emigration

The 2001 usurping of power in the emigre Russian Church, ROCOR, and the expulsion of its leader, Metropolitan Vitaly, gave rise to a series of schisms in 2007, which were only limited in Australia and Germany because those in power had made as sure as possible that local church properties belonged to them. Elsewhere the losses were far more serious, especially in South America, North America, France and England. There followed the sidelining of the next ‘Carpathian’ Metropolitans of ROCOR, Laurus and Hilarion, who succeeded Metr Vitaly, and were turned into mere figureheads by the clique that had taken charge.

The clique appeared to have little interest in Church life, in real and, not token, monasticism and pastors and prayer, only in being ‘princes of the Church’ (one of their favourite expressions), in power and riches, property and prestige. Church was no longer about the salvation of souls, but about the ‘salvation’ of property by bishops, who wanted to take property away from monastics, pastors and the people. Thus came about the quite unjust 2016 expulsion from London of an excellent priest, the 2018 excommunication from Geneva of lifelong devoted ROCOR Orthodox trustees who had controlled the Cathedral, the closure of a parish near Saint Louis in the USA in a property dispute, and the loss of the church in Miami (it too did not belong to the ROCOR administration), in yet another property dispute.

There followed in exactly the same way the attempt to destroy Church life in parishes in England and close their churches (those properties too did not belong to ROCOR bishops). None of this left anyone in any doubt as to the utter ruthlessness of the US-financed business clique in charge of the Russian emigration Church. And the situation is continuing in the USA today, as more leave. All of this was caused by the desire of the ruling clique to imitate the Sergianism of the Church inside Russia, of the Third Rome. That clique too was going to ‘save the Church’, that is, to seize and preserve power and riches, property and prestige. In their worldliness they too confused the salvation of the soul with the preservation of empty buildings beneath golden domes and soulless property portfolios.

The Failed Attempt to Close Down the People’s Churches in England

In our own cases, after insisting on keeping our church open, despite covid regulations and aggressive and bullying intimidation, we were at various points in 2020 and 2021 the only Orthodox priests in England celebrating normally. For this defiance of death and our will to keep our churches, bought with the people’s money, open, the elite clique in charge had to punish and try to destroy us. As a result, they initiated a schism with the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Moscow Patriarchate in December 2020. As the senior priest in the Diocese, I, with all the others, was forced to seek canonicity away from schismatic bishops. We applied Canon XV of the First and Second Council under St Photius the Great and 317 other Fathers, that those who ‘have been diligent to rescue the Church from schisms and divisions’….’shall be deemed worthy to enjoy the honour which befits them among Orthodox Christians’.

Ironically, as we have said, this Archdiocese of Western Europe with which the clique began a very public schism, is under the Moscow Patriarchate. However, the then ROCOR First Hierarch, Metr Hilarion (Kapral), was far too ill to contain the sectarians of ROCOR and its mini-Synod which had for 20 years been running everything. Therefore, individuals with power in New York refused to listen to what was happening and rejected our request for stavropegia in early 2021, using the electronic signature of the ‘Carpathian’ Metr Hilarion to justify themselves. We had known Metr Hilarion since 1988 and he came to us twice, ordaining clergy and celebrating in our church before he fell ill. Persecution of us was not his will. After his illness came the end. After this and the rejection of our application to join the Moscow Patriarchate, which was frightened of New York, we had to move to another Local Church.

We had to find canonicity against the schism of the bullies and to protect our churches from their attempts to close them. They accused us of being ‘criminals’, of stealing money (!), slandered us, tried to put us on trial and then sentenced us uncanonically and illegally behind our backs. They repeated all the oldest tricks in the book, using their naïve, new followers and yesmen. This was the Golgotha that the new Sanhedrin had prepared for us. God was testing our patience and humility. So we accepted our Cross and so God led us to spiritual freedom in another Local Church and so they lost everything. The New York schism endures to this day, but many clergy and people have left ROCOR. Though we have gone to the Church of Romania, several others, controversially, have joined the Patriarchate of Constantinople, especially in the USA and the Netherlands (as also in the Ukraine and now Lithuania), and a few elsewhere. Meanwhile, in the USA all free churches are continuing to leave ROCOR one after the other.

Part Three: Survival and Victory

The Orthodox Way

Certain Greeks wanted us to join their local Archdiocese. This was not Divine destiny. We believed that the Constantinople leadership is compromised by its modernist history of ecumenism, new calendarism and other practices, and especially by its treacherous activities in the Ukraine and the persecution of our dear friends in the Czech Lands. True, Moscow has also acted uncanonically in Africa, just as Constantinople has done in the Ukraine. However, the Greek vengeance on simple Africans who want to see an African, and not Greek, Orthodoxy, with the help of Moscow has been quite as vicious as the New York vengeance on us and as the Moscow vengeance on those seeking political freedom outside the controls of Soviet nationalism, whether in the Netherlands, Lithuania or elsewhere.

Then, we have many parishioners from the much-suffering Ukraine. They are faithful to Metr Onufry of Kiev, who has been so mistreated both by Constantinople and by Moscow. This double persecution from both extremes, from Constantinople and Moscow, is a sure sign of his righteousness. True, in the US, there is a (Russian/Ukrainian) Slavic Vicariate for persecuted refugees from ROCOR, but in the US context, with others refusing to take refugees from ROCOR, there may be no alternative to this. We are free to do otherwise. Similarly, we do not judge those seven priests in Lithuania, forced to join Constantinople because of their mistreatment by Moscow. We are free to do otherwise.

Others called us to old calendarist groups. However, for us, schisms and sects of any sort are the unthinkable. That is the precise reason why we left ROCOR – because it suffers from the sectarian, old calendarist illness of schism. Being on the old calendar is very different from old calendarism, just as being on the new calendar is very different from new calendarism. For within the Romanian Metropolia of Western and Southern Europe, our ex-ROCOR group of six parishes is on the old calendar. We are following the Third Way between and beyond the Second and Third Romes. For we are turned towards St John of Shanghai (as also is the Romanian parish in Birmingham) and the New Martyrs and Confessors, and the local saints of the early centuries, to Moldovan spirituality and the heritage of St Paisius (Velichkovsky) (1722-1794) and Fr Cleopa Ilie, the great Carpathian elder (1912-1998), as well as to contemporary Ukrainian figures like Elder Iona of Odessa (1925-2012) and Metr Onufry of Kiev (1944 – ).

‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy Survives in England

Thus, in February 2022, 6 parishes, 16 clergy, including 7 priests, and 5,000 laypeople moved away from the local ROCOR diocese. Nearly all went to the Patriarchate of Romania and not a single one returned to serve in ROCOR. The departure of over three-quarters of the ROCOR Diocese in England to the Patriarchate of Romania, left ROCOR with mainly a few new and untrained Non-Russian-speaking convert clergy, a tiny group of about 100 core faithful and 1500 nominal Orthodox. Moreover, our move took place eight days before the present phase of the conflict in the Ukraine in 2022 and the further tragic politicisation and disruption of Russian Church life.

A spiritual son of, and ordained priest by, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, the successor in that see to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, I believe that the positive heritage of the old ROCOR has to be saved. It was Archbishop Antony who had stopped the spread of sectarianism in ROCOR in the US already in the 1970s. We followed him. We are ever loyal to the memory and practices of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and his successor Archbishop Antony, to the Presov Rusyn Metr Laurus (Shkurla) and to the west Ukrainian Metr Hilarion (Kapral) (1948-2022). We see in the politically free Autonomous Romanian Metropolitan of Western and Southern Europe, with nearly 3 million faithful, 700 parishes and several monasteries, the greatest hope for a future Local Church of Western Europe.

After nearly fifty years of faithfulness to the Russian Church and over 36 years of unpaid service at the altar, this marked a new beginning, but one to which all had been moving in the recent period of the Sovietisation of ROCOR, which sees the Church as a Business. We twelve, five priests, two deacons and five readers who joined the Romanian Church, are an international group, profoundly opposed to the sectarian trends coming from the new ROCOR in the USA. We do not want to belong to the ghettoes of egomania or the sects of pathology. They are not the way forward. These trends were exported to England during the critical illness and loss of control of ROCOR by the ever-memorable Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral). He was the last ROCOR First Hierarch able to keep ROCOR unity, before being struck down by his dementia and cancer well before his repose in 2022. We honour his memory, as also that of Metr Laurus.

Our Parish and the Future

On 20 May 2022, in one of her last acts, the late Queen Elizabeth made my native town a City. Its coat of arms, depicting St Helen and the three crowns of St Edmund, declares: No Cross, no Crown (of martyrdom). Our churches in the City of Colchester, the main one dedicated to St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, and the other dedicated to All the Saints of these Isles, have become a spiritual centre for Moldovans, Ukrainians, Romanians and all patriotic, but non-nationalist, Russians. We consider that we have only one passport and under ‘Nationality’ that passport says ‘Orthodox Christian’. We have trilingual services and an emphasis on personal confession and communion and the prayer of the heart, as well as rejecting the money-making mercenary spirit of marble and gold, so evident in so many churches, especially in London and other capitals.

For us the Patriarchate of Romania, which is in communion with all Orthodox, is the royal way forward, between the extremisms of Constantinople and Moscow, which are scandalously out of communion with one another, both effectively in schism with one another. Ignoring politics and nationalism, the Colchester parish has good relations with the Greek monastery at Tolleshunt Knights, where I often met the now St Sophrony in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the monastery was still poor. Attended on Sundays by between 200 and 400 faithful, communions at St John’s number between 100 and 300 on Sundays, with between 50 and 100 children, making it one of the three largest Orthodox parishes in England. We are followers of ‘Carpathian’ spirituality. The Carpathians are on the Western edge of the Orthodox world. So are we.

We continue in the path of the everyday spirituality of the people, of Carpathian Orthodoxy, outside the Romes, with their Spirit-quenching politics, soul-destroying bureaucracies and anti-spiritual ‘protocols’. This is the same as Hebridean, Ionan and Lindisfarnian spirituality of old, practised in these isles some fourteen centuries ago. It is the one and the same ‘Spiritodox’ world, the world of ordinary families who go to their pastors, monks and hermits for spiritual orientation, making pilgrimages to Mt Athos, Moldavia, Diveevo and Ekaterinburg, and St Spyridon and St Nicholas. This is not some sort of ‘neo-hesychasm’, for hesychasm never died. Last year at the Ascension the large icon of St John of Kronstadt in the Colchester church began to give off a fragrance, noticed by all, and the Icon of Christ on the iconostasis gave out a large droplet of myrrh. So does heaven reply to the persecutors of the Church, with Love, not with the aggressive bullying and attempted intimidation of the pharisees. We pray for them all, that they may be relieved of their burden of hatred and come to know Christ.

Part Four: The Future

Rejecting the Temptation of the Romes

There are those who ask how the present stand-off between Constantinople and Moscow, the Second and Third Romes, will end. Those pessimists who see only the acts of sinful men should know that there will not be an everlasting schism. Political personalities come and then they die. True, too many harsh words have been said and too many injustices have been committed by both sides. The use of ‘defrocking’ for purely political, and not canonical, purposes is absurd. All political ‘defrockings’ are reversible, as they have been reversed so many times before, when the injustices of previous regimes are overturned, just as the tables of the money-changers in the Temple were overturned by the Saviour, Who said: ‘My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves’ (Matt 21, 12-13). Bishops who misapply the canons, those who themselves receive clergy without releases but then condemn others for receiving clergy without releases, because those selfsame bishops have instituted schisms, and in places as far apart as the USA, the Netherlands, England, Lithuania and Africa, only discredit themselves and make themselves into laughing-stocks.

There will have to be negotiations between them on territory. Moscow cannot go on behaving as though countries like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, like Finland, Poland, the Czech Lands or Slovakia, are any different from the other countries of Roman Catholic and Protestant cultural background in Western and Central Europe. Those countries too are de facto shared territory like Western Europe. On the other hand, as regards Africa, perhaps Hellenist Alexandria will have to return to holding only the territory of Egypt and Libya, as a century ago, and leave the rest of Africa to missions from the Russian Church. And Hellenist Constantinople will have to abandon the domain of the East Slavs, Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, to the jurisdiction of the Russian Church – for a moment.

For the coming political takeover of the Ukraine as a result of the Russian military operation against the US on the battlefield of the Ukraine and the conferring of the status of a pro-Russian Protectorate on the New Ukraine, will make no difference in the Russian Church sphere. Though the Russian State will surely win militarily in the Ukraine, as it is already winning, the Russian Church is already the great loser. It has lost through its involvement in politics and is discredited outside the Russian Federation, its churches in Western Europe often reduced to little more than embassy churches. If other Local Churches recognise the self-declared autocephaly of the canonical Ukrainian Church, this will hasten the inevitable end. The Russian Church will have to cede long-overdue autocephaly, both to the New Ukraine and then to Belarus. The three brother-peoples will belong to three Sister-Churches.

Thou Hast Conquered, O Galilean

As for us, we continue to stand in the centre. Some will say that we in East Anglian England are provincials, ‘rustics’. Well, we are provincials – but we are not ashamed of it. Though standing in the centre means that we are attacked by both extremes, this is the only valid position, for Christ was also crucified between two thieves. However despised provincial Galilee was, it was Galilee that defeated the Capital of Jerusalem, with its Sanhedrin of high priests, scribes and pharisees. Why? Because in fact Galilee was the centre, just as a cave in Bethlehem, not the Senate in Rome, was also in its time the centre. The People’s Orthodoxy is controversial to the Imperial elite, just as Christ was controversial to the scribes and pharisees. But woe unto them.

And so our ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy stands at the centre. We stand outside the politics of capitals, old and new. We reject the Three Romes and their Imperialism and Papism, both Phanariot and Muscovite, which are supported only by their readiness to compromise on everything with States. We reject both the Church-State of Old Rome and the State Churches of the Second and Third Romes. It is Imperial Orthodoxy, not ‘Carpathian’ Orthodoxy, that is marginal, because the Imperial Church is not the Faith of the people, of pastors, parish priests and monasteries, but of intriguing oligarchs, hard-hearted politicians and self-tortured ideologues.

In the 4th century the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (331-363), born in Constantinople and finishing his poisonous life in what is now Iraq, returned to persecuting the Church. He became known as ‘the last Pagan Emperor’, though, alas!, that is not true. Julian wrote an attack on Christianity, ‘Against the Galileans’. The trickery of the ‘Galileans’—his usual term for Orthodox Christians – had nothing divine in it, he claimed, it appealed to ‘rustics’ only, and it was made up of fables and irrational falsehoods. Here can be seen his intellectual snobbery, like that of our present persecutors, who claim to have some worldly academic qualifications. Julian’s plan to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem had to be abandoned. He lost his fight against Christ, humiliated by ‘the rustics’. It is said that his last words were: ‘Thou hast conquered, O Galilean’. The provincial Galileans had even then won.

Towards a Local Church

Our Church is already a Local Church. Indeed, other Local Churches already exist. They begin not in capitals, where there is a separate church for each nationality, often de facto embassy churches, but in the provinces, where Orthodox of all nationalities are brought together and have to be together, living with one another. In the greater picture beyond this, there is the whole problem of Western Europe, the Americas and Oceania, where the absence of four Autocephalous Local Churches is absurd, despite over a century of Orthodox presence there and despite the presence there of some 10% of the Orthodox episcopate of 1,000 bishops.

We have always opposed those who tried to undermine the inevitability of new Local Churches in these Diaspora lands. They ruin all hope for them through extremism, whether of the modernist/secularist/new calendarist, or the pharisaic/ghettoist/old calendarist, variety. If your only selling-point is that you are like the whole secular world around you, whose values you share, then you have nothing to give to create a new Local Church. But if your only selling-point is your differences, or, worse still, that your differences make you ‘superior’ to all others, then you are a pharisee and you too are working against a new Local Church.

A Church of and for ‘incels’ and right-wing pharisees is not a Church. A Church of military rigidity, of the straitjacket and Stalinist conformism is not a Church. A Church of and for intellectuals is not a Church. A Church of wokeism, of anything goes, swimming with the tide and secularist conformism is not a Church. The Church is for all who accept Her as She is, the Church for all generations and all nationalities, for all who wish to live better lives and know that this is possible only through Christ. Our Church is the Church of the spiritual, not of the material and its obsessions with power and riches, property and prestige. Our Church is not the Church of politicians and businessmen, but the Church of the Saints. We too say: No Cross, No Crown. And again we say: Christ is Risen!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips,

City of Colchester, England,

Eastertide 2023

(The above is available as a printed brochure)

The Struggle for the Restoration of the Christian World

‘Western Civilization? That would be a very good idea’.

Attributed to Gandhi

Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

Samuel P Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations, Chapter 12

Introduction: The Christian World

The Christian (also called Orthodox) world covers nearly one seventh of the world’s land surface, numbers 220 million people, 3% of the world population, and is responsible for 6% of world economic output. The core country of the Christian world is the heart of the former Russian Empire, for the moment called the Russian Federation. Outside this core lie various provinces, for the moment cut off from the core by the Western Powers and their manipulations of the petty nationalist vanities of traitors. These provinces are: the Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Cyprus. However, millions of Christians also live in countries like the USA, Kazakhstan, Germany, Syria, Poland, Italy, France, Latvia, Australia, the UK, Slovakia, Albania, Kenya and Israel and are scattered in smaller numbers through almost every country and continent in the world.

The Non-Christian World

Our Christian Civilization, often called Orthodox, that is, Orthodox Christian, confesses in our sign of the Cross the Holy Trinity and Christ, True God and True Man. This is unlike the ex-Judeo-Christian and now atheistic Western world, also called Euroamerica. This apostatic world has not in fact confessed the real Holy Trinity for a thousand years, abandoning Christ for humanistic self-idolization and spreading the mythology of its imagined superiority throughout the world. As a result it has ever since aggressively invaded and greedily raped the rest of the world through organized violence. This barbaric violence, from Charlemagne’s slaughter of the Saxons in 782 to that of the Teutonic Knights, from Hitler’s Blitzkrieg to Rumsfeld’s ‘shock and awe’, has known no bounds, as also its greed, from that of the bloodthirsty Crusaders to the sadistic conquistadors of Columbus, from Clive of India to De Beers.

The Great Deviation

Some may criticize and say that even many in the Christian world do not confess the Holy Trinity and Christ: they point to endemic corruption, high abortion and divorce rates or widespread addiction to various drugs. Of course, they are quite right in this respect: in the Great Deviation of the Twentieth Century, that catastrophic aberration of the Western and Westernized elite which cost hundreds of millions of lives of many peoples, the Christian world was overthrown by apostasy and nominalism. However, by the grace of God, it has over the last generation begun its repentance and so its slow return to the Father. Although there is very far to go to the Father’s House, its general direction is diametrically opposed to that of the Great Deviation, when it abandoned its values for the mess of pottage promised by the Apostatic West, which today is ever deepening its atheistic aberrations.

A Destiny and a Struggle

As an Orthodox born and living in the West, it has been my destiny and the struggle of my life to fight for the civilizational values of the Old West, of the Holy Trinity and of Christ, True God and True Man. These values are essential to our conscious Christian world. We have had to oppose Western cultural arrogance and hubris and today its Trotskyite globalism, which has made the West hated by all. This is the result of the terminal moral decline of the West, come about through its rejection of real Christianity, which stood at its own roots a thousand years ago, as we have described in detail over the last 45 years. We have always fought against our external enemies, the secularism inherent in and inherited from the Papal-Protestant roots of the Non-Christian West, as well as the illusions of the Non-Christian East. However, our greatest struggles have always been against our internal enemies. Who were they?

For the Faith

Firstly, we have had to fight for the purity of the Christian Faith against venal conformists, both Soviet and Western. The Soviets said that there is no God and that therefore all was permissible, the Westerners said that there is a God, but He supported their aggressive violence, rapacious greed and hypocrisy, telling them, for example, to invade oil-rich Iraq. There were internal enemies who went along with these out of treason, cowardice and deceit. The treason was that of those who said that they were Christians but, taking advantage of the paralysis in Moscow, in fact behaved immorally, all being permissible, and so persecuted us. The cowardice was that of those who feared not God, but feared their Western-controlled authorities, and so persecuted us. The deceit was that of those who said that they were Christians, but so lacked love that they supported the enemies of Christ and their vices, and so persecuted us.

For the Christian Empire

Secondly, we have had to fight against those who wanted to deny that Christ is True God and True Man. Denying that Christ is True God, the first wanted to secularize and humanize His Body, the Church, making Her into some petty nationalist mascot, no more than a national flag. Failing to understand that the Church of God is international and universal, they tried to provincialize Her, making Her parochial, instead of accepting Her as Imperial. These vain and weak people were played off and ego-flattered by US ambassadors in the Balkans, who, dividing and ruling, appointed their patriarchs and so created schisms. Denying that Christ is True Man, the second ones we had to fight against were those who wanted to disincarnate His Body, the Church, making Her into a dreamy, impractical philosophy, an irrelevant intellectual conceit, not the fire in the belly of the Church of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

For the Emperor

We have fought for the purity of the Christian Faith, resisting the treason, cowardice and deceit of external and internal enemies. We have fought for the Incarnation of the True God and True Man, the Christian values which result from the fact that, although we are not of this world we are in the world, so justifying the future restoration of the Christian Empire. Thirdly, we have also had to fight for the Emperor. In this matter we have had to fight against those who want to deny that the Holy Spirit comes to earth to inspire the representative of Christ on earth, willed into being by the Faithful People of God. This is why we have defended the last Emperor from the widespread calumnies against him. And this is why we explain why we await the next Emperor. He is vital, for He is the future Emperor who alone can resist the Western preparations for the Antichrist and so can delay his coming.

Conclusion: To the Future

Euroamerica has ignored the common sense advice of its own geopolitician Samuel Huntingdon. Some 25 years ago he pleaded with the West to abandon its hubristic arrogance and recognize that its ‘civilization’ of ‘organized violence’ is not at all universal. Its atheistic materialism is not ‘the end of history’, as the foolish and deluded Fukuyama proclaimed after the end of the Cold War. Since then the West has destroyed itself under the fantasist neocons who want to take over the world. In Iraq in 1991 and 2003 it finally lost the Muslim world, in Georgia in 2008 and in the Ukraine and in Syria in 2014 it made an enemy of Russia, in 2016 of Turkey, and so has allied Muslims, Orthodox and Chinese against itself. It is now itself splitting apart, with Brexit, Trump and the fault-lines of the EU and the USA, as the West falls into the abyss of its own moral depravity, caused by its millennial rejection of Christ.

 

Catalonia: The Coming End of the EU Empire

By 1940, the whole of Roman Catholic Europe, from Slovakia to Italy, including France and ‘neutral’ countries like fiercely Papist Ireland, Spain and Portugal, were living under Fascist dictatorships. This was only natural. Under the centralizing lapsed Roman Catholic Hitler (like the centralizing lapsed Roman Catholic Napoleon, who in effect was also a Fascist), a centralized Fascist European Superstate had come into being. He was greeted as a hero in Fascist Croatia and the Fascist western tip of the Ukraine. This was only natural, for Roman Catholic Europe was only following in the footsteps of the centralized Pagan Roman Empire (also in effect a ‘Fascist’ Superstate) and of the centralized Carolingian Empire (also in effect a ‘Fascist’ Superstate).

Today we see the same in Catalonia. The Spanish State, firmly backed from central headquarters in Brussels, is suppressing the Catalan movement for freedom. This is quite different from the independence movement in Scotland, which Brussels actively supports, since Scotland is anti-Brexit and therefore worth disrupting Britain for. However, it is quite similar to the Ukraine, where the bloody war against a free Ukraine by the centralizing EU-supported Fascist junta in Kiev, rages on. It is also quite similar to the recent Kurdish referendum, where the near hundred-year battle for Kurdistan rages on against centralizing Baghdad. Self-determination turns out to be highly selective. It means self-determination only for those whom the Western elite supports.

As the centralized Spanish government and brutal police terrorize the Catalans, we see that not much has changed in Europe. The fight for freedom goes on. In Europe artificial conglomerates have everywhere fallen, from ex-Yugoslavia to Czechoslovakia. In the Ukraine, a country cobbled together out of Russia, Poland, Romania and Hungary by Communist dictators, the same is happening, as freedom is being won despite US and EU support for the Fascist junta in Kiev. Now, in all the artificial Western European conglomerates, the UK, Italy, Germany, Belgium, France and Spain, the same is happening. Freedom is in the air despite Fascism. All empires built on injustice end. Take note, Brussels and Madrid tyrants.

After a Century of Demonic Possession

Destiny exists. In Christian language it is called God’s Will. God’s Will exists not just for individuals, but also for whole nations. Whole nations receive a calling to do God’s Will. Such is the case for Russia. Its calling came as part of the process of 2,000 years of Christian history. This history began with Christ and went through two great events. The first, after nearly 300 years of persecution and martyrdom, was the proclamation of the future St Constantine as the first Christian Emperor, on 25 July 306 in York in Britain. The second was the martyrdom of the future St Nicholas II as the last Christian Emperor to date, on 17 July 1918 in the very centre of Northern Eurasia. By his martyrdom he united East and West, becoming the personal embodiment of the double-headed eagle. His martyrdom marked the start of a century of demonic possession, during which the Christian Empire was abolished.

Between St Constantine and St Nicholas, the centre and capital of the Christian Empire was transferred from distant European Rome, become provincial, to the Eurasian New Rome (Constantinople) and from there, after its sacking by the West in 1204 and the East in 1453, to the Third Rome (Moscow). By 1453, having passed through the dark crucible of aggressive Western ‘crusades’ and the Eastern Tartar yoke, Russia was ready to accept its Divine destiny as the defender of Christendom against heretics and infidels alike. For over 500 years it lived for Christ, despite setbacks, weaknesses and further Western assaults, until the fateful year of 1917, when it was betrayed. 100 years on from then nearly all now understand that huge and tragic mistake of accepting the illusory Western ideology of Marxism in 1917 with its utterly false promise of paradise on earth, which at once turned into hell on earth.

Today, however, Russia, through repentance for its delusion and through the restoration of Orthodoxy, is on the path once more to its inevitable destiny. True, Russia faces once more, just as in 1917, Western-funded and Western-orchestrated dissidence by greedy and corrupt oligarchs (who, ironically, camouflage their real power-grabbing aims under the mask of being against corruption). For them Russia is simply to become another nationalistic state, like so many others in Western Europe, which, as the provincials they are, they idolize. Russia has, they say, no multinational and international, that is, no Imperial, vocation. This is exactly what the West (the self-appointed ‘international community’, in fact a tyrannical, anti-international ghetto) wants Russia to be reduced to.

The West fears the spiritual power of Russian Orthodoxy, its Christian Civilization and values, its call to the Risen and Living Christ against the dead Western Mammon. This comes at a time when the European Union, the Fourth Reich, in the words of the notoriously Russophobic British Foreign Minister Johnson, is in chaos. This collapse comes as a result of its hubris in imposing the euro, its open Muslim immigration policy (refusing to solve the problems at source), and Brexit, which itself is the result of the two above policies. At the same time, Roman Catholicism, the medieval ancestor of the centrally-controlled EU tyranny, is also in chaos, under a Pope who appears to be a liberal humanist rather than a Christian, that is, an anti-people (anti-populist, in his own words) Pope.

While Brexitland UK is refusing to pay the EU for indulgences in what is a Second Reformation, 500 years after the first one, a magnificent Russian church of All the Saints is being raised up in Strasbourg, the capital of the EU. (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=eglise+russe+strasbourg&rlz=1C1CAFB_enGB663GB665&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOyuz9uYHTAhWkD8AKHXTCCmMQ_AUICCgD&biw=1024&bih=470). It is a symbol of the rise of Russian Orthodoxy in the spiritually degutted Western tip of Northern Eurasia, as its local Orthodox saints are being included in the Russian Orthodox calendar. It means that all Russian Orthodoxy in Continental Europe, already 80% of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe, will come under the direct jurisdiction of Moscow. It leaves the Anglosphere under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. This is the Will of God, not of man.

On the Meaning of Destiny and the Future of Russia and the West

Introduction: Destiny

The word ‘destiny’ is vague because it has different meanings according to the three parallel universes which exist. The first-created universe is Heaven and here the word ‘destiny’ means God’s Will. The second universe is Earth, now fallen, aptly called in Old English ‘Middle-earth’ (a term more recently popularized by a former Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon, J.R.R. Tolkien). Here the word ‘destiny’ can have the pagan connotations of ‘the fates’, indicating fatalism and the buffetting of forces apparently beyond human control, called by the Ancient Greeks ‘the gods’, but by Christians ‘the demons’, but it can also have positive connotations, for on Middle-earth, people can also be inspired to do God’s Will, though this is not always understood. Finally, there is the third universe, which we call Hell, that provides a hellish destiny, what the demons want for us.

The Parallel Universes

Those who listen out for and do God’s will have a heavenly destiny or calling. They follow their heavenly roots of the past and the future. Awaiting Divine inspiration, they can have a prophetic gift and become God’s seers, visionaries. They foresee a hellish destiny for mankind if there is no repentance and a heavenly destiny if there is. (Demons can only foresee the hellish destiny because they have renounced their freewill to do good. This is why demonic prophecies are very often wrong in their dire and depressing prophecies, as they are unable to see the possibility of good. And this is why secular media often depressingly imitate those hellish forecasts). Prophets have their eyes fixed on the future and are not too bothered by the details of the present, which can tie down to the quagmire of this world, and which scandalize the narrow-minded who cannot see long-term.

Christian Destiny

Those who listen to their Divine calling and so have a Christian Destiny, do not live according to the destiny of the Middle-earth, still less to hellish destiny, but according to heavenly destiny. Their prophecies lead heavenwards. Their destiny is, according to the logic of this world, seems strange, irrational, ironic, mysterious. In reality, none of this is true, for it is the logic of this world that is composed of fallen human rationalism and therefore is strange and ironic. God’s logic, heavenly destiny, is quite different, it leads heavenwards.

Men and Women

The general heavenly destiny of men is self-sacrifice, meaning tenderness. That of women is natural beauty, meaning beauty of soul. The general hellish destiny of men is egoism, meaning brutality. The general hellish destiny of women is artificial beauty, meaning vanity. Modern Western society has largely chosen a hellish destiny, so becoming a society of egoism and vanity, that is, the selfie society, a society of narcissism, the self-important, I-society of look-at-me Facebook and MySpace, of i-phone and i-pad, of I love me.

Russia

As regards the destiny of Russia, we can say the following:

The first shot of the so-called Russian Revolution, as stated by one of the assassins, Purishkevich, was fired on 30 December 1916. The countries of the former Russian Empire then went through three 25-year generations of horror, obscenity and hysteria, of turning their backs on their roots. After the bloodshed following 1916, came 1941 and yet another Western invasion, which was a call to repentance, then the abortion holocaust of the 1960s with the whole Soviet ABCD (alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce), the result of 50 years of rejection of pre-Revolutionary values and the demotivation, especially of men, who no longer had any role to fill, as the State had total control, and finally the horrors of perestroika after 1991, in which millions died premature deaths, especially through vodka and suicide, as people were unable to face the banditry of so-called ‘privatization’ and ‘the bright future’, promised for the huge sacrifices made for the Soviet Union, turned into a nightmare. The heaven on earth promised by the Communist ideologues had become hell on earth.

Today, the hangover and vestiges of the hellish destiny of the Soviet past are still alive, but the younger generations are now aware of their Christian roots, of their forgotten and rejected heavenly destiny. Hell stopped in 1991 and a great many stepped back from the brink. Hope sprang. A generation on, there is still uncertainty, but as time passes more and more Russians have not only stepped back from the brink, but are fleeing it as fast as possible.

The West

The same pattern of generational change, every 25 years, has gone on in the West. In 1914 the Western elite rejected Christ and slaughtered and maimed its youth in indescribable conditions. In 1939 it rejected the possibility of repentance and deepened its abysmal tragedy. In the 1960s it rejected inherent Christian cultural values. In 1989 it began to spread its evil to Eastern Europe and worldwide under the slogan of a ‘New World Order’ and the word ‘globalism’. Western Europe, since 1917 under US domination, now became nothing more than a laughable US vassal.

However, in 2016, with the events of Brexit, the election of a Non-establishment politician in the USA and the rejection by Italy of Brussels bureaucrats, there is hope that the Western world is also stepping back from the brink. Having peered over the precipice and seen hell, some at least are coming to their senses. What will 2017 bring? Of course, it may be that the events of 1916 are mere pauses before, lemming-like, the West continues its suicide, but it may be these events mark a sea-change. The West stands on the edge of the cliff, hesitantly. Political elites and their hireling-journalists, who obey hellish voices and destinies, are alarmed: they could lose their well-paid jobs Could the people be reclaiming their freedom despite their alleged manipulation into zombies by the Western media?

Conclusion

In Paris this weekend, a stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower, Patriarch Kyrill consecrated the symbol of Holy Rus in the Western world, a new Christian Cathedral and spiritual centre. Jerusalem has come to Babylon. Will this help the Western world to come back to its senses and roots? By the grace of God, may it be so.

Some Autobiographical Notes

I have been asked a number of questions about how, coming from a simple, earthy English background in rural England, I came to be a Russian Orthodox priest of the Church Outside Russia. Making use of some unexpected time this week, I have looked back through some old papers which I had forgotten and can now answer those questions with some dates.

Q: How did you come to the Russian Church?

A: After a countryside childhood strangely filled with interest in faraway Russia, I started teaching myself Russian in October 1968. I was told to do so in a particular spot in Colchester, which I could take you to now, by a voice heard coming, brought as it were by a wind from the east. So I began to read a lot of Russian literature in translation and Russian history. Two years later, in 1970, I had decided that I wanted to be part of the Russian Church and had begun reading as much as I could to find out about it (very little was available at that time). However, it was only after my sixteenth birthday that I managed to visit Russian churches.

Q: Where? In London?

A: No, my family never went to London, which we always looked on as a different planet, ‘the smoke’ as we still called it. The countryside was our home. I won a bursary and at the end of February 1973 I managed to visit a Russian church in England. This was the tiny Russian Patriarchal house chapel in Oxford, where I prayed at vespers on two successive Saturdays. Then in the same year I won another bursary to visit the then Soviet Union; in fact the first church I visited there was St Vladimir’s Cathedral in Kiev. As I entered those churches, I knew that I wanted to be part of their inner life and that this was my destiny, the whole meaning of my life, regardless of all the barriers that would be put in front of me. I felt that I had always been here, that this was in my blood. (Only in 2004 did I discover any possible though very distant explanation in a Carpatho-Russian great-grandmother – my mother’s mother’s mother). At the end of 1973 I also managed to visit the Patriarchal Cathedral in London, of which I had heard. ROCOR then had no existence outside itself, being largely unknown to the outside world, at least in England.

Q: Which part of the Russian Church did you join?

A: As soon as I was free to do so at the age of 18, in 1974, I asked to join the Russian Church. Of course, there were two parts then. Firstly, I met two representatives of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), who solemnly informed me that I would not be allowed to join their Church since it was in any case ‘for Russians only’. I also met other, rather fanatical and sectarian individuals from ROCOR, who completely turned me away. I therefore took the only option left to me and joined the Patriarchal Church, presuming that this was identical to the Church that I had seen in Russia and the Ukraine.

However, I very soon found out that the small Oxford Patriarchal parish was dominated by two opposing clans – on the one hand, by haughty Parisian-type modernists, and, on the other hand, by Soviet chauvinist nationalists, for whom the Communist Party could do no ill! I gave myself spiritual life by reading Russian theological books I ordered from Jordanville and elsewhere. Visiting Soviet Russia for a second time in 1976 and spending time there, I saw again how the real Russian Church was different from the Oxford cliques. In 1977 a priest I had met in Russia the year before suggested that I study at the Moscow Theological Academy. I would very much like to have done that, but at the height of the Cold War this was absolutely impossible. That was tragic.

Q: What did you do?

A: I did the next best thing and in 1978 went to live and work in Thessaloniki in Greece for one year. Here, I saw how traditional the ethos could be, quite different from the Church of Constantinople, which I had seen in England, but also, unfortunately, I saw narrow Balkan nationalism and came across the semi-Protestant Zoe and Sotir organizations – closer to Methodism than Orthodoxy! However, I also visited Mt Athos and was especially influenced by Fr Ephraim at Philotheou and the very poor and heroic monks at the Russian St Panteleimon’s Monastery. I remember especially Fr Seraphim, Fr Misail (who wanted me to join the monastery and be the librarian) and the choir director from Odessa. These were real, exemplary Orthodox. It was at this point that I decided that I should go and study at a Russian seminary.

Since I had been told (in fact lied to) that Jordanville only accepted Russians, I took the only option left and went to St Serge in Paris. (The two ‘seminary’ establishments of the OCA held no interest for me since they were both on the Catholic/Protestant calendar and deviated in other ways from the ethos and practice of the Russian Church inside Russia. I knew enough from talking to people who had been to them and from my visits to Russia to understand that they were not right for me. I wanted the real thing).

Q: What happened next?

A: I went to study at St Serge in Paris. There I experienced the battle royal between the two factions in Paris at that time. The first, led by Protopresbyter Alexis Knyazev, a wonderful teacher, was the pro-Russian one that was clear-sighted enough to see that the only future was to rejoin the Russian Church, but on some autonomous basis.

The second group, the Fraternite Orthodoxe, led basically by the Jesuit-educated Count, Fr Boris Bobrinskoy, notorious for having celebrated the liturgy in a Catholic convent with the filioque (!) – so as ‘not to offend our Catholic brethren’, was virtually composed of Uniats. Other members included the fantasist and Athos-hater Olivier Clement and a Georgian priest who spent his time extolling the Second Vatican Council. I soon gave up going to their courses. The modernist and manipulative Fraternite was populated by patronizing aristocrats and fantasist ideologues who preyed on naïve Catholics and converts. Descendants of those who had carried out the Revolution, they absolutely hated Russia and had no intention of ever returning to the sobriety and discipline of the Russian Church. Naturally, I supported the first group which alone was authentic and also realistic.

These two groups depended on the Rue Daru bishop, the weak, elderly but saintly Archbishop George (Tarasov). The Fraternite was clearly waiting for him to die and then seize power, which they only managed to do in full twenty years later. Members of the Fraternite, some soon to become priests, used to hiss, mock and boo Archbishop George publicly. It was awful. I believe that Archbishop George, a former WWI Russian pilot from the Western Front, was a saint. Had he been in good health and lived another fifteen years, he would have returned the group to the Russian Church with the status of an autonomous Metropolia.

Q: Where did you go after St Serge?

A: Having met my wife, who is basically of Anglo-Italian-Romanian origin, and married in Paris, we returned to England. We stayed here for three years, trying to find some sort of balanced spiritual life between the extremes of the pseudo-Patriarchal Church and the Church Outside Russia, with their cliques which were not Churchly at all, quite different from the Church inside Russia, which I had seen in 1972 and 1976, and again at St Panteleimon’s on Mt Athos.

Having discovered the scandalous truths about the extremists dominating both groups in England, we returned disillusioned to France and my wife’s jurisdiction (Rue Daru). Here the new German Archbishop had personally promised us that he was going to steer the Church away from the modernist and ecumenist Fraternite Orthodoxe and back to Russian Orthodox Tradition, but using Western languages whenever necessary. Enthused by this sensible direction and the support of Fr Alexis Knyazev, who was still alive then, I was ordained in Paris in January 1985.

Q: What happened?

A: I had fallen from the frying pan into the fire. Within four months I was asked to become a freemason, which I refused to do, thus signing a kind of spiritual death warrant for myself. Through weakness of character, the new Archbishop had by then taken a suicidal path. He was ordaining freemasons and other members of the Fraternite, while also forbidding the use of local languages, doing exactly the opposite of everything he had promised. He was guaranteeing the death of Rue Daru, whose only hope for survival was in fact to return to one or other of the parts of the Russian Church.

So I surrendered to God’s Will. And in 1987 I was granted the grace of meeting the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, a representative of the real ROCOR, just waiting to return to a politically free Russian Church. Coming from Kiev, where I had first been to an Orthodox service, Archbishop Antony showed me the real, multinational ROCOR, which I had read about, but totally failed to meet in London with its nationalism and sectarianism. In July 1988, Rue Daru held a service in honour of the millennium of Orthodoxy in Rus, attended by the modernist Catholic Cardinal of Paris, but from which all Russian bishops had been banned!

It was the last straw and, thanks to God, Archbishop Antony gladly received a group of 17 of us spiritual refugees into ROCOR at the end of that year. This was actually a turning-point for the Rue Daru group, as ever since then the flow of serious Orthodox leaving it has not ceased, giving up the fight to save it. We now realize of course that that fight was impossible and we had undertaken it out of misplaced idealism. The well had been poisoned from the outset. It was also a turning-point for us, from which we have never looked back.

Q: Looking back, what would you do if you had your time again?

A: A purely hypothetical question. Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing. At the time I had no advice at all, except for very bad advice, and there was no internet. Today, there is no doubt in my mind at all that I should have studied in London and then, in 1977, gone and studied at Jordanville. However, if I had not done what I had done then, how could I know all this now? Only experience teaches.

If I had not done what I did do, I would never have understood the Church of Greece, I would never have met the saintly Archbishop George Tarasov, the heroic Archbishop Antony of Geneva and so many other saintly figures, like the last representatives of the real White Russian movement, Fr Silouan of Athos of the Patriarchate (the disciple of St Silouan), the wonderful Baroness Maria Rehbinder, that exquisite Parisian poetess Lyudmila Sergeevna Brizhatova, the last White officer Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky, and so many others, the representatives of the real Holy Rus in all jurisdictions of the Russian emigration.

Neither would I ever have understood the tragic renovationist decadence and absurd Soviet nationalism within parts of the Patriarchate outside Russia at that time, the two sides of the suicidal Rue Daru jurisdiction (sadly, today there is largely only one side left) and how ROCOR was nearly enveloped by the marginal extremes of narrow Russian nationalist chauvinism and fanatical old calendarist converts, but saved by the holiness of Metropolitan Laurus and the many with him, who so exactly expressed our values in Holy Rus, Eternal Russia.

There is in even this short, forty-year experience a lifetime of joys and sorrows. I have been privileged to know it all. In that sense I do not regret anything, even though I have met many tragic individuals, seen much waste and many lost opportunities, and seen parts of the Russian Diaspora committing suicide through spiritual impurity. However, I have been even more privileged in that I have also seen the old and artificial disunity fall away and become heartfelt unity and so life in the dynamic present and future. The worst, and it was really bad, is over and the best is now and in the future. Over nearly the last twenty years Providence has allowed me to work freely for the Russian Orthodox Church in missionary work in my own homeland of the three counties of the East of England.

One Thousand Words on 2016

As 2015, with its interminable wars, terrorist horrors and torrents of wretched refugees, the results of rapacious Western invasions of countries which the West itself created by its abandonment of Christ’s commandment to love our neighbour, draws to an end, what hopes are there for 2016? Many are downcast and have little hope in the darkness, fearing yet another worldwide conflagration through the apostasy expressed in the anti-Christian New World Order imposed by genocide a generation ago. However, for those of us who are Christians, there is always hope in the darkness, for we know that if we pray and do our best, the rest is in God’s hands. And with Him what is impossible for mankind can become possible.

In Muslim countries where disastrous chaos and rage for revenge have been generated by the injustices of the Western Powers, there seems to be little cause for hope. In Iraq and Afghanistan the chaos-creating forces of NATO were routed by the Taliban and had to abandon their lost wars. They were evacuated to their distant homelands, having in vain sacrificed thousands of lives and wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, leaving only darkness. In Libya, its government overthrown by Western greed and injustice under the cloak of ‘humanitarian intervention’, there reigns chaos and bloodshed. In Turkey, its authoritarian and warlike regime being provoked to war by NATO, but also threatened by Russian sanctions and full-scale civil war with the Kurds, the future seems bleak. But this darkness is only part of the story.

In Syria, the government of President Assad has invited Russian support to defeat the Muslim terrorists, founded and until recently fully supported by the Western Powers. There is now cause for hope as the first areas have been liberated and refugees are returning. In the Ukraine, with the Fascist regime in Kiev bankrupt and unable to pay its international debts, there is hope that freedom will come to that sorry land, perhaps within only a few months, and millions of refugees will be able to return home. Meanwhile, spiritually healthy forces in Serbia, Montenegro and Moldova are fighting off quisling governments and NATO and EU colonialism. Much the same is happening in Central Asia, Georgia and Armenia.

‘Defend yourself in the West and find friends in the East’, said St Alexander Nevsky over 750 years ago. Thus, China and Russia have allied themselves after both became the victims of wild US aggression. Both countries are resisting the New World Order of the Zionist neocons and, together with them are allied India, much of the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America, all the former Western colonies. These are all rejecting the US dollar as a currency. Only the crazed apostate leaders of the Western world, with their Israeli and Sunni vassals in Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, are still fully enslaved to the Machiavellian Prince of this world.

Throughout Eastern Europe, in the Baltic States, the Czech Lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, the peoples with the free governments, though not with corrupt puppet governments, are resisting EU tyranny and the Muslim invasion. Even in Western Europe, in France, Spain, Italy, the UK and Denmark, there are everywhere forces for national sovereignty and restoration that are at last waking up and wanting to return to their cultural roots. They say, ‘Enough, we want our countries back’. Such national liberation and globalist resistance movements, wishing to restore their countries’ sovereignty, look to Sovereign Russia for support.

Spiritually there are small numbers of heterodox in Western Europe who are at last awakening to Orthodoxy. They are finally realizing that the remnants of Orthodoxy in the West, in the form of Catholicism, have been so debilitated by filioquization (which makes the Church into a purely thisworldly institution, subjecting God to fallen human nature) and then by the virus of Protestantism and its Old Testament moneymasters, that they cannot return to the Church en masse. They must now make their path to the Church and so national restoration through personal repentance.

In the Church world, we prepare for the 2016 ‘Council’, much-feared since Washington has been trying to impose its agenda through its pawns, the State Department-appointed bishops and their paid hirelings. Here too there is good news. On 21 December Patriarch Kyrill of the Russian Orthodox Church, three-quarters of the Church and the only part that is completely free, stated categorically that our Church will hearken to the voice of the people, the guardians of the Faith, and will resist any attempt at apostasy from the Christian Faith.

If this so-called Council does take place (no-one is yet sure exactly where or when), this guarantees that it will be the opposite of the Vatican’s masonic Council over fifty years ago, it will be the affirmation of the Faith, not its rejection. And in that case it will be a real Council, a Council of St John the Baptist, a last rallying call to the whole world to enter the Church to fight against the world’s preparations for Antichrist. And if the secular-minded do attempt to corrupt the Faith, then either no ‘Council’ will take place or else this second ‘Council of Florence’ will be rejected by the boycott of the faithful clergy and people.

Thus, although there is much darkness in the world, there are also glimmers of light, indeed, the promise of brightness for ‘those that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death’. For now we repeat the words of the Prophet and Forerunner: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’ and we say to the Pharisees and Saducees: ‘O generation of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?’ Unlike the renovationist ‘infil-traitors’ of the fifth column, there are those of us who fear nothing and will resist to the end in faithfulness to Christ and His Church, whatever the cost. For we shall win in the end, make no mistake.

A Destiny

Our destiny is to do God’s Will, each in the way that God has appointed for us. Nobody’s destiny is easy. I started to become aware of my own in early childhood. It was something that I never sought, but that was given to me. A series of revelations more or less every three years heightened my awareness of it, bringing others to call me single-minded. My destiny called me, its signposts were everywhere for me to follow and by my early teens all the essentials without exception had become clear to me.

This individual destiny, like all individual destinies, is merely an infinitely minute part of the world’s destiny and of the overall mystical struggle against spiritual impurity and slander, against Cowardice, Deceit and Treachery. Three groups which were dominated by these three weaknesses tried to stop me fulfilling this destiny. In the order in which I experienced them, they were:

1. The Rejecters, who showed Cowardice through their inward-looking narrowness.

They had no vision of the Universal Christian Empire, Worldwide Rus. They were narrow-minded and sectarian and among those who persecuted St John of Shanghai. They rejected, saying that I was English and too well-educated.

2. The Thwarters, who showed Deceit through their fraudulent claims.

They could brook no rivals and sought only popularity for themselves, so falling into renovationism and a jealous and persecuting upper-class personality cult. They thwarted, saying that I was too young and told the Truth.

3. The Preventers, who showed Treachery through their unfaithfulness.

They were unfaithful compromisers, weak academics and unprincipled anti-patriots, who were frightened of the Truth and so betrayed the Church. They prevented, saying that I was a mystic and had too many children.

But my destiny consisted and consists of three tasks which opposed and oppose them all:

1. To Spread the Message of the Universal Christian Church and Empire despite the Cowardice of the sectarian Rejecters.

2. To Guard the Message of the Universal Christian Church and Empire despite the Deceit of the renovationist Thwarters.

3. To Bring Together into the Universal Christian Church and Empire despite the Treachery of the schismatic Preventers.

For carrying out these three tasks which they never wanted me to do, they will never forgive me, but my destiny is fulfilled despite them all.